Canon's Corner: Silent Auction How-to

By The Rev. Linda L. Grenz, Canon to the Ordinary

One of the easiest ways to raise money for your church is to hold a silent auction, and now is the time to ask merchants for a donation to yours. 

Most businesses set aside a specific amount to give in response to requests like this and they give them out on a first come, first served basis. If you ask in August, you may be out of luck, so ask in the first quarter of the year.....preferably February or March (they often haven't done their inventory and closed the prior year's books until the end of January).

When you ask, have a specific fundraising purpose you and your parishioners can describe to potential donors. Ask your parishioners to think of goods or services they can donate, or places beyond your local community that might be willing to support this effort. 

It isn't unusual for parishioners to donate a time-share unit they don't plan to use this year, or for them to ask the ski resort they frequent to offer free ski lift tickets. Also, think beyond the usual food baskets, toys, artwork and dinners. A swim club might offer a free family membership (which was THE most popular item at one church), a museum might offer free admission, and a roller rink might offer free skating for an evening. Approach any business your church uses as a vendor and ask parishioners to tell you their favorite stores, events and organizations so you can ask them for a donation.

Business people want to make a difference in their community, but they also need to earn a living. Some may ask you "What is in it for us?"  Tell them you will give them credit at your event, and then make sure you do so. Put their name in a booklet you hand out and/or on the paper next to the donated item -- you can even put out a business card or small flyer about their business. Send them the usual thank you letter with the IRS tax deduction statement when they donate. And then remember to send them another letter after the auction, thanking them for their donation and telling them how much you raised at the event and what you will do with it. In other words, tell them how their contribution will help make a difference in your cause and their business.

If you set up form letters for your requests and thank you letters, you can easily solicit many vendors. Some will require you to use your shoe leather and personally request it, but some will respond to a letter. You can always follow up with those who didn't reply to the request letter.

There are many people outside the church who want to make a difference and will support a cause by attending your event even if they couldn't donate an item, so promote your cause widely outside the church. Then, at your event give attendees a way to make a difference regularly and they will begin to identify with your church -- some will begin to see it as "my church" even if they don't attend worship. If they feel belonging in this way it more likely that they will turn to you at other times in their lives, or even just start coming to your church!

At the auction, have a set opening and closing time. Be sure you collect names, emails and phone numbers so you can follow up with winners who left early (and so you have that information and can invite them to your next event!). Prepare some interesting food (appetizers and desserts are good) and music, then arrange your silent auction items on tables around the room and let people browse. If you have really good food and music, you can even charge a modest cover charge ($5/person) which increases the income. And don't forget to have your parishioners circulating, getting to know people and inviting them to church.

If you have a beautiful church building, you can even have the organist playing (or set up some quiet recorded church music), light lots of candles and offer people a chance to tour the church. You'd be surprised by how many people will take you up on that -- and, again, it gives you an opportunity to connect your church with people in a way that makes it easier for them to turn to you when they are seeking God.

This (and every fundraiser) can have some, or ideally all, of these goals: 1) raise money, 2) build relationships with people, 3) invite people to church, 4) provide an opportunity to serve and 5) be a fun/joyful/rewarding experience for participants.

Canon's Corner: Tips & Resources for Talking to Kids About Tragedy

This afternoon The Rev. Linda L. Grenz, Canon to the Ordinary, sent out a document called "Talking with children about Tragedy", courtesy of LeaderResources.

We recommend you take a look whether you are a parent, clergy person, lay leader, teacher, or someone who interacts with children on a regular basis. When tragedies such as the shooting in Newtown Connecticut happen, it is difficult to know what to say to our little ones. Even so, it's important that we adults be able to answer their questions at their level, and be able to help them process thoughts, fears, and emotions in a healthy way.

Convention Evensong Sermon: St. Andrew's Day

The Rev. Linda L Grenz,
Diocese of RI Canon to the Ordinary

November 30th, 2012

I grew up on a farm in South Dakota where there is lots of land and not much water! We were farmers, tillers of the soil and not fishers in lakes. But every summer the day would come when my dad would declare that it was time for a vacation day. And yes, that meant a DAY, not a week or two. But we’d take a whole day off from work and all pile into the car and head off to a distant lake – to go fishing. My older brother hated fishing and I’m not sure what my mother and younger sister did, because dad and I were the fishers. We’d both happily head to the shores of some lake, slip an earthworm onto the hook, throw out the line – and then we’d sit on the shore and wait, and wait, and wait. Staring out across the water with an eye on the red and white bobber, waiting to see if some fish would take the bait.

