The dramatic numbers reported last week continue to reverberate across the Episcopal Church.

From Jim Naughton’s lede on Mariann Bude:

I’d ask you to read Michelle Boorstein’s story about the situation that confronts the bishop and the church, and then look at the Q and As in The Post and the Examiner. Several things struck me as I listened to her give these interviews. She is unabashed about the need to rebuild the church. Unlike some of our leaders, she does not theologize our decline. She is also clear in her opinion that the church does not lack a heart for mission. Rather, it lacks capacity because so many of its congregations are weak and struggling simply to keep their doors open. It makes no sense (this is my opinion, not hers) to tell these people that if they look inward they will flounder, but if they look outward they will thrive, because they may be in no position to look effectively in either direction.

It’s hard to focus on mission and outreach when all of a congregation’s energy is going into survival. Or to put it another way, given how thinly stretched resources are in a typical congregation, resources in terms of staff, clergy, and volunteers, it’s almost impossible to do things well, let alone innovate, when so much effort is expended on making sure the doors are open.

Donald Romanik says much the same thing, challenging us to focus on the local, not the national or international:

for the overwhelming majority of members of our congregations, the Episcopal Church is equivalent to their local faith community and the mission and ministry of that local congregation is measured by the impact it makes on the people it touches both on Sunday, and, more importantly, throughout the week.

As leaders of our local faith communities, our primary responsibility is to bring the message of Jesus and his healing presence to our immediate surroundings and engage our neighbors and friends in the work of God’s reconciliation in the world. And we do this through a constant cycle of prayer, worship, education, fellowship, outreach, and evangelism – that awful “e-word.” The Episcopal Church has a powerful message of hope to a broken world. Likewise, our local faith communities also share this important message.

I suppose I began my annual report to the parish with those same statistics because I wanted to provide some larger context for our struggles at Grace, but also, at least implicitly, to remind people of the great resources we have at Grace to reach out into the world, and that we are already doing many of those very things, including evangelism.