Fr. Dave's Thoughts - March 28, 2025
Dear friends,
I am going to depart a bit this week from the blog that I have been working on with you on the Bible. I will get back to it next week. I told the vestry that I would write a piece about the various designations we have for the clergy in our Episcopal tradition, so you have some context for me as a priest-in-charge. The model that has been true here at Zion for most, if not all of you who have been here for any length of time, is what I will call the “Rector” model. Most Episcopal churches still identify with this model, though things are beginning to change. I will go into that shortly. A Rector is a man or a woman (since 1976) that is duly elected by the vestry of a parish with the approval of the Ecclesiastical Authority, which in most cases would be the bishop of the diocese. Generally, a search committee, formed by a congregation after their priest has left, is responsible for bringing in two or three candidates for the vestry to interview. After the vestry has interviewed the candidates, it can either vote to officially extend the call to one of them or reject them all and send it back to the search committee to look for different candidates. Normally a priest is going to want a unanimous decision by the vestry to call him or her before they will accept the call.
Once a priest is called as a rector, they are there for as long as they want to be there, unless of course there is some “moral failing” that would precipitate their dismissal by the bishop. A non-clergy friend of mine once told me that the clergy have the best union in the world, which I thought was pretty funny and quite accurate. I was called as the rector in my previous two parishes. I was in my first parish, Good Shepherd Church in Wareham, Massachusetts for 7 ½ years and in my second parish, Christ Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts for 12 ½. A suffragan bishop in Massachusetts, the late Bishop Bud Cederholm, suggested to me early on in my ministry that most clergy might want to consider leaving a church after about 10 years. He believed that it was important for a congregation to have “institutional memory” from a period before the departing rector began his or her ministry. I always thought that was a good rule of thumb for a rector and I probably would have left Plymouth sooner if it hadn’t been for the pandemic. When I started my ministry 25 years ago, the average length a rector stayed in his or her parish was around 7 years; today that number is around 4 years. So, you can see that when John Mitchell stayed here at Zion for nearly 25 years, his tenure as your rector was way outside the norm.
A priest-in-charge is different than a rector in that he or she is appointed by the bishop after the bishop has consulted with the vestry of the searching congregation. The priest-in-charge, once appointed, has all the authority of a rector, just not the designation. The priest-in-charge is not only responsible to the vestry of the congregation he or she is serving, but is also subject to the authority of the bishop in a way that a rector is not. Since the bishop appoints the priest-in-charge, the bishop is usually more involved in that priest’s ministry to ensure that the goals of the bishop and the vestry are being accomplished. In my experience, a priest-in-charge has normally been appointed by the bishop to go into difficult situations to help congregations move past some trauma or abuse they experienced at some point in their common life. Given this perspective, you can see why a bishop might want to be more closely tethered to the work of a priest-in-charge. This is obviously NOT the philosophy of Bishop Shannon or the Diocese of Vermont as many clergy here, including myself, were brought into healthy parish communities as a priest-in-charge. When I came here, I was surprised to find so many of us with this designation.
Unlike a rector who can stay in their parish for as long as they would like, a priest-in-charge begins with an initial 3-year contract. After that contract has expired, the priest-in-charge can become the rector if the vestry and the bishop and the priest all agree that this is the way they all want to proceed. It is important not to confuse a priest-in-charge with an interim priest. An interim priest is in a parish for as long as it takes for a new rector to be elected to a congregation. Usually this takes a good year and a half. An interim, however, CAN NEVER become the rector of the parish he or she is serving as the interim. So, just to be clear, a priest-in-charge can become the rector of the parish he or she is serving but an interim priest cannot. This is a major difference between these two roles.
It is becoming more and more common for parishes to invite the bishop to appoint a priest-in-charge instead of calling a rector. I am not entirely sure why this is, but it seems to be trending that way. I believe perhaps one reason that the “rector” model is changing is that there are fewer and fewer priests out there. We, and that includes other mainline Protestant traditions, are experiencing a clergy shortage every bit as acute as the Roman Catholic Church. Trained interims are very hard to come by these days. The interim training is a three-part training that a lot of people simply aren’t doing anymore. I did part one of the interim training back in 2021 myself. Even 20 years ago it was common for churches to say goodbye to their rector and have the diocese appoint a trained interim until the search committee and vestry could do their job in finding a new rector. Because of the clergy shortage, this model of transition is becoming the exception and not the rule. The pandemic didn’t help as a lot of clergy, including a lot of interims, decided to retire during that time and we simply aren’t replacing them with new and younger clergy at the rate we used to see. There are other designations for priests, including chaplain, but that is not relevant to our situation here at Zion. I hope this has been helpful to you.
Next week we will get back to our conversation about the Bible.
Peace,
Dave