St. James' is a multicultural community in East Austin founded originally in 1941 by a group of students and faculty from Huston-Tillotson College. The Rev. Eileen O’Brien currently serves as the Rector of St. James’ Episcopal Church, Austin, and Board Chair for Welcome Table, Inc.
This summer, we visit with a few leaders of faith communities about how their congregations responded in real time to the changing landscape demanded by the pandemic. The first of the series is with Rev. Eileen O’Brien.
Can you describe some of the ways your congregation interacted as a group pre-pandemic? What did it look like when you gathered?
We were gathering for four services for worship, each with a different [liturgical] language, as well as small groups, Bible studies, and outreach work. For pastoral care we had a lot of person to person visits. Mostly all in-person, we didn’t do much online beyond conferencing into meetings.
At some point it became clear that this would last longer than a couple of months. How did the leadership and congregation respond?
When the bishop said on the 13th of March to go online and hopefully by the upcoming Sunday, we had anticipated that this might happen, so we moved online really quickly. We had a prerecorded service that people could call up at any time that also had a Facebook watch party so that people could participate with each other. For the smaller services, we set up Zoom-based services so that people could interact around the intercessions and the sermon, which had become more participatory. We didn’t experiment with in-person until late August.
We planned and pre-recorded a lot of music for the upcoming seasons and decided how to fit it in or decided what we could ask the harp player, for instance, to record at home. Our liturgical committee did a lot of brainstorming for fully engaging the congregation in the liturgy and attending to the liturgical calendar of Feasts and Fasts, such as renewal of baptismal vows, online.
The House of Bishops for the Episcopal Church said no virtual communion, period. So we had to change the format of the service to a non-Eucharistic service that would still develop a feeling of communion and community. That was a primary challenge our liturgical committee struggled with: how do we do communion without the bread and the wine?
At one point, people started indicating that the services, which we had shortened at the advice of our diocese, didn’t feel like a full enough worship experience. So we filled it out more and got a really good response.
Lots of people were home alone and I imagine there was a great need for pastoral care. What did St. James’ do in that regard?
About 25 people made periodic calls to the entire congregation so we could address needs as they arose. We wanted to check in on everyone, knowing that everyone was in struggle. We did a lot of porch visits: outdoors, masked, and distanced. We worked closely with the chaplains inside hospitals and coached families on how to pray for their loved ones themselves. It was very empowering - we are all pastoral care providers! For deaths we had graveside services and online memorial services for prayer, story-sharing and music. Similarly with weddings.
Is there anything developed during this time that you feel is valuable enough and serving enough of a need that you’ll keep doing it even after a return?
Yes. During our evening service, we really developed a very robust Prayers of the People with thanksgivings and intercessions. People really hear each other's prayers more clearly. We want to import that into our physical experience. The other thing that’s been a delight in that service is the opening up of the scriptures during the sermon meditation time. Over the course of the summer we’re going to experiment with different forms of participatory sermons and a time immediately following the service to dissect the readings and respond to the sermon. We have enjoyed that as a community and everyone felt like they got a lot out of the discussion in the evening.
What surprised you the most this past year in the context of your job and your community?
One of the things I anticipated but didn’t realize what the full effect would be was about regathering in person. Ours is a multicultural community, and there are demographic and geographic patterns in the response to the idea of regathering, even with a fully vaccinated congregation. People’s pacing and comfort levels are all different. They all have different factors going on in their lives. So visitors to the congregation at this moment aren’t getting to meet many long-time members. It’s taking a while to reform our identity based on physical presence. This is an interesting thing I'm still learning about.