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Welcome!
The Rev. Dr. Brenda Pelc-Faszcza
Our Interim Minister, the Rev. Dr. Brenda Pelc-Faszcza began her ministry of support and preparation on October 14, 2007. Pastor Brenda is a graduate of Smith College, Yale Divinity School and the Chicago Theological Seminary. She has served as interim pastor in East Hartford, Glastonbury, Suffield, Windsor, Manchester and Farmington.
Most recently she has served for nine years as Senior Pastor at First Church of Christ Congregational in Suffield.
Brenda has two daughters; Tara, who is a senior at UCONN and Nina, a senior at the Loomis Chafee School in Windsor where the family lives. Brenda's husband, Jeff Faszcza, is Director of Washington, D.C. Operations for the Hamilton Sundstrand Division of United Technologies.
See another of Rev. Brenda's sermons from the Conference Sermon Collection: Reflections for a Time of War
The Rev. Dr. Brenda Pelc-Faszcza, Interim Minister
Jennifer deSimas, Director of Christian Education
Cathi Peters, Director of
Music Ministries
Bon Smith, Interim Organist & Assoc. Director of Music Ministries
Denise Beeney, Secretary
Martha Bernier, Administrator
Avon Congregational Church
6 West Main Street
Avon, Connecticut 06001
Tel: 860-678-0488
Fax: 860-674-1516
Go to the Green Pages for Service Schedules, FAQs, Current Events, Contact, Directions
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Susan K. Smith© Avon Congregational Church
The Best Ten Minutes
The Rev. Dr. Brenda Pelc-SaszcaIn a recent confirmation class, we were talking about how various aspects of a worship service can make a disparate bunch of people feel connected. One confirmand said she especially loves the singing of hymns for that reason. Someone else said she always loves that moment after Communion when everyone puts their cup in the holder and you hear the collective sound of that throughout the church. Somehow that moment, for this person, held some of the power of Eucharist. Who would have thought that something so mundane could feel like one of the best moments of the whole thing?
It reminded me of another conversation I once had with a church member, about preaching. He said he always waits for that moment in a sermon when just one line or one image, one lump-in-the-throat second, can move him and make him glad he was there that day. I thought of a book on acting I’d read once for a preaching class. The author, a teacher of actors, said that when people go to the theater, “they pay their money not for the whole performance, but for the best ten minutes,” that one place in the whole thing that makes your insides stand up and clap.
As far as I can tell, this is entirely true. In your favorite room, there is one piece of furniture that, to your eye, makes the room. In a movie, there are one or two stand-out scenes you remember. In a book, you underline a few pithy quotes that by themselves are worth the price of the book. In a symphony, you wait on silent edge for your favorite part. In a routine day, one moment can break open the surface of things and send the rest of the day (or the rest of your life) in a new direction. In a relationship, there are occasional soul-meetings so powerful that you live on them all the rest of the time. The best ten minutes: that salient, sacred something that rises up to where you can just see it, feel it, be moved and transformed by it. Human experience seems to be constructed this way, which means this is how God gets at us.
Worship leaders know that in a service of worship, not everything will move everybody – we’ve all got our own take on what the best ten minutes are. The one thing that half the room loves, the other half would happily live without. The hymns that some wish we could be done with are the very ones others long to sing. The sermon that falls flat to some ears is appreciatively heard by others. Who can ever say what the best part is? The way we listen and respond is at least as important as what the order of the day is serving up, and it is our own receptivity that allows for those privileged moments of grace to find their way in. In other words, the quality of our attention contributes at least as much to the best ten minutes, or the best one minute, as anything that anybody else is doing.
For preachers, I must say, it is a relief to know that maybe even one good line can manage to bear witness to the gospel and speak a difference-making word to somebody (and that on days when the sermon never gets off the ground, you might be saved by the tinkling of communion cups). For all of us in all our roles, it is a gift and a challenge to know that this is how life works. We need not excel at everything every minute – just devote ourselves to that small part of whatever we are doing that just might soar, and sing, and transform. Maybe all of history has been filled with one “best ten minutes” after another, and that is how God gets at us.
Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living
The Rev. Dr. Brenda Pelc-SaszcaA book I really enjoyed reading within the past year is Roger Housden’s Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living (2005). Recognizing the clutches of our stressful culture, this author writes of simple delights and little pleasures that allow us healthy, joyful perspectives upon our tightly wound lives, and says the purpose of his book is “to get you to lighten up and fall in love with the world and all that is in it.” Here are the seven essential “sins” he says we ought to be committing regularly:
1. The pleasure of all five senses.
We miss way too much in everyday life.
2. The pleasure of being foolish.
Not in a dangerous way, in a liberating way.
3. The pleasure of not knowing.
The capacity to tolerate complexity, mystery and nuance, and to be alright with saying “I don’t know.”
