Our Call to Ministry

The Visioning Team was asked to reflect deeply on ministry at the Cathedral in order to answer the twelve questions below, required for posting the position in the Episcopal Church Transition Ministry Portfolio Database. The content of our responses is drawn from the generous and candid feedback we received from the Cathedral community and is informed by important input from the Vestry. We engaged with these questions thoughtfully and prayerfully in order to produce an accurate portrait of our values, concerns and aspirations. The answers to the questions were reviewed by Bishop Edington and the Presiding Bishop's office for final input prior to submission.

• Describe a moment in your worshiping community’s recent ministry that you recognize as one of success & fulfillment.

  The Sandwich Ministry is a pivot from our Friday Mission Lunch, a seated lunch for 60 that was suspended in Covid. Bag lunches are prepared and distributed to 80-100 guests twice weekly.

  The heart of the Ministry is radical welcome: Each person, whether guest or host, is recognized as a child of God, equal in value and contribution. Volunteers experience true humility, service, and teamwork. They prepare sandwiches and bags in camaraderie, pausing for Noonday Prayer in the Nave and for song before sharing the joy of service through God’s love with our guests, who are also invited to join Noonday Prayer. The guests have formed a community, supporting each other and sharing fellowship (as well as the occasional spat). Most are regulars who attend rain or shine. Some guests have become volunteers; a few have become parishioners. Several groups have become more interactive with each other via their participation: Scouts, Youth Group, external organizations, and clergy have all volunteered, and Sunday School holds food drives.

  The Ministry is supported by the Cathedral community through Mission & Outreach, with additional support from individual donors.

• Describe your liturgical style and practice. If your community provides more than one type of worship service, please describe all:

  The Cathedral’s liturgical style is broad church. We sometimes use bells, incense, and sung Eucharist. Our worship reflects our deeply held belief that all people are connected in Christ.

  We have Sunday Eucharist at 11:00 a.m., Rite 2, with a vested choir and organ, an organ voluntary and postlude, two sung anthems, and a sung psalm. Congregational singing is encouraged during the four hymns and service music. Average attendance: 200.

  Noonday Prayer takes place on weekdays and is grounded in the daily office, with meditation on the lives of the saints. Average attendance: 12.

  La eélébration eucharistique en français par La Mission Épiscopale Francophone de la Résurrection takes place on Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. This is a Mission of the Convocation that gathers for worship in French in the Cathedral Nave. Average attendance: 35.

  Choral Evensong occurs monthly on Sunday at 6:00 p.m. Average attendance: 75.

  Jazz Vespers occurs one Sunday a month at 6:00 p.m. Average attendance: 45.

  Our special services for Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Holy Week all include a vested choir and organ. See the Cathedral’s YouTube channel. In the past we have also offered meditation and meditative services.

• How do you practice incorporating others in ministry?

  There are many opportunities to be integrated into the Cathedral’s ministry, ranging from involvement in worship (choir, liturgical guilds, ushering, and lectoring) to service and outreach ministries like the welcomers, the Junior Guild, the Sandwich Ministry, and Love in a Box (an initiative providing gift boxes to needy children in Paris), as well as Sunday School, Youth Group and the 20s/30s group. Nevertheless, not all parishioners and newcomers feel invited to contribute and to lead, and we need more volunteers. However, as many among us have expressed their desire to serve and to help extend our outreach, there is a real opportunity for Cathedral leadership to encourage and empower us to find our place in ministry, to be spiritually nourished and to contribute to the life of the church and to reach out to the Convocation, as well. Members want the Cathedral to extend its ministry of radical welcome to include refugees, to give one example; we also want to break down the perception of “insider” and “outsider” within our congregation. Our situation as an Anglophone church in Paris calls for a Dean who will marry a local perspective with a global one, and who will promote our inclusive values both within and outside our walls.

• As a worshiping community, how do you care for your spiritual, emotional and physical well-being?

  The act of worship is central to our community and its spiritual well-being. We are a parish that values our liturgy and music, the Word, and above all a welcoming eucharist; these elements gather and bind us together as one, and are an attractive draw to those seeking a faith-based community in Paris. Our congregation also values the spiritual and emotional encouragement we receive through pastoral care, including consideration and attention from our fellow parishioners by way of friendships, coffee hour, forum discussions, and small group meetings; our discernment process revealed a desire for a warmer and more widespread welcome, and for increased pastoral care led by clergy.We seek an accessible shepherd-leader who will connect to and follow up with parishioners, recognize and tend to the well-being of our dedicated music and office staff, and foster a climate of openness so that we all feel comfortable reaching out for guidance and support whenever we are struggling in mind, body, or spirit.

• Describe your worshiping community’s involvement in either the wider Church or geographical region.

  Our unique position in a resolutely secular nation on another continent affords the opportunity to be a source of experimentation and innovation.We have a worldwide network of Friends of the Cathedral who—though they no longer live in Paris—retain the connection because they periodically return, and many attend online worship. Our Friends and other online worshipers number about 2,000 weekly. We would like to further develop their engagement with us, so that all who join us may experience worship, mission, and stewardship at the Cathedral in a meaningful, intentional, nourishing way.We look forward to our Dean working with the Vestry and Cathedral ministries to live into our leadership role among the Convocation parishes and missions in Europe, providing them with program ideas and resources, and responding to their express needs. Furthermore, we envision the Dean and Vestry working with the Bishop-in-Charge to lead our congregation into fellowship with Anglican, ecumenical, and interfaith partners.Pairing our outreach in Paris with such efforts will put the Cathedral more prominently on the map as a resource to all.

