This week's reflection is offered by The Rev. David Langille, Rector of Messiah Episcopal Church in St. Paul, MN.

Come Holy Spirit, come like a fire and burn. Come like a wind and cleanse. Convict, convert, and consecrate our hearts to our great good and to your great glory. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. -- Fleming Rutledge

Spiritual renewal is in Messiah’s DNA. This is a Renewal Church, a Holy Spirit Church, a Day of Pentecost Church. That is what Messiah is known for, and how Messiah sees itself. But here’s the thing about Renewal Churches, and as someone who grew up in a Pentecostal Church, I know this history all too well. An era of renewal tends to last three generations before the soil is prepared for another era of renewal, or the renewal ends. From John Wesley’s Methodism to the Pentecostal Revival of the early twentieth Century, to the Charismatic Renewal in the mainline Churches in the 1980’s, they all had a shelf life. Messiah is in the second generation of the renewal that swept through this Church almost 40 years ago now. The current generation are inheritors of this renewal. Messiah tended and cared for the fruits of that renewal: the praise music, the healing ministry, the intercessory prayer, the house groups, and other signs and wonders. Messiah has been faithful. And, just like all Churches, conflict happens. Even in eras of great conflict, Messiah has known what NT scholar Wes Hill calls, “the comforting presence of the Spirit,” that has kept this Church going and from collapsing under the weight of it all.  

Messiah Episcopal Church is the last of the Charismatic Renewal parishes in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, filled primarily with those who grew up in Evangelical churches. When asked by Rector friends what one thing I most value about serving here, I half-jokingly reply that I am free to preach without an “Episcopal Decoder Ring;” in other words, that I am free to preach exegetical, biblical, and lectionary-based sermons. Messiah’s commitments in its Mission Statement are clear: The Worship of God; the Lordship of Christ; Renewal Through the Holy Spirit. And its values are biblically inspired: Following Jesus through Christian Formation, Spiritual Renewal, Human Diversity, Evangelism & Biblical Justice. And yet, even a congregation with these commitments can grow stale. After a year of some growth in 2024 that included Messiah’s largest Confirmation Class—of youth and adults—in living memory, the Church seemed to have stalled in 2025. It was challenging to develop a welcome ministry here, with few taking advantage of the gift of the Alpha course to invite friends and neighbors to meet Jesus. There has also been the challenge of new folks feeling welcome, of being able to join existing ministries, or, more importantly, of being discipled. All of this led to the discernment by parish leaders to participate in RenewalWorks. Why RenewalWorks? Because it came highly recommended by friends of Messiah elsewhere in the Episcopal Church and its commitment to “help churches grow in love of God and neighbor within their unique contexts and needs”.

Over seventy households responded to the RenewalWorks survey, and a team of lay leaders—from a diversity of backgrounds—worked through the data set applying it to Messiah. Beginning at our Annual Meeting we began rolling out these findings that have begun to shape this Church’s future. Simply put, we have learned several things, including that most adults at Messiah take being disciples of Jesus seriously, and that most respondents read Holy Scripture daily. And yet, there was a deep dissatisfaction with how their Church helped them as disciples. We also learned from those here five years and less that there was no clear pathway for them to become part of this community.  

Messiah has been granted a great gift with the RenewalWorks process. The team so well led by gifted lay leaders has made four recommendations to which every ministry is now called to respond:

Welcome: To create clear, simple pathways for newcomers to belong, learn, and build relationships

Grow: To develop visible discipleship pathways for people at different stages of the faith journey

Serve & Lead: To see the healthy movement of leaders and volunteers across ministries

Bless & Go Out: To develop meaningful acts of service in Messiah’s local community as a natural expression of our faith

Clergy and staff are now meeting with every ministry, to ask how they will apply these recommendations. Then we will revisit this conversation quarterly over the next year.

As we sing at Pentecost: Revive us again; fill each heart with Thy love. May each soul be rekindled with fire from above. Hallelujah! Thine the glory! Hallelujah! Amen! Hallelujah! Thine the glory! Revive us again. 

This week's reflection is offered by Loren Dixon, Director of RenewalWorks. 

Episcopalians often report that they value serving within their churches and in the broader community. Serving is a key characteristic of Episcopalians, and an important part of their church life, as confirmed through RenewalWorks data from over 400 Episcopal churches. Currently, 47% of Episcopalians report they serve those in need outside the church once a month or more.

Conversations with church teams reiterate this focus. Episcopalians want their churches to serve the needs of their communities and often – to be seen as a leader in this role.  

