When I’m invited to open a vestry meeting, I do something different. I ask everyone to open their prayer books to page 304 and read the Baptismal Covenant together.

The room changes. Not dramatically, not always immediately, but something shifts. You’ve said these words dozens of times, but something about this context makes them land differently. You’re not reading from a bulletin on a Sunday morning. You’re sitting at a table with a budget spreadsheet in front of you, and you’re being asked whether you intend to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and whether you’ll strive for justice and peace, and whether you’ll respect the dignity of every human being.

That last one tends to land hardest.

Most people pick up the 1979 Book of Common Prayer on Sunday morning and put it down when the service ends. That’s understandable. But the theology sitting inside it, particularly around the laity, is specific and serious enough to deserve more than that.

The Catechism lists lay ministry alongside ordained ministry, not as an afterthought, not as the accessible alternative for people who didn’t go to seminary. It’s there because the Prayer Book means it. The ministry of lay persons is described as “to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.” That’s on page 855, in the same section as the ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons.

But the Baptismal Covenant, found on pages 304–305, is where the BCP gets most concrete about what that vocation actually requires. After the Apostles’ Creed, there are five questions. The congregation answers each one the same way: “I will, with God’s help.”

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship? Will you persevere in resisting evil? Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ? Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Five questions. One answer, five times. That repetition is doing something. It’s not liturgical filler. It’s a structure designed to let the weight of each commitment settle before you move to the next one.

“I will, with God’s help” is worth sitting with longer than most of us do.

You’re making a promise and acknowledging your limits in the same breath. Whatever doubt you carry about your own capacity, whatever distance you see between who you are and what these questions are asking, the answer already accounts for it. The Prayer Book doesn’t ask you to be certain. It asks you to be willing. “With God’s help” is what makes that possible.

In my own life, the dignity question is the one that costs the most. I think about it when I’m in a meeting and someone says something I disagree with, and I have to decide how to respond. I think about it when my politics and someone else’s are nowhere near each other and we’re both sitting in the same pew. I think about it when I’m raising my children, trying to teach them values that aren’t just family values or civic values but something that actually comes from this covenant, one they received at baptism and will one day affirm for themselves at confirmation.

That commitment to dignity is concrete. It asks something specific of how you vote, how you treat people in service roles, how you talk about people who are absent from the room. It shows up in the language your diocese uses, in how your vestry makes decisions, in whether the people who clean your church building are treated as part of the community or invisible to it.

Most Episcopalians encounter the Baptismal Covenant a handful of times a year, during baptisms, at the Easter Vigil, on a few other occasions when the liturgy calls for its renewal. Between those Sundays, it tends to stay in the prayer book.

That’s worth naming.

The covenant lives outside the liturgy too. It belongs in vestry meetings and diocesan gatherings and discernment conversations and, honestly, in the ordinary week, not just the Sunday it gets read aloud. If the ministry of the laity is as substantial as the Catechism says it is, then the covenant that describes it deserves more than occasional public recitation.

How about trying this on: the next time you’re at a meeting that actually matters, open with the covenant. Not as a warm-up exercise. As an orientation. Ask the people in the room what it means that they’ve already agreed to seek and serve Christ in all persons before the treasurer’s report begins.

It changes the question from “what are we deciding?” to “who are we being while we decide?”

The Prayer Book put those words in our hands and we’re all expected to use them.

She wasn’t being unkind, just curious (and maybe a little judgy). My mom is more familiar with the evangelical tradition. She found that church as a teenager, after her family moved to this country. The Jamaican community had gathered there, and it wasn’t just worship, it was an extension of family. My dad’s mother was there. My mom’s aunt was there. My parents got married there. I was christened there. The Spirit moved through people who knew each other’s names, each other’s joys and sorrows, and prayer was part of that movement, unscripted and immediate. My dad eventually found his way back to the Episcopal Church, the tradition he’d grown up in before emigrating. My mom stayed where she was. I left church altogether for a while. But that’s another article.

