Dear St. Luke’s,

At this point, I think it is important to point out that I am a hypocrite. This should be no surprise. If we are honest with ourselves, we are all hypocrites at one point or another. The world changes, we do too, and sometimes we are flat out wrong and need to rethink our convictions.

It was not that long ago at the annual meeting that I told the congregation that I plan on keeping St. Luke’s a solo clergy parish for the foreseeable future. We’ve implemented creative and forward-thinking changes to the staff that have greatly improved the quality of our ministry, but we have the tremendously good problem that we are still struggling to keep up with our rate of growth. I knew that if we continued to grow at this rate, we’d have to re-visit the whole multiple priest thing, but I did not think we’d be here so soon.

The vestry and I have come up with the idea of a pilot curate position that could help us ride this wave of growth, and help us determine if we should embrace St. Luke’s as single clergy parish, or if we should aspire to grow our ordained staff.

A curate is a newly ordained priest whose position will prepare them for future leadership, and it is innately temporary. This particular position is only for one calendar year. The majority of the job description is that of a generalist. The curate will help with worship, pastoral care, evangelism, education and at the Day School. They will also have the opportunity to take on leadership roles; in this case they will work with our J2A program and our pastoral care team.

My hope is this will free up resources for us to start new ministries. I have been itching to get our Senior High School Verger program underway, to start a mid-week healing service, and apply to have a seminarian posted at our Church. Having someone else to divvy up the priestly work will give me the time to get these initiatives underway.

A huge boon to this position is the fact that it is temporary. At the end of the curate’s time with us, we will celebrate the time we had together, and we will be able to look around and see what sort of Church we have become. There is a good chance we will just need a year of extra help to get things going, and then we’ll see no need to search for another priest to serve at St. Luke’s. We could realize that having another clergy person just simply did does not reduce the work or stress on the rest of the staff and volunteers. We could realize that it was helpful, but we wish the job description was a bit different. We may realize we cannot afford a permanent position, even though it was helpful. We may realize that we cannot live without a second priest, and they bring in more resources to cover their salary. At this point we will never be able to determine what we will realize after a year, so we are going to try an experiment. At the end of this year-long experiment the congregation and the vestry will be well-equipped to discern how we should proceed.

An important part of this experiment is how it will be funded. St. Luke’s has built up over the course of many years a healthy reserve from surpluses. This position will be entirely funded from these reserves, and will still leave us with a healthy amount in the case of an emergency. Even though these funds are unrestricted, I think using these funds on a salary is particularly appropriate, because the original donors gave these for the operations of the Church. The bottom line is that we do not plan on asking you for money to pay for this pilot position, and I never want to find ourselves in a position where we keep asking for pledge increases to pay for staff we cannot afford.

This is the concept, now let me tell you want has happened. The vestry created an internal search committee that was composed of three vestry members of different opinions on this pilot position. We worked with the diocese to create a process and posted the job description to the Diocesan website. I honestly did not think we’d get more than one qualified candidate that would want a position for just one year, but we received three. After interviews the search committee unanimously recommended one candidate for the position, and after the vestry met with the candidate, they unanimously voted to approve the hire. Now, we are waiting for the diocese to do their thing and for us to finalize a Letter of Agreement, and then we will have a curate at St. Luke’s.

I have very high hopes for this coming year, and I am personally excited to be working with our candidate while they are with us. My expectation is that they will fit into the happy and sometimes goofy place that we’ve made at St. Luke’s, and we will see their ministry flourish along with ours. I could be wrong. I don’t think I am, but if I am then we will at least know more in a year than we know now.

This is a lot, and it is very different from what St. Luke’s has done in the past. A lot of you may be excited, others disappointed, and many of you have a lot of questions. Scott Cameron has graciously allowed me to take his slot at the Adult Forum on May 7th at 9:00 am. Please come if you are interested and want to learn more about what our hopes are for this position. If you’d prefer to talk to me one-on-one, please be in touch so we can schedule a meeting. Regardless of what happens, I am thankful that we are doing this Church thing together.

Blessings,

Nick