Dear Friends,
I am very pleased to announce that the Reverend Meredith Ward, who began in June as a part-time Interim Associate at St. Bart’s, will now join us as the full-time Associate Rector for Pastoral Care. Of course, every priest at St. Bart’s is involved in offering some level of pastoral care to our community, but Meredith will be responsible for coordinating and leading our primary pastoral care efforts.
Even as we reach a more hopeful phase of the pandemic, pastoral programs continue to be a critical ministry for our congregation. Meredith brings considerable gifts to this work at St. Bart’s. In August she launched “Forward Together” for those discerning career transitions, and in September she organized a lay-led group offering the “Transforming Power of Stillness” for these uncertain times.
In an article from the Harvard Business Review, Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen wrote, “Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership).”
This is true of clergy teams as well as other organizational teams. The clergy serving at St. Bart’s are diverse in terms of age, gender, sexual orientation, race, theology, experience, and gifts. They are all technically skilled to navigate a post-pandemic world and they possess remarkable theological training and insights. No two of them are alike and, while they possess many similarities and work well together, one can easily discern all the ways in which they are different. This, of course, is intentional because we want the clergy team to represent the diversity of our entire parish. Churches are best served by a diverse group of people working closely together who possess a variety of skills, gifts, and backgrounds.
Teams need to work well together. They need to put aside individual agendas and rivalries for the good of the whole. The Harvard Business Review goes on to define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” That sounds just about right to me. If it is so, the clergy team we are building at St. Bart’s has very few peers.
You can read more about Meredith’s many fine qualifications in this letter announcing her appointment in June. In just five months she’s made a wonderful and lasting impression on everyone who has met or worked with her at St. Bart’s, and I am thrilled she is the latest full-time member of this extraordinary clergy team.
Faithfully,
The Right Reverend Dean Elliott Wolfe
Rector