What I can tell you is what my mom encountered when she walked into Trinity. It was quiet. It was ordered. Everything, what was read, who read it, when to stand and when to sit, was already printed in the bulletin. She’d brought her own Bible and realized, with disappointment, she didn’t need it. Everything was right there. The instructions were in the bulletin and spoken aloud by the priest. She knew exactly what to do. But that’s also when the question sharpened: they tell you what to say too? As different as that was, she also saw something familiar. My children knew people. After Godly Play, they were introducing her to the kids they sat next to every week. Parishioners were eager to meet her during the passing of the peace and linger with her at coffee hour. The extension of family she’d found in her own church, she could see it here too. The difference between our Sunday experiences wasn’t the community. It was everything else.

In her tradition, the Spirit moves through spontaneity. The preacher finds the words in the moment, the congregation responds in kind, and the liveliness of the room is how you know the Spirit is present. Nobody scripted it. Her church is a perfect example of what some may call “charismatic.” A written prayer, to her, raised a real question: how connected could we be to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost if it was all written out? How could she tell if the Spirit was moving if everything was already scripted?

When I walk into Sunday Eucharist, I’m not carrying myself in alone. I’m carrying a week. Decisions I second-guessed, a conversation that didn’t land, something I should have said and didn’t, fatigue I haven’t fully named yet. If I had to produce fresh words for all of that in the moment, I’d spend the hour inside my own head. I’d be composing instead of praying.

Liturgy, a Greek word that means “the work of the people,” takes that weight off. The words are already there. Thomas Cranmer, the author of much of the Anglican liturgy, wrote most of them in the sixteenth century. Some are older. On a Sunday morning at Trinity, I don’t have to think about what comes next. My attention goes somewhere else entirely. Into the words themselves. Into the silence around them. Into whatever the Spirit is actually doing, which I would absolutely miss if I were too busy managing the service in my head. The liturgy is my Sunday rhythm.

The prayer isn’t done for us. We do it together, out loud, from the same page, in the same breath. The sameness is part of the point. It connects the person in the front pew to the person in the back, and both of them to the same prayer spoken in a church three hundred years ago, and three thousand miles away, this morning.

My dad’s family practiced this tradition for generations before it came back around to me. My mother chose something else. We’re both, I think, after the same thing. We just found different roads to it.

Ordinary Time is the season that belongs most to lay ministry. It runs about half the year, twenty-six Sundays with no feast day, and lay leadership is what carries a congregation through that stretch. Clergy often step forward on the high holy days. The long green season is often guided by lay leaders who teach, visit, serve, and hold the community together, week after week.

I think about the high holy days of Christmas, Holy Week, Easter Vigil, Pentecost. It’s all so intense, and the congregation often shows up gathered and attentive. That’s simply the nature of high holy days.

But from now until Advent, what holds the congregation together is people. It’s people like the Godly Play teacher who shows up in September when exactly four kids are in the room and makes it count anyway. The Eucharistic visitor who drives out to someone’s house because they haven’t been able to get to church in three months. The vestry member who stays after the meeting to help a newcomer feel welcomed. The altar guild member who sets the table week after week, not because it’s dramatic, but because it needs to get done and they’re committed to doing it.

This is lay ministry. This is the actual practice of lay ministry in real time on unremarkable Sundays. Ordination and titles have nothing to do with it, but it does require commitment and follow-through.

There’s something else Ordinary Time offers, and we don’t talk about it enough: time to breathe.

Not every Sunday needs to feel like Easter Sunday. The church year has already done that work. Easter happened. The Spirit came. We’ve been through it, and it mattered. But some Sundays are just Sundays. A familiar liturgy, a sermon that lands somewhere in the middle, coffee hour with the same people you’ve known for years. Communities are sustained by that kind of rhythm.

You can’t sustain a congregation at high speed every week. If anyone tried to make every Sunday feel like Easter, it would be exhausting for clergy, confusing for congregants, and simply not true to how spiritual life actually works. Faith isn’t always revved up with meaning, and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s just practice. We show up, say the words, receive the bread and wine, and go home. That regularity shapes us and deepens our faith.

