Gardner

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November, 1998 - Vol. XXVII No. 2
Total Ministry: A New Way of Being Together

"Total Ministry on the Eastern Border of Oregon"
by The Rev. Dan Gardner

Holy Trinity, Vale, is an extremely small congregation in the Diocese of Eastern Oregon. It was founded in 1908 by a group of women in the community and served by visiting clergy on a hit or miss basis. The church building was dedicated on October 11, 1911 and still remains much the same as when it was built. Vale has always been a small farming community and could seldom support a full-time priest. Its last resident clergy left in 1963 and since that time Holy Trinity has been served in a number of sometimes innovative ways. Most often, Holy Trinity has been yoked with St. Paul’s, Nyssa, about 20 miles away. Both congregations, though small, have been adamant about keeping an Episcopal presence in their communities. My family and I joined Holy Trinity in 1963 and I soon became a lay reader and later served as Senior Warden. Once during a conversation with a priest we shared with St. Paul’s he suggested that I "read" for the priesthood so that I could serve as a non-stipendiary priest at Holy Trinity. I told him that I didn’t want to do something like that by myself.

In 1986 Holy Trinity was asked to investigate the possibility of joining a "cluster" with Nyssa, Ontario, and four churches in the Diocese of Idaho. We had already been aware of the Green Country Cluster in Oklahoma put together by Jim Kelsey and were intrigued by the concept. Fr. Kelsey came to our cluster and talked to us about the idea of Total Ministry and we jumped at the chance to move into this exciting way of being the church. By 1988, The Seven Rivers Cluster of the Dioceses of Idaho and Eastern Oregon had been formed and a Missioner hired to oversee the cluster. The Rev. Craig Heverly came to us from a cluster in Central New York. Craig shared our vision of the "Ministry of all the Baptized" as we called it and quickly began work to put together "Covenant Groups" styled after the groups put together by The Rev. Jim Kelsey and Bishop Ray in the Diocese of Northern Michigan. With the formation of the Covenant Groups a "Ministry Development Specialist" was needed to train the Covenant Groups and The Rev. Patricia Green was hired to fill that position. Soon Craig and Patricia had teams studying in six of the seven churches in the Cluster with the intent of forming ministry teams to operate in each of the congregations. Five of those six churches had no resident clergy. Problems developed between the two dioceses over the amount of training needed by the local priest candidates and after a period of six years, the cluster was dissolved, with a new smaller cluster containing just the three Oregon churches surviving. With the loss of support from the Diocese of Idaho Craig Heverly left the cluster in early 1995. Patricia Green stayed until late in 1995 to help the much-reduced cluster consolidate. Their work had produced two well-developed Ministry Support Teams in Nyssa and Vale. The Ministry Support Team of Holy Trinity was commissioned and ordained in December of 1995 as was the team of St. Paul's, Nyssa. The two churches, along with St. Matthew's, Ontario now form the Treasure Valley Episcopal Cluster.

Since 1995 Holy Trinity has operated with the Ministry Support Team as its leaders. The Rev. Patrick Bell of St. Matthew's in Ontario serves as mentor to the team and meets with them on a regular basis. Our team is composed of an Administrator, a Pastoral Care Coordinator, an Education Coordinator, a Justice and Peace Coordinator (outreach) and myself as Local Priest. The team members call upon the congregation for help in their respective areas as needed. The Pastoral Care Coordinator, for instance, may call anyone in the congregation for help in a particular pastoral care situation; she does not do the work alone. As Local Priest I am contracted to do a minimum of two services a month as well as special celebrations such as Christmas and Easter. I find that serving as the Priest part of the team is really not a lot different from serving as one of the two lay readers in our congregation. For years, the two of us conducted Morning Prayer Services three Sundays a month. Now, four of the congregation are licensed Lay Readers and they provide Morning Prayer when a priest is not available for Eucharist. We average having Eucharist three Sundays a month. As a part of the team I can call on any of the others when I need help and it is gladly supplied. For instance, nearly everyone in the congregation serves as Lector, including those of Junior High and High School age.

The over all feeling of the congregation at Holy Trinity is upbeat. Most of the people will say that they feel a real presence of the Holy Spirit at work within the congregation. The spirituality of each person has increased because they are no longer just receivers of ministry, but they are doers of ministry as well. We all minister to each other as well as to the local community. We each see our place in Vale as an opportunity to minister to those with whom we come in contact. We now take our ministries with us to work and see those jobs as just another opportunity to do the work of Jesus Christ. The people of Holy Trinity are looking outward to the local community to see where their ministries are needed. This tiny church probably could have closed its doors years ago, but it continues to offer the Episcopal presence to the community. Our outreach has gone to other congregations in Vale as well. An arrangement between Bishop Paul Swanson of the ELCA and Bishop Rustin Kimsey of the Diocese of Eastern Oregon has allowed me to offer worship services at Grace Lutheran in Vale as well. This ELCA church has been without a Pastor for 16 months and the arrangement allows them to continue to operate during their long search process. The mutual ministry model has been demonstrated to the people of Grace as they investigate their future.

We can see problems in the future that we will need to overcome. We need to continue to train new team members so that the present team does not simply replace the Parish Priest in the old model. Getting a new round of training started has been difficult, mainly because there are not too many people left to train and we have settled back into a kind of inertia after five years of intensive study. The Diocese has developed a new study guide, which we hope to begin in Advent with the intention of training new team members. Our goal is to have everybody in the congregation involved in the team in some significant way.

We are seeing small signs of growth. Some old members are returning to church and a few new families have started attending on a regular basis. While there has not been a rush of new members to our doors, we feel we have halted a downward spiral and are starting to move back up. Holy Trinity will never be big. The community of Vale has a population of 1500 and another 2000 in the area outside of town. There are ten churches in town including two wards of the LDS church. Our mission is to provide an Episcopal presence in our community and to enable our members to be ministers of Jesus Christ to the world. We have found that the Mutual Ministry approach has helped us to live into that mission better than any approach we have tried before.

Dan serves as local priest at Holy Trinity in Vale. You may contact him at dang@micron.net