July 2008

From the Desk of the Interim Rector
Sweet warm days of summer have finally arrived! I don’t know about all of you, but for me this spring and it’s ever changing weather patterns has been a bit of a challenge for this Chicago gal. It is hard for me to believe that my time with you is already half over! Thus far, I’m having a great deal of fun as we work together to prepare for the arrival of your new rector.

Interim time is set apart to work on things that a congregation wouldn’t ordinarily work towards with a permanent rector in place. We should be trying new things with the purpose always to enhance and deepen the sense of community in our church. We are also to renew our relationships with our diocese as well as the national church. Having said all that, I would ask each of you to reflect, not only on my time with you here, but over the past year and wonder about how this family may have changed for the better as a result of this “in between rector” time. How have you discovered new possibilities for ministry, inside and outside your church?

Leadership is an interesting thing. I get to watch this family from a special perspective. Over the last two months, I have experienced a congregation full of hospitality, care and a deep commitment to work towards new birth. I’m often finding myself getting excited about David and Susan’s arrival, even though when that happens, I know I must take my leave of you. I continue to hold you all in my prayers daily and would ask you to do the same for me.

I will be away on vacation with my two sons the first week of July. My youngest son and I are traveling down to St. Louis to see my first born son Nick as he anticipates beginning his last year of undergraduate work. We have tickets to see the Cubs beat the Cardinals (I pray)! Regardless of the outcome of the game though, I hope you all enjoy this holiday that reminds us all about the precious gift we have in this country, the gift of freedom.

I’ll return home on Monday, July 7th. While I’m away Vicki Garvey will be holding things steady and responding to any pastoral concerns. The Rev. Mark McIntosh will visit with you on Sunday the 6th.

I’ll leave you with this quote I recently discovered: “Pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you!”

In God’s service I remain faithfully,

Mary

From the Desk of the Incoming Rector

Dear parishioners of St Mark’s, Barrington Hills,

For over a year we have both – that is the community of St Mark’s and my family and I – been travelling upon journeys that have crossed and are about to become one. There are many fascinating stories of journeys in the Bible: Abraham, Jacob, Joseph and Moses, Jesus on the road to Emmaus and Paul on the Damascus road, to name a few. Journeys are spiritual endeavors.

Over a year ago, Revd. George Hull, your last Rector, moved on and you entered the interregnum under the interim rectorship of the Revd. Dr. George Martin. In that time you have mourned for George I and been led by George II through many and varied liturgical expressions. Your Discernment Committee has led you through the process of preparing a (quite excellent) Parish profile and searched for and interviewed prospective candidates. Eventually, and with much patience and extraordinary faith, they have made their appointment, so that now, under the skilled guidance of Revd. Mary Tudela, you are now awaiting our arrival, putting, as it were, the finishing touches upon your preparations.

Throughout both journeys there has been a great deal of waiting, watching and praying for God’s guidance. It has to be said that contemporary wisdom is that the church is woeful in taking so long to make appointments: “why not”, people always ask, “set the ball rolling so that a new person arrives as the incumbent moves on?” Part of the answer is that the church recognizes the value and importance of the process. I know it takes time and can be quite painful, but there is tremendous value in reflecting upon what has been, where we are going and discerning God’s guidance and support in it all.

At the same time St. Mark’s began their journey, the Gibbons family was embarking upon its own journey of searching. We decided that we would test a sense of vocation and calling to serve in the United States. Spurred on by a desire to minister in Susan’s homeland, I sought approval from my Bishop in Portsmouth (UK) and the (now retired) Bishop of Maryland. This alone took a year, but once ascertained I began searching for parishes looking for a priest. I had completed applications for various parishes on the East coast (near Susan’s parents) when I received a letter from Betty Kilgore inviting me to apply to St Mark’s. Apparently my profile had shown up a match on the computer for your search. I wasn’t expecting to apply to a parish so far from Maryland, but the profile was so strong that we decided to apply. As most churches seem to do, this lead to a ‘phone interview, which went very well.

