I've been thinking about the mission God has entrusted to us. Particularly I have been thinking about how our mission statement prayer focuses us on our parish. Wait a minute! I do want us to understand the difference between a parish and a congregation in the Anglican understanding. The parish is geographic area-a field for ministry. The congregation is the people who undertake the ministry.
In England and certainly in colonial Virginia there were various "metes and bounds" for these parish ministry areas. When Little Fork Church began her ministry as one of 6 or 7 "chapels of ease" a new area carved out of St. George's parish stretching up from St. George's in Fredericksburg. This new area was called St. Mark's Parish. The quintessential pastor of St. Mark's parish: The Rev. John Thompson had church buildings all scattered about ten miles from each other so that worshippers could usually attend worship on Sunday with a round trip of ten miles or less. St. Mark's parish was served by all of her congregations providing for the welfare, health, and moral tone, spirituality of everyone in the area not just those who were official members of the church.
We are still part of St. Mark's parish even as other congregations have faded away (from Colonial times and later) and still others have come into being and flourished.
We tend to see our areas of responsibility differently in our inter connected "information age" where we can know about and reach out locally, more broadly into the diocese and surrounding areas and even globally say to Our Little Roses Ministry in Honduras.
Our "us" has expanded way beyond why don't "they do something. I have a picture in my office painted by somebody I once met and prayed with. It shows a little girl out in a field with a lamb over her shoulders around her neck. The title of the picture is "How can I help?".
Yes let us minister to the "parish". There is so much we can do in and for the parish God has entrusted to us if we get together as a congregation and step out of the comfort zone into the parish where God has gone before and beckons us to follow.
In Christ's Love,
Servant Pastor, Bill
