In a corner of Terry Fullam’s office sits an architect’s model of a large sanctuary, gathering dust. It is a silent reminder that visions do not always become reality.
“That’s what we thought God wanted us to build five or six years ago, when our present building first filled up,” the bespectacled rector recalls with a grin. “You know, the place was packed, we were having four morning services-time to build a bigger barn. It was going to go right out on the front lawn. The vestry and congregation were all unanimous.
“But when we went to the city fathers for approval, they were just as unanimous: NO. Our plans would be a massive overdevelopment of this wooded area, they ruled.”
Only then, says Fullam, was the church ready to comprehend an alternate vision. It came as a message from the church’s senior warden: “God wants us instead to build the living church, to give ourselves to strengthening his people, not only here in Darien, but across the nation and even the world.”
That is what has happened. Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church has become a hive of renewal throughout the Connecticut suburbs of New York City and beyond, with thirteen hundred worshipers coming to the four weekly services, two of which are held in a high school auditorium. Four times a year, pastors and church leaders trek to Saint Paul’s for clergy conferences; in between times, Terry Fullam spends major amounts of time on the road, speaking mainly to ministerial groups.
LEADERSHIP Senior Editor Dean Merrill went to Darien to talk with the man who for the past eleven years has been a realistic visionary in a local church come alive.
Who originates the vision for a church-God, humans, or both?
Vision is the product of God working in us. He creates the vision, and we receive it; it becomes a rallying point, a goal toward which we move as his people. Without it, as the Scripture says, “the people perish.”
In my own case, the Lord spent most of a summer working on me to prepare me for this church, first through Scripture and then through a rather strange experience that is, I suppose, unique to me. I had been a college professor up until then, so it took a lot of extra effort to implant the vision of the parish ministry in me.
I didn’t hear God audibly, but his word to me was so clear that, had I heard him out loud, it would have added nothing. It gave me the courage to step into an unfamiliar role. It has provided a stability for me ever since.
What were the specifics?
I was on a study tour in the Holy Land. Two days before leaving the United States, I had received a call from the vestry of this church. I was very reluctant.
Then I noticed one morning in 2 Chronicles 15 a mention about Israel’s decline for lack of “a teaching priest.” I knew all about teaching, of course, and I was familiar with the priesthood-but could the two be combined? Apparently so.
Later I was deeply challenged by Jeremiah 23, which described “prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes; they speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. … But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings” (vv. 16, 22).
Then came the moment in the middle of the night, while in the Sinai, that God put the pieces together by saying, “You are to go to that church, for I have chosen that congregation to do a mighty work for my name’s sake.” He went on to reveal what the church could become. I was astounded.
How did this personal vision of ministry affect your beginnings here?
When I stepped into the pulpit here on October 1, 1972-my first Sunday-I said to those 175 people, “One of two things will happen to you over the next months and years. Either you will find yourself opening up more and more to the Lord, in which case you will sense you are growing spiritually. Or else you will find yourself tightening up, constricting, to the point the atmosphere will become intolerable.”
That was a strong thing to say-but it proved true. I went on to make a promise: “When I stand in this pulpit, I want you to know that at least I think God has given me something to say. And I make a covenant with you: If he doesn’t speak-I won’t.” This deep conviction had been born out of Jeremiah 23.
Did God ever call your bluff?
Yes! The second Sunday of January, 1973, found me absolutely blank. I had gone through my usual discipline of sermon preparation and come up empty. Not that I couldn’t stand up and talk in a reasonably meaningful way about Scripture-I had done that in the classroom for years. But this particular week, I had not heard from God.
It got to be Saturday. Finally it was evening. I still had nothing at all. I went over the next day’s lections again. Still nothing.
I went back to the church late that night to pray. “Lord, are you testing me on what I said? If so, I really meant it. I’m perfectly willing to go to the congregation tomorrow morning and say, ‘There won’t be any sermon today.’ “
Still no quickening in my spirit. Nothing.