Cally Parkinson, a consultant for congregations and author of Rise: Bold Strategies to Transform Your Church describes eight archetypes that reflect church personalities. Episcopal parish data taken in total shows that nearly 30% of Episcopal churches surveyed by RenewalWorks present in an archetype called Extroverted. 

This church personality reflects parishioners with an impressive and strong sense of serving the local community, strong satisfaction with the church and church leadership, and members committed and energized by church opportunities provided for community service. At the same time, these churches also show parishioners with a lower commitment to understanding core Episcopal beliefs and spiritual practices. 

In some cases, the focus on serving has overtaken the idea of an individual's personal relationship with God.

The opportunity for Extroverted churches is to shift the focus away from volunteering to the notion of ministry or service as a spiritual practice, and an expression of discipleship rooted in scripture and liturgy. There are many ways to do this but often the simplest is to ensure that all church activities integrate worship, prayer and scripture into each offering. 

Within outreach activities, small changes can reorient and refocus. Examples from RenewalWorks churches include adding time for a group prayer for the those who you are serving before meal preparation, or inviting local first responders to a Sunday worship service and blessing. Then there are changes made in the context of a church with a large resale ministry - a shop that was important to their community and staffed by church volunteers. At the completion of the volunteer shifts, a quiet sharing time was implemented. Volunteers now come together to offer a prayer or a reflection on how they felt God at work in their ministry. It was a small change, and one that did not require staff or financial consideration, but it grounded the volunteer time as discipleship. 

I invite you to ask a few questions:

How is your serving grounded in your faith? 
How can your church activities be an instrument for God’s healing in the world?
Are there ways that your outreach can be refocused on a love of God and neighbor?

As we say in the Holy Eucharist at the end of the Sunday worship, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”. 

Churches considering RenewalWorks often wonder how the initiative gets integrated into the larger church community upon completion of the formal process. This week we again consider this question with comments from Larry Haas, Senior Warden at Christ Episcopal Church in Glendale OH. Larry reflects on how his church views RenewalWorks as a beginning. Christ Church participated in RenewalWorks in May 2025.

Christ Church Glendale recently participated in the Renewal Works spiritual inventory process.  We heard about it from the Rev. Scott Gunn, Executive Director of Forward Movement and a priest at our church.  I was surprised and very pleased that it was not what I was expecting.

I am Larry Haas, Sr. Warden, and when I heard about Renewal Works, I was immediately thinking about the data.  An inventory of data – oh my, spreadsheets and graphs and unlimited cross-sections of data!  That certainly appealed to me since my career was in high performance computing.  But another part of me is deeply interested in spirituality.  I have been a lifelong student of Christianity and am continually learning how to engage my faith life with everything else in my life.  This was the big surprise of Renewal Works.  The data was subordinate to the conversation about spiritual growth.  Each of the four workshops touched on the data, but only to provide context for where we were, both individually and as a faith community on the spiritual growth continuum.  And furthermore, it wasn’t so much about new programs and devices to grow but rather conversation about how to become what we say we believe.

I think it is fair to say that it is challenging for most churches to embark in a new direction without a solid plan in place and a final product to coalesce the parish around.  But that is the beauty and challenge of Renewal Works.  It isn’t about a product at the end; rather it is about reviving a culture within our parish that permits spirituality to permeate everything we do.  Done well, it infuses the existing programs and gatherings with the one thing that separates faith-based organizations from other non-profit organizations; the opportunity to connect what we do with how it shapes our faith in God and our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.  Now that is not new or revolutionary but how many times do we come together and “do the thing” without a moment of conscious acknowledgement of God and what he is doing or has done?  Just taking a moment to ask the questions, “where did you see God in this ministry or the program or this project?”  Or a moment at the beginning of a meeting or gathering to set it up with a verse of scripture and a prayer to help us remember why we are “doing the thing”.

Here is an example to further illustrate the desire to finish a project and check the box – complete.  At the end of our workshops, we developed a report to the Vestry about this process and our recommendations.  Near the end of the report, we had a series of thoughts about how we could begin to insert some of these learnings into the everyday activities at our parish.  Since it was the end of the document, it felt unfinished, and we wondered if we should leave that section out.  I think that is a poignant result of our experience.  It isn’t a survey followed by four workshops and culminating in a report to the Vestry.  Rather it is a beginning; to recognize how we can challenge ourselves and each other to be cognizant of God’s work among us and how to become better followers of Jesus.  We intentionally left that section in the report and told the Vestry the work is unfinished.