In my experience supporting lay leaders across the diocese, burnout sometimes comes from rarely feeling like the work counts. They taught Godly Play for six years and nobody told them that was holy work. They served on the altar guild and assumed the clergy were the real ministers. Ordinary Time is a good moment to correct that. To tell the people around you, this is your season. The long green season. And the work you’re doing is ministry, even when it doesn’t feel like it, even when there isn’t a feast day to tie to it.

Especially on an ordinary Sunday.

Fishermen, a tax collector, the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee. Different people, different histories. On a fire scene, it doesn’t matter where you came from before that moment. Everyone moves together, speaks the same language, works toward the same thing. The Spirit has a way of doing what a good fire crew does: putting everyone on the same page, hearing the same language, having the same mission.

A seasoned captain told me something once, after he watched me get frustrated over a skill I hadn’t mastered yet. He said: “Everyone has a first day.” What I heard in those words was permission to be a beginner. To keep practicing, keep showing up, keep doing the work, even when I didn’t yet know exactly what I was doing. In the fire service, mastery was something you could measure. In ministry, faithfulness is the standard, and your faithfulness is personal. It doesn’t need to be measured against someone else’s experience.

The disciples had a first day too. They walked out of that upper room not knowing exactly what came next, filled with something they couldn’t fully explain, speaking to a crowd they hadn’t planned for. Different languages, different faces, different needs. They hadn’t prepared for those particular people. But the Spirit had. We’d love it if ministry always worked that way. Sometimes the people who need your spiritual gifts are right there waiting. Sometimes you’re the one hoping anyone shows up at all.

Pentecost puts a simple question in front of every layperson: what are you doing with that fire? You don’t have to have it mastered. You just have to begin.

Everyone has a first day.

I’ve been asked that question myself, and I know people mean well when they ask it. But the question carries an assumption: that a calling strong enough to be taken seriously will eventually point toward seminary, and anything short of that is still-figuring-it-out.

The Episcopal Church’s own theology doesn’t support that. The Catechism is clear: the ministry of the laity is “to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.” That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a job description for a whole life. It’s also worth noting that this definition appears in the same section of the Prayer Book as the ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons. Same page. Same weight.

Think about the worship leader who steps up to lead Morning Prayer Sunday after Sunday when a congregation is between rectors, sometimes for a year or longer. She’s not filling in. She’s holding the parish together through a season of uncertainty, keeping the liturgy alive, giving people something solid to come back to when so much else feels unsettled. She’s learning the Daily Office, preparing the readings, showing up early, staying late. The congregation knows where to be, and they know she’ll be there. That’s not gap coverage. That’s ministry.

Or the Godly Play teacher who has been in the same room for fifteen, maybe twenty years. Godly Play isn’t traditional Sunday school. It’s a carefully developed approach that treats young children as capable of genuine spiritual encounter, trusting them to sit with the story and respond from their own place. A teacher who has given that gift across two generations, who has watched children grow up and come back with their own children, is doing something whose effects reach well past Sunday morning. She was there for the first sacred story some of those adults ever heard. That’s a vocation. It didn’t need ordination to be real.

And then there are the Eucharistic Visitors, the lay people trained and licensed to bring communion to those who can’t make it to church, whether they’re recovering from surgery, managing a chronic illness, or simply bedridden. I know what this ministry means from the receiving end. I was injured once and couldn’t get to Sunday services, and someone from my parish drove to my home and brought the sacrament to me. It was one of the most quietly profound things another person has done for me in my life of faith. That person wasn’t a priest. They were a parishioner who said yes to a calling, showed up at my door, and made the church present in my living room.

The confusion happens partly because ordination is visible in ways lay ministry often isn’t. We have ceremonies for ordinations. We have titles. When a deacon or priest stands at the altar, the role is unmistakable. There’s a collar, a liturgy, a moment of public recognition. When a lay person spends years leading Morning Prayer or tending the same classroom or sitting with the grieving, it doesn’t look like anything special from the outside. It just looks like someone who keeps showing up.

Which is, in fact, what faithfulness looks like most of the time.