The next morning, the worship service began. It came time for me to preach. I was literally on my way to the pulpit, preparing to make my embarrassing announcement, when suddenly it flashed in my mind that I should tell the Sinai experience. I had not thought about that once the whole previous week.
So I told the story. I know now that the Lord did this on purpose. If he had instructed me ahead of time, I would have disobeyed, for all kinds of reasons. Nothing about this church seemed ready for such a tale. I told not only what had happened to me but also what God had said about this church and what he intended to do with it. I told how the voice inside my head had said, “I want to move in a powerful way in that church. It will not be like other churches. Don’t put your eyes upon another church and try to copy its program. That is not my plan. … I’m going to change the congregation, from altar to window and wall to wall.” The whole vision was spilled-when none of it had even begun to take shape at that point!
It’s now been eleven years, and the Lord has been filling in the parts and pieces. People still remember that Sunday and talk about it occasionally. From that day on, of course, I was free to share the vision from time to time, keeping it before the people.
Bob Slosser’s book Miracle at Darien tells how you made quite a point in the beginning of saying, “I will not be the head of this church. Christ is the Head and we must take our directions from him.” How does a statement like that become more than rhetoric?
We stumbled onto that before I had been rector here forty-eight hours. At a special meeting of the vestry on Monday night, October 2, I began by reading some Scripture about the church as the body of Christ, and Jesus as the Head. That led me to pose some questions to the people sitting around the table.
I’d always believed the theology, of course, but not once in my life had I ever applied it to church governance. I was an American, with a built-in bias toward things democratic. The way to guide a group was to do what most of them wanted to do.
But I asked that night, “If Jesus is the Head of the church, and if it’s the function of a head to direct the body and tell it what to do-then doesn’t that mean he is supposed to direct us?”
Well, yes, that was the implication, they said.
“So if he is leading and we’re listening,” I continued, “is it conceivable that he would lead, say, ten people one way and two another?”
No, they said, if he’s leading us, he would lead us together.
Inadvertently, we had stumbled upon a second principle: that we could move in the unity of the Spirit. We weren’t looking for unity. We were looking for how to function under the headship of Christ, and we stumbled onto unity.
The whole vestry embraced the concept that night-which was a miracle. Some of the members at that point were not even believing people, and yet they agreed that if this was the way God meant the church to be, that’s how we would function. We committed ourselves to think of the church principally as an organism, not so much as an organization.
Some would say that such a view, while noble in intent, gives the veto to the most irascible or ornery member of the group. Any one person can stymie the vision.
That is true. But in practice, it doesn’t work that way. The group is so intent on finding the mind of God that unity emerges. Hundreds of churches across the nation are coming to experience this.
I know of one church where a board member had always voted against the others. That was his chosen role-to obstruct. The others came to an understanding of Christ as the Head of the church and decided they would stop overruling this fellow, as they had always done in the past. They went through three monthly meetings without passing a single action, because the direction of the Head was not unanimously perceived.
Near the end of the third meeting, the man began to sob. He confessed that all his life he’d taken the opposing point of view-it was the only way to be noticed. He hadn’t really expected anyone to do anything about it. At that point, his whole heart was changed.
If the heart of the people is really to find the will of God, I don’t think God will allow this kind of vetoing to go on indefinitely. My counsel is: Don’t ignore the obstructionist. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, he can speak through any designated leader in the church. In fact, part of what you want to convey is that he or she is part of this chain of communication. Trust the process; watch God work it out.
We have taken the position that no vestry person knows what God’s will is until we all know.
Do you think average church members care all that much about a church’s vision, so long as their particular interests are addressed?
It tends to come to the fore in churches that are really open to the Lord and concerned with finding his purposes for individual and corporate life. The notion of vision requires some kind of personal encounter with Christ. If church is mainly a matter of ritual and ceremony, the subject of vision doesn’t come up very often.
In some places, it is mainly the clergy who worry about vision. But in others, there are a lot of frustrated lay people who desire to move out in the things of the Lord but find no vision in the pulpit, other than running Sunday services.
Is there a difference between vision and goal setting, other than that one sounds spiritual and the other businesslike?