Sometimes we got lucky and a couple of them would bite. Sometimes we went home empty handed, but it didn’t really matter. What fishing was for us was a day away from the hard work on the farm, a time to just sit in the sun, enjoy the peace and quiet, and do nothing.

That image of my dad and me, sitting on the lakeshore waiting for the fish to bite isn’t at all what the Andrew and his brother Peter were doing as fishers. We were recreational fishers. They were professionals. For them fishing was a job – and it was hard work, long hours, and a means of earning a living. They had to catch fish if they wanted to survive. We got to eat a fish if we happened to catch one.

I think we can learn something about life in the church and world today by looking at Andrew and his family of fishers, because I suspect that most of our churches today operate a lot more like my dad and me than like Andrew and his family.

When it comes to catching people for Christ, we’re recreational fishers. We sit in the warm sun, enjoying ourselves and occasionally throw a line into the water with a baited hook on it to see if someone might bite. An ad in the paper, a few posters promoting an event, a series of emails, a banner outside of our church. We toss out a line here and there and watch to see what happens, and mostly we despair of anyone taking the bait. We commiserate among ourselves about how church attendance is declining and how more and more people are choosing to declare themselves “spiritual but not religious.” We begin to think that the lack of hits on our fishing line is inevitable – that the fish just aren’t biting anymore.

I think that’s largely because we’re recreational fishers and aren’t fishing for a living. Andrew and Peter and their family weren’t throwing a couple of fishing lines into the lake – they got into a boat and tossed out huge nets. They were looking for big schools of fish where they could pull in hundreds, even thousands of fish at a time. They got up early in the morning and worked long and hard all day long. If they weren’t getting enough fish in their nets, they pulled up anchor and sailed to another place or threw the net over the other side of the boat. They went looking for where the fish were and pulled them into the boat.

“That’s a great image, Linda,” you say, “but where are the people who we can catch for Christ today? People don’t come to church anymore.”

You know, there’s another way to look at the situation today. When I was growing up, the town where we attended church had at least 90% of its residents in one of the churches on Sunday morning. The next closest town was about 40 miles away and it’s people were almost all going to church too. So there weren’t exactly a lot of fish to catch, so to speak.

But, our waters are teeming with fish! Rhode Island has one of the lowest church attendance rates in the nation. On any given Sunday morning, only about 25-30% of us are attending worship. That’s about 700,000 people in Rhode Island who aren’t in church on Sunday mornings. If we became fishers of people and only brought in 1% of those, that would more than double the size of the every church in the diocese.

The low church attendance rate in our state means there are a lot of people who aren’t part of a Christian community. There are tons of fish in the sea and lots and lots of people who are, at some level, longing to connect with God, eager to hear the Good News, or maybe just wanting something they can’t even name or identify.

Our problem is largely that we don’t see that and maybe we don’t even believe it. We’re recreational fishers and we’ve come to believe that there aren’t any fish in the lake because no one is taking our bait.  I think that’s because we’re throwing out lines when we need to be throwing out nets.

Fishing in these times and in these waters is hard work, and most of us are used to taking it easy – doing recreational fishing. No more. The time has come to make fishing our vocation! We need to get out in the boat and start casting the net. And you’ll notice that when the fishers do that, they often get a big haul of fish – fish of every kind and including a few questionable fish and an old shoe or two for good measure! That is because, as our lesson from Roman’s reminds us, God is drawing near to everyone – because fishing today requires us to go beyond our comfort zone and draw in people who haven’t been in our churches before.

When you’re doing recreational fishing, you can determine what kind of fish will bite by what lure you offer them. Want a trout? Use a worm or cricket on the hook. Want to catch a sunfish? Use a red and white lure.

And that’s what we do. Consciously or unconsciously, we throw out a line that has a lure that will attract our kind of people. If we are going to be vocational fishers, we’ve got the throw the net out and pull in all kinds of fish. We’ve got to learn how to reach out to people we don’t normally encounter and don’t naturally relate to.

So some fishing lessons we can take from Andrew:

• Vocational fishing requires a net and not just a fish hook and line.
• Using a net means bringing in anything and everything – anyone and everyone.
• Vocational fishing is hard work, not just some time in the sun throwing out a line and waiting to see what happens.
• When there are lots of fish in the lake, you can catch them!

But there’s something more that Andrew has to teach us this evening. You’ll notice that Jesus doesn’t show up, stand on the shore, commend them for their fine fishing skills, stop at the snack shack for some fish and chips and then move on. Jesus calls them to leave their boats and follow him.

