Daily Archives: June 22, 2011

The nature of a worshiping community

Posted on by
Reply

Giles Fraser, who is Canon Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London has some interesting things to say about the nature of community when 85% of those in attendance at services are visitors from around the world. We certainly have nothing like that percentage of visitors on a Sunday, but I continue to be surprised by how many we do have. Certainly most Sundays it’s probably over 10% and a goodly number of those are out-of-town visitors. Another substantial segment are people who attend from time to time, with no real interest in joining.Just in the last month, we’ve had visitors from Burkina Faso, Uganda, and Germany, as well as several people who grew up at Grace and left Madison decades ago. We’ve also had people who have attended once on a whim or a quest, and have returned Sunday by Sunday, week after week.

Even at our midweek service, where average attendance is less than 10, we’ll often have a visitor or two. More likely than not, that visitor is a young adult. Sometimes they will attend regularly for a few weeks or months, and we’ll never see them again. Others will drop in semi-regularly.

I wonder about these attendance