Yes. Vision arises out of our burden to know the will of God, to become whatever it is God wants us to become. Goal setting is a projection of our perceptions of what we want to accomplish. There’s nothing particularly nefarious about that-it’s just that vision is something that elicits a response from us, that calls us forth. Goals, on the other hand, are things we project.
That is why I suppose I’m not as firmly committed to goals-I (or we) thought them up in the first place. Vision, on the other hand, summons me.
Again I say, the process of goal setting cannot be bad. But if the church is indeed an organism and I am part of the body of Christ, it’s not really a matter of “Where do I want to go?” but rather “Where does he want to take me?”
So then perhaps goals come after vision?
I think so. Here at Saint Paul’s, we have set intermediate goals along the way to achieve the vision. I had a very clear word from the Lord in the beginning that I was never to regard this as “my church.” He was only asking me for obedience as he brought about what he wanted; in other words, he really did intend to build his own church. What was not given to me in that vision, however, were the steps by which this was to be achieved.
I’ve often had the feeling that I’m the only person in this whole church who can really mess it up. I don’t think the people can derail what God has planned to do here. “The zeal of the Lord of hosts” will fulfill it.
How could you sabotage it?
By willfully moving out of his direction. If I started to do my own thing . . . well, even that wouldn’t sabotage it permanently, but it would sidetrack it. That keeps me very low before the Lord, because I desperately want to be open and willing to be led.
What are some of your goals here that emerge from the overall vision?
One would be to evangelize every member. We have a saying in the Episcopal church that we have sacramentalized our people but not evangelized them. We have done everything to them you can: we’ve baptized them, confirmed them, and all the rest, but we need to make sure we introduce them to a personal faith in Jesus Christ.
This is obviously important for two reasons: the Lord wants us to do it, and the church will be strong only to the degree that people are committed to Christ.
So in pursuing this goal, we make an interesting assumption: we assume a person does not have a relationship with Jesus Christ unless he is prepared to say he does. The simple fact of being in the church is not enough. We don’t argue with people; we don’t sit in judgment on their salvation; but neither do we take for granted that they have committed their lives to Christ unless they say so.
This obviously affects the way we go about many things in the church.
Second, in the case of believers-and this will seem like the exact opposite-we assume commitment rather than noncommitment! I’ll give an example. We have a number of clergy and lay leadership conferences here every year, drawing people from all over the world. And we house them in the homes of the parish. For many years, I used to go to the congregation and say, “A conference is coming up, and we need 200 beds; please sign up.” We always got what we needed, but it was a hassle.
Then one day, I realized all that wasn’t necessary. I went before the congregation one Sunday and said, “You have heard me ask for beds for the last time. From now on, we will assume that if you have an extra bed in your house, of course you would let someone use it. Because everything you have belongs to the Lord and you’ve consecrated your home to his service, naturally you would make it available to his servants. So we have made up a bed bank for the parish, and we’ll assume yours are available. If for some reason you cannot host a guest, you let us know-otherwise, we will assume commitment rather than noncommitment.”
And the people readily agreed that that was the way to look at it.
So many clergy pitch the level of their ministry to the least committed members of the congregation, being careful not to offend them. That’s not what we were called to do.
Is vision a matter of “bigger equals better”? Are church leaders called constantly to dream the impossible dream?
Not necessarily. But an overall vision has to be big enough to be worth giving your life to it. Size is not as crucial as importance. A vision is important because the will of the Lord stands behind it. Whether the world would call it large is beside the point. But within our lives, as we answer the call to obedience and discipleship, it is a big thing.
Right here is one of the great failures of the church, especially with regard to young people. I remember sitting in a class one day and hearing a professor say, “Cults are the promissory notes that the church never paid.” His point was that if the church were what it should be, the cults would never get off the ground. The church normally calls its people to do so little. Meanwhile, young people are looking for something to give their lives to. And when a cult leader comes along demanding total commitment, they are challenged. The vision is big enough to command their attention.