Now we’re so used to hearing this story that I think we miss the impact of what that implies. Jesus shows up and calls out to these two young men working the nets with their father. They immediately get off of the boat, leave behind their family, friends and neighbors; abandon their life’s work and family’s fortunes and follow this guy. They don’t seem to know him. They don’t know where they are going. They don’t know what they are going to do, how they will earn a living, where they will get food to eat, where they will sleep at night, or what will happen to them but they go anyway. They leave absolutely everything that is important, loved and familiar to them to follow Jesus into the completely unknown.

And, by the way, you notice that their call didn’t require a discernment committee or a Commission on Ministry; they didn’t go to seminary for three years, take the General Ordination Exams and get ordained. It’s probably a good thing. If the disciples had to go through some of our ordination processes, Jesus would have been dead, buried and rose again before any of them would have gotten to be a disciple!

There’s another reason why I’m focusing on the fact that they immediately followed the call of Jesus, and that is because the disciples weren’t being called to a job in the church as an ordained person or even to a lay ministry in the church. The disciples were being called to follow Jesus – to hear his Word, see him in action, to learn from him and to practice his ministry of proclaiming the Gospel, teaching and healing the sick.

Being a disciple of Jesus probably wasn’t that easy for Andrew and the others. Preaching, teaching and healing aren’t exactly the skills you acquire as a fisher. Andrew and Peter knew a lot about how to sail boats, cast nets and haul in fish. They didn’t know much at all about preaching, teaching and healing, but that’s what they, and we, are called to do. All of us. Not just the ordained or the laity who are active in church life, but all people and all kinds of people are called to follow Jesus and share in his ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom, teaching and healing.

To do that today is just as challenging to us as it must have been to the disciples. They didn’t have those skills and most of us probably believe we don’t either. They had to leave everything familiar behind – and so will we. Like them, we need to get off of the boat and head out into the unknown countryside. We need to follow Jesus – wherever that leads us. The disciples ended up following Jesus into some pretty unfamiliar and often uncomfortable territory. They headed off to the big city and into enemy territory. They didn’t have a familiar home where they could lay their head each night. They didn’t have a lot of time to go fishing for fish – because they had a new task of fishing for people.

We too are called into the unfamiliar places and called to do unfamiliar things if we are to follow Jesus and become fishers for people. There are people out there, right outside these doors, right in this neighborhood, who are longing for God, who want to see Jesus. There are people, lots and lots of people, right outside of the doors of your church and just outside of the doors of your homes who want to see Jesus.

As Paul says...
But how will they call on God if they do not believe?
And how will they believe, if they do not hear?
And how will they hear, unless someone proclaims the Good News?
And how will they proclaim it, unless they are sent?

My friends, in this day, more than ever, we are called – and we are sent. We are called to follow Jesus. I know we have a new bishop now and we’re all looking to him for leadership, but we aren’t called to follow Nicholas (sorry boss), we’re called to follow Jesus.

We’re called to follow Jesus, and Jesus will proclaim the Good News to us, will teach us and will heal us. Jesus will send us, just like he sent the disciples, out into the unknown to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is here, to teach, to heal and to make disciples of all people in all places.

How will we do that? Fear not, as Paul says, “the Word is very near you, it is on your lips and in your heart.” The Word IS very near you. It already is on your lips and in your heart.

So, let’s go fishing! Because WE CAN DO IT! We can be fishers who haul in nets full of all kinds and sorts of fish.

Let’s be brave and head off into the unknown. Because WE CAN DO IT! We can proclaim that the Kingdom is right here Rhode Island, we can teach others about the Jesus we know and love, we can heal the sick and we can make disciples.

So let’s do it! Let’s just do it.

Because God, acting in and through us, can do far more than any of us can ask or imagine. For that we give thanks and praise, in Jesus name. Amen.

Canon's Corner: Hurricane Preparedness for Parishes

By The Rev. Linda Grenz, 
Consultant to the Bishop Elect

As we anticipate the arrival of a major storm, it is a good time to remind ourselves of the precautions we need to take with our buildings and the actions we can take as a faith community.

First: Bishop-elect Knisely and I would like to have each clergyperson’s cell phone number so we can contact you – both in the case of an emergency such as this one might become and just so we can contact you in general.  Please email that to RMoulton@episcopalri.org.  She keeps a list of all churches and clergy on the server that we can get on our IPhones as we travel around so getting this up to date is important.

Second: Check with your local emergency response office for information relevant to your community. Each congregation’s situation will be different, but here are some things to consider:

Buildings:

·      Batten down the hatches! Make sure windows are closed tightly – if you are near the coast you may need to consider additional protection. Check around the church yard to make sure there aren’t any cans, planters or other objects that have the potential to become flying missles.

·      Turn off propane tanks and unplug appliances -- especially computers!

