This week’s post was written by The Reverend Maureen Martin, Associate for Parish Life and Community Engagement at Christ Episcopal Church in Grosse Pointe Fams MI. Maureen recently led her church through RenewalWorks for the second time this spring. Here are her reflections on the process:

“When I first arrived at Christ Church Grosse Pointe (CCGP) to serve as the Priest Associate for Parish Life and Community Engagement in February of 2022, I was tasked with offering the RenewalWorks inventory to the Parish, and creating a committee of key leaders to engage with our results who would then make recommendations based on our findings and reflections to the Vestry. I was not sure at first how I felt about this task or even how I felt about RenewalWorks as a concept, but I plunged in and found the experience to be an excellent way to begin a new ministry. Whether or not you are new in a call or seasoned, RenewalWorks is a strong tool for  examining the spiritual vitality of your Parish. In this post I will focus on what RenewalWorks can do for those who are new to a parish based on my own personal experience.

The Opportunity to Understand Ourselves

One of the challenges I faced was getting to know a large congregation at the tail-end of the pandemic. How they had functioned during the shutdown was a great unknown to me and, I think more crucial, what they had looked like prior to the pandemic, as well as who they believed themselves to be. RenewalWorks was a unique opportunity to look under the hood, so to speak, and an opportunity to build  a foundation of trust during my first years as a spiritual leader for the particular needs of CCGP. Hopefully we will not encounter anything like a pandemic in the years to come, but, in any new ministry context, there is always going to be a bit of a perceptual mismatch between who a parish believes themselves to be, and how they are experienced by new clergy in their midst. Rather than having to wait for this complex issue to arise over time, RenewalWorks gave me permission to begin asking serious questions about the spiritual vitality of this community.

Being new on the scene, there were a few folks who questioned my motives behind administering the Inventory, but it was only a handful. For the most part, people saw it as an opportunity to engage with their new priest. I was careful to explain to them that the results are anonymized and that the work that follows is communal and participatory. We had a higher percentage of our membership take the Inventory the first time than we did the second, which I attribute to this honeymoon effect.

The Work of the Workshop Team

Parallel to individual participation is the work of a committee pulled from the various ministry areas in the parish. Creating this committee helped communicate to the Parish that my leadership style is inviting and collaborative. I would highly suggest to anyone embarking on RenewalWorks that they have this committee in place before the Inventory is launched because they will play a huge role in driving member participation.

The committee members may reach out on your behalf directly to the membership to encourage them to take the coming Inventory and share with them the benefits they are already feeling from having done the Inventory themselves. Add to that, the one to one contact allows church members to ask questions about the new priest on staff. Because the materials for RenewalWorks are well organized and backed up with considerable research and data, the committee will have positive information to share about the new clergy person’s leadership style from the very beginning. The types of questions on the Inventory get people thinking about spiritual vitality long before the results roll in and will already begin to provide the committee with new and thoughtful language in their conversations, scaffolding the new priest’s lay leadership partners from the beginning.

In the years to come, the RenewalWorks data serves to strengthen the leadership’s position on new initiatives within the Parish. Referring back to our data I have been able to make my case to the Vestry a number of times as we begin new endeavors. They find it reassuring to know our decisions are supported by what we learned about ourselves through our participation in RenewalWorks and the feedback that we received from their staff at Forward Movement.

Learning We Are On A Journey

Once the results were in I met with our committee on four separate occasions for dicussions which led to our recommendations to the Vestry, based on the strength and growth areas of the congregation. The first meeting centered on a exploration of what it means to be on a spiritual journey. Contained within the materials provided by RenewalWorks is an insightful exercise for helping the committee members understand where their own spiritual growth has ebbed and flowed over the course of their lives.

In our case  - and I suspect this is a usual finding - people were surprised to discover how often their biggest growth phases happened in response to some of the hardest moments in their lives, and how during those periods of time God’s grace carried them through. They could see that it was grace which propelled them spiritually, not their own might, as each one of them had been through similar periods of exhaustion and despair. It also created an appropriate venue for me to share moments of growth and hardship in my own life. As I was new and we had no water under the bridge my offering to them was seeing them with fresh eyes which helped them to see themselves that way too.

I repeated this exercise with other groups of people and found that we had similarly powerful experiences across the board. If I were to go back to that point in my ministry I would repeat this exercise in our other ministry areas from Altar Guild to Formation Leaders to the Vestry. I think the biggest discovery for people is that everyone is on a spiritual journey and that the spiritual life is not some kind of black box within us, an unmeasurable mystery.

In order to address a concrete area of exploration let us take Biblical literacy as an example. Like so many Episcopal churches, our church learned that we needed more time with the Bible. I suspect that many people feel uncomfortable admitting that their relationship with the Bible is an uneasy one. However, learning, as a whole, that they are not alone in this helped people overcome their shyness around this topic. I offer specific classes on the Bible every year, alternating between Old and New Testament topics and the response had been exactly what RenewalWorks said it would be, which I happily point out from time to time. People are hungry for the Bible and in need of instruction on the transformational nature of Scripture.  In addition, I made it a point to tailor my preaching to their need for direct teaching on the weekly texts.

How Had We Changed?

When we repeated the Inventory this spring we saw that our congregation had matured quite a bit in just three years with many people shifting from exploring a relationship with Christ to growing in their relationship with Christ. Being able to point that out to various leaders in the coming years will help them feel confident that we are on the right track and will help them support new endeavors designed to help people move from growing in Christ to deepening in their relationship with Christ; the next step, and the hardest one to take on our journey to becoming centered in Christ.

RenewalWorks is a powerful tool for building the spiritual vitality of a congregation and on that I found very helpful at the beginning of a new ministry in the Church. I would love to hear from others who may have used it themselves in this fashion and see if their experience has been as positive as mine here at Christ Church Grosse Pointe.”