Our Vestry has embraced this experience, and our Stewardship Commission used some of the new language of spiritual growth in their appeal for our annual canvas.  Our next step is to offer a workshop to small gatherings of our parish.  We are hopeful that there will be enough of our experience embedded in these gatherings to capture the imagination of our members so that we can embrace our spiritual journey together, intentionally, even as we are “doing the thing”.

Churches considering RenewalWorks often wonder how the initiative gets integrated into the larger church community upon completion of the formal process. This week Craig Hillemeier, Senior Warden at All Saint's Episcopal Church in Hershey, PA, reflects on how his church has begun implementing RenewalWorks into the broader parish community. All Saint's participated in the Winter 2025 RenewalWorks cohort. Craig's thoughts are below:

I would say RenewalWorks was a very positive experience, certainly for the people who made up the team and the facilitators.  With the exception of one person, the comments were all very positive with many noting it was the most spiritually enriching experience they have had.  From my own perspective I am somewhat concerned how the positive nature of the experience can be translated it into a similarly positive impact on the rest of the congregation.  I would imagine many have wondered how to transmit that feeling which the RenewalWorks workshop team experienced into something accessible to the entire congregation.  Obviously there was the 10 - 15 hours of teamwork that brings about a sense of investment and when attached to a spiritual component, the RenewalWorks experience becomes pretty powerful.  

In addition to the interim and final reports to the congregation we have had many table discussions during the fellowship time after the church service downstairs in the parish hall.  One thing that our Rector, Mother Anjel Scarborough, has instituted that I have found very successful is having members of the RenewalWorks team spend 2 - 3 minutes addressing the congregation after her homily.  During the stewardship drive for the last several years people have given testimonials regarding why they attend All Saints. This year she has steered it to a focus on the RenewalWorks program.  

One these last Sunday blew me away.  A parishioner talked about their lifelong pursuit (struggle) with perfectionism.  Her spirituality would clash with that need for perfectionism as life events (death, health, disappointment) would cause her assessment of her spirituality to wax and wane, falling short of her perceived goals.  The RenewalWorks process helped her understand that 3/4 of the parish was in the first two groups and that falling short is, if anything, part of the human condition. Perfectionism in spirituality is simply not possible. The opportunity to plot a way forward was very uplifting.  

As we go forward I think our plan will be for three of the RenewalWorks team members who have some sense of ownership for implementation will probably try to get the entire team together every three to four months to assess how we are doing.   At least from my own perspective, small steps with a consistent reassessment and calibration are the best path forward.   

For many churches June is often spent reflecting on the prior church year and planning for the next.  As you think about your church’s focus for next year, we hope you will consider RenewalWorks. 

RenewalWorks is a discipleship initiative to re-orient parishes around the goal of growing spiritually - growing in love of God and neighbor. The curriculum includes a guided methodology of self-reflection, sharing, best practices, and workshop discussions. It is based on nearly 15 years of Episcopal research from over 350 churches and 29,000 Episcopal parishioners. The methodology has uncovered key characteristics of flourishing congregations.

More practically, participating Rectors report that completing the RenewalWorks process helps to identify lay leaders and to encourage these individuals to become spiritual leaders. What is the difference between having a church job versus being a spiritual leader?  RenewalWorks provides a framework for contemplating how lay leaders might incorporate spiritual components into their own ministry groups. The process invites them to open their thoughts to how church activities can draw us closer to each other, the broader community, and God. 

Last month I had the opportunity to work on-site with Christ Church, Glendale in Ohio.  In one workshop we had an interesting conversation about the Property Committee’s winter work of shoveling snow to clear walkways.  Everyone agreed this was an important and necessary task but wondered how this ministry could be seen as a thank-offering to the parish and to God.  As a result of the conversation, the senior warden plans to acknowledge that Committee’s thank-offering with the entire congregation.  Committee members will be invited to share, through testimonials, why this work is important to them and is ultimately an expression of their faith.

In another church, the RenewalWorks Facilitator decided to begin including a simple lay-led bible reflection into the weekly Prayer Shawl/Knitting Circle group.  She used Forward Movement’s Prayer app to access the daily readings.  In each session a different member would prepare and lead the bible reflection.  The Facilitator reported that this small change completely transformed the focus of that group. 