• How do you engage in pastoral care for those beyond your worshiping community?

  Certain ministries were adapted or fell away during Covid. The congregation would like to restore the latter, retain our newer initiatives like Sandwich Ministry and Love in a Box, and go further than we have before. Previously, the Lambda group, a restorative outreach initiative, welcomed LGBTQ+ people of other faith traditions; a burgeoning Mission & Outreach initiative is serving young refugees where we find them in the city; many ideas that will require further discernment have surfaced in conversations at the Cathedral. Overwhelmingly, parishioners have signaled that they want to serve at-risk Parisians, refugees, and LGBTQ+ communities; connect with Convocation churches and missions; and strengthen interfaith, ecumenical and ministry partnerships.

• Tell about a ministry that your worshiping community has initiated in the past five years. Who can be contacted about this?

  Covid was the catalyst for creating our online ministry. Thankfully, we were able to jumpstart online offerings rapidly and mindfully via careful decisions on equipment, respect for our church ambiance, installation during lockdowns, deployment to Facebook and YouTube, prayerful messages to online worshipers during services, and weekly communications to our parishioners publicizing these offerings. Through this process we were able to serve the spiritual needs of homebound members and have succeeded in creating an effective, impactful, continuing outreach.

  Our online ministry reaches local as well as global viewers: current parishioners, Friends and new worshipers attend routine church services and special events, including the Sunday 11:00 a.m. service, concerts, noonday prayer, Youth Stations of the Cross, Bible study, forums, and pageants.

  We seek to leverage our online presence to help us achieve our outreach, service, and stewardship goals, and expand our online presence to include the Francophone mission.

• How are you preparing yourselves for the church of the future?

  Many are drawn to our combination of tradition and radical welcome; worship, music and sermons help them find meaning in a secular world. As parishioners have many demands on their time and are spread far and wide, we must offer varied opportunities for engagement; these will increasingly define membership rather than in-pew attendance, and are another draw in a culture where most are raised with no experience of organized religion and are reluctant to attend a worship service: about 6% of people in France go to church weekly. Newcomers and members of all ages need multiple access points, including cultural, educational, musical, and social events, and service to the marginalized.The Vestry and the Bishop-in-Charge have been considering our role as a Cathedral in Europe. How do we spread the Word in the face of forces resisting traditional worship? What innovations will allow the Church to thrive in an increasingly secular future?With respect to our parish concerns, we have conducted three discernment projects in the past 18 months (Re-entry after Covid, Capital Campaign, Dean Search Survey). A Capital Campaign is imminent, to restore the organ and address important needs.

• What is your practice of stewardship and how does it shape the life of your worshiping community?

  Many in our community cite stewardship, fundraising, and the Cathedral’s ongoing sustainability as an ever-present challenge. Though we stress that stewardship comes in many forms—time, talent, and treasure—the concept and perception of stewardship varies among our members. While we are a sizable parish that needs all three gifts to thrive, to some in our community it may come across at times that we need only the treasure to survive. We also have many members who are unfamiliar with the practice of giving to religious organizations, as they do not come from the Episcopal faith tradition or the U.S. We need a Dean who can foster a full understanding of stewardship in our community, especially as preparations are underway for a Capital Campaign, and because our discernment process has revealed a desire to serve among many parishioners that has gone untapped and will help us meet our needs, spiritual and otherwise. We seek to recognize our common purpose and to fulfill the Christian mission of stewardship of returning the gifts that God has given us, not just providing for our operational and temporal needs.

• What is your worshiping community’s experience of conflict? And how have you addressed it?

  Many parishioners are unaware of conflict or feel it has been handled well. For others, a lack of communication about the background and reasons for decisions made by leadership and clergy in recent years has resulted in lingering pain, suspicion, and resentment. Confidentiality has been interpreted as secrecy and this has been exacerbated by inconsistent and indirect messaging, resulting in hearsay, conjecture, and a sense of insider information. Although not widespread, for some it has significantly affected worship, pastoral care, leadership, and service, and the divergent reactions to these decisions have undermined our sense of community. We have not yet addressed these conflicts openly. Some have suggested that we pursue truth and reconciliation, and develop the language, skills, and framework to do so. We are eager to move forward, knowing that a balance must be struck between confidentiality in certain matters and a collective desire for transparency and accountability. We seek mutual understanding so that leadership enjoys full trust and the congregation is engaged via open communication in consensus-building whenever possible.

• What is your experience leading/addressing change in the church? When has it gone well? When has it gone poorly? And what did you learn?

  We extend Jesus’s welcome to the Eucharist, use inclusive language, embrace LGBTQ+ persons, and value traditional liturgy and music; the pairing of inclusion with tradition is cherished among us, although we did lose members in the transition to inclusion. We regret that we didn’t do more to maintain fellowship with those who found change uncomfortable or undesirable. Nevertheless, our style of worship is the primary reason why many—including American and international transient expats, permanent expats, and French nationals—find their spiritual home with us. Members who did not feel welcome in their faith tradition have felt loved at the Cathedral.Our special situation in Europe presents unique challenges. Team building is one of them, as a notable number of our congregation is transient. Additionally, the French government imposes constraints on us, due to the separation of public and religious spheres fundamental to French law and society, resulting in a fiscal split of our church from Mission & Outreach that complicates our budget and fundraising. With support from the Cathedral community, our next Dean will need time to learn how to help us navigate such unfamiliar issues.

• Please provide words describing the gifts & skills essential to the future leaders of your worshiping community.

  Energizing and inspiring preacher

  Delegator and team builder

  Pastor and reconciler

  Cultural curiosity and intelligence