You’ve been here eleven years. What is there yet to do? Do you want to build a larger building so you don’t have to keep meeting at the high school?
That would be fine; our present arrangements really are not adequate. I suppose when the Lord thinks he can trust us, he’ll let us have a building. But that has never been part of the vision. We’ve been busy building the living church, so that over half the giving here goes into mission beyond the borders of Saint Paul’s. If we were building a building, we might have to cut back on that.
But there’s much more to be done. We need to find more effective ways to equip the saints for ministry. We already have a lot of instruction going on at various levels, of course, but I’m thinking about several outstanding people who are coming up to early retirement. I feel a great sense of stewardship for such magnificent gifts, to help them discern the ministry God has called them to.
Another task is to influence the wider church toward better preparation for ordination. There has to be a better way than most of our current models. Perhaps Saint Paul’s can be a “teaching parish” to show the way.
Then, we’re just novices when it comes to pastoring the body of Christ here. I’m not thinking of crisis intervention so much as nurturing people through the plateaus and rough spots in their lives. The necessary gifts are resident in the church; we just have to put them together with the needs. A lot is being done, but there is so much more to do.
What are the impediments to these visions? What things stand in your way?
Like any group of church leaders, we face the need for constant “deprogramming.” My vestry members come from long days in the business offices of New York City and the surrounding area, and they struggle to get down to the point of being able to hear the Lord speak. We’ve talked about that a lot together. My task is to help them focus, to remind them we’re a body of people God is preparing to use. But we have to be ready; we have to deal with broken relationships among the leaders, not letting them slide.
We also have to remind ourselves constantly what we’re about. We’re not here to negotiate-“I’ll give in on this if you’ll give in on that.” Rather, we’re actively seeking for the mind of the Lord, and we believe the Lord will speak to us corporately, not individually. He never seems to give the whole vision to any one of us. We’re constantly putting a jigsaw puzzle together.
There’s a great difference between our vestry and a board of directors. In the early days, we had the conventional approach of each member being responsible for some area of church life. We found that to be an unnecessary layer of authority, since most of the ministries were being done by people who knew much more about them than the vestry.
Now we seek to be a group that discerns the Lord’s direction, the vision seekers. And I’m willing, as rector, to tie myself to the common vision received by the whole of the board in unity.
Isn’t that a risky statement?
I made it eleven years ago, and I’ve never regretted it. As I look back, I can think of no vestry decision I would have disagreed with. If the group seeks God’s will and comes to a sense of peace, I’m satisfied.
How does this work at the congregational level, where you have many more people and vastly differing levels of spiritual maturity? Can you get unity there?
The unity need only be as broad as the group having the authority. In the Episcopal church, the congregation holds relatively little authority. They elect officers and in this particular church, they also vote on the choice of a new rector.
But in those matters, yes we have moved only in unity. Our selection process of nomination and voting is like many other churches, I suppose, but throughout the whole search each fall for four new vestry members is this assumption: God has four people to fill those positions, and we must find them. After careful prayer and discussion at several levels, four names are presented. We’ve never had a negative vote in eleven years.
If we did, it wouldn’t be any scandal. We would simply withdraw that person’s name and start all over, until we were sure we had found God’s choice.
Please understand: Our goal is not to maintain unity. Our goal is to move under the headship of Christ. Unity is simply the gift he gives us when we find his mind.
Have you at times been frustrated waiting for unity to come?
Not really. I remember the time we wanted to sponsor a Vietnamese refugee family, and all but one vestryman were in favor of it. A committee had done all the study and planning, and here was this one holdout. He felt we weren’t paying enough attention to material needs in our own membership.
We didn’t press; I didn’t try to coerce. We brought the subject up again the next month, and found we were at the same place as before. We tabled the subject again.
At the third meeting, the man said, “You know, I’m so embarrassed, but now at last I have a sense of peace about bringing this family. Let’s move ahead.”
It was only then that we learned the family didn’t want the Connecticut climate and had settled instead in a warmer state. Had we moved ahead earlier, we might have caused them considerable unhappiness.