This spring two RenewalWorks churches had small groups that included active dinner groups. To date they had not incorporated a spiritual practice into these dinners.  RenewalWorks participants wondered how adding a prompt for deeper conversation might create a venue for deeper connection.  For the fall, both will look to provide evangelism cards as a conversation prompt. It’s a small change, but also an opportunity to share our stories and grow in relationship to each other.

The above are examples of how RenewalWorks creates an environment for lay and clergy to jointly examine current church groups and activities.  Does your church view ministries as a way to deepen relationships with each other and God?

Come join us this fall to start the discovery.  We are currently taking registration for our fall 2025 cohort through the end of July.

We are excited to announce that RenewalWorks has a new website! RenewalWorks.org was designed with an easy-to-navigate layout, clear pathways to resources, and an intuitive design, making it easier than ever to discover all that RenewalWorks has to offer. Be sure to also check out the new introductory video on our homepage. It describes the research behind the RenewalWorks initiative as well as our process, support, and outcome examples.

While churches have many reasons for engaging RenewalWorks, they all center on our core mission of assisting parishes in creating vibrant communities, oriented around the spiritual deepening of its individuals. Whether you're a church leader or an interested parishioner, RenewalWorks looks forward to sharing our findings from over 350 Episcopal churches and best practices for how to refocus church culture on nourishing and growing our love of God and neighbor.

We invite you to explore the website and video to discover how you can engage with RenewalWorks. We are currently speaking with churches interested in the September RenewalWorks cohort. If you are interested in joining this group, please reach out to have a conversation with RenewalWorks staff or register here.

Presumptuous sins

As I read this familiar psalm again this week (see above), I got stuck on what the psalmist meant by presumptuous sins. As I started thinking about it, the following questions occurred to me:

By presumptuous sins, does the psalmist mean presuming that God owes me something, that the blessings of life are anything but gift? Is it about presuming that I know better than God how to run the universe? Presuming that I am in a position to judge somebody else? Presuming that other people exist for my convenience? Presuming that I have any clue what is going to happen in days ahead, maybe even in the next fifteen minutes? Presuming that my value is tied to my financial assets, my resume, my social connections? Presuming that the ways I have hurt other people or let them down are not really that big a deal? Presuming that the ways others have hurt me are too grand to merit forgiveness? The list goes on. Presumptuous sins: It’s actually a pretty broad description of ways we go off the rails.

How are we to be preserved from presumptuous sins? It is interesting to me that this confessional portion of the psalm follows two sections with distinct themes. On first reading, they may seem disconnected, as if there are three different psalms smashed together. But I think there’s a thread.

First, in verses 1-6, the psalmist notes that all of creation witnesses to God’s transcendence, the heavens declaring the glory of God, with a message that goes out to all the lands. Consideration of that witness, a glimmer of the majesty of the Holy One, singing "How Great Thou Art", may well lay the foundation for deliverance from presumptuous sins. Maybe presumptuous sins are countered in God’s question to Job near the end of the book, a passage offered in the daily lectionary last Saturday. God asks Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth.”

Second, moving to another theme in verses 7-11, the psalmist notes that the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. Those laws are to be valued, more desired than gold, sweeter than honey, bringing enlightenment. I believe those laws may be best described not as God telling us: Do this or else. Rather we look to Jesus who in the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures says that the law is summed up in love, love of God, love of neighbor, love of self. Divine teaching, God’s law, the commandments, God’s statutes are there to keep us on track. It strikes me that they bear the possibility of warding off presumptuous sins.

All of which is to say that we do so with God’s help. That’s why this verse with reference to presumptuous sins is followed by the prayer that concludes the psalm: Let words of mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. It’s a prayer often offered by preachers before they hold forth in the pulpit. And since we’re all preachers (we are all called in baptism to proclaim good news), it’s a good prayer to start each day, to see our words and our thoughts unfolding in the presence of the Holy One whose glory is declared in the heavens and whose law if the way of love.

This psalm invites inventory this Monday morning: what variety of presumptuous sins have a hold on us? And how can we find release from their power over us? We can start by looking up to the heavens which declare the glory of God.

-Jay Sidebotham

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Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule. (Now accepting signups for the January 2025 cohort)  Sign up now!

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks - Digital Catalog

We are sometimes asked the question: is my congregation too small to do RenewalWorks?

Experience has shown us that RenewalWorks process is most productive for congregations with average Sunday attendance of 45 and up. However, we know that no congregation is too small to focus on spiritual growth and we have some great resources for smaller congregations to share with you.

