On Social Media. This is the reality, where are we as the Church in the mix? Do we understand (I mean honesty, really understand) the fundamental shift that is happening and the right and good role the Church can play in both the digital and tactile worlds? For the Cure of Souls? For peace? For an alternative? How can we be the imago Dei among all of this?
From this month’s issue of the Living Church, an article on St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Hollywood, CA. As the article says, the only Anglo-Catholic parish in Los Angeles. The article, “Apolitical Inclusion at St. Thomas the Apostle, Hollywood, CA“
In terms of reviving a parish in the Anglo-Catholic tradition (and I simply love the “apolitical inclusion” bit), a couple paragraphs from the article:
“The Rector, The Rev. Elliott Davies, restored the altar to an eastward facing position and celebrates Mass with his back to the congregation in lieu of ‘the bartending position.'” I love that – “the bartending position.” Continuing, “Ensign recalls UCLA students fascinated by the celebration [Gregorian chant, lots of incenses, etc.] – as opposed to ‘that old hippy crap our parents like.'” Out of the mouths of babes. And, continuing, “‘One guy had never seen a pipe organ,’ Ensign said. ‘For us baby boomers what was so meaningful, relevant, and rebellious is so old hat. What’s old is new again.’” [emphasis mine]
“St. Thomas has a tradition of social activism in the surrounding area, including among the homeless in Hollywood and gay and lesbian residents in West Hollywood… But Proposition 8 [California’s marriage amendment] has never been preached about,’ Ensign said. ‘Preaching is always gospel-centered and Scripture-based. We’re here to worship Almighty God. If you want to be political, join a political group.'” Did we hear this! In the Anglo-Catholic tradition of social activism, the parish tends to the needs of those disadvantaged and marginalized, yet they recognize that their focus is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to worship Almighty God, not to be a political action committee or a social service organization. The Good Works happen because the people are taught to love neighbor as the love themselves, but tend to their relationship with God first.
“‘I got suckered in by Fr. Carroll Barbour,’ Ensign admitted. ‘Urban legend goes: in the early 1980’s St. Thomas was downgraded to mission status. The bishop called Fr. Barbour in – then in his late 50s, and serving in Long Beach, with a checkered past, a history of alcoholism – and said, basically, it was make or break for both.’
“‘He took the parish Anglo-Catholic in theology, teaching, and ritual, and threw the doors wide open,’ Ensign said. ‘He held his ground when parishioners left, then went to work. There was little money, no answering machine, let alone a secretary. No organ, no choir. Just a mock English gothic building in a so-so location.’
“‘He was a little guy from North Carolina; a real jackass,’ Ensign said. ‘But he was no-nonsense, and a real priest. Not a social worker, or politician; always humble by the altar. The priesthood was most important in his life.’
“‘He was a broken man. He often said, ‘God loves broken things. We break bread, and broken people are ready to listen,’ Ensign recalled.'”
Here is a pertinent paragraph from the Wikipedia entry for “Millennial Generation.” This observation/assertion is that the Millennial’s generational thinking and attitude and ascetics that run quite counter to the whole counterculture and anti-establishment nature of the Baby Boomers.
For the Church, this means that those who are still convinced that to save the Church is to get rid of everything that was (standard theology, doctrine, traditional architecture or music or language or liturgies and on and on) are now acting not for the future welfare of the Church, but for the perpetuation of their generational ideology. My experience with younger people suggests that even things like “inclusive language” is passe – particularly among the women. When we think about how to form or re-form the emphases or methodologies of the Church for future generations, we must do our best to truly understand emerging generations. If not, we will once again “miss the boat.” We’ve missed the boat so often…
Here is the paragraph:
In some ways, the Millennials have become seen as the ultimate rejection
of the counterculture that began in the 1960s and
persisted in the subsequent decades through the 1990s.[62][63]
This is further documented in Strauss & Howe’s book titled Millennials
Rising: The Next Great Generation, which describes the Millennial
generation as “civic minded,” rejecting the attitudes of the Baby Boomers and Generation X.[64]
Kurt Andersen, the prize-winning contributor to Vanity Fair writes in his book Reset:
How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America that many
among the Millennial Generation view the 2008 election of Barack
Obama as uniquely theirs and describes this generational consensus
building as being more healthy and useful than the counterculture
protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, going as far to say that if
Millennials can “keep their sense of entitlement in check, they might
just turn out to be the next Greatest Generation.”[65]
However, due to the global
financial crisis of 2008-2009, at least one journalist has
expressed fears of permanently losing a substantial amount of Generation
Y’s earning potential.[66]
This recent article from the Episcopal News Service has prompted me to think again about the “E” word – you know, “evangelism”. The article is entitled, “Mobilizing for mission: Seminarians organize for young adult evangelism.” I have a lot of respect for this group of Episcopal seminarians in their effort to engage in evangelism, but to what are we calling people? Is there an enduring aspect to what we are calling these young adults?
