VERO BEACH — Father Chris Rodriguez will look out over a very different congregation this weekend when he performs his first service as the new rector at Trinity Episcopal Church.
Never mind that his previous church bore the same name. Trinity Episcopal in Red Bank, N.J., housed in a 175-year-old church, had a congregation of young, affluent professionals, most of whom commuted to New York City.
Young or old, Rodriguez, 43, says parishioners ask the same question in tough times: “Why?” For that, he has answers, and as he did at Red Bank, looks forward to the challenge of sharing them with his flock.
Rodriguez fills a void left in January when Father John Jacobs and his wife Betsy, who came to the Vero church in January 2010, decided to leave.
“It just wasn’t a good fit,” says Rodriguez, who spoke with Jacobs prior to accepting the post. Jacobs was charged with healing a congregation that had lost an estimated three-fourths of its membership in a doctrinal split a year and a half earlier. Now, Rodriguez hopes to regain some of those former members who are still searching for a spiritual home.
His challenges here are nonetheless similar to those he undertook when he arrived at Red Bank in 2007:
Grow the congregation by attracting families that will call the place home for generations to come.
“We nearly doubled our attendance, from 90 to 175,” says Rodriguez. “Our average age went from 65 to 37.”
He and his wife Kathy give credit to prayer.
But volunteerism didn’t hurt either – throngs of parents got together and organized a vacation Bible school. They built a strong Sunday school program. They also started a youth group that grew so popular that the Rodriguez children were more upset about leaving it than just about anything else when they moved.
The growth of the Red Bank church “just happened, if you pray about it and you have a mission – and you have volunteer boots on the ground,” says Kathy Rodriguez. “We had a lot of people who wanted it, and were willing to give of themselves. It’s amazing how quickly things start to happen once you take that step out in faith.”
Soon, families already driven to give their children a religious upbringing saw that they could think of their church as a social scene as well. While Wednesday night pot-lucks drew empty-nesters to Bible studies, Easter egg hunts and Halloween parties drew children from the public at large in the hopes of recruiting more members.
Now, it is the Trinity congregation embracing the Rodriguez family. Renting a home on the barrier island, they “hunkered down for a few days” when they arrived with their three children, saddened at leaving friends behind.
Then invitations to outings started rolling in. “Several young families have been effusive in inviting us over for pool parties and cookouts. The girls immediately made friends and there hasn’t been one single tear since then,” says Kathy Rodriguez.
“People have been extremely welcoming,” says Father Chris, as he likes to be called. “They’re different from people in Red Bank – in a good way.”
“That’s why this church is going to grow,” continues Kathy Rodriguez.
“The people here want it to grow and they’re welcoming it. You work on your people to make them spiritually strong and they go out and invite more people to come.”
“New Jersey was hard ground,” says Rodriguez. “Just like when Jesus talks about the soil being rocky. Red Bank was a suburb of New York. It was very secular, very skeptical, very intelligent, very questioning, and that’s great, in my opinion. They’re asking me, ‘Who is this Jesus guy and what does it mean to me?’ That was huge up there. “
Rodriguez says he himself is a “skeptic by nature,” a psychology major at Penn State who earned a master’s degree in organizational psychology at North Carolina State University. He worked as a systems engineer with a health-care company, while in his spiritual life, debated a conversion from Catholicism, inherited from his Basque grandfather, to Anglican, which he found allowed for more freedom to question. In 1995, he converted – as did his wife, raised Irish-Catholic. Nine years later, Rodriguez graduated from the seminary.
When he got his first job with a church, he continued to work full time in systems engineering, where his co-workers gave him plenty of exercise making his case for Christianity.
“There were all these computer engineering guys who were skeptical about faith. We talked about it all the time,” he says.
“I’m left brained too. I taught statistics and scientific research methods. “The scientific method points us to God. I believe that we have not fed our people with the intellectual ability to understand their faith in an adult manner.”
Here, he expects the challenge to be ministering to the needs of an older congregation, asking the same questions but provoked by different issues.
“As you get older, the specifics change. Why has my husband died before me? Why do I have cancer? The answer is always the same,” says Rodriguez.
“We live in a fallen world. Until Jesus comes to redeem it, the world is not the way it’s supposed to be.”