We then proceeded to set up a cash assistance program-unanimously-to help those in the parish with financial needs. We learned something here about “the fullness of time.” We learned that you can trust the process. So what if it takes a while longer? It’s all right. Something unseen may be working itself out.
What are the dangers of a one-man vision?
The perspective is limited, no matter who the man is. The vision is always partial. We all see through a glass darkly.
If a vision is going to be owned by the people, it has to be more than something we talk them into. In our case here, I hope the shared vision arises not only from what I say but also from the rather clear evidence of what God is fleshing out among us. We simply respond. We’re not a program-oriented church, where we construct programs and then invite people to come. Everything is done as a response to a felt need.
Do you follow any pattern or regimen in defining vision or setting goals?
Well, of course I have to rearticulate the vision every time we bring new communicants into the fellowship. I have a session tonight, for example, with fifty-five new people who will join the church in February.
I also usually address the issue on a Sunday morning around the anniversary of my coming here.
Then the vestry spends time on these things regularly. We go on two retreats a year-sometimes three. We’re constantly talking about what the needs are, what has been slipping through the cracks, what the Lord might be saying to us about various concerns. Right now we’re concentrating on how to enable the pastoring function I mentioned earlier.
Will this possibly result in some kind of small-group construction?
We already have that-extended families in house churches, and so forth. But we want to do a better job.
How can a vision be propagated besides through preaching? Are there other ways?
Teaching and preaching are the principle formats, but there’s also the prophetic function-to interpret where God is already at work. That is a part of comprehending vision.
I did something last Sunday in this area. It was the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the church year, just before Advent. I talked about how Christmas doesn’t make sense without Easter, and Easter doesn’t make sense without this day, the revelation of Jesus as Lord. If he is Lord, I said, he holds rights to all the gifts he has given us. I then asked every communicant of the church to take stock of his or her life and write me a letter. “This is a large parish,” I said, “and I’m unable to be with each of you individually. But I want to be alongside you in prayer.
“You know that I pray through the parish list on a regular basis. So look at the stewardship of your life-your natural abilities and your opportunities-and tell me in letter form about yourself. What obedience is the Lord calling you to? What thing is he commending? What are your dreams for your life, for this body, and for the interplay between the two?”
I told them I would put their letters in order according to the parish list and then share their dreams, praying for each of them. I announced that on Christmas Eve I would bring all the letters to the altar, offering their gifts to the Lord. And then at this time next year, I will mail all the letters back for review.
There’s a great reservoir of commitment in this church and a desire to find God’s will. In this way, I hope to help people focus on vision.
Does God intend that visions vary from one congregation to the next? In other words, are visions tailor-made, or is there one generic vision for churches?
The Lord wants certain things to be present in all churches. I believe he wants them to be loving fellowships, worshiping bodies, places where people are nurtured and become equipped to move out and serve. These are common components.
But beyond that, there are different functions for churches to play within the body of Christ, just as individual Christians have different gifts. If all the churches in a town were truly open to the Lord and moving in his will, I suspect you would find one church with an outstanding youth program, another as a great teaching center, and so forth. I don’t think every church is called to do everything.
What is the specific call for Saint Paul’s?
We believe it’s to be a resource for renewing. That’s why the vestry came to me more than seven years ago and said they believed the Lord was releasing me to minister beyond the borders of this church. They tried to come up with a percentage figure on how much time I might be away, but finally abandoned that. They just said, “Feel free to minister to the wider church.”
Scores and scores of our people put tremendous numbers of hours into the clergy conferences and lay leadership weekends. We also have a program called PRO (Parish Reaching Out) to respond to the requests for lay people to come and conduct vestry retreats or do preaching/teaching missions in churches. We’ve sent teams to Africa, Australia, and many places throughout Canada and the United States.
Give some examples of other churches you know and their specific callings.
The Church of the Redeemer in Houston has had a great ministry in music. Their tapes and records have gone all over the world for years.
College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati has an outstanding lay pastoral ministry. It’s a model for other churches.