When I ask myself that question, here is what I keep coming back to: The Church needs to reclaim one of its primary purposes – to be about the Cure of Souls. That means we call people to God through Jesus Christ first and foremost. But, why should anyone be compelled to heed such a call, particularly if they take an account of our lives as examples of what we are calling them to? How is our witness?
Within certain circles of the Christian Church in the U.S., and I suppose everywhere, the “E” word is avoided with a passion or simply redefined to fit particular sensibilities.
Growing up in American-Evangelicalism/Pentecostalism, evangelism was supposed to be at the center of my experience of the Faith. We believed that we and all Christians are charged by God to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” We believed this because, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16).
While I certainly upheld this call to us all to preach the gospel, the problem I had with all the evangelism stuff was the preferred and accepted method most often used by American-Evangelicals, particularly in my context, which was the college campus. The method used was often refereed to as “Confrontational Evangelism”. In a more crass and defamatory description, some people referred to it as “bible-thumping.”
I was uncomfortable with evangelism all together because this was all I knew. This method to me seemed fake, contrived, and forced in a way that didn’t leave room for dealing with real and honest questions and doubts. To me, it did not seem to respect there object of the effort. Paul, as described in Acts 17, often said something like, “Come, let us reason together…”, but there was no real reasoning within confrontational evangelism. It seemed overly superficial. Yet, I personally knew people who came to be reconciled to God (“saved,” in good Evangelical verbiage) through this method – God works as God will work! Who are we to get in the way of the Spirit because of our own likes and dislikes!
I was drawn to another concept of evangelism during those days – “Friendship Evangelism.” This method seemed more natural and respectful. We befriended people simply because we wanted to be friends, although added to the mix was our desire for the person to also be a friend of God. The problem was the constant tension between being “in the world,” but not “of the world.”
Being friends with a “worldling” sometimes seemed to ran counter to God’s demand that we, “come out from among them”. (2 Corinthians 6:17) How could one just hang with a non-Christian and be okay with that when being with him/her may be a bad influence on one’s own struggle against sin and striving for holiness? Besides, their eternal soul hung in the balance and it was up to us to do something about that. Pressure! Pressure that made real friendship nearly impossible. That’s why these “friendships” rarely lasted. When the object of our efforts didn’t get saved, we dumped her/him and moved on to another prospect. This was our witness of “friendship” among many non-Christians. Some kind of friendship, eh?
This was why I hated “evangelism.”
Within American Mainline Christianity, there took hold among some an idea that “evangelism” wasn’t so much converting people to Christianity, but doing things that helping the poor and down trodden and then hoping that those helped would like us. I remember while in seminary a representative from our Church’s Foreign Missions office declared that we no longer try to convert people, because that is disrespectful of their culture and religion, but we simply help them be all that they can be. To what are we calling people?
Today, for much of the Mainline, the “E” word has been redefined. “Evangelism” is simply helping, and then perhaps someone might like to help us help other people. Helping others is a very good thing, but is it that to which we are to call people?
I can’t get into this kind of “evangelism,” either.
Within the Imago Dei Society, we center on Formation and Witness. The Imago Dei Initiative is the means for helping us to live lives that reflect God, that reflect the transformational nature of God’s work within us, and that reflect something compellingly different within the surrounding contexts of our lives that get people’s attention. What we hope gets people’s attention is not due to marketing, gimmicks, or manipulation, but simply the way we live – “There is just something compellingly and delightfully different about these people!” The difference, if seen, is due to our relationship with God first and foremost and the re-formation of heart and mind that results.
In a society and culture that is increasingly similiar to the pre-Constantinain environment, “evangelism” comes about because something about our lives and example attracts the attention of those seeking something other than the status-quo. If we can be the “image of God” with integrity, with honest, and with humility in our everyday lives among the people we encounter regularly, we will be doing “evangelism.” We will be a good witness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
We do “evangelism” whether we want to or not. The question we have to answer is whether the image of God and the Christian life we portray is on target (as best it can be in success and failure) and whether we call people to be reconciled with God before anything else. Do we?
We hope to call people to two things consistently – be reconciled to God and with one another. Take up your relationship with God and discover how you are transformed to live “life to the full”. (John 10:10) It isn’t easy, and that is why we need one another to keep on.