After visiting St Mark’s and due process was observed by the Discernment Committee, I was asked to be the next Rector. At this point, however, I was still discerning my call and had other churches I was interviewing with. I was awaiting another final interview with a church back east. What to do, I wondered? The two churches were quite different in size, make up and the character of ministry. Both were very attractive, but to which was I genuinely called? The Discernment Committee showed enormous generosity of spirit as well as immense faith by deciding to wait for an extended period for me to pursue this process of discernment. It was a difficult and perplexing process, which demanded much prayer, thought, discussion and waiting upon God. It was very important for me to be able to work through my process of discernment. Shortly after my last interview, it became clear to me – quite suddenly and unexpectedly - which was the right path, the right call. I suddenly knew St Mark’s was where I was being called by God to serve. Whether or not I was to be offered the other job was irrelevant.

As the journey’s that both St. Mark’s and the Gibbons family are on come closer together, the journeys are still separate and very different. St. Mark’s is in a place of anticipation, waiting and preparing for us to arrive. We are in the place of finishing off business, ending projects, leaving schools, packing and sorting and having final farewells and leaving parties. These are two very different final legs of our separate journeys before we come together.

Most things I am doing now in the parish are for the last time and involve saying goodbye to someone or some group of people. The sadness of the goodbye is tempered by the excitement of the prospect of being with you in a very short time. I look forward to being your rector, but I am, for the moment at least, still the rector of St Faith’s and my desire is to be as attendant to the present as possible. I remember telling an old friend, who I had met in my year in the States as a student 15 years ago, that I would miss him on my return to the UK. “Oh, that’s great”, he said, “I’d hate it if you didn’t care”. I guess it’s the same now – I am sad to say goodbye, but I think that it is the sadness that best enables me to be happy. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

It has been a delight to serve in the Portsmouth diocese for the past 14 years and much will be missed. But, once we are on the plane heading to the USA, I will be looking forward with great excitement to the fantastic opportunity ahead of me as Rector of St. Mark’s Church.

Our journeys are coming together after a long and winding process. One aspect of the journey that I am most grateful for and impressed by is the incredible faith that the discernment committee had in God to wait and pray, however painful it was, for me to finish my discernment process. We look forward to being part of your community that shows such great faith and has great hope in Christ.

With every blessing,
David

From the Senior Warden:

With this July Messenger we are only one month away from the arrival of David Gibbons as the 7th rector of St. Mark’s. David and Susan will arrive in Barrington on August 4 to get settled before their daughters arrive later in the month. His first services will be Saturday, August 16 and Sunday, August 17. We have appointed a transition committee consisting of Jill Meyer, Susan Morris and Jo Loughridge to organize the setting up of the rectory. It will be some weeks before the shipment of the Gibbons’ goods arrives from England. So this group will work to furnish the home with furniture and provisions for this interim period. I know the committee will be looking for help from the parish at large to accomplish this work.

Rick Cavenaugh is spearheading the improvements to the rectory. The work will include a new roof, exterior and interior painting, refinishing the upstairs floors and tiling the sun room. Our initial plans were to have volunteers do some of the painting. However, we found a very reasonable indoor painter who will be able to accomplish the task more quickly than a group of volunteers so we have decided to utilize our volunteers to do the weeding and trimming at the rectory. We have scheduled two clean-up days the mornings of July 12 and 26 beginning at 8 AM. Everyone in the parish is encouraged to come. Bring you favorite gardening tools (shovels, pruners, rakes, etc). We’ll have some fun and get the rectory ready for the Gibbons’ arrival.

During my address to the congregation on June 1, which was reprinted in the June Messenger, I indicated that we are still facing our original budget deficit of $60,000. In addition we have encountered some unanticipated repair costs such as the recently completed masonry work on the church and two houses. At that time I indicated that I was going to approach the Vestry and Search Committee to be leaders in helping us narrow this gap.

