Dear People of St. James’,
On March 13, 2020, as the pandemic crisis escalated around the nation, St. James’ joined all of the other congregations in the diocese in a quick scramble to move worship and life together into the online world. I called my first ever “emergency Liturgy Committee meeting,” something I had never previously imagined that I would have to do, in order to reconfigure our Holy Week plans. We gathered a small group of musicians to record weeks worth of music, anticipating that even though we’d been told to plan for two weeks, it would be far longer. We moved all of our committee and small group meetings online, and did a bunch of learning and coaching about how to use Zoom. And, this whole time we worked with the question, “How do we do something like we did before, something familiar, tried, tested, and true, but on a new platform?”
As we adapted, we discovered that this question began to work less and less well for us. The first eye-opening case of us finding that we needed to break the mold was the challenge of adapting Neighbor 2 Neighbor to our new circumstances, flipping it from a gathering model for community, food pantry and services to one of check-in and resource connection calls, food delivery, and volunteer-provided support. We found that in order to continue to hold on to our mission, we needed to change our way of working and invest in new partnerships and new ways of connecting neighbors with assistance. You can find out more about where we are headed here. We are simultaneously working on developing a new set of strategies for living into the mission and vision for our Freedom Schools – Austin program as school districts make plans for virtual summer school. This work may involve a greater focus on helping parents adapt to a new role in their kids’ education even as we seek to nurture the child’s excitement and joy in learning.
I think we are embarking on a new phase in adapting our life together to the current crisis. Phase One – the scramble to move all the things online – is (mostly) behind us. Check! But, if you’d been thinking, “Oh, I can hold out until we are all back together in the building again,” please consider rethinking that. We would love to help you get connected to community online.
Phase Two will demand that we ask new questions about what it means to be the Church in a socially distant world. And, for St. James’, it means asking what does it mean to be a church with a particular character in a socially distant world: a church of radical hospitality where all find welcome in spite of differences in socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity – even as those gaps widen due to the strains of economic and institutional meltdown.
We need to create spaces to connect and speak with and hear from each other about what we are seeing. These are open spaces, and we need you to invite friends and family members to join us. To that end, we are trying some new experiments:
- We are launching Online Connections Groups, and we want you to sign up by Wednesday, April 22.
- This Sunday morning, April 19, we are launching a study of Acts during our growing Forum Hour at 9 am. Acts is a particularly powerful text for our time, as we seek to re-understand our baptismal call to follow Jesus and to be apostles, a people sent as part of the uniting work of the Spirit in the world. The study will be accompanied by weekday spiritual practices for adults (and kids!).
- On Friday, May 1, we are going to try out a St. James’ Family Trivia Night online.
- In honor of Thurgood Marshall, whose feast we’ll celebrate on May 17, we will hold a Faith and Society Seminar Series on Saturdays in May to discuss the ways our current crisis is laying bare the gaps and fissures in our social fabric and to discern our call as people faithful to each other, as brothers and sisters, and to God. These one-hour seminars will build upon the conversation begun at the Union of Black Episcopalians May 2 General Meeting.
Stay tuned for more about how we are creating spaces to hold grief together and to celebrate May milestones!
Peace be with you,
The Rev. Eileen O’Brien
Rector