·      Turn refrigerators and freezers to the highest setting and tape around the door frames to keep food as cold for as long as possible if electricity goes out.

·      If you anticipate that anyone will be in the church during the storm, put flashlights in key locations (with fresh batteries).

·      If you have a sanctuary lamp, it is probably best to extinguish the flame during the storm.

Pastoral Care

·      Make a list or, if you have one, review the list of people in your parish who live alone or who may be vulnerable for any reason (which isn’t just elderly people!). Find a way to make sure someone will check up on those folks to make sure they are OK or find help, if needed. You can do this in a variety of ways: recruit partners, let people self-select a partner, etc. You may also want to notify police and fire departments of vulnerable people, if that's your community's system. In any case, it is important to have a way to make sure that someone will check on people if that's necessary.

·      This is a good time to make sure your parish contact list is up to date.  Collect cell phone numbers, confirm addresses, etc. Also, you might want to gather as information about who will be out of town so you don’t go hunting for someone who is in Florida!

·      You may want to identify people who are ready, willing and able to assist should you need extra hearts and hands if the situation requires.

·      In any case, encourage people to follow emergency preparedness suggestions offered by your local community – and by common sense!

Service

·      If your parish hall serves as an emergency shelter or you plan to make it available as one, contact your local emergency response office for information and requirements.

·      If you think you might end up with folks coming to the parish for shelter (not as an official shelter but as a back up option), ask parishioners to bring blankets, pillows, air mattresses, water, food, baby supplies, etc. so you are equipped to handle that should the need arise. You can, for example, ask people to drop off boxes labeled with their name and then if the supplies aren’t needed they can take them home again the next Sunday.

·      Take time to talk about options, strategies, etc. so you have an idea of who to contact, things to do (or not do). Sometimes just talking about emergency preparedness can help us remember what we need to do to get ready.

The Episcopal Relief and Development website has some information you might find helpful: http://www.er-d.org/resourcelibrary. In particular, there is an article on how to set up an emergency shelter inyour parish hall. http://www.er-d.org/userfiles/Post-HOW-TO_Yonkers(1).pdf.

Thanks to all of you for being on the front lines of ministry at times like this. Please let us know if there is anything we can do. And know that we will hold you in our prayers in the days ahead.

~Linda   (on behalf of the diocesan staff)

Letter from the Bishop-Elect: The Rev. Linda Grenz Joins RI Diocesan Staff

The Rev. Linda L. Grenz

People of the Diocese of Rhode Island,

During the interviews with the Search Committee for the 13^th Bishop of Rhode Island and during the walkabout presentations this past Spring, I emphasized my belief that the Diocese must be very intentional about leadership development and Christian formation for the laity as well as the clergy as it moves into the 21^st century. Since the election I have been thinking and praying about how we might sharpen our focus in these areas.

As I begin the transition to the Diocese of Rhode Island and assume the role of bishop later this Fall, I’d like to announce a staff addition made in consultation with Bishop Wolf, our Standing Committee President Scott Avedisian, and our Transition Committee Chair Lora MacFall. At my request, Bishop Wolf will invite the Rev. Linda Grenz to join the diocesan staff as my consultant during the transition process.

After the Consecration in November, I will name the Rev. Grenz as Canon to the Ordinary.

Many of you will recognize Linda’s name. She has had a long and successful ministry as an Episcopal priest serving in parishes large and small on the East Coast. She is the publisher and CEO of Leader Resources, which publishes the Journey to Adulthood curricula as well as a number of other faith formation resources. As part of that ministry she has been a consultant to parish vestries and dioceses across the country in leader training, management, development, and conflict resolution. She has done extensive work assisting congregations in developing effective Christian formation, evangelism, and stewardship programs. She has taught at General Seminary and served on the national church staff as the Coordinator of Adult Education and Leadership Development. She has a number of books in print on these topics and has been in demand as a speaker for years.

Linda is married to Del Glover, a retired DuPont Executive, who just completed his term as a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council and was recently elected as a Trustee of the Church Pension Fund at the General Convention in July. Del has failed to truly retire several times, having served as the Associate Dean of General Seminary and as the chief administrative officer at Trinity Wall Street as well as The Riverside Church.

I am grateful to Bishop Wolf for her graciousness in supporting this call and making it possible for Linda and I to start working with all of you as soon as possible. I am also grateful that the present staff will continue to offer their important skills to the life and ministry of the diocese.  We all look forward to working together as a team to provide the diocese with the resources it will need to grow deeper in faith and to most effectively proclaim the Good News of God in Christ Jesus to our neighbors in Rhode Island.

 Yours in the shared ministry of the Gospel,

The Very Rev. Nicholas Knisely, Bishop-Elect