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Start Me Up: New Grace rector helps church start over
During a recent sermon at Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, the Rev. Stephen Zimmerman invoked not the Bible or the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
Zimmerman quoted the Rolling Stones.
“St. Paul the persecutor was a cruel and sinful man / ’till Jesus hit him with a blinding light, and then his life began,” said Zimmerman, who on Nov. 1 became priest-in-charge of Grace and St. Stephen’s downtown.
Zimmerman has also quoted lyrics by Bruce Springsteen and U2 during sermons, and his cell phone announces incoming calls by playing the Stones’ “Start Me Up.”
But make no mistake. Zimmerman, 60, is more than just a fan of classic rock. He’s thought deeply about the problems within the Episcopal Church, racked in recent years with internal division over the role of gays and women in the church.
For Zimmerman, the disagreements can be positive if people still realize they are united in Christ. “The gift of the Episcopal Church to the rest of Christendom can be that communion is larger than confession,” he said, meaning Christian community outweighs differences in theological interpretation.
Zimmerman’s rector experience, theological knowledge and rhetorical chops — lightened by references to classic-rock lyrics — may help him lead an Episcopal parish blindsided by events that literally split the congregation.
Healing a parish
In March 2007, Grace rector Donald Armstrong and his vestry voted to leave the liberal-leaning Episcopal Church to join the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a conservative province within the Anglican Communion. That decision led to an expensive and sometimes nasty property trial this year, won by Episcopalians, for the $17 million Grace Church campus.
Meanwhile Armstrong, the Grace Church rector for 20 years, was defrocked in November 2007 by Episcopal leaders for allegedly embezzling $400,000 in church funds. Armstrong’s criminal trial begins Feb. 22 in Fourth Judicial District court downtown.
“There is no doubt the congregation went through a painful time,” Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman, 60, was raised in Sanford, Fla., where his father was rector of the local Episcopal church. After graduating in 1971 with an English degree from the University of the South in Tennessee, Zimmerman spent several years teaching at a high school and then working at a mental health clinic, before entering the Virginia Theological Seminary.
He graduated in 1978, one year after Armstrong’s graduation there, though the two didn’t know each other.
Zimmerman was rector of All Saints in Grenada, Miss., and the Chapel of St. Andrew in Boca Raton, Fl., before coming to Grace and St. Stephen’s. Knowing Grace was in need of a priest-in-charge, Robert O’Neill, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado, recommended Zimmerman to the vestry. After meeting Zimmerman this summer, the vestry agreed unanimously that he was the right man.
“We love the guy,” said Grace junior warden David Watts. “He’s a strong, dynamic leader who has lots of ideas.”
Moving forward
Zimmerman is impressed by Grace’s vestry and parish.
“I anticipated there might be an undercurrent of suspicion and skepticism of me,” he said, “but none of that has been true.
“I have also been surprised and inspired by the lack of anger and recrimination toward Armstrong and the other people who have left,” Zimmerman said. “The overwhelming sense here is that if God was calling people to leave, they needed to go where God is calling them to be, but they are always welcome home.”
Zimmerman said the strife within the Episcopal Church is because Episcopalians are encouraged to think for themselves on issues.
“The church has had to struggle with how to be faithful to the compassion and love and forgiveness and grace of Christ,” he said. “We are trying to discover the mind of Christ. It is part of what I find exciting about being an Episcopalian.”
As for Grace and St. Stephen’s, Zimmerman has no particular agenda other than to preach “theologically classical Anglicanism.”
He says the Grace parish has learned through its struggles that they — not a building, rector, vestry or Episcopal council — are the church. This has resulted in lay leaders creating numerous faith-based committees.
“I feel like the leader in the French Revolution,” laughed Zimmerman, “who said, ‘There goes my people. I am their leader. Now excuse me while I run to catch up with them.’”
Start me up, indeed.
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Call the writer at 636-0367.
