Moving On in Ministry

Farewell Homily- Canon Davis Memorial Church, July 29, 2012

I had never been in Sarnia, or heard of Canon Davis Memorial Church before I got a phone call from Bishop Terry Dance in the spring of 2010 wondering if I would be interested in applying to serve as a parish priest here.

That winter I was in my third year as Rector of the South Parkland parish in the Diocese of Brandon, and while I felt my ministry was going well there, and I was the president-elect of the local Rotary Club, there were other considerations.

Family is an important part of any decision on ministry. It seemed to Coline and I that ministry in Ontario would allow us to better fulfill our family obligations. Coline’s mother needed more care than the senior’s home in Dauphin could provide. So we found one in Toronto with more care. But we needed to be closer in the caregiver role.

Our grown children in Toronto, and the Timmins area, were settling down, with marriage plans and children on the horizon.

I spoke to Bishop Jim Njegovan in Brandon and he gave his permission for me to apply to the Ontario dioceses, although he might have been wondering about how to fill a multi-point parish which had been vacant for almost three years before I arrived in 2007.

I sent the letters out the all the Southern Ontario Dioceses, and then came Bishop Terry’s phone call. The point of telling this personal story is that we can all be called to ministry in ways we might not expect.

Wherever we are called, we bring our gifts. I would hope my gift to all the parishes I have served in 11 years as a full-time parish priest is drawn from: my experience in leadership roles as a lay person, my musical skills from choral singing, my passion for proclaiming the gospel through my work in communications, my teaching and organizational skills from my writing efforts over the last four decades.

Perhaps most important I hope I have been able to be a bridge builder. These last forty years have been an era of almost constant change for the church. So many things have changed: liturgy, music, our role in the community, the age and size of our congregations.

I share with you a deep love of the Anglican tradition, as reflected in the Book of Common Prayer, which I grew up with, and as reflected in the Book of Alternatives which I have appreciated for these last 25 years. Both prayer books offer a framework for our Anglican liturgy which is one of the great gifts of our tradition.

It may seem like the Anglican church is in decline, and we are joining other parishes in following that path of decline.

We wonder why with our beautiful church building, our fine rectory, our sizable hall, with its additional rooms in the basement, why the 50’s and the 60’s—when this parish was a happening place—have become distant memories.

Perhaps rather than look at the decline in negative terms, we need to look at it as an opportunity to move in an unexpected direction.

We know we can’t sustain the model of a full-time priest living in the rectory any longer. But there are other options, and since the parish wants to continue, it’s up to everyone, regardless of age, to take part in a process of exploring something new, something creative. This isn’t just up to Pat as the Rector’s Warden, or Ed, as people’s warden, or even the parish council or the small group. It takes everyone.

We don’t know what the future will look like at this point, and as Greg Robbins from St. Paul’s says, it definitely won’t look like what we have now—doing everything we are doing now except with fewer clergy and the same number of buildings.

When you come down to it, buildings can be millstones as well as opportunities of ministry. Since we will all say the most important thing about the church is the people, not the building, and coming together to worship God as a community, then we have to try and think creatively about how our buildings can be used.

I had to think creatively about my own future in ministry when I realized that Canon Davis could no longer afford a full-time priest last fall. So after talking to Coline and the Bishop, I decided that rather than start over again with another parish in Huron, I would take early retirement and move home to Toronto where we have retirement housing. We will be near Coline’s Mum as she continues in her 95th year, and three of our grown children.

At least until I’m 65, I’ll have to work part-time in journalism or in the church to make ends meet. That’s where the creativity will come in. It’s a calculated risk. But we’ve taken risks before.

The two years here have been challenging. It isn’t easy to watch a dedicated group of lay leaders and faithful congregation members come to the realization that the hopes they had of renewal only two years ago, after two long incumbencies, were not going to come to fruition.

I’ve tried to do my best under difficult conditions, including some dissension and opposition to new ways of doing things, to provide a ministry of word and sacrament, pastoral care and administration, and work with parishioners and collegially with other clergy in the deanery and the Diocese.

I wish the entire Canon Davis community well as you attempt to meet the challenge of new realities in the church today. When I came here, it was certainly not with the intention of leaving this soon. But sometimes we have to let go of the old way of doing things before the new way becomes possible.

Now I move into another phase of ministry. And as the words to the famous mariners hymn go:

I feel the winds of God today
Today my sail I lift
Though heavy, oft with drenching spray
And torn with many a rift
If hope but light the water’s crest
And Christ my bark will use
I’ll seek the seas at His behest
And brave another cruise