I am pleased to say that we have 100 percent of the Vestry committed to increasing their pledge, funding a portion of a project, helping to defer the Gibbons’ relocation expenses or some combination of these three. Seven of the eleven Search Committee members have done the same to date. That has resulted in over $16,000 in additional commitments from these two groups. We also have received $2,000 from another parish family.

I now would ask each of you in the congregation to consider your ability to help in this way. It is very important for us to be as financially sound as possible as we enter the next chapter in our life as a parish. After my comments on June 1 there was a good bit of enthusiasm among our picnic attendees to form a $1K Club. That level of support would be welcomed. However some can and have given more. Each of us is in a different place in our ability to give. What is important is that we have broad church support. So I ask you to consider this request and if you can contribute please communicate your intentions to our treasurer Don Svec at don.svec@sbcglobal.net or (312) 578-5242 or me at ned.loughridge@globemarketingpartners.com or (847) 382-1188. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to celebrate the news that we had 100 percent support from every member and family in the parish?

Yours in Christ,
Ned Loughridge

Wild, Wild Western Wonders

Juxtapositions are wonderful things, don’t you think? A month ago I was in something of a quandary. About the nature of public worship? About arcane theological conundrums? About the meaning of life? Well, sure. I’m always ruminating on that stuff, but this was serious: How to pack for a two-part trip in one carry-on and a backpack. I’d be away for about two weeks and although I’m a great little packer and have no problem going out of the country for a month with only that much luggage, this set of excursions comprised the pilgrimage/mission trip with our J2Aers on the front end and a business meeting of the church-wide board -- Executive Council -- on the other. The latter necessitates lugging lots of files and often my laptop and prayer book and other businessy things; the former entailed stuff for vastly different away-from-home needs like equipping myself for sleeping on unknown church floors, schlepping the sorts of small props necessary for team-building exercises and leadership games, starters for prayer and process sessions. Just the packing was an adventure.

Traveling with high school students is and always has been a wonderful experience for me, though I must admit that sleeping on the above-mentioned floors was one thing in my twenties and thirties and quite different on the old back these days. But this part of the trip, creaky back and all, was pretty much pure good times. For those of you who haven’t been around during the late spring and summer, this J2A group decided to go to Arizona, in particular to Sedona and the Grand Canyon. Pilgrimages are not, I remind you, vacations; they are meant to be a journey in search of the self and the self in the company of God and other pilgrims. For most of us, including the adults, this was a first-time experience of one of the natural wonders of the world, a place -- along with the eerily mystical beauty of Sedona -- that invites one’s sense of wonder at creation and the Creator, that invites interesting musings about our place in it all when compared with the sheer size and age of those amazing land masses. Think billions of years. Think cataclysmic earth-building with the strata of the planet surging and heaving and grundling along to form what we saw. Think mighty power of surging, crashing forces of ice and water. Awesome. And imagine if you will our hearty little band of 21st century flatlander Midwesterners gaping and reveling at it all. Actually I don’t have adequate words to convey to you our experience. I invite you instead to talk with the pilgrims when you see any of us, a much more fruitful exchange than this two-dimensional one.

Way too soon, I sent my fellow pilgrims back to Chicago while I toddled off to Albuquerque for Executive Council. To remind you, EC functions as a board of trustees or even a vestry, but for the whole Episcopal Church which includes, remember, 15 countries. I had basically the space of a short plane ride and a shuttle hop to make the transition from pilgrim to board member. From the Grand Canyon and the grandeur of God and our teenagers to a series of hotel meeting rooms and the grandeur of God writ smaller in the faces of those who care for this church. At EC we’re dealing with the state of the whole church, with our relationships with one another inside The Episcopal Church, with the Anglican Communion and with some other ecumenical and interfaith bodies. A bit of a different agenda. But again, I was struck by contrast and comparison that got me wondering and made me thankful. In my committee, one of the issues we addressed was the extreme poverty of some of our dioceses, particularly those in Central and South America and indeed, in some parts of our own West that I had so lately left. It may surprise you to know that many of the indigenous peoples of this country are Episcopalians and although they are doing wonderful ministry, their own economic circumstances and living conditions are grave. So it is good when we are able to find a way to assist these others of our larger flock in substantial and meaningful ways. Which we did. Again, so much goes on at these meetings that there’s no way to express it worthily to you in a single article. If you want more, you know where to find me.

