Lisa Fischbeck, Orange County Missioner
Mike Shea

(Editor's note: At long last the proposed new regional church to serve our growing and potential Episcopal Church population is in its early stages of development. The new congregation is a joint project of The Chapel of the Cross and The Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill and St. Matthews in Hillsborough. The Rev. Lisa Fischbeck has been selected as Orange County Missioner. She took up her new role in mid-September.
According to Junior Warden Terry Eason who serves on the Mission Executive Committee, the church "will probably serve an area bounded by I-85 in the north to Highway 64 in the south and the Haw River in the west to Highway 55 in the East." "No worship site has yet been picked," he added.)

For two years the Rev. Lisa Fischbeck, along with other members of the New Church Planting Committee, wrestled with the problem of finding a priest for the proposed new regional church. This spring she began to discern whom God might be calling: herself.

She realized, she says, that she possessed the gifts the committee was searching for in a new mission priest. "I was very familiar with the region, I had a history with at least two of the three churches, I had experience in institutional development, a gift for bringing people together as a community, and a background in fundraising. I started thinking maybe I am the one to do this."

Lisa Fischbeck knows The Chapel of the Cross. It was her home parish for 10 years. "I first started coming to the Chapel of the Cross in 1981," she says. "I had just finished a Masters at the University of Virginia. Bob Duncan was the chaplain, and he had a Wednesday night ten o’clock liturgy that was wildly popular with the college students and that was my primary worship experience. I was working at Duke as a development officer for cancer research, and my boss was a parishioner at St. Stephen’s in Durham. He recruited me to be in charge of EYC (Episcopal Youth Community) there and I ended up there on Sundays, but here on Wednesdays and, for a good year, divided my time between them but then slowly began coming here on Sunday mornings."

"By ’83," she says, "I was head of Parish Care and around then began considering a call to the ordained ministry." But Lisa found the road to ordination would not be without difficulty. She went before the Discernment Committee twice without success and she speaks of her experience frankly, "I had difficulty each time articulating my call and so went to work at Carolina Friends School. It changed my life. It was an amazing experience, working in a community that really listens, appreciates silence, respects one another. It was a very healing and life-giving experience. All of that led to a spiritual centering, an empowerment, and confidence. And when I went back before the Discernment Committee the next time it made all the difference in the world." She was finally in the ordination process and enrolled at Duke Divinity School.

After an internship at The Church of the Holy Comforter in Burlington, where she met her future husband Lamar Bland, Lisa began a year in 1989 as interim Chaplain at Chapel of the Cross and was ordained to the Diaconate in this church in 1992. Her daughter, Rebecca, was born the next year.

She then became Assistant to the Rector at St. Stephen’s in Durham and five years later returned to Chapel Hill as Assistant to the Rector at The Church of the Holy Family. And it was there she made her mark as one of the new leaders of the diocese. Currently she is dean of the Durham Convocation and serves on the diocesan Commission on Mission Strategy Planning. Lisa was also an elected member of the Diocesan Council for three years and a member of the Diocesan Visioning Committee. And maybe more importantly, Lisa became a member of the region’s New Church Planting Committee.

Lisa smiles as she describes the difficulties the committee encountered, "We spent a year getting a sense of the demographics of the region, justifying that we really needed to call somebody, coming up with a description of who we were, did a national search, narrowed it down and called someone. She said no. So we started again and spent another year doing the search."

Lisa says the original candidate then surprised the committee and asked to be re-considered. The committee again said yes and this time so did the candidate. But after another personal visit and reflection the candidate rejected the offer, leaving the committee back where it started. "Then," she says, " the rectors got together and decided to do this as a shared parochial mission. They wanted to come up with a new vision of how to start a new church rooted in tradition. It is within the Canons as parochial mission, which means a parish hires a missioner and the new church is started by people who come from the existing parish and by new folks coming in. But what makes this model new is that, while canonically it is a parochial mission of the Chapel of the Cross, at the same time it is a shared mission of the three parishes of Orange County and all three are contributing to the finances of this new church and all three churches will contribute parishioners."

But don’t look for smaller crowds at our 9 o’clock service yet.

"I’m going to take a whole year working among the three churches in rotation," Lisa says, "giving me a chance to get to know the milieu of the three churches and giving the three churches a chance to get to know me, really emphasizing it is a work of the three churches." She predicts a service as a separate congregation is probably about a year away. "In the meantime I’m going to be offering several education and study opportunities that will be open to people of all three churches. But I’ll offer them in Hillsborough then in Chapel Hill." She says some of the study groups will be directed toward starting a new church and she hopes that by next summer people who are interested will begin to come together as a new congregation.

Meanwhile, Lisa radiates enthusiasm and energy. "It’s like Advent, you know, all this anticipation," she says, "what’s it going to be, it’s exciting."