St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

Attention!

Stat!

Listen here!

I have something to tell you. Read, please!

I felt I had to make a couple demands.

You probably have lots of people and materials and tasks demanding your attention. I bet you have lots of stuff, besides this newsletter, to read.

But this is the most important thing you will read. Right now.

More important than those old New Yorkers or Reader’s Digests or the NYTimes Magazines that are slowly accumulating on the corner of your living room table. Have you read a book within the last year? If you have, it’s because you’ve got a long commute. You’ve also got that desk full of unopened bills, most of which you probably pay on line.

I know that you feel like you’ve been neglecting your family.

Sometimes I feel like I have ADD or ADHD or whatever too much TV and sugar is being diagnosed as. Or Schizophrenia - because one moment I have an email then I have to write a check, then I have to think about raising money, then I need to write a sermon, and prepare for a board meeting.

Economists are now studying attention – and the religious are studying mindfulness. Mindfulness keeps us focused and attentive to an object, event or series of thoughts of our own choosing. The work of mindfulness requires calibration because the demands upon our attention are numerous.

The challenge of the church is about capturing attention. Recently, in New Orleans, the Episcopal Bishops were trying to craft a satisfactory response to the rest of the church, which generally places same-sex partnerships in the same category as pornography. I don’t think they are the same, myself. I’m just having a hard time caring about the discussion.

This is where my attention is: our bills. We have a $16,000 + diocesan assessment. We have about $6,000 in costs to upgrade our heating. Then the fire department is requiring a $9,000 fire suppression system for us to continue our ministry.

That’s a lot of bills about maintenance.

We’ve got to start capturing the attention of people – and it won’t be about our bills. Everyone has bills. But not everyone has strong friendships based in the power of the spirit. So how do we build our relationships with the community? That is what growth is: building relationships, making connections, engaging our world. How can our connectedness capture the world’s attention?

The church captures attention because it can transform relationships. It may offer authentic, real, tangible friendships. Through these relationships, we can build the power that can make our culture a more joyful, less miserable, more meaningful place, challenging those institutions that make victims invisible and thrive on the restlessness and carelessness of the culture.

The challenge, of course, is to remember that it is our responsibility to leave our comfort zones and think about how people outside the church think of us. How might we capture their attention?

We won’t like the changes. We’ll think of lots of reasons not to make them. But we will. And we will thrive. In the midst of this busy, challenging, and overwhelming economy of attention – we’ll continue doing the good work we are meant to do.