Here’s the thing: As different as each segment of my two-part June journey was from the other, they were also of a piece. Each reminded me in their divergent ways of what we’re to be about on this larger journey through the Christian life: about tending to one another, caring for each other, marveling at the gifts we have been given in one another and in ‘this fragile earth, our island home’. -

Vicki Garvey

Tabernacle, Part 2
Since our last in-person conversation about the possibility of placing a tabernacle in the church and the June issue of The Messenger in which I provided a brief history of the tabernacle, a number of things have happened. A tabernacle committee has been formed and the members have been working on what sort of structure we might consider, where it might be placed, costs involved, existing revenue sources and that sort of thing. We’ve also issued a call to other congregations in the diocese to see who has an extra tabernacle we might visit to see if it would work for us. [Extra tabernacle? Sometimes churches remodel; sometimes congregations merge or close, leaving the diocese with extra ecclesiastical accouterments.] And we’ve located a couple of churches in the area that are architecturally close to our structure; the committee plans field trips to each of these to see how they’ve tabernacled and what they have to teach us about our process.

At one of the meetings of the committee a question was raised which led to a request that I address the issue for the congregation. Question: Why would we put the tabernacle in the church and not, say, in a closet in the sacristy? Answer: Several reasons. Arguably the principal reason is because the church proper [aka, sanctuary] is the one room in our buildings where we gather as the community of faith at least weekly to offer worship to our God, to hear the stories of faith that have been handed down, to be nourished in word and sacrament, to nourish one another, to be sent back into the world to do the work of the gospel. It is most fitting that a tabernacle, meant to house the most tangible symbol of the presence of God in our midst -- the sacramental elements of consecrated bread and wine -- be in that same space. Having the reserve sacrament in the sanctuary also makes the elements most accessible, both for replenishing during a celebration of the Holy Eucharist itself and for taking the sacrament to those who, for reasons of health or travel restrictions, cannot be with us when we gather for worship. Finally for the moment, senses of spirituality and practices of piety differ from person to person as they should, and such differences make us the richer. Some find the interior of our sanctuary, its simplicity and its openness to the outside with its celebration of the created world around us to be refreshment to their spirits; such surroundings are for them most conducive to prayer. Others prefer a different reminder of the presence of God, and for them, the tabernacle with its light is a more tangible reminder of the presence of God in the church and in their lives. It seems to me at least that one form of piety need not obviate the other; rather there is a real possibility of a comfortable and comforting complementarity for both pieties here.
As always, I am happy to talk with anyone who has questions or wishes to engage in more conversation on the topic. VLG

Ebeneezer Who?

A few of you asked me in person or online last week about the phrase "I raise my Ebeneezer" in the 2nd verse of our closing hymn, "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing". As you will have guessed, it's not Scrooge; for one thing, the hymn was written before Dickens wrote his famous short story. Ebeneezer is a character in the Bible, but the verse seems to be pointing back to a story in 1 Sam 7: The Israelites were having difficulties with the neighboring Philistines; Samuel prayed and the Lord threw the Philistines into confusion so Israel won the day. In thanks, Samuel named and dedicated a stone there to commemorate God's saving act; the name of the stone was eben-ezer ['stone of help']. My guess is that the word was more in the public domain as a symbol of God's help in trouble in the 18th century when Robert Robinson wrote the hymn. VLG

Come join the Barrington July 4 Parade!
The 2008 Barrington Area CROP Hunger Walk Committee invites you and your friends to join us in marching in the Barrington July 4 parade, on Friday, July 4, of course. Wear CROP T-shirts or patriotic colors and meet in the parking lot at Barrington High School no later than 9:30 a.m. It will be fun and remind our communities that the 2008 CROP WALK will be held this year onSunday, October 19. Please contact Barbara Schmidt at 847-381-3074.

