Our Annual Meeting occurs on Sunday, November 13. We’ve got all of the paperwork taken care of; we’ve got a slate of excellent candidates for vestry and wardens; our stewardship campaign is well underway and we have a draft budget.

I’ve begun working on my annual report, my third as Rector of Grace. It’s an opportunity to reflect back on where we’ve been over the last year (and longer) and where we are headed. Taking stock of the past is no easy thing. Detecting and analyzing trends and themes in ministry and mission can be difficult; it’s easy to come up with compelling and competing narratives that make sense of where we are. Looking into the future is even more difficult. What will the new year bring?

My experience in the past year has brought home to me how easy it is to be overtaken by events. I couldn’t have predicted the wave of protests that broke out on Madison’s Capitol Square last February and how they shaped Grace’s ministry for months. There was no way to prepare for something like this; no way to have thought about in advance how to respond. The same is true for other things.

It’s easy to operate in a crisis mentality for a time. For most churches, the budget, for example, seems always to be in crisis. We look for quick solutions that will solve the problem for this year or next, and the only longer-term trend we notice is the long-term reality (at Grace, it goes back decades) that we run annual operating deficits in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Focusing on that long-term trend may distract us from focusing on other long-term trends that might help to explain the situation we are in and help us begin to strategize how to move forward. The Episcopal Church, Christianity, even religion are in decline in the United States. More people than ever before claim no religious affiliation; membership and attendance numbers in the Episcopal Church are down, mirroring trends in other denominations.

In spite of our prominent location on Madison’s Capitol Square, Grace Church, like other churches, exist on the periphery of our culture. I doubt that’s going to change. We might want to mourn that fact, look back wistfully on the “glory days” of the 50s and 60s; we might even think that there’s something we can do that could return us to prominence. I don’t think so.

Former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold was recently interviewed by Faith and Leadership. He said:

I also think that ecclesial bodies — just as in our own life cycle — go through a paschal pattern again and again. There’s a dying and a rising, a dying and a rising.

There’s an arrogance and a self-confidence that is shattered by things falling apart. Usually, that is an invitation to deeper wisdom. It may be difficult and painful, but there’s usually a grace hidden in that in some way, and then there’s a resurrection with new insight and wisdom that comes out of suffering or loss.

He used the image of the earthquake damage to the National Cathedral as a symbol of what’s happening in our church. Built at a time when the Episcopal Church and Episcopalians were at the center of our culture and power, the damage forced the congregation and its programs, beginning with the 9-11 commemoration, to other venues.

We are broken, as a denomination and as mainline Christianity. To use another of Griswold’s images, we are in a desert place. But as he says, that can be a good place, a creative place, where old baggage is jettisoned and new possibilities envisioned and engaged.