Value Beyond Price

Pastor’s Annual Report, AD 2022

I feel like people who read annual reports are interested mostly in numbers. How was attendance? How was giving? —that sort of thing. Perhaps I’m projecting. Perhaps these are really my own expectations for the sort of report I’m to write each year.

By what metric does one measure the success of a religion? By definition we deal in intangibles: in faith, hope, love, meaning, purpose, value, wisdom, mysticism, enlightenment, salvation. Even the things here we can see and touch—water and oil, bread and wine—impart to us the invisible divine. How does one report on such things?

The Church is not a business. We need to pay the bills, of course. No-one wants to worry about money. But as soon as we think that we’re selling something, as soon as it comes down to advertising and marketing and customer service, we’re done. We won’t be God’s Church anymore. We’ll just be one more in the long line of American snake-oil salesmen.

We are a community called to be Christ together: one in His Body, one in His Spirit. What I can say of the tangibles, in brief, is that we’re still here—emphatically so! Financially we’re in the black, thank God. Our doors are still open to all, offering Word and Sacrament, worship and education, absolution and prayer, coffee and conversation.

Coming up on two years since the beginning of the Covid pandemic—and its various iterations of Delta and Omicron, like waves of Black Death through fourteenth-century Europe—I’m proud to say that I know of no-one who has contracted the virus by coming to worship at St Peter’s. And while that could change tomorrow, I consider it a true badge of honor, and a sign of our love for our neighbor, throughout all of 2020 and 2021.

Attendance is still down, way down in some respects. Families with young children are particularly thin upon the ground, despite the loyal efforts of our Sunday School teachers. St Peter’s Youth, however, remains active and well-attended, and we thank God for that. It was also good to see so many familiar faces on Christmas Eve.

For those whom we don’t see in person—particularly the most vulnerable among us—we try to keep connected through emails, YouTube, Facebook, pastoral visitation, phone calls, the U.S. Postal Service, and every other tool at our disposal. This quite naturally includes a lot of prayer.

And we’re still reaching new people online, sometimes quite a lot of people. Whenever I start to wonder about whether anyone is joining Michelle and I for our livestreamed Morning Prayer, I receive some message or comment from a completely unexpected viewer in Sweden or India or the United Kingdom. We have a small but real presence in cyberspace with which to preach the Word of God, and for that I am grateful.

I’m also deeply thankful to our committed core: to those of you who have stepped up, time and again, to serve faithfully the life of this community above and beyond the call of duty, for these two long years in which I have so often been my own usher and acolyte and communion assistant and reader. Your ministry has allowed me to continue my own.

In the long run, we will have to learn to measure success in countercultural terms. Christians, especially those of a more thoughtful, liturgical, and sacramental bent, are becoming strangers and aliens once more. Religion isn’t going away; people will always worship something. The question then becomes, What is it that our culture holds sacred?

And here’s my take on that: Americans don’t believe in God. Not really. Americans believe in the market. If you can buy and sell it, then it’s real. Otherwise it’s just taking up time and energy better spent on earnings and entertainments. That’s why the only religions currently thriving in America are those that are selling something.

For much of the West, the only reality is economic. The only value is price. We have to show them something more. We have to show them Jesus. Only then will we be free.

Better to be what Christ has called us to be, than to measure success in worldly terms. Better to be small and faithful, humble and welcoming, passionate and patient. Better to proclaim forgiveness without price and salvation beyond worth. So long as we can do that here, we will be the Church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Welcome to 2022. I can’t say what all this New Year will bring with it. Only a fool scries the future. But I am confident that we will fail, fall, make mistakes, seek forgiveness, receive grace upon grace from Jesus Christ our Lord, and get up to be sent out and to do it all again. As long as we can do that here, we will be God’s Church.

Christianity is death and resurrection every day. What have we then to fear?

In Jesus. Amen.