4. The pleasure of not being perfect.
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
5. The pleasure of doing nothing useful.
Occasionally, it is extremely healthy to lay down your big causes and enjoy life wherever you find it, on its own terms.
6. The pleasure of being ordinary.
Many of us spend lifetimes trying to avoid being ordinary, which is virtually a sin in a culture where the whole point is to do whatever will make you stand out and be noticed.
7. The pleasure of coming home.
George Washington once said, “I’d rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world”
You know, life is not supposed to be so stressful that we can’t remember what makes us smile. We just make it that way. We keep denying our souls their lives, as we choose to keep up with relentless outer demands, neglect deep inner needs, and lament how hard it all is for such busy people like us. And why do we do this? Sometimes to demonstrate our worth in the eyes of others (look at all I’m doing), or our worth in our own eyes (see, I never rest, I must be super-competent and indispensable). And sometimes it is because we have internalized a message we think is “Christian,” that enjoying being alive, relaxing at least once in a while, and accepting limits are sins God had better not catch us at. Must be that Puritan heritage.
Sometimes, when I am worrying about the life of the church, I worry most about what a sabbath-less place a church often is. I worry that those who come to church for spiritual renewal, deepening and balance, will end up getting burned out instead on the work of running the institution. I worry that we mistake activity for faith. I worry that there is an essential freedom we’re lacking, because so often we’re not anywhere near the joy of being a faith community, just the work of it.
When I think of the early church being born, living on that risen spirit of Christ that was unmistakable to them, infused with an energy they compared to wind and fire (see Pentecost), I remember that we are supposed to be living on that kind of energy too. When we’re not, we should ask why. Maybe we have a misplaced focus. Maybe we forgot what all the church’s activity is for. Maybe, as it turns out, there are actually some “sins” that Easter people should be committing – those practices that can become habits, reacquaint us with the Spirit, and turn our hearts to the abundant life that awaits….for individuals, for churches, for everybody.
"Midwifing" the Church
Years ago, when I was first learning about intentional interim ministry, I learned that one of the best images for an interim pastor is that of midwife: someone who assists, encourages and attends the birth-giving of someone else. All these years and congregations later, I still like that as a metaphor. It holds, it fits. Interim pastors are present with congregations through the labor of renewal, through the work of discernment and attention that underlies the birth of something new. Hopefully we have some knowledge and skills to help the whole process along, to recognize when it is healthy and going right, and when it might be in distress. Hopefully we bring the kind of affirmation and encouragement that the often difficult process needs, and are there to celebrate the new life at the end. And hopefully we do not forget – nor let our congregations forget – that of course it is not we who are bringing forth the new thing. The best midwife in the world can’t give birth for somebody else. Only the congregation can do that for itself, after a patient process has unfolded, and when the new life is ready to emerge.
This sometimes comes as a disappointment to churches, who think that in hiring ministers (interim or settled, for that matter), they are hiring solutions to their problems. This goes along with a business-model understanding of the church, and assumes that if you get the right manager or CEO for the place, the issues you have now should be solved. It is especially tempting to enter into the search for the next settled pastor, as ACC will soon do, thinking that he or she will be the “fix.” Need more members? More money? More programs? More enthusiasm? Hire the right minister, somebody who knows how to get all those things for you.
Though there are certainly business aspects to the church’s institutional life, an overall business-model understanding of church will fail us every time, if what we are truly after is a community of spiritual vitality, health, authenticity and depth. A faith community, a group of Jesus-followers, is not a business. It’s more akin to a family. There’s something organic and alive and unpredictable about it. It participates in resurrection. The processes of spiritual formation that are supposed to be happening in our lives when we are part of such a community are not consumer transactions that you can hire out and pay for. They are more akin to the mysterious process of pregnancy and birth, where there is important gestation time, something miraculous going on where you can’t see it yet, and eventually, sacred life that wants to push its way into the world and incarnate God. When we feel something like that in the church, it’s a whole different thing from when we don’t. Pastoral leadership is extremely important. But no matter how good it is, it does not replace the congregation’s ownership of its own spirit.
“Behold, I am doing a new thing. Don’t you see it?" Isaiah 43:19
I believe congregations are more alive when they think of their common life this way, when they have the heart and will and patience and wonder for the new thing God surely wants to do through them. Midwives are essential; somebody always needs to help us give birth. But they can’t do it for us, and the best ones will always remind us of that. The new life we want will have to come via our own care, effort, love and commitment. We will have to do the patient work of the pregnancy. We will have to trust the process by which new life grows, out of all proportion to our comprehension of it. We will have to trust God. We will have to be an Easter people.
In my next life (which is to say, some day when I have time), I am going to write a book. It is going to be called “Midwifing the Church,” and I will tell all the stories of all the births I have been privileged to attend as a minister, and what I have learned about how amazing the whole thing always is, every time.
