In one week in October, three new rectors were installed in the parishes where they have been serving three-year appointments as priests-in-charge: the Rev. Karen Coleman at St. James's Church in Somerville on Oct. 3; the Rev. Leslie Sterling at St. Bartholomew's Church in Cambridge on Oct. 6; and the Rev. Amy McCreath at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Watertown on Oct. 9. All are in the Alewife Deanery. All are women, and two are African-American women. Their installations triple the number of women of African descent who are rectors in the Diocese of Massachusetts.
Perhaps most notable, though, is that in these three churches, it is possible to see a rekindling of lay ministry, revitalized connections amongst members and growing engagement with the community. These parishes are finding that by drawing on their core identity while also reaching outward, a congregation can strengthen its internal bonds as well as its relevance in the wider community, all toward the goal of growing in numbers, vitality and mission.
While the timing of these rectors' calls might be a coincidence, signs of renewed life in their congregations aren't, according to the Rev. Holly Antolini, Rector of St. James's Church in Cambridge and Dean of the Alewife Deanery.
All three have engaged, in their own way, in a process of redevelopment prior to calling their priests-in-charge as rectors, she said, something that requires "really savvy and committed leadership, both from the clergy and their lay leadership, and a willingness to occasionally bump along."
"It's been so exciting to have a front-row seat to what's happening in all three of these places," Antolini said. "I think there's a lot of anxiety abroad about congregational life and its future, and this is a testimony that there is great stuff happening and waiting to happen."
"Building a new golden age"
St. Bartholomew's Church in Cambridge has become a more visible force in the community since the Rev. Leslie Sterling's arrival as priest-in-charge in 2009, although she emphasizes that she is "the encourager, the cheerleader" not the initiator.
"I just helped create a place for these seeds to grow," Sterling said. "It is about how I point other people towards their ministries, encourage other people to see what they can do."
These "seeds" have grown into a diverse and lively array of worship and community programs and projects.
The parish's weekly meal program, founded by a group of MIT students two years ago, has drawn many members of the parish into active community service. With the leadership of Archdeacon Pat Zifcak, the parish is also engaged with the Outdoor Church of Cambridge and frequently makes sandwiches for the Sunday meal served to the homeless.
The Sunday school at St. Bartholomew's has returned. When Sterling began as priest-in-charge, it was run by an informal group of parents, but a former Sunday school director was persuaded to return and now the program is thriving. A teen member traveled to El Salvador on a diocesan youth mission trip, and now participates in the Diocesan Youth Council and Youth Leadership Academy.
Sterling said that the church has also become a more active part of diocesan life. A member of the parish serves on the board of the Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference Center, and the church's participation in the diocese's Together Now fundraising campaign was highly successful.
Through becoming more connected to the community and the diocese, members of the church are also strengthening their bonds with each other.
"Working together on these ministries creates opportunities for fellowship between members," she said. "[We are] bringing in the community and letting them know we're here and trying to do things--feed people, love people, all that cool stuff that Jesus told us to do."
Sterling sees members taking pride in the diversity that is so essential to the church, and in the intersection of tradition with innovation.
St. Bartholomew's "is a good mixture between valuing history and tradition and being open to look at new things and step out in new ways," Sterling said.
One of the ways St. Bartholomew's is embracing change is by renovating the church for energy efficiency and eco-friendliness. It recently added energy efficient weather stripping and lighting. Thanks to solar panels, the church has eliminated its electric bills. Because of its use of solar energy, St. Bartholomew's will receive an award from Massachusetts Interfaith Power and Light later this month, and will be a stop on the Solar Houses of Worship tour. The church is also in the process of converting its boiler from oil to natural gas, a project funded through a diocesan Green Improvement Grant.
Sterling took an untraditional path to her new rectorship. After she graduated from Harvard in 1979, she spent years working as a professional singer and songwriter, and later as a sports writer and broadcaster.