My Way of Love is a joint project with RenewalWorks and Presiding Bishop Curry’s office. It begins with each parishioner taking a very short online survey (based on the RenewalWorks spiritual life inventory). Each participant then receives an email with a helpful explanation of our findings, along with some tips for growing spiritually and the opportunity to sign up to receive a personalized 8-week spiritual growth program via email tailored to where they are currently in their spiritual journey.

Churches have gathered small groups and even challenged their whole congregations to take this inventory and then spend some time together reflecting on their personal results. Participants can meet weekly to share their experience of the program: What are they finding new, exciting, troubling? Which suggestions are they implementing to deepen their spiritual lives?

Bishop Curry recently did the My Way of Love himself and loved it! (He discussed it with Scott Gunn, Forward Movement’s executive director.)

Although the email program is personalized for each participant, the group sharing creates a way for the overall church to come together around the idea of spiritual growth.  More information can be found here:  https://www.episcopalchurch.org/way-of-love/my-way-of-love/

The best part is—it’s free, a gift from Forward Movement and the Episcopal Church.

The second program we suggest for small groups and small congregations is Revive. This discipleship program is the perfect gift to offer the lay leaders who have poured out so much in service to your congregation. Revive is about transformation through spiritual formation. In just 10 months, this small-group program transforms leaders of practical church ministry into confident spiritual leaders who love God and participate in Christ’s ministry.

Thanks to the videos and extensive facilitator and participant guides, there is little prep work for the facilitator and can be convened online through zoom or in person.  The cost is $50 for a small church.

It is a beautiful program and participants report that it really changes their lives and causes them to grow spiritually in love of God and neighbor.

Information on Revive can be found here: https://revive.forwardmovement.org/

The mission of RenewalWorks is to help congregations of all sizes foster a culture of spiritual growth, and by spiritual growth, we mean growing in love of God and neighbor. Please contact us if this mission resonates with you, we would love to be a resource in this journey.

A new chapter at RenewalWorks

As of July 1, RenewalWorks enters a new chapter, after eight years of ministry helping congregations focus on spiritual growth. We began this work in the hopes that it could be a helpful tool for the Episcopal Church. It was an experiment, a pilot project. As such, it involved a bit of stepping out in faith. Generous donors joined in taking that leap, for which I will always be grateful. Our ultimate goal was to find a home for this work. Good news! After working with about 300 congregations, and learning a lot in the process, our staff will now be supported by the Forward Movement operating budget, an indication that the work is sustainable, that it will continue and grow. The Rev. Canon Scott Gunn has described RenewalWorks as the Research and Development arm of Forward Movement. We’re excited that we can continue in that role.

This will involve some change in our staffing. I’m pleased to announce that Ms. Loren Dixon will take on the role of Director of RenewalWorks. Ms. Samantha Franklin will take on the role of Associate Director.Both Samantha and Loren have been at this work for years, and have proven to be effective and imaginative coordinators and collaborators with congregations. I will continue to be involved as a Senior Consultant, and will do what I can to promote this work. Under the leadership of Loren and Samantha, I know this ministry will grow in new and interesting ways.

• Our core ministry is the RenewalWorks process, with online inventory and subsequent workshops, providing helpful discernment for congregations as they seek to move forward. (We believe that this process can be especially helpful right now as we move out of COVID and seek understanding of where people are in their spiritual journeys.)
• The process which we call Revive continues, with a focus on the heart of the leader, helping clergy and vestry and other lay leaders explore what it means to be spiritual leaders.
• RenewalWorks-for-me (an individual inventory followed by a series of emails offering a personal spiritual plan) has been adopted by the Presiding Bishop’s office, in a new ministry called My Way of Love.
• We’ll continue to offer monthly zoom gatherings (called RenewalWorks: Connect) with conversation about what discipleship looks like in the Episcopal Church.
• And once we fully emerge from COVID, we plan to return to offering conferences to gather Episcopalians focused on discipleship.

As we move into a new and exciting chapter for RenewalWorks, we value your prayers along with any thoughts you might have about how this ministry can grow. We welcome you to spread the news about RenewalWorks to other congregations. As we mentioned, we believe it’s an especially valuable tool coming out of COVID. And Forward Movement will certainly welcome any financial support you can offer in days ahead. This is important work, transforming work for the Episcopal church. It is worthy of your support.

As Dag Hammarskjold wrote: For all that has been, thanks. For all that shall be, yes. Stay tuned for the next chapter of RenewalWorks! By God’s grace, it’s going to be great!