Saint Luke’s Episcopal in Bath, Ohio-a small community-is a very powerful church. People go there from all over to learn about youth ministry, sometimes staying for up to three months and paying actual tuition for the training they receive.
Saint Andrew’s by the Sea in Destin, Florida, a little fishing town, draws people from all around to its counseling ministry.
Each of these has other ministries as well, of course, but I’ve singled out their special contribution to the church at large.
Do you ever observe bogus visions?
Yes, from time to time.
Can you illustrate?
Well, I’m thinking of one man who really had a powerful message from the Lord in the area of community. He urged that the average congregation should be much closer than it is-and who can deny that? Fellowship certainly ought to mean more than coffee after a service.
But unfortunately, in my judgment, he confused the part with the whole. For him, community meant residential living, families moving in together. God blessed their efforts for quite a few years, and they became a model to scores of churches all over the world. But-those churches by and large couldn’t make it work. What had happened was this: a vision God gave one congregation had been universalized, made normative. It was not the vision for everybody.
You didn’t become an Episcopalian until around age thirty. You were raised in Baptist and Congregational churches, served on the pastoral staff of Tremont Temple in Boston, and taught at Barrington College. What did you learn about vision in these various settings?
In the early years I certainly learned a love for Scripture. I learned the need for personal regeneration-and therefore the need to both preach about it and do whatever else is necessary to bring it about. This served me well when I came to the liturgical church, where it’s so easy to substitute ritual for relationship.
I also got from the Baptists a degree of global vision.
My vision of the church today is of three streams leading into one river. From the historic Protestant side comes the emphasis on the Word, the priesthood of the believer, and the need for individual, personal encounter with God. From the Catholic stream comes the idea of the corporate body of Christ-that you can’t be a Christian all by yourself. (My earlier assumption was that the first-century church was some sort of free-flowing whatever that gradually hardened into structure. The biblical evidence does nothing to support that notion. A body has a skeleton.) So here I learn the need for mutual submission.
Then the third stream is the charismatic dimension, which emphasizes the immediacy of God’s working in our lives. The operation of the Spirit does not supplant the Scripture in any way, but it shows that God still speaks to us today, through prophecy and in other ways as well.
So my personal quest is for wholeness, for moving from a partial to a more adequate understanding of the vision, both personal and corporate. The church as I see it needs to be Catholic, Protestant, and charismatic all at once.
As you travel and spend time with pastors and church leaders, what do you observe about their vision?
Many of them are very discouraged. They have tried everything they know to do, without much response. Some say to me, “I haven’t found the ministry fulfilling at all; it’s horrendous, and I’d get out of it if I could, but I’m not trained to do anything else.”
This kind of malaise is partly because for so long the church has been bereft of any significant biblical preaching and teaching. These languishing leaders are themselves products of a “professional” ministry. They are sincere, but they haven’t caught any kind of vision from the Lord, and so they resort to human methods to try to get the job done.
One man came to a conference here from a church in Fairfield, Alabama, to which the bishop had sent him with the instructions “Close the place, and I’ll be happy with you-it hasn’t done anything in a hundred years.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to do that, but he was so frustrated he was ready to leave the ministry.
Well, he listened to the preaching and teaching in the conference, and he began to catch a vision. He went back to Alabama and said, “Lord, I suppose I always knew you were the Head of the church, but I must have forgotten it.
“I’ve tried everything I know in this place, and it’s gone nowhere. But now, I understand something different. I want to promise you that I will do whatever it takes to establish your headship over this church in a functional way-even if it means I have to pump gas for a living.”
That degree of commitment brought astonishing results. Today that congregation is a leader in the South. Blacks and whites are worshiping together there and redeeming whole neighborhoods as they move in to be close to the church. They’ve had to build a larger building. The vision has taken hold and is being perpetuated.
For a lot of clergy, their vision is essentially limited to the expectations of the people around them. No wonder they get bogged down. Our vision must not be confined to our circumstances, or it will be forever small. It must instead be a vision engendered by the Scripture and supported by the Spirit.
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
