Dear People of Grace,

I wanted to take a minute to send you a reflection that was a sort of four-year update. This January, I will begin my fifth year as your rector. Hard to believe! Over these four years, we have shared so much as a community. I am proud to say that Grace is a thriving spiritual community that places enormous value on our three crucial focus points of prayer, compassion, and belonging. I have to pinch myself to believe that I really do have the opportunity to be here among you.

To be sure, there is always space to grow and improve, to live more deeply into our call to grow into the fullness of Christ, as our Prayer Book describes. To that end, every December I ask the vestry to share what they see as strengths of the parish as well as what they see as areas that need more attention. What are we doing well as a community? How are we living into the Spirit's call? What is the Spirit calling us to explore more? What are we missing? These conversations are deeply important, and this year we reflected in particular on the way we have seen the growth with the mindful cluster model here at Grace.

For those of you who are new-or those who are not familiar-I introduced this framework of clusters when I arrived. I was curious about how we might step away from a more program-maintenance model that emphasized simply preserving customs and patterns. I was curious about how a resource-sized parish could actually be more vulnerable as a community, how we could intentionally cultivate an awareness of how the Spirit of Christ is calling us to be curious, to work collaboratively, and to listen deeply to where we are being invited. Rather than focus on who we could get to step into leadership roles and simply maintain existing structures, we organized ourselves into five Ministry Clusters: Administration, Compassion, Participation, Formation, and Liturgy & Creative Expression. No one likes change just to change; however, we are called to be nimble to the Spirit's direction. My doctoral thesis at Sewanee focused on this entire experiment.

Our shared experience has been enormously enriching, with the staff, vestry, and committee members all becoming more aware of "how the pieces fit together" in the community. Grace is a large, complex parish, and these clusters help us all see the whole, to notice how God is at work.

I want to send you two essays that I have written over the past few weeks, collaborating with colleagues from the diocese and others from around the world who gathered with me in August in Snowmass at St. Benedict's Monastery. In that space with Thomas Keating, Tilden Edwards, Laurence Freeman, Richard Rohr, and others, I began to wonder even more how to teach this shift, this reorientation. How can we better understand the space we are being invited to explore? What are resistances? What are glimpses of grace? How might we explore congregational development through a contemplative lens such as this? I offer these two essays to you as theological reflections on the reorientation in our shared ministry.

So, please take a bit of time to read these essays, and bring your thoughts to the conversation in January! I look forward to seeing you.

Bless you all,

Stuart+