Clean Up Days
Please plan to join fellow parishioners at 9:00 am on July 12 and July 26. Come to one or both as we work to beautify the church and the rectory grounds. Our numerous spring rains have caused record sized weeds and overgrown bushes. Let’s chip in to have the ground ship shape for the arrival of David & Susan Gibbons on August 4. Please RSVP to the parish office at 847-381-0596.

WHOSE CHURCH IS IT ANYWAY?
Conference
A unique learning opportunity for those working with adults, youth and children will be held August 22 and 23 at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois. This interactive conference, which is being sponsored by the Diocese of Chicago’s Office of Christian Formation and Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry, will feature workshops, hands-on use of resources, experiencing a portion of a specific curriculum or program, and brainstorming sessions for exploring questions and exchanging ideas and experiences. There will be over 50 learning experiences on topics related to adult learning, youth and young adults, children, lifelong Christian Formation, congregations, mission, peace and justice, technology, and stewardship. LEARNING CIRCLES of 6-8 will meet to reflect on conference experiences, explore questions and consider ways to incorporate new learnings to fit particular needs in their congregations. Participants will leave with a notebook of handouts from each of the 50 learning experiences. The conference center at the University of St. Mary of the Lake is surrounded by over 800 wooded acres and 200 acres of sparkling lake about 45 miles from downtown Chicago and within easy traveling distance from Chicago O’Hare airport. On registration, participants will receive a full listing of learning experiences from which to select those that best fit their needs.

Keynote speaker is Jenifer Gamber, author of My Faith, My Life, A Teenager's Guide to the Episcopal Church; and textbook editor for McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Gamber is youth facilitator and confirmation leader at the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Registration begins at 1 pm Friday, and the conference concludes at 4 pm Saturday. Registration fee includes lodging, meals, materials: Single $150 per person, Double $125 per person, Commuter fee $40 per person per day includes meals and materials. Because of the format of this program, we encourage you to attend both days if at all possible. We hope that no one misses this event because of money. Scholarship assistance is available. For information see the online brochure or contact Courtenay Smith (312) 751-4206 csmith@episcopalchicago.org

Super Summer Saturday - July 19
This outdoor laid-back Saturday liturgy is welcoming to every age. We have a host family to read the readings, prayers of the people, to usher and be the chalice bearers. However, we need a Chef to bar-b-que. If this is your talent, call the parish office. The menu is salmon as well as hot dogs and mac & cheese for the younger crowd. Please bring a side dish or dessert to pass. The dress is casual.

Super Summer Saturday – JULY 19
NAME________________________________________________
I (We) plan to attend the June 14 Saturday liturgy.
Number attending ____________
We will bring____________________________________to pass.

Offering Envelopes
Offering envelopes for the second half ‘08 are ready for pick up in the parish lobby. Please stop and pick up your packet. Thanks for helping us save postage.

Collect For the Good Use of Leisure
O God, in the course of this busy life, give us times of refreshment and peace; grant that we may so use our leisure to rebuild our bodies and renew our minds, that our spirits may be opened to the goodness of your creation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Book of Common Prayer, page 825

Passages
We offer congratulations to whose who were confirmed this past May 3, 2008 and June 21, 2008: Justin Barnowski, Anna Etherington, Lauren Gray, Ashley Jensen, Ryan Melone, Dana Nelsen, Mauri Resseguie, Margaret Stevens, Monica Worsley, Zachary Zambelli, Tim Dilsaver, Pamela Jensen, Martin Doran-Smith, and Robin Doran-Smith.

We welcome into the household of God:
Celina Jane Kelley, daughter of Jennifer Gillespie and Kevin Kelley. Celina was baptized in St. Mark’s on June 15, 2008.
Abigail Kathleen Johnson, daughter of Kristi & Josh Johnson. Abigail was baptized in St. Mark’s on June 15, 2008.

We extend sympathy to: Robert & Christine Barnowski on the death of his mother, Edith Barnowski on June 7, 2008. Edith was the grandmother of Ross and Justin Barnowski.