A great sendoff!

I got a great sendoff from the folks at St. Matthew's (my home church) this morning, the first stop on the journey. Our Rector and my friend The Rev. Bill Exner gave me a nice note, an olive wood cross from the holy land to carry with me on the trip,  a sprinkling of holy water, and then invited me to recess behind the crucifer, bike and all.  First time I've ever done that, and it was an honor.  The St. Matthew's community is really a fantastic group of people. I'm going to miss them, but I'll proudly share all of the great work they do with all of the other congregations I visit.

The stats:

distance: 20.27 mi

average speed: 16.2 mi/hr

average heart rate: 142 beats/min

6260 miles to go!

p.s. I wanted to add a couple of logistical notes about this project:

- I won't ride if the weather is truly horrible.  Horrible is generally defined as rain when the temperature is below 40 degrees F, snowing to the point where it is accumulating on the roads, or any time the temperature is much below 15 degrees F.  There may be exceptions for the really short rides like the ones within Manchester
- I won't ride if I have a personal commitment, I need to be at St. Matt's for some reason, I'm out of town, etc.  Because of this and the weather, I'm allocating roughly 70 Sundays to make 56 visits.
- I'll post where I'm going for the next 2-3 weeks so people can join me if they wish, indicating their interest by commenting on the post.  I'll also warn the churches I am going to visit so they aren't alarmed when some dude wearing spandex shows up in their pews.

So what's this all about?

I have served on the Diocesan Mission Resources Committee in a couple of stints over a number of years, starting I think in 2003.  In doing so, I had the pleasure of visiting a number of congregations, mostly for worship on Sunday.  Whenever I visited a congregation, I always came away energized by the interaction with people that shared the same traditions and values as me, but expressed them in so many unique ways in their churches.  Somewhere along the line I told myself that someday I would visit every congregation in this Diocese.  That all percolated in the back of my mind until one day in the fall of 2009, when I was biking on a Saturday to a Diocesan meeting in Hopkinton and I was screaming down route 13 with my pedals spinning away on my fixed gear bike.  In the fury of that descent it somehow came to me that the way I was going to do these visits was to bike to each church on Sunday for services.  I walked into the meeting, told the Bishop what I was going to do, and with his approval the idea was born and baptized.

This experiment kicked off today with a trip to St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, my home parish, only 10 miles from my house.  On successive Sunday's, I'll choose in advance where I am going to visit and publish it on this page.  The distances range from a roundtrip of 6 miles to 320 miles.  I'm not sure how I am going to tackle the longer distances, but I'll figure it out as we go.  I'll also publish approximate routes and times so that anyone who wants to join me for part or all of a leg can do so.  It's going to be interesting.  All I know for certain is that I'll learn and experience things I didn't expect.  Here's to the journey.  I hope you'll join me either virtually or on the bike.