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FridayOur own Jessica served as verger for the Diocesan worship service Friday evening, where Scott was concluding a day of reports and elections.

The event took place in the main gym of Holy Innocents Episcopal School, established in 1959 by the Episcopal church of the same name. Scott's mother taught there from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. Here's a photo of the same location, then and now.

At a presentation by The Office of Congregational Vitality (vitality@episcopal.org), Scott joined Sue and Sharon, co-mentors of the morning EfM group at St. James. The presenters advertised services offered to congregations regarding stewardship, leadership, and congregational discernment.

There we participated in an exercise based on John Westerhoff's list of Anglican characteristics. Stations were set up along the walls of the room for the "temperaments" centered on aesthetics, nature, history, moderation, intuition, comfort with ambiguity, open-mindedness, catholicity, and politics (but not "partisanship" -- one participant told us that a round-table discussion earlier in the day had turned ugly when partisanship got involved in a discussion of the phrase, "Behold, I am doing a new thing"). The other stations identified Anglican "spiritualities" described as mystical, pastoral, sacramental, communial, and liturgical.

We EfM mentors saw the four sources of a TR behind all those many categories. The presenters were using a procedure in the RRG called "TR in Motion."

The Bishop's sermon was a TR that drew on a poem about the "minutes" of our lives, and a bit of Isaiah. Before the prophet talks about "a new thing," there's a passage of remembrance of God's great deeds. Then Isaiah tells us to forget about all that -- Bishop Wright called that a "what the--?" move. The Bishop guessed that some of us might be anxious wondering what "new thing" we might have to do and reminded us that it's God who's doing something.

[See a fuller report at Scott's personal blog The Word Sanctuary.]