Here is the quote:
“I think there is something much bigger going on than finding a niche market and asking how should we position this product of the gospel so that those people will appreciate it, and will like it, and will accept it. We’re really asking a deeper question about who we are in a changing cultural environment when it comes to the way think, the values we hold, the tools that we use, and the aesthetics that are meaningful to us.” –Doug Pragitt (describing the concepts behind his new book, “Church in the Inventive Age“)
Pagitt is the pastor of Salomon’s Porch Church.
This is the melee in which I desire to be and where the Imago Dei Society has a real place within the greater arena of Anglicanism. Well, actually, this whole way of considering and thinking has had a place within Anglicanism, but to understand how we continue to do this thing called Anglicanism (this Christianity) in emerging cultures and with emerging generations are the questions we need to continually ask!
I came across one of the ministries that has as its purpose (or its obsession) the condemning of the “Emergent” side of the Church as being heretical. I don’t know whether it is simply their inability to understand enculturation and that we are all raised within a cultural system that forms us in the ways we collectively think, the way we understand the world around us and our place it in, what we consider to be aesthetically pleasing or appropriate, and even what we consider to be moral and ethical. I don’t know whether they are simply ignorant of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, etc., or what is really going on within them. The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the divine Logos do not change, but we certainly do, our cultures certainly do, and what we consider to be self-evident truth certainly does. So, groups like this, I suppose, either honestly not to understand, are being willfully ignorant (and as a former teacher, this is an astounding tragedy), or are intransigent in their beliefs – fundamentalists, in other words.
What is this particular ministry, you might ask? Apprising Ministries. I don’t know anything about this, really, and perhaps much of what they do is really good, but with regard to Emergent stuff, they have a thorn in their craw! So, make up your own mind.
Fr. Dan Martins in his blog, Confessions of a Caricoa, posted an entry entitled, Missional Notes. He is writing about the services of the Church and their connection with people of varying degrees of knowledge about or commitment to Christ. He is wondering about the growing population of people who are very much in American post-Christendom and what can be understood in these days to draw people into relationship with God through Jesus Christ and the Church.
One thing mentioned is that a service like High Solemn Mass (which we do at St. Paul’s during the regular season) might be over-kill to someone without a church background – the uninitiated or unconverted. Fr. Dan writes, “Solemn High Mass is solid food, and is likely to induce spiritual
indigestion in those who haven’t been carefully and gradually prepared
for it. Where’s our version of breast milk, strained carrots, and
Cheerios?”
How do we configure and do “Church” in Post-Christendom and in a culture that is becoming far more pre-Constantinian than post?
We can no longer assume that new people coming in the door of whatever service or activity the Church engages in know anything about the Christian Gospel, Jesus, or the worship of the Church beyond often trite sound-bytes. Something like a High Solemn Mass can be very intimidating, and if we actually obey our vows to uphold the Canons of this Church we cannot assume they are baptized Christians, so they may not be able to participate in the central act of such a service. (They can, of course, come up for a blessing, which is exactly what every unbaptized person to whom I have explained the requirement for communion and why has done once they know they can come forward for a blessing.) Perhaps this kind of service is for the initiated, while something else may be better suited for these post-Christian seekers. A fine, well done choral Morning Prayer or Evansong may well fit the bill.
And, how do we configure and do “Church” differently in ways that resonate with younger people and still remain faithful to who and what we are as Anglican Christians in the Episcopal Church? After all, they are looking for that kind of faithfulness. An interesting thing about the demographic research – the majority of GenY’ers would rather us say up front who and what we are and clearly delineate what we believe. They are looking for people and groups who are clear and unafraid to stand for what they believe, as long as we can deal with their honest questions, opinions, and doubts forthrightly and graciously. With many in the younger generations, it comes down to a matter of rebuilding trust before we can earn the right to speak into their lives.
These are the very questions that I envision the Imago Dei Society dealing with – a charism to research and analyze emerging generations and the emerging cultures so we can meet them in authentic ways that resonate with them without jettisoning the Tradition, both in liturgy and in belief. Then, taking the knowledge and engaging in “experimental” worshiping communities to see what sticks and what doesn’t.
I know I shouldn’t get into this, even before I start. I have decidedly not been visiting all the Anglican/Episcopalian blogs very often, because, basically, they were truly causing me a lot of angst and distracting me from other important ministry stuff. I have two brain cells, and when one and half of them is dealing with how this person doesn’t like what that bishop said or whatever that other Primate declared, well, that only leaves 1/2 a brain cell to deal with the rest of my life – just too much to do. In the end, all this stuff in the Church will come to nothing more than distraction within our culture and defamation of the cause of Christ.