"I was always resisting the call while I did music, sports writing, sports broadcasting. But God waited me out," Sterling said of her call to ordained ministry. Along with nine others, she was in the first class of postulants admitted at the beginning of the episcopacy of Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, SSJE. She was sponsored for ordination by St. James’s Church in Cambridge, and was ordained to the diaconate in 2001 and the priesthood in 2002.
Her first job was at All Saints Parish in Brookline, and she came to St. Bartholomew's as the first female priest the church had ever had. She became active again in the Union of Black Episcopalians (UBE), and is currently the president of the Massachusetts chapter. "Once I came to a historically black parish I wanted to get involved again with UBE so we could be connected to all the other traditionally black parishes," she said.
At first, arriving at St. Bartholomew's was a challenging transition. "I like to say that it was like an arranged marriage where we learned to love each other," Sterling said. "Now we have genuine affection for each other, genuine affection and Christian love."
Senior warden Stephen Mascoll confirmed this. "We've found that Leslie Sterling is a unique individual that we feel is going to be a great fit for us at St. Bartholomew's," he said.
St. Bartholomew's and Sterling are looking forward.
"Instead of looking back at the golden days, we're trying to build a new golden age now," Sterling said. "The name of this church now stands for a certain level of ministry and community involvement, and I think people are looking to us, seeing what we're doing with the food program, starting to talk about us again."
Ministry for a changing neighborhood
The Rev. Karen Coleman was installed as rector at St. James’s Church in Somerville on Oct. 3. She had been priest-in-charge at St. James’s since 2010, but the active, expanding church was ready to make the change to rector.
“It’s a wonderful affirmation of the lay ministry, that they’re very active and involved in the community and with outreach,” Coleman said. “We’ve done an extensive amount of work on discernment and intentional prayer to ensure that we were a good fit.”
Coleman says that this more active and involved lay ministry speaks to the changes in the community and in the church. Although the church is small, with an average weekly attendance of around 40, it is growing. A few years ago, attendance was averaging around 26 people a week. This growth, said Coleman, is a sign of the times.
“The neighborhood is changing…it’s a nice mix,” Coleman said. “We have grad students from Harvard, young couples with families and families who have always lived in Somerville. We have more happening with the church school, intentional outreach and in general more connecting people together.”
St. James’s connects with the larger Somerville community through initiatives including women’s AA and an English as a Second Language program, which Coleman says is the only free ESL program in the area.
“We are the only Episcopal church left in Somerville, so we are always trying to connect to the city,” Coleman said. (Christ Church in Somerville closed earlier this year.)
Coleman had been introduced to St. James’s during her time at Episcopal Divinity School, where she received both her master’s and doctor of divinity degrees. Coleman was ordained in the Diocese of Newark in 2004, and spent time as priest-in-charge at Christ Church Needham and Trinity Church in Randolph before she was called to St. James’s.
“I have had some incredible luck to be very supported in my ministry,” Coleman said. “I don’t think it was an accident that I came to St. James’s.”
As a woman of color, Coleman said that she has felt supported by the diocese and is heartened by the number of people of color represented in the clergy, although currently only a few of them are women.
“Of course I wish there were more African-American women called to come to Massachusetts,” she said, “but when you look at other dioceses…we have a pretty high number of clergy of color in our diocese in comparison.”
St. James’s, too, is looking ahead to a bright future.
“We’re going to continue what’s been working, being an open, welcoming parish, and I’m looking forward to all of us taking that walk together as the entire parish,” Coleman said. “Everybody has a ministry in the parish, and we’re looking to go out and spread the word about the wonderful things we’re doing at St. James’s.”
“A laboratory for mission”
As the Church of the Good Shepherd in Watertown celebrates the installation of its new rector, the Rev. Amy McCreath, on Oct. 9, it turns the page into a new chapter in the story of a small, family-sized parish that’s been working hard at renewal over the past three years.
In the spring of 2010, Good Shepherd’s longtime rector had retired, and it was looking for new clergy leadership just as McCreath was ready to move on from her position as the Episcopal chaplain at MIT in Cambridge. Prior to that, she had served at parishes in Wisconsin, where she was ordained in 1998, in the Diocese of Milwaukee.
