Small Churches Uncovered as Hidden Treasure of Ministries
Episcopal News Service. October 1, 1992 [92203]
Ariel Miller, Assistant Editor of Interchange, the newspaper of the Diocese of Southern Ohio
Sitting quietly together on the New York City piers, a little group of people watch the sun sink in sultry splendor over the Hudson River. Male and female prostitutes, a drag queen or two, they've been gathering here each week for Bible study with Episcopal deacon Hugo Sanchez. At his request, one of the women reads aloud the parable of the Samaritan woman at the well. She finishes, and looks up in astonishment. "Gee, I think I like this Jesus," she murmurs.
On the other side of the continent, Montana ranchers who labor 20 hours a day during the calving season pause gratefully as a lay Eucharistic minister from Christ Church in Sheridan arrives to bring them communion.
Hundreds of miles south in Tennessee, a trucker unburdens himself to a weathered, canny old man in suspenders, the Rev. Archie Stapleton, whose beat includes making rounds of truck stops and cafes in the Cumberlands to offer an ear to the lonely people of the road. The waitresses are pastors too, keeping track of who's well and who's in distress among the people they serve.
This is the world of small-church ministry: incredibly diverse, rooted in and flowering out of the unique culture and needs of its surrounding community.
Until recently, this world was largely undiscovered by the wider church. "If you look at an evangelism map, we're red, 'unchurched,' says the Rev. Mary Jacques of Montana's Majestic Mountains cluster, which appears inthe records as two tiny congregations in a 15,000 square mile area. "To my mind, that's the church's problem: the church is not where the people are. Would you drive a hundred miles to get to church?" But Majestic Mountains generates a flourishing array of ad hoc fellowships and prayer groups that arise and disappear as needed, and serves hundreds of people who are not formally affiliated with any Episcopal church.
Creative initiatives like that are now coming to the forefront through a steadily expanding network called Synagogy ("learning with"), which links grassroots ministries, national and diocesan officials and innovative ministry development programs across the country.
Launched in 1990, Synagogy held its second national conference in Cincinnati, September 17-20 of this year, with teams representing small congregations or specialized ministries in 27 dioceses from San Joaquin (California) to Massachusetts. Fully two thirds of the delegates were lay.
There was no keynoter or expert panel. Instead, every team was assigned to a circle with three or four others, and all had the opportunity to describe their own situation as well as to hear about the experiences of the other teams in their group. This approach is the secret of Synagogy, a process based on the motto "teachers with much to learn and learners with much to teach."
The first hints of how potent such a method could be emerged at Sewanee in 1989, when Stapleton convened a group of small-church ministry teams from all across the country to brainstorm on how seminary education could be strengthened to better equip clergy for ministry in small congregations.
As the Sewanee participants began to share their own stories, it became obvious that this kind of training was already occurring -- at the grassroots. Caught between their own scant budgets and the often enormous human need of the communities they served, small congregations were by necessity coming up with creative, daring and effective new ministry and empowering their members to carry it out.
Innovative structures and a true interdependence of lay and ordained ministry were starting to emerge, as well as a climate that fostered indigenous leadership. Not surprisingly, this leadership was taking infinitely varied forms, from the farmer's widow who started a crisis hotline for farmers in desperate financial straits to the group of Hispanic women in New York State who mobilized their parish to push for reforms in the local public schools.
But how to share this learning more widely?
Synagogy is proving an excellent start. For teams struggling to minister in remote areas, it's an antidote to isolation and discouragement. "We're not alone!" wrote many participants on their evaluation forms this year. "So many of us are facing the same issues!" Teams listened keenly to the solutions that other groups had found to common problems, and pounced on ideas that could lead to breakthroughs back home.
The network is also providing many remote ministries with their first real link to the resources of the wider church. Grants from institutions including the Standing Commission on the Church in Small Communities, the Roanridge Trust and a number of endowed parishes made it possible for Synagogy's planning team to provide scholarship aid to at least half of the teams at this year's conference. Several participants had never before had the opportunity to attend any kind of church conference or even a diocesan convention.
The most poignant breakthrough of this year's conference was on race, a different kind of isolation. Ethnic groups such as Hispanics and Indians have felt virtually invisible within a denomination focused mainly on the rifts between whites and blacks. But Synagogy this year was a congress of nations- -several Indian tribes, an ebullient Hispanic delegation representing many different Latino communities and people speaking English in accents ranging from Filipino to Jamaican, with a spicy admixture of Appalachian. No one group was the majority, and all contributed powerfully to the insights gained by the whole.
"Many, many people talked about cross-cultural issues and having greater understanding. Some said that until they got to Synagogy, they had never felt accepted," reported planning team member Sandra Majors Elledge, who is communications director of the Appalachian Peoples' Service Organization (APSO). One Hispanic delegate was amazed to discover how similar the sufferings of Indian and white delegates were to his own, and vowed to take this insight home.
What happens next for Synagogy? Informal networking is likely to flourish, as it did after the original conference in 1990. To supplement that, Synagogy's planning team hopes to begin consultant training in 1993. Every participant this year said that they'd like to see this conference happen regularly, and Synagogy 3 is planned for April 1994. With the high cost of travel, regional meetings may be the next step after that.