With Thanksgiving coming soon, it’s only fitting that I talk turkey with you. But, no matter how much I love to eat them - roasted with all the fixin’s – I don’t mean the bird.

I want to talk turkey with you about the church – about St. Paul’s Church. Relax. I’m not going to be critical. St. Paul’s is a wonderful community of people - goodhearted, possessing sincere faith in God, receptive to God’s Spirit, dedicated to following Christ, and situated in a delightful place. When I say that I’m going to talk turkey about St. Paul’s, I mean that I’m going to be direct and realistic.

When I arrived in North Kingstown as the new rector, one of my first priorities was to stop, look and listen. I stopped myself from impulses to change things. I looked at the parish to try to understand its ways. And I listened to parishioners so as to hear what your hopes and dreams for the parish might be. I’ve always tried to follow this process at each parish I’ve served. All of us have a few bedrock guiding principles that guide our work, and this has been one of mine: stop, look, and listen.

In the process, what I heard you say is that St. Paul’s has been very important to your life, over the years, and you love it. I’ve heard you saying that you want the services and liturgies to remain pretty much as they have been, that you want to continue the outreach into the wider community that you’ve been known for, that you want our excellent liturgical music to continue, that you want high quality Christian education for the children, a strong youth program for the teens, expanded fellowship and spiritual growth opportunities for adults, pastoral care for one and all, and proper attention paid to the maintenance of parish buildings.

As a result of all this, we’ve developed programs and mustered staff members and dedicated volunteers to lead those programs. The purpose of it all is to serve God’s purposes in helping parishioners to grow into the strongest followers of Christ that you will be able to become and, thereby, to make a loving, Christ-like difference in the world. This is another one of my bedrock guiding principles: that whatever we do in the church isn’t really about us – to please us or to satisfy our tastes - but to shape us into instruments of Christ to serve God in this world.

While I’m at it I might as well share the rest of my bedrock convictions:

• The Church belongs to God, not us.
• The rector should stop, look and listen. Meet and accept people where they are.
• We are Christ’s community.
• Our purpose is to help each other become servants of Christ’s mission.
• We’re meant to do what God wants to do with us.
• We need to pray to seek consensus in discerning what God wants of us.
• God pays for what He orders. He provides the means to do it – the people and the money.
• We’re the ones He uses to provide those means. He won’t do it without us.
• All of us need to pitch in, or none of us can do what He wants us to do.
• There are no passengers – we’re all part of the crew.
• Never do for the people of the church what they should do for themselves.
• If we don’t have enough, it means that either God doesn’t want us to do it or we’re not being faithful.
• God means for us to strive to tithe – to give a significant proportion of ourselves in time and money in order to do what He has in mind for us to do.
• We can do anything with Christ’s help and the guidance of the Spirit.

These are the principles that have guided me in ministry over the years.

Now, as I’ve said, that’s why we’ve tried so hard to develop programs, a staff and volunteer leaders – to help each other become the strongest followers of Christ and servants of His mission that we can be. To do this we’ve raised the bar of our expenses just about 20%. It’s quite a stretch. We knew it would be. Looking at that purely from a material point of view is more than daunting, this year, when you take such things as increases in the cost of living into consideration. But then again we’re not just talking about underwriting an organization’s budget. Frankly, I never entered the ministry merely to perpetuate an organization. That would be utterly hypocritical – using the idea of God to raise money to underwrite the ongoing existence of an organization about God. But I’m not talking about that at all! I’m talking about striving to tithe in order to be faithful in serving God’s purposes through St. Paul’s. If we keep our eyes on Christ and seek that goal, there’s nothing that we couldn’t do. Sure the 2006 budget seems like an enormous stretch, but with God’s help I’m absolutely confident that you can do it, St. Paul’s!

Rooting and praying for you,