An article from the Cathedral Times
by Dean Sam Candler
Grace! Excellence! Hospitality! Are you noticing the renewed energy of the Cathedral lately? Services and programs have begun the fall with vigor and excitement. There are new saints and angels around!
We have welcomed two new clergy among us! The Reverend Julia Mitchener and the Reverend Nate Huddleston are serving and preaching with amazing excellence! Their particular ministries are already benefitting from their presence; Julia serves with delightful wisdom in our Children’s Ministries program; and Nate, of course, is our energetic Director of Youth Ministries.
Perhaps those of you familiar with complex organizations realize that lively systems and organisms are always looking for excellent staff. Even when I am not looking in particular for a new staff member, I keep an eye out for possible wonderful clergy and staff!
Meanwhile, we also have two important searches going on. Dale Adelmann seeks another faithful Assistant (or Associate) Organist-Choirmaster (especially for young choristers). Even friends of mine around the country are suggesting great names. David Rocchio, our tremendous Director of Stewardship, is looking for a Program Coordinator for Stewardship and Membership. This person would also be a key piece of our pastoral care ministry. Let us know if you know of a great candidate.
I am thankful for good clergy and leaders who have answered the call to serve elsewhere, and I still talk to many of them. In the past two weeks, both of our most recent “missionary canons” (Wallace Marsh and Beth Knowlton) have telephoned me for counsel. Besides Patrick Scott, who left to be Organist-Choirmaster at Grace-St. Luke’s Church, Memphis, another recent Assistant Organist is now Professor of Music at the School of Theology of Sewanee.
The Cathedral—our community!—is proud of these transitions and searches. We receive excellent staff members, we learn about grace and excellence and hospitality together, and God sends them elsewhere into the harvest. This is the rhythm of ministry, and of life itself. Some of our most pastoral routines at the Cathedral are the funerals we conduct almost every week. At every service, we are reminded that life is wonderful, that life on this earth ends, and that eternal life begins every day.
Hey! We are gearing up for Stewardship 2020, too. “The Greater Good” awaits us, and we need your commitment. Even with the Cathedral going so well, we can do greater things.
We are also receiving the names of candidates to be nominees for the Cathedral Chapter. Jennifer Rosenblath, a past Senior Warden, has accepted my invitation to be Chair of the Nominating Committee, and the committee will soon be assembled.
The Cathedral and the Chapter already have a mission, the one given to us in Episcopal Prayer Book: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” (BCP, page 855). Here at the Cathedral, the Chapter oversees a grand and complex village of ministries, some of which are parish based; others that operate within our larger “village” are what we call “parochial entities,” and they, too, report to the Cathedral Chapter. They are the familiar Cathedral Farmers Market, Cathedral Counseling Center, Cathedral Preschool, Cathedral Book Store, Cathedral Thrift House, Cathedral Towers, Cathedral Antiques Show, and Friends of Cathedral Music. All serve with what we call our Cathedral Values: “Grace, Excellence, and Hospitality.”
Pray for us this fall! The Cathedral community – the Cathedral Village! – is running and humming and buzzing and singing with grace, with excellence, with hospitality. Thank you!
The Very Reverend Samuel G. Candler
Dean of the Cathedral of St. Philip