Yet, when I hear this new line of reasoning and affront coming out of the leadership of this Church – whether lay or clergy – I just can’t help myself. When I hear people attempt to use a line of argument around the Episcopal Church’s sense of “colonial victimhood” when the Church of England’s & the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury makes decisions that spank or put into “time-out” this Church for its self-centered actions, well, that is just beyond the pale. It really is. When I hear the leaders of the provinces in Africa making the “colonial victimhood” accusation against the “Western” provinces, I can understand their justifications for such accusation (even while I think they use that accusation for convenience and to attempt to justify their own actions of rebellion within the Communion). (Before God, we will all give an account for what we do and say according to the attitudes of our hearts, and if any of us do things and then justify those doings with fine sounding arguments that are not the attitudinal reality within our heart – lying, in other words – then we will give an account to our final Judge and jury.)
This Church in the U.S. has absolutely no right to claim colonial victimhood! 

We as a Church act in the world with respect to the wider Anglican Communion just like the Bush administration acted politically and militarily in the world. We expect that we have the right to do whatever we want unilaterally because we are so developed and so enlightened and so absolutely correct and our “prophetic” doings are so righteous. We can do anything just so it is justified in our own minds no matter what hardship it may cause for anyone else. In our hubris and the resulting blindness, we actually believe that it is “good for them.”
Then, when we get pushback, or spanked for our childishness (which ++Rowan is doing, now) by those foreigners, then we start to act with petulance. It is laughable that we attempt to rebuke the English Church because we were once a colony of England – nearly 300 years ago! We, at this point in our ecclesiastical decline as a Church, can no longer really act this way, but we still do so because this generation of leadership doesn’t know how to act in any other way. We are blind to our own “colonizing” attitudes and “imperialistic” actions with respect to the rest of the Communion, and particularly those “poor, backward” Anglicans in most of Africa (except Southern Africa, because they agree with us).
The time is coming sooner than later when the rest of the world will stand up to the United States politically, economically, and militarily and say, “No more!” Just wait until that happens and see the epileptic fits this country will go into. We will become truly dangerous during the transition from world dominance to a far lesser status. We will assert our dominance, in the mean time, by brute force if need be because we have lost our moral authority as a great nation and beacon of freedom. This is what is happening to the Episcopal Church, our Church, within the Communion and with many of our former ecumenical partners. We may not lob physical bombs (or money, in our case); we will simply not listen to anyone else, hands over our ears. We will simply not face up to reality and our place in the world Communion. Oh, we want diversity and multiculturalism all right, just so long as they believe just like we do or pretend to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
We have to come up with fine arguments or attacks against those English colonizers in order to attempt to save face, but we continue to act in ways that do nothing much more that prove that we are not trustworthy and unwilling to listen to the plight of those less fortunate than our own American selves.
It isn’t that I disagree with women being clergy or LBGT people being members, priests, or bishops of our Anglican Churches. It isn’t that I don’t think we can or should be advocates of such things around the Communion or the greater Church. What I absolutely disagree with is the way this generation of leadership in our Church has been conducting itself with respect to institutional change and the “controversial” issues. We treat those issues as civil rights causes and make decisions in like manner. This is not the way the Church should handle things.
Now, because our leadership makes decisions in such a political or social manner (they know no other way), we are losing the knowledge of how to made decisions as a the Body of Christ, internationally. And herein lies the problem of trust and “faith and order” as the other provinces attempt to order their lives when they cannot ignore what the Americans’ are doing without much regard for their plight.
Bishop Whalon, of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe, has written an excellent and I think very important opinion piece on Anglicans Online.
It is entitled, “What We Think We Are Doing,” by The Rt Revd Pierre W. Whalon, D.D.
Basically, he says in very strong terms that this Church of ours has gotten the cart before the horse when dealing with the issue of the full-inclusion of gay and lesbian people. Because there has not been a clear and faithfully formulated theology supporting the relationships of gay people leading to their full-inclusion, we are acting unjustly and unfaithfully as a Church when we ordain partnered clergy and bless unions.
We have acted politically, not theologically, and we have done all this before we are able to make a cogent and thorough theological defense – particularly since we are changing the universal Church’s understanding from the beginning.
