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20/20
Strategy Group moves beyond mere numbers
By Susan Erdey
Episcopal News Service
When they arrived at Camp
Allen in the Diocese of Texas on Jan. 28, members of the 20/20 Strategy
Group and program groups may have thought that 20/20 was all about the
numbers – doubling the average Sunday attendance in Episcopal congregations
by the year 2020.
By the end of the first
day, though, their vision had grown beyond data. They were envisioning
innovative and groundbreaking ways to move the Episcopal Church away from
“business as usual” and into a missional mode that would strike the words
“we’ve never done it that way before” from the Episcopal vocabulary.
Sixty-five people from
across the country and Europe, representing the diversity of the Episcopal
Church, were invited by the presiding officers of General Convention to
participate in a planning process to develop strategies for meeting that
numerical goal.
God's
project: reconciliation
Presiding Bishop Frank
Griswold and House of Deputies president, the Rev. George Werner, welcomed
the group to Camp Allen and spoke excitedly about the 20/20 initiative.
Griswold told the group
that “20/20 has unleashed a vision of mission that both celebrates and names
some of the energies abroad in our church. It also pushes the church to step
outside its institutional safety zone and open itself to the driving motion
of the Spirit in the service of God’s project, which is the reconciliation
of all things in Christ.”
Griswold described the
initiative as “God’s project,” calling it "nothing less than the
reconciliation of all things to God’s own self in Christ through the agency
of the Holy Spirit.” He went on to “pledge the full support of the Church
Center staff to this missional vision, aspects of which are already being
engaged.”
Moving into missional mode
Nine program groups
ranging from “spirituality, prayer, and worship” to “research,” “next
generations,” and “funding” spent the next three days in intense
conversations, developing ideas that could move the church into that
missional mode.
Several groups addressed
the challenge of raising up the next generation of leaders to achieve the
20/20 goals. Members noted that diocesan ordination processes are often
unreceptive to college-age students or to “entrepreneurial temperaments.”
Others cited crushing debt loads from seminary loans as a strong
disincentive to accepting a financially insecure position as church planter.
One person observed that given a choice between an associate position at an
established suburban parish or one as a church planter with only a year’s
guaranteed salary, with $500 a month in seminary loan payments, there really
was no choice.
Dylan Breuer, a doctoral
candidate in biblical studies and a youth minister at a church plant in
Walkersville, Md, was part of the new congregation development program
group. In a message posted on a listserv for GenX Episcopalians, she
admitted that she had been “deeply skeptical” of 20/20 when she first heard
of it, but came away from the meeting “wildly enthusiastic,” in large part
because of the Camp Allen meeting. “It was amazing to see the kind of
creative energy that can result when we stop trying to figure out who
deserves to be in the ‘in crowd’ and start working alongside whomever God
calls,” Breuer said. Her program group’s ideas included remitting the
educational debts of church planters, yoking dioceses without experience
with church planting with those that have successful church plants, and
providing incentives for church planters in historically underserved
populations, especially those who are multilingual.
Not just numbers, but
diversity
The Rev. Gary Steele, a
GenX priest in the Diocese of Alaska and a member of the 20/20 leaders
program group, observed that the 20/20 initiative is “now, since the 20/20
meeting, emphatically about more than numbers.” Steele’s impression of the
meeting was “that 2020 became focused on diversity. I think the Rev. Michael
Hopkins [a member of the next generations program group] summed it up when
he asked, ‘Who will be welcome in the Episcopal Church? Will it be more than
middle-aged, heterosexual, white folk?’ Then I think we addressed the
question: If we place the Gospel at the center and seek to welcome all whom
the Spirit draws, what will our church have to look like to be welcoming?
With the possibility of whites becoming an ethnic minority by 2020, what
will it take for the Episcopal Church to reflect the multicultural reality
we see all around us? And the 2020 movement is saying: ‘Pursuing this
mission is how the Body of Christ will be built up’ (Ephesians 4).”
A glance around the meeting
rooms at Camp Allen revealed a key difference from a “typical” national
church meeting: a critical mass of younger leaders. The Episcopal Church has
often been criticized by GenX and GenY members for ignoring them and giving
voice only to Boomers and older generations. Many attendees at the Camp
Allen meeting were far younger than the national average age for
Episcopalians (59), including Nina Meigs, a high school student from Geneva,
Switzerland, representing the Convocation of American Churches in Europe.
Nina drew international attention last November when she read a prayer for
peace and unity during an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. A
thirtysomething program group member remarked that he was used to being the
youngest in the room at church meetings, and at the Camp Allen meeting he
felt “almost middle-aged!”
At least half of the nine
program groups are chaired by people born after 1960, a conscious effort on
the part of the 20/20 Strategy Group to showcase and nurture younger
leadership. Strategy Group chair Sarah Lawton, a GenX leader from the
Diocese of California, said, “It’s important to me that those who are
helping to build the church for 20/20 look a least a little like the church
we are trying to build. To take just the age issue, this means providing
more than token representation to the people under 40 who will be among the
experienced leaders of the church in 18 years. These are people with
significant years of job, life, and church experience already but who are
also connected in significant cultural ways to the younger postmodern
generations coming up right behind us.”
Several program groups
suggested producing 20/20 materials in languages other than English,
especially given the goal of building a church that reflects an American
society that is increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. Participants
shared war stories of trying to find liturgical resources in Spanish that
weren’t merely direct translations of the Book of Common Prayer or the
Hymnal 1982. Others suggested multicultural training opportunities for
church musicians, noting that not all parishes have or want classically
trained organists who are most comfortable with the generally Anglo hymns of
the Hymnal 1982. Still others described asking publishers about developing
church liturgical software in Spanish, and being told “there’s no market for
that.”
'Get
ready for something bigger'
Although participants
quickly moved away from focusing on “the numbers,” there was considerable
agreement that an accurate method for collecting data was necessary, and
that the parochial report system as it currently exists definitely wasn’t
the answer. The research program group suggested that the current parochial
report be amended to include demographic data such as age, ethnicity, and
race. The group also suggested redesigning parish service registers to be
compatible with a new parochial report, so that determining the actual
attendance numbers for Sunday services would not be so difficult or prone to
miscalculation and misreporting.
Still another sign that the
20/20 movement isn’t church business as usual: the Camp Allen 65 probably
won’t meet face to face again, at least not as a large group. The program
groups intend to accomplish all their work by e-mail, Web, and conference
call. The communications program group determined that one of its top
priorities will be to develop and launch a 20/20 resource Web site so that
program groups and any groups working on 20/20 projects will have a central
repository for materials, contacts, data, and ideas. Within hours of
arriving home from the meeting, Strategy Group chair Lawton set up a
Web-based listserv for the entire group, and program groups began sharing
electronic files that summarized their four days of conversations and
consolidated notes taken on low-tech newsprint. Some didn’t need to wait
until they got back to their offices, laptops, and e-mail to exchange files;
they simply beamed files between their handheld Palm Pilot and Visor PDAs.
More than one person read the day’s lectionary from a PDA during noonday
prayers and the Wednesday evening Eucharist.
“I want to tell you
something about this whole 20/20 vision, as we carry it forward,” Griswold
warned the group. “It’s going to be messy, and people who are frantic about
tidiness – forget it! There are going to be ways it doesn’t fit the
legislative process of the General Convention and diocesan conventions.
People are going to be upset because it isn’t the Church the way it’s always
been. Thank God! Just get ready for something bigger.”
Susan Erdey is chair of
the Communications Program Group for 20/20, and is director of
communications at the Foundation Center in New York City. |
