Bishop charts a course for the future with 11 actions

BY LEIGH ANNE WILLIAMS

On a busy day as he prepared to lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Bishop Shane Parker kindly took time to talk with Crosstalk It happened to be the third anniversary of his election as 10th Bishop of the Diocese of Ottawa, so we began by asking him to reflect a little on the occasion.

QAt your consecration, Archbishop Anne Germond, Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario, warned you that on some days your mitre will seem to weigh 500 lbs. The first years of your episcopacy have been especially challenging due to the pandemic. How are you feeling as you look back on the past three years and ahead to the future?

I remain thankful that I’ve been called to serve as the bishop of this diocese. That was the feeling I had at the time and that still remains for me. It’s nice to have 35 years of ordained ministry under me as I offer what I offer…. I’m energized by the things that we’ve accomplished together over the last three years as a diocesan church, and looking ahead to what is now the 11 Actions. I’m very motivated to see them through.

QYou have often described the diocesan church here as a body with two arms, community ministry and parish ministry. How are each doing at this stage in the pandemic?

Our community ministries are very strong, and they’re very highly respected. At a retreat with community ministry leaders last fall, I suggested that some of our community ministries are in a position to expand. I use that word advisedly…. God has been good to make us very competent in providing supportive housing for women, in running day programs in Cornwall and Ottawa, certainly in the refugee ministry and in our counselling ministry as well. We’re good at those things, and we may be called upon to do more of that work in Ottawa or in the area of our diocese… I’m confident that we could do that.

QHow are parishes doing?

The simple truth is that all our ministries and certainly our parish ministries, offerings and attendance, were affected by the pandemic. However, I have observed that parishes are resilient. People have stayed connected with one another, and now that the great return is happening, the dust is sort of clearing in terms of who may have made life decisions not to go to church (and that has happened), and who may have made life decisions to begin to attend church or have reaffirmed their commitment to church. Offerings will slowly come up. There was about a 20% drop in offerings right across the Canadian church, frankly, and that was true for most of our parishes…

The Shape of Parish Ministry Consultation was very clear that a number of things needed to happen … to make it more possible for parishes to thrive. Part of that was to consolidate our ministries wherever we can….During the last year, we’ve seen a number of parishes make the courageous decision to either amalgamate or to close a building, so that people will participate in the life of a neighbouring parish… We’re not leaving people. We may cease to use some buildings, but our ministries need to expand. I would say that we are developing regional churches now, rather than community churches. It’s unlikely that we will see the building of churches as our response to growth, certainly in the city of Ottawa and other places. But what we will see are churches that are on the cusp or the edge of new developments, their ministry, imagination and reach needs to extend into new communities…. So fewer parishes, wider scope of ministry for each parish and as we continue our work with the 11 Actions, we need to invest heavily in enabling those churches.

QHow will the 11 Actions be felt and experienced by parishioners?

What we heard in the Shape of Parish Ministry Consultation was people are tired, they’re burning out. There aren’t enough volunteers to do things. We heard a lot of confusion about how we actually run our churches, about what we need to do, what is optional, what is no longer essential…. How do we reach out to the community around us? How do we learn how to be more effective? How do we learn to thrive? And so, the 11 Actions are speaking directly into that.

There will be training for parish officers and the training will help them support them, equip them to run parishes efficiently and effectively….There will be … clearly defined supports that are given from Ascension House to parish leaders around the issues of property and human resources and finances and administration.

And then there’ll be a whole bunch of resources and knowledge developed through what will be called the Learning Commons. There will be Resource Hubs which include people who want to develop expertise in certain areas and share that expertise with our diocese as a whole….around children and youth, for example, possibly around the stewardship, [or] new worshipping communities. And those Resource Hubs will generate knowledge and information that will be shared with everybody.

There will also be informal Knowledge Networks for people who are interested in a particular area, who just want to explore it with one another…

And then there will be a program of parish advancement, which will include a number of modules that parishes will participate in or take in that will give them core education around how we advance our parish ministry so they can thrive.

QWhat financial help will there be for parishes?

Another part of what we heard in the Shape of Parish Ministry Consultation was that the costs of parish ministry are high, and that our diocesan operating budget and the parish fair share system relies heavily on parishes for revenue, to support the ministries of our diocese as a whole. Even community ministries are supported from revenue that comes from parishes. So, on the one hand, we want to help parishes with financial stewardship to learn how to do that more effectively. On the other hand, as a diocesan church, we need to somehow reduce our reliance on revenue from parishes, beginning with using dividends from trusts held by our diocese to contribute to our operating budget …

We now have a director of communications and development, and part of her work will be to increase the financial capacity of our diocese as a whole, so we can try to reduce our dependence on parishes for revenue.

QWhat other sources of revenue might be used?

 Future course, p. 9

It is possible, I believe, to endow certain ministries of our diocese. For example, in universities, you have certain chairs endowed. I believe it’s possible and desirable for us to endow the ministry of our bishop. I believe we could raise funds to substantially endow the “chair of the bishop” so that it the bishop’s ministry is not as reliant upon revenue from parishes. Wouldn’t it be great if this ministry was fully endowed?

It may also be possible to set up an endowment for priestly ministry in our diocese as a whole, a central resource which would provide dividends to reduce our reliance on parishes for the funding of priestly services.

QWhat do you see when you look ahead to the next few years of your episcopate?

To be honest, I’m just thinking in terms of what I believe I was called to do. …The first thing I knew I needed to do was to champion our agreed-upon priorities and to lift them up and to engage as we have. Now, I know I’m called to oversee and ensure that the 11 Actions are fully implemented. We have not always fully implemented our plans after spending time and energy to develop then, and that cannot happen this time… So, we have an aggressive timetable for the 11 Actions we agreed to at Synod, and I will oversee their implementation, Including making sure the fruit of the 11 Actions become firmly embedded in the culture, in the operations, in the structures of our diocese. …They need to continue to be shepherded, so that they just become the way we work together. What we’re doing through the 11 Actions is not simply tweaking… In order to implement them properly we need to think differently. We have to behave differently. We have to see ourselves as a diocesan church which has collective resources that can be wisely used to make our community ministries and parish ministries thrive and serve.

QWhat timeframe do you have in mind?

Implementing the 11 Actions will take about 18 months, but the deep embedding of the actions will probably take another 18 months or so. I feel called to lead us through that. I sense people are very responsive to focused and disciplined direction right now because we need to be… Those [were] remarkable moments at Synod last year...I think there were only one or two motions that did not achieve unanimity in the room… As I said to the team who led the consultation, there’s no greater praise that you can get than seeing a body endorse so overwhelmingly the work that’s been produced… A lot of [this] is getting our house in order, and we need to be patient with that. Soon we’re going to feel that we are able to thrive a little bit more robustly and serve a little bit more joyously.

I believe it was Professor Owen Chadwick [who] said, the church is like a stained-glass window. It’s filled with things of beauty like stained glass… things like faith, love, justice, peace, healing, hope and reconciliation. But a stained-glass window needs to be held together by iron and oak. A lot of what we’re doing in the 11 Actions is making sure the frame that holds the beauty of who we are as a church is being properly held in this world and cared for, and when it is, that frees us to shine in the world around us.