“Chaplaincy work is by definition missional and requires reinventing the community over and over again as students move on,” McCreath said, and she had learned to do that work in a highly entrepreneurial and collaborative institution. She also was part of networks of people involved in youth leadership, creative liturgy and the emergent church movement. “I wanted to be able to use all of this and not have it go to waste in an environment where people didn’t care about those things,” she said.
What she found at Good Shepherd was a community that “had been experiencing some measure of decline, as a lot of churches do in their lifecycles,” she said, but which also was open to change and had a character of both inquiry and mentorship about it.
“They were committed to having a future but were also clear that it would need to be different in some ways. The question was really about how do we move forward as a community that means so much to us but also speaks to a new generation and in a world that has changed an awful lot,” McCreath said.
With McCreath’s appointment as priest-in-charge, the parish has been involved in a kind of experiment, what she described as becoming “a laboratory for mission.” Since 2011, Good Shepherd has been the recipient of an annual diocesan grant of $60,000 from the proceeds from the sale of closed churches. It helps pay for McCreath’s salary.
“[Bishop Tom Shaw and diocesan leadership] said to us: We want you to experiment and report back on what you’re learning and share that with other churches that are also in redevelopment mode. So the diocesan investment was not just in us but in a lot of churches indirectly through what we could discover and be able to share in terms of best practices,” McCreath said.
Good Shepherd has been part of a collaborative program through the Episcopal Church called Missio: Engage!, which senior warden Stephen Steadman describes as an “effort which seeks to engage the church in the community through a radical welcome.”
Written into McCreath’s contract with the parish is the stipulation that she will spend half of her time out in the community. “Yes, that’s unusual, and it has really paid off,” she said. Her conversations and interactions at the coffee shop and library, for example, have led to meeting people and getting involved in organizations working on public health issues, diversity education and services to the elderly.
“I learned a lot about the community and that helped us figure out where the gifts of Good Shepherd might meet up with the needs of the community,” McCreath said.
“Amy provided guidance but the leadership was very much broadly distributed among many lay people in the congregation,” Steadman said, some of whom “had very strong church leadership backgrounds, often with time spent in seminary, who were attracted to Good Shepherd by the enterprise.”
With the help of interns from the Life Together program in the diocese, Good Shepherd has gotten involved in food justice issues—it helped start Watertown’s first community garden two summers ago, grows and collects food for the local food pantry and runs a summer Vacation Garden School for children, with the help of a diocesan Simple Acts “green” grant—and it has connected with two local group homes for people with developmental disabilities and is making monthly Sunday visits for prayer and companionship with residents.
The latter is an effort to build on the parish’s longstanding commitment to people with disabilities, both in terms of their full inclusion at church and advocacy, McCreath said. The Perkins School for the Blind is in Watertown, she noted, and the parish has a sizeable number of members active in parish life who are blind or have disabilities. “We really want to do more,” she said.
Focusing on ministry that reflects its core identity and developing ministry in a sustainable way are key points of emphasis in Good Shepherd’s redevelopment, McCreath said. Its families are mostly working families, she said, with little free time on their hands, and the financial picture remains uncertain. “We’re trying to put all that together and trying to do that out of a place of appropriate urgency but not anxiety,” she said.
“What has been both inspiring and challenging is seeing all the new people in the congregation, the vitality, yet developing effective ways to integrate them. The young parents have very busy lives, so planning events and finding time for getting acquainted can be very challenging. It is a challenge that we enjoy,” Steadman said.
McCreath said Good Shepherd’s current experiment is one that she’s proud to be a part of.
“I see Jesus in the great compassion and hope and trust that members of this congregation have for one another and for the world. I say this a lot, but I mean it: These people are the real deal. They come to church on purpose,” she said. “I would say that being part of this community has made me a better Christian and continues to do that.”
--Ellen Stuart, with Tracy J. Sukraw contributing