Teens and adults from Redeemer and Guardian Angel churches prepare a Thanksgiving Day meal together (2001).

Sharing resources to build a community-based church
by Robert W. Ihloff

Guardian Angel, Baltimore, is a small church in a once blue-collar neighborhood now punctuated with crack houses and cheap apartments. The church has a long tradition of ministering to and with its neighborhood. It sponsors a food pantry, provides clothing, houses a program to train persons to go on job interviews, and hosts a number of neighborhood ministries. On Sunday or other days one finds a drug addict worshipping side-by-side with a social worker, a mentally challenged adult, a mother on welfare, an elderly lifelong resident of this Remington neighborhood. The congregation is racially mixed and truly welcoming of everyone. At a visitation some years ago, I had been praising the vestry of Guardian Angel for its commitments to social justice. A vestrywoman politely interrupted, "Bishop, what you keep calling social justice ministries we just think of as being the church."

She was absolutely correct. At Guardian Angel, social justice is integral, not one aspect of being the church in that neighborhood.

Less than three miles away from Guardian Angel is Church of the Redeemer, the largest Episcopal Church in the city. Located in a posh neighborhood, Redeemer is an upper-middle-class, white congregation made up of professional and business people. At first glance, it might not seem that the members of these two congregations even live in the same world, let alone in the same city. In fact, they share a common commitment to the ministry of Guardian Angel, and a growing commitment to sharing resources.

When Alice Jellema accepted the call as rector to Guardian Angel, she left a full-time position in a suburban parish to accept this part-time cure in the city. It necessitated her taking a second job as a receptionist. Alice longed to devote her full attention to the demanding ministries of Guardian Angel, but the parish could not afford to pay her more money. In her previous ministry, she had come to know a number of members of Redeemer. They encouraged her to seek assistance from Redeemer’s Outreach Committee. As she shared the story of Guardian Angel’s ministry in the city, many people saw an opportunity not only to provide a quarter of Alice’s full-time salary and benefits (the Diocese agreed to pay a quarter as well), but also an opportunity to share talents and time. Now members of Redeemer are enthusiastically involved as volunteers in a number of ministries at Guardian Angel, the clergy engage in pulpit exchanges and resources are being shared in ways that are cooperative more than paternalistic.

Moving from parochialism

All the resources we need to do all the exciting ministries we can imagine are right here in this diverse diocese of urban, suburban and rural areas, with pockets of dire poverty and of extraordinary affluence. However, they are not equally distributed, and some are not available in the places of greater need. More explicitly, all the talents and experience, all the time and energy and even all the money we need to accomplish the mission of God’s Church are at our disposal. To effectively utilize them, acting morally and conscientiously, we need to move from parochialism into the sharing of resources across parish lines.

The diocese is the smallest unit for Christian mission and ministry! This flies in the face of the popular Protestant notion that the basic (and sadly for some, the only) unit is the parish church. No congregation, not even the largest, most active and dedicated, will be able to attend to all the ministries that need doing nor even to see and comprehend the full implications for mission. What too often happens is that large congregations with many resources simply multiply the ways they minister to their own constituents, thereby increasing their own comfort levels as they increase the gulf between themselves and the less well-endowed. In such parishes, little information comes from outside the congregation to inform leaders about other needs and possibilities for ministry. There are always some individual members who are dedicated to outreach, but, sadly, in most able congregations, outreach is not truly resource-sharing. Rather, it is a response from their largess, which enables members to feel that they are being generous while they continue to spend most of their resources on themselves.

What is needed is a larger sphere in which persons of considerable diversity interface; this is where the diocese plays an essential role. When all of the needs and aspirations for ministry in a wider area can be shared out of a rich diversity of persons and places, and where conflicting needs and ideas can be weighed, persons of faith and goodwill respond through sharing their resources. In my experience, this sharing is not only an exercise in stewardship worthy of the name Christian; it also deepens the spirituality of the participants, bringing each person to greater wholeness and deeper happiness. I believe most people want to be generous. When persons blessed with many resources are brought into dialogue with brothers and sisters with obvious needs, a sense of community ensues in which there is a wonderful opportunity for generosity and meaningful sharing. Such dialogues are time-consuming, not infrequently heated, often difficult to maintain, and absolutely necessary for the mission of the church. It is a major moral imperative and responsibility of dioceses to foster and sponsor such dialogues in a variety of ways and to encourage sharing their vision and their resources.

The diocese as broker

The diocese should be a broker of talents and expertise, enabling persons to contribute these in places other than their own parish. Bishops and other members of diocesan staff should understand themselves as catalysts for this sharing. Diocesan budgets should reflect this by placing resources in areas of greater need. For example, our diocesan budget largely funds one of our inner-city parishes. This parish is not a mission but its work is integral to the mission of the diocese. Although there are few financial resources and insufficient persons with talents and time within that community, many volunteers from other parishes participate in a number of community ministries through this parish and we all contribute to its budget. This ministry is a priority even though it will never likely be self-sustaining. Our diocese similarly sponsors a number of city and rural parishes, providing some financial assistance and/or people. These augment the resources available locally. We do this without the stigma of calling churches missions or aided parishes; they are simply integral to our mission, which assumes the sharing of resources. Moreover, we encourage special relationships among parishes. Eight congregations in a region sponsor a program to house homeless families; none could do this alone. In another region, a school is being built through resource-sharing. It is, after all, one ministry – Christ’s ministry, in which each of us has a part to play and resources to share.

Robert W. Ihloff, D.Min., D.D., is the Episcopal Bishop of Maryland.