“Living Stones is a natural partnership for us…”

by the Right Reverend Thomas Clark Ely, Bishop of Vermont
Mountain Echo
June 2004

The Diocese of Vermont is a member of the Living Stones Diocesan Partnership, twenty dioceses from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada dedicated to providing mutual support for dioceses engaged in developing baptismal ministry. Our diocesan coordinators are Peggy Crane and Bill Rayner. Living Stones is a natural partnership for us as we seek to live more deeply and more fully into baptismal ministry as a diocese.

At the heart of baptismal ministry is the understanding of the local church becoming and being a ministering community, with its roots in baptism and its focus on the world. A theology of baptismal ministry understands that all Christians are gifted and authorized for ministry by virtue of baptism. For some this means ordained leadership, but for most it means identifying and carrying out our ministries as the people of God in our daily lives.

Here in the Diocese of Vermont, we are working hard and working together to help congregations live more fully into this concept of ministering communities. Many of the case studies we have presented at the annual gathering of the Living Stones Partnership have been about lively expressions of baptismal ministry in Vermont. Over the years we have shared the stories of the Border Ministry (Canaan, Vermont, Colebrook, New Hampshire and Hereford, Quebec), Immanuel Church, Bellows Falls, Christ Church, Bethel and the consultation on cooperative ministry in the Northeast Kingdom, to name a few.

Each story, each case study, is a way of sharing with other partners the vitality of baptismal ministry present in our diocese.

New baptismal ministry conversations are springing up in many congregations throughout the diocese as well as among groups of congregations like those in the Northwest Deanery and several congregations in Vermont and New Hampshire bordering the Connecticut River.

Through our partnership in Living Stones, we also bring back to Vermont the stories and experiences of those who are engaged in the development of baptismal ministry in other parts of the United States and Canada. Partners hold one another in prayer and are available for ongoing consultation and support. Central to the Living Stones Partnership is the conviction that dioceses working together can be more effective in helping the church take seriously a central theme of the Apostle Paul that believers would take their place in the ministry and the church would identify, nurture and utilize all gifts for ministry.

The Living Stones Covenant affirms five principles that we believe help to move the church forward in the development of ministering communities:
• All Christian ministry is rooted in Baptism.
• As we reshape ministry, we seek to be congruent with Scripture, informed and guided by tradition, reason, and experience.
• The Christian church is a ministering community whose effectiveness is measured not by mere numbers, but by the quality of the life we share.
• We recognize a variety of ministries, including locally trained and ordained deacons, priests and licensed ministers.
• The diocese exists primarily to encourage and support the ministries of its congregations.

I wanted to share the ministry of Living Stones with you in this way because I think both the focus and the operating model of this partnership are of value to us in our common life and ministry as a diocese. The focus on baptismal ministry and becoming ministering communities is an engaging and exciting way of thinking about and being the church. The partnership model is an important reminder to us that we are part of a body, a community, a people who are engaged in the work of Christ’s reconciling ministry as partners—partners with Christ and partners one with another.

We read in the Bible, “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:4-5). I pray that this is what we are building and who we are becoming as ministering communities and as a diocese.

Faithfully,
+Thomas