Here are the two final paragraphs:
Finally, I am quite aware that changing a part of the church’s teaching may be in error, and that those leaders who lead others astray will fall under God’s judgment. I do not expect to get handed one day a millstone with my initials on it fitted to my neck size, so to speak, but those are the stakes, and we need to own up to it. Moreover, as a matter of justice, not to mention love, it is simply wrong, that is, unjust and unloving, to continue as a church to live into a new teaching without giving clear reasons—carefully argued and officially accepted by our own church—for doing so. While justice delayed is justice denied, the global scope of our actions is in fact hindering the acceptance of gay and lesbian people elsewhere.
Some have said that the moratoria will end when we act to end them. Such an action, undefended, would only perpetuate the present anomie, and raise a real question about a “General-Convention fundamentalismâ€â€”“the majority voted it, therefore God said it, and that settles it.†Rather, we need to continue to keep “gracious restraint” until we have done the necessary work in order to end it. We do not have to wait for the rest of the Communion to approve our arguments, of course. But it is terrible that we as a church have continued to avoid that work, and all therefore continue to pay a heavy price, both within and without The Episcopal Church. If we go on blessing same-sex unions and consecrating people in those partnered relationships, and yet continue to refuse to do that work, will that mean that we cannot justify our actions? And if we cannot, then what — in God’s name — do we think we’re doing?
I highly recommend the article.
How often I hear these days that “the Church must change or die.” I think this kind of talk comes generally from people bent on institutional survival when things don’t look very good for the coming years. Funny thing, most of them seem to be anti-establishmentarians. I think it comes more from a place of insecurity and a lack of assurance that the Tradition has any longer much to say to contemporary culture. I could be wrong. I think they are wrong.
Of course organizations and institutions change. But the question I have to ask is what must change – everything, organizational structure, teaching, belief, attitude, expression, etc… Perhaps all, perhaps one, perhaps none.
Here’s the thing… When I hear that “the ‘top-down’ authority structures have to change or else the Church will die.” I don’t believe it. Why? Because the world totally functions within a “top-down” authority structure. There is nothing wrong with it, but then again there is nothing pre-ordained about it either. It simply is, and it is neutral. When I read or hear this kind of assertion, what I come away with is an experience of bad leadership. Rather than focus on helping leaders – be they priests, bishops, CEO’s, mayors, or any other authority of rank – be better leaders (which isn’t easy, I know), we would rather tare down the structure and replace it with what?, something we imagine will be better?
Here’s another thing… When I hear that “the teaching of the Church must change or it will die!” I don’t believe it. Why? Because the core teachings of the Church have flourished, when given an chance, in more cultures and languages than can be counted for over 2,000 years. There is something reliable there, folks. I think the panic comes from people who have lost their sense of imagination. Of course, there have been a whole lot of adiaphora forced onto the Church from centuries past that was (is) never necessary, and these things should perhaps be let go of, but this is a different matter.
What the Church and its members do need to do is learn from the enduring understandings and experiences of the Church in Christ and from the lives of countless Christians over two millennia. Too many of us, I think, have a somewhat vague notion of what a Christian is supposed to be like intellectually, but too many of us do not have the experience of God that enabled martyrs to endure their suffering and death, the down trodden to endure their hardship with a semblance of self respect, the grieving to somehow have joy, the pained to rejoice. This knowledge comes only through relationship, however too many of us have dysfunctional relationships with God. The problem is that we too often demand to stay in our dysfunction. God has other ideas, however, but He will respect our decisions.
What the Church does need to do, I humbly assert (and of course the Church is only individual people), what we need to do is learn how to translate the Faith and the Tradition and the Experience that have endured for all these centuries to emerging generations.
Our problem is a translation problem! Our problem is that we don’t translate or reflect the imago Dei very well in these times and in our own contexts. Many do, of course, and they don’t seem to have the same kind of “change everything” panic that tares at the heart of what enlivens the Church and enables Christians to be.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave the Presidential address to the Church of England’s General Synod, yesterday.
Of particular interest, aside from his more balanced thinking on the whole LGBT issue and of the troubles within the Anglican Communion, of particular interest to me was his explanation of the distinctiveness of the Christian understanding and definition of freedom and liberty. (this starts around the 17:51 minute mark)
I also find very interesting his presentation of the concept of “three-dimensional thinking.” In many ways, he is presenting something that should be natural for Anglicans – really it is a re-presenting of the Via Media extended beyond the original middle way between Roman Catholicism and the Continental Reformation.
“Seeing something in three dimensions is seeing that I can’t see everything at once: what’s in front of me is not just the surface I see in this particular moment… So seeing in three dimensions requires us to take time with what we see. It may help us look more critically at solutions that seek to do too much all at once; and perhaps to search for structures that will keep open the ability to learn from each other.” (Source)
This is something I want to thank more about.