In general, I am not a procrastinator. I like to face my work and get it done. I tend to turn in work ahead of deadlines. Occasionally, however, I am working to deadlines in ways that I did not expect. Today is one of those deadlines. We are in the midst of production of our church’s annual reports and my report is not yet finished. I have three different starts on the project and a list of ideas about what I might say, but the report is not written. For most of the 37 years of my career as a pastor, my annual report to the congregation has been completed in a half hour or so. It doesn’t take too long to summarize the work that has been accomplished. The year that has just passed is on the top of my memory and remembering what I have done isn’t hard work.

I am sure that people read annual reports with different expectations. Some are looking for the overall health of the institutional church. They are checking the financial figures, the reports of activities, and the words of ther pastor tor signs of mission accomplished and funds well managed. Others read the report for a sense of belonging. They want to see how they fit into the overall program of the church. They like to see their own name or picture in the report. Others read with an eye to changes that they would like to see in the year to come. They wonder whether or not the report is of business as usual and look for innovation and new programs and projects.

It is probably a product of my age and perhaps a bit of my experience, but I am no longer satisfied with lists of tasks accomplished. I am not as interested in results of my work as I am with faithfulness. What I would like to express to the congregation is my continuing search for wholeness in the ministry - the development of a spirituality that is not about me and what I can do, but about deepening relationships between God and the members of the congregation.

To put it in different words, I would like to report on the growth of the church toward the really big values of love, truth and justice. And those really big values are much deeper than a list of accomplishments.

A colleague recently commented that he has been focusing on his effectiveness as a pastor. He concentrates on what gets accomplished. While I respect my colleague, I know I cannot look at my work from that perspective. When a person becomes attached to “effectiveness” there is a continual temptation to take on smaller and smaller tasks because it is easy to get consistent results from the small tasks.

To put it in yet a different light: If I focus on tasks accomplished in an annual report, I have to speak of things that can be done in a single year. But the church is about long-term faithfulness. Do I really want to constrain a church that has 136 years of ministry behind it to looking head at only the things that can be finished in a year?

I find myself wanting to dream about what will happen 50 and a hundred years from now in the life of the congregation. And I know that I will not be the pastor for the majority of those years. The things that I really care about are much bigger than what I can accomplish.

Will our church be able to be a community of faith in the midst of an increasingly secular world? Will we speak out for justice when others are silent? Will we be a place of hope for those who find themselves on the margins of society?

What I want to report to the congregation is more than just what tasks I have accomplished. Indeed I have been busy. I have visited families, I have planned and provided leadership for funerals. I have preached sermons. I have taught classes. I have directed staff members. I have produced resources. I have attended meetings.

Whatever the outcomes of the work I have done, however, will stand on their own. The congregation doesn’t need me to report on these. They will be evident in the larger story of the church.

What I want to write to the congregation is about whether or not I have been faithful to my gifts. Have I responded to the needs I saw around me? Have I used my gifts to address the needs of others? Have I been faithful to the vocation? These are the questions that occupy my self evaluation.

Quite frankly, after all these years as a minister, the list of things I have done is a bit boring. What excites me is not what I have done, but who I am. Even more exciting is what our community is becoming. I am convinced that I am far less likely to meet the resurrected Christ in my reminiscences than in starting something new. No matter what words I find to put in my annual report, it will still be an index of what has happened and the exciting edge of our faith is not what has been, but what is becoming. God continually calls us to the future.

This doesn’t mean that the words I put in the annual report are unimportant. Who knows? Someday a few decades from now some historian might blow the dust off of our old reports (or more likely discover them in digital archives) and read the words we crafted for this year. Perhaps those words will give some insight into the work that God is accomplishing in our midst. More important than the “legacy” value of the words, however, is the power of an annual report to capture the excitement of the congregation about what is yet to come.

And now I have written more words about the process of writing an annual report than will be in my annual report and that report is still unwritten. There is still work to do and words to write. May I bring integrity to that work and genuineness to those words.

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