Last Tuesday night, I led Thankful’s Vestry[i] meeting.  It was my first meeting of the Vestry since I returned from a 3-month sabbatical.  We had a lot of ground to cover, but, honestly, most of that ground was just the Vestry members getting me up to speed on what had been going on over the summer.  From capital projects to stewardship to outreach, Thankful Ones have been hard at work even over the lazy days of summer, even while their Rector was away for three months.  And as I listened to them talk at the Vestry meeting, it occurred to me how little they really need me. 

Don’t get me wrong; I know they love me and they appreciate me and they want me.  But they don’t actually need me – not for much.  I’m handy on Sunday mornings when they need an ordained priest to say the Eucharist and they like that that priest is the same woman who knows and loves them.  They need me to bless the dying and they need my seminary knowledge to do some decent teaching and preaching every once in a while.  But for the rest of it?  They really don’t need me.  The capital projects, the outreach, the fellowship with one another, the pastoral care of each other: they have got it all under control and if I wasn’t there, they would miss me, I know, but they wouldn’t have to stop their work, their ministries.

And that is a huge part of – if not really the only reason behind – Thankful’s success as a small but mighty parish. 

I have a friend and colleague who says that the problem with The Episcopal Church right now is that it’s made up mostly of small parishes, places that on any given Sunday see less than 100 people in the pews, but that much of the higher-up administrative parts of the Church still think that small parishes should be run like big parishes, just on a smaller scale.  And that’s never going to work. 

In a big parish, the Rector (the senior pastor) functions in many ways like a CEO.  The Rector oversees everything and everyone else, from the large staff to the many volunteers, from the programs of the church to its liturgy.  And, much of the decision-making rests with the CEO-Rector, all with input, of course (assuming you’ve got a good Rector), all with the consensus, for the most part, of the Vestry and the people, but ultimately, it’s a top-down sort of structure. 

But, in a small parish, the Rector has a very different sort of job.  As I sat in the Vestry meeting on Tuesday, I tried to figure out the role I was playing.  The tradition of the Church has often come up with various analogies for the way in which priest relates to people.  Aside from the CEO model, there’s the metaphor of being the parent of a family, or the center at which the spokes of a wheel come together, or the classic image of being shepherd to the sheep.  The priest who preached at my ordination offered a twist on that latter one: she pointed out that Jesus is the shepherd, so my role as priest couldn’t take over his.  Instead, she suggested that I be the sheep-dog, the sort of right-hand helper of Jesus the Good Shepherd. 

But even in that scenario, it still sets me so far apart from the people with whom I work and minister.  Whether CEO or parent or wheel-center or shepherd or sheep-dog, I would still be somehow different from my folks.  And I don’t feel that way.  I feel very much as though my Thankful Ones and I are on the same team, working together in the same trenches and there is not, in the end, all that much that distinguishes me from them.

Instead, I think the relationship is much more subtle than that.  I imagine that together, we have been given a picture of a beautiful piece of art and before us stands a vast empty canvas and we are all charged with turning the picture back into art in a large mural.  And so I’m right there with them, right alongside my Thankful Ones; we make decisions together about what colors match best and where to draw the lines and where to put the paint and who is best-served holding a ladder and who is best at big swaths of paint and who is best at the detail work.

And every once in a while, someone has got to step back and compare the mural we’re making with the picture that we’ve been given, someone who can see the big picture and make sure we’re on the right track.  And that’s who I am.  And that’s all I am.  I have the great good fortune, the wonderful privilege of being the person who gets to see the big picture of all the good work this little parish is doing, how well we are fulfilling God’s dreams for us, and communicate that back to them, share with the rest of them that very good news. 

[i] For those of you unfamiliar with Episcopal-ese, a Vestry is the board of lay people that help to govern and lead the parish church along with the clergy of that parish.