The invisibility runs deeper than perception, though. Many laypeople have absorbed the idea that a sense of call is the beginning of a discernment process that might lead to Holy Orders, rather than something that might be answered entirely outside that track. The feeling becomes a prompt: should I be a priest? And when the answer is no, or not yet, or not in that way, the original feeling often gets shelved. It doesn’t fit the available container, so it gets set aside.

In my work on the Commission on Ministry, and now as Director for Lay Vocations and Ministry, I’ve sat with people who described feeling pulled toward teaching, care, leadership, or witness. Their first instinct, almost always, was to wonder whether that feeling meant they should be clergy. Sometimes it does. More often, it doesn’t. The call is real either way. The work is helping people find language for it beyond ordination.

What makes a vocation a vocation isn’t the collar. It’s the fit between who you are, what gifts you’re given, and where you’re placed.

Frederick Buechner wrote that vocation is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” He didn’t say anything about ordination. The gladness part is deeply personal, and it shows up differently in every person who has it. So does the hunger the world presents. The Godly Play teacher found hers in a room full of children and a set of wooden figures. The worship leader found hers in the rhythm of Morning Prayer and a congregation that needed someone steady. The Eucharistic Visitor found hers at a front door, sacrament in hand.

None of them needed permission to have a calling. They needed someone to name what they were already doing.

That’s part of what I hope to do here. Not to convince anyone that ordination is the wrong answer, but to make room for the truth that it’s not the only one. The church already has leaders, pastors, teachers, and witnesses sitting in its pews. Most of them have never been asked the right question.

I’ve managed emergency scenes. I’ve led teams through things that didn’t go the way anyone planned. And I’ll tell you honestly: a room full of clergy still has its own gravity. There’s a reverence that comes with the collar, and it’s not nothing.

The order of the laity is one of the four orders of ministry in the Episcopal Church, defined in the Book of Common Prayer. When you walk into that room, you’re representing an order of the church with its own theology, its own call, and its own rhythm, including the Sunday morning one that most people in that room experience from this side of the altar.

Holy Orders announces itself. A collar tells you who someone is and what they’ve been set apart to do. The order of the laity doesn’t come with a uniform, which means lay people walk into rooms and have to establish, all over again, that they belong there and have something to offer.

You belong in that room. The church doesn’t exist without the order of the laity.

That was the moment I understood I was in a relationship of reciprocity, with my church and with God. I wasn’t there just to take communion, a warm greeting during the passing of the peace, and coffee. I was there to share my gifts. Spiritual gifts I didn’t even know I had yet.

I had direction. I had a conversation partner. I had a church leader who ushered me in as a leader from the very beginning. Decades later, I’m still giving, now in a different capacity.

I’m Marsha McCurdy, Director of Lay Vocations and Ministry for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and a parishioner at Trinity, Hartford. When I stepped into this role in January 2025, something became clear quickly: most people never had a Monday morning email. They came, they worshipped, they left. Nobody asked about their gifts. And yet they stayed, Sunday after Sunday, wanting to give something back, wanting to be part of something, not always knowing how or where or whether anyone was waiting for what they had to offer.

People take their lay ministry seriously, and they want help doing that. They want places to ask the real questions. They want practical tools, for the ministries they’re already serving in and for discernment, the ongoing work of figuring out where the Holy Spirit is leading them. They want to discover and use their gifts. They want to answer a call, even when they can’t quite name it yet.

That’s what The Pew Note is for. I have notes with observations from the field, and from the pew.

Some weeks I’ll write something shorter, personal, probably recollecting something that happened to me or someone I talked to that week. Other weeks something longer: history, theology, a question worth sitting with over something delicious to eat or drink. I’ll try to explain Episcopal vocabulary when I use it, because our tradition has a lot of it. I love both our tradition and the people in it who are quietly working out their faith in the middle of regular, complicated lives. The eucharistic minister driving forty minutes each way. The vestry member who said yes when she was already exhausted. The person who keeps showing up even when they’re not sure why.

It counts. That’s why. The longer answer is what this newsletter is for.

See you Sunday.