September 23, 2008
By Mary Frances Schjonberg

As employees and investors reeled after a week of calamity in financial markets, Episcopalians are among the many still sorting out what the news means to them, their congregations and their neighbors.

Much of the immediate impact of Wall Street's financial woes were felt in and around New York. Due to turmoil on the mortgage and credit markets in recent days, the Lehman Brothers investment firm went bankrupt and brokerage giant Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America. In addition, the U.S. government acquired federally-chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and took control of troubled insurance firm American International Group.

"In New York City, almost like nowhere else in the world, the air we breathe is filled with nearly visible molecules of money," the Rev. Buddy Stallings, vicar of St. Bartholomew's Church in midtown Manhattan, told the congregation on September 21. "From the days of the free-trading Dutch, money has been the business of this city."

Many preachers spoke about the eventful week during their sermons that day, the Sunday whose proper included Matthew 20:1-16's, parable of the vineyard workers who got paid the same wage no matter how much work they did that day.

Trinity Church, which stands at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in lower Manhattan, began offering a series of sessions September 22 called "Coping with Stress." Two sessions on "Navigating Career Transitions" will be offered September 29 and October 2.

At least one employment networking effort, Christ Church in Short Hills, New Jersey's 21-year-old Careers in Transition, saw its attendance jump from its normal range in the teens to about 40 people on September 20.

And congregations large and small wondered about the status of their endowments and other investments.

"Perhaps you have spent years working at your job, a loyal employee sacrificing many weekends and evenings when you would have liked to have been with your kids but you wanted to provide well for them and to build up a secure retirement," the Rev. Canon Anne Mallonee, vicar of Trinity Church Wall Street, suggested during her sermon on September 21.

"And then someone in the company had power to make decisions -- make mistakes -- gamble with your future, and then this week your company went bankrupt, your retirement portfolio was vaporized and you found yourself holding a cardboard box on Wall Street filled with files and knickknacks from your desk. It doesn't seem quite fair, does it?"

Stallings told the St. Bart's congregation that "the truth is, even the most suspicious of us about inequity in this country understand that we benefit when Wall Street is soaring and that the opposite is quite true when it tanks."

Admitting that most people in the congregation were "way too raw" to find a silver lining in the events of the past week, Stallings suggested that a potential for one existed in "a slower, more honest assessment of what truly matters to us, a more genuine awareness of what altars we really worship, and, most hopefully, a new look toward the path that leads us to the security that we really need and most deeply want."

Saying that the claim that the day's parable tells listeners something about the kingdom of God is "astonishing," Stallings added that "even if we do manage somehow to theologize it with enough antics and acrobatics to make it palatable in at least that arena of our lives, we stop short from considering it as a possible indictment of our entire system of resource distribution."

Mallonee, Stallings, and others called upon congregants to reach out to others, despite their own anxieties and uncertainties.

"If money makes the world go round … then the world is spinning fast and furiously right now," the Rev. Dr. James Lemler, priest-in-charge at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, wrote in the congregation's newsletter. "Christ Church is affected by these uncertainties and stresses in some very direct and real ways. Most significantly, they impact the lives of the people who are part of our congregation and whom we serve broadly beyond it. People are unsure and frightened about their work, their communities and their lives."

The congregation and Greenwich itself plays host to a number of executives in the financial industries. According to the chamber of commerce, the average home price in Greenwich is $2.85 million and per capita income is $108,712.

Mary Ragan, director of Trinity Wall Street's counseling center and leader of the "Coping with Stress" workshops, echoed that perception in a September 23 interview with ENS. In the midst of anxiety and the inability to have a sense of predictability, people feel that "there's nobody who can say that it's going to be OK."

"Fragile, superficial reassurance doesn't help," she said. Instead, during the first stress workshop on September 22, Ragan said she emphasized the basics of stress reduction: easting well, exercising and engaging in spiritual practices "that have a long history of working."

Both Trinity series were advertised on the parish's home page under the headline "Help in uncertain times: Coping and counseling in lower Manhattan". The series are being offered by the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute, an interfaith organization which is houses at Trinity. The idea for the series, Ragan said, began early on the morning of September 15 when Mallonee phone the institute and posed the question of how Trinity could respond to the growing crisis.

Ragan noted that some people have remarked that the sense of urgency and "tremendous sense of crisis" in the air of lower Manhattan these days reminds them of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and of the days after. "Obviously, it's not the same," she said, adding that what she called the somewhat "invisible" nature of this crisis is resulting in a different kind of anxiety.

People are also grieving, Ragan said. They are feeling the loss of their money and the value of their investment portfolio, their jobs, their identity, their self-esteem and their sense of control.

"The world has changed this week," Stalling told the St. Bart's congregation, calling it "a shift that has altered our view of reality."

Lemler told ENS in a September 23 interview that the mood at Christ Church this past Sunday was "sober and somber."

However, he said, when calamity such as this hits a community such as Greenwich, it presents "a chance to recognize, rely on and fall on the grace of God."

The parish has just begun a series of education and formation offerings and on September 21, Rabbi Mitch Hurvitz from near-by Temple Sholom spoke about doubt and faith. The news of the previous week made for a very different conversation than might have been the case had Wall Street not been experiencing such an on-going reorganization, Lemler said.

The day before and about 60 miles south of Greenwich, about 40 people showed up for the regular meeting of Christ Church in Short Hills' Careers in Transition group. Parishioner Sandra Johnson, who has led the group for more than 10 years, said the 40 included a retiree who announced he was forced to look for a job because of his recent investment losses. Another person who used to work in lending said he'd been out of a job for a about a year and always assumed that he'd have little trouble finding a new job when he was ready. Last week, Johnson said, he realized the job market would soon be flooded with unemployed financial-sector workers.

For example, the September 15 bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers alone endangered the jobs of about 25,000 world-wide. Barclays said a week later it had offered jobs to more than 10,000 Lehman employees in the U.S. after buying Lehman's North American banking business, the Associated Press reported.

The mood last Saturday was "resigned" among the marketers, strategic planners and change-management specialists who made up the bulk of the participants, Johnson said. While one might expect people with these sorts of skills to be in demand during a time like this, she said that is not the case.

"Your sales people tend to keep their job and everyone else gets axed," she explained.

Because such economic upheavals trend to unemploy people in waves, Johnson said she and the group's other organizers expect they will soon see as many as 85 people come to the Careers in Transition meetings. The number is similar to what the group experienced during the 2001-2002 tech meltdown, she said.

During the meetings on the first and third Saturdays of each month, participants network, have their resumes reviewed, do mock interview, polish up their "elevator speeches," and in general try to brush up their job-seeking skills. The group is not restricted to any industry, employment level or even to membership in Christ Church or the Episcopal Church. She has recruited a Roman Catholic and a Jewish person to co-lead the group with her. They replaced two Lutherans who retired and moved away, Johnson said.

"I've had people say: 'what's with the Episcopal Church? They're open to everybody'," she said, noting that many such group are offered only to congregation members. Trinity Church in Princeton offers a similarly unrestricted job-seekers group, she added.

Johnson also predicted that the newly "reduced profile[s]" of many of the area's employers will mean reduced incomes for people who do keep their jobs. That reduction could mean changes in local economies, she added.

Sandra McPhee, a lawyer who belongs to St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois, and the chair of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parish's endowment committee, told ENS that she expects that Episcopal parishes with endowments of all sizes are consulting their investment experts and "taking a wait-and-see attitude." While the consortium does not give investment advice and does not track how member parishes invest, McPhee said the best investment strategy in times like this is one of prudence based on the advice of a trusted adviser.

McPhee, who is also a member of the Episcopal Church's Executive Council, participated in the Eucharist at St. Matthew's this past Sunday (during which her two-month-old granddaughter was baptized) and recalled that rector Jane Henderson acknowledged in her sermon that "everyone's antsy, everyone's nervous."

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Episcopal Church governance, structure, and trends, as well as news of the dioceses of Province II. She is based in Neptune, New Jersey, and New York City.