In a recent article for the Alban Institute, Deborah Kapp writes these words:
“Congregations are like human beings. No two are alike, and no two express their faith in exactly the same way. Like any individual Christian, each congregation can be said to have its own vocation. That is, God calls each congregation to live faithfully in a particular time and place, within the constraints of its capacities and perceptions of itself and the world.”
She goes on to write that four factors help to shape the vocational understanding of a particular congregation, which are: people, context, theological orientation, and action.
Since I have just become part of this community of faith it is impossible for me to comment too much on how any of those four elements are illuminated in the Barrington Presbyterian Church. However, I can say that it is exactly these elements that we will discover together in the coming months and years.
Who are we as a gathered community of faith? We are all not alike. We do not all come to worship with the same outlook on life, the same desires and hopes, the same anxieties nor the same life experience. As individuals we make up a corporate image that is offered to the community and the world about who we are. Our task as a church community is to seek together to understand more fully what that corporate image is and what changes we may want to make or what portions of that image we want to enhance.
As a church community we gather to worship and work at 400 County Road. But is that all there is to our context? Each one of us moves around the communities of Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts in our daily travels and activities. We interact with a variety of people in a variety of situations. We impact those people and situations and they impact us. What do we bring to those settings and what do we bring from them? While we are situated in a particular place we reach out in ever expanding circles that provide us with daily opportunities to share something of who we are as people of faith. What more do we need to understand about where we are in order to share more about who we are?
Just as we are all different in our personalities and lives, so too are we different in our theological orientations. This difference in our midst is a good thing because it calls us together to share our faith with one another and with those not yet part of this community so that we might better understand one another and the one who is the author of all our faith. It is in the sharing of differences that we can become open to learning more about our God. And yet as we bring together all of our theological perspectives we must look with new eyes at how others see who we are as a community of faith. Does our corporate theological orientation make sense? Does it invite inquiry and discussion? Does it create barriers to those seeking care and community? What does it say about who we are, whose we are and where we are in our journey of faith?
In the very short time that I have been here, I have discovered that this church is not passive. There is a great amount of activity occurring at the church and on behalf of the church every day. In many ways Barrington Presbyterian Church is a faith community that actively lives out its faith. That is a good thing, because it means that we understand that we are called out into the world. But there are many institutions that are just as active and yet profess no faith connection. What makes us different from them? This is not to suggest that we should either cease our activities or that those other organizations are in some way less helpful or worthy af attention because they are not faith based. Rather it is to suggest that as faithful people who are both called together as a community of faith and called out into the community as people of faith that we need not hide the fact that we engage in many of the activities in and around the church and the various communities of our lives because of our faith. We act because of God’s action in our lives. We respond because God acted first. We are who we are, where we are engaged in the various activities of our lives in large part because of whose we are. And that news is worthy of sharing!
Friends, we have much to learn from each other and much to share with each other. I look forward to long conversations held over a long period of time as we work together to discover who we, as the Barrington Presbyterian Church, are called to become in the years to come. May God continue to bless us as we together worship and work in this time and place.
Rev. Patrick Notley
Deborah J. Kapp, “Worship and Congregational Vocation” in The Alban Weekly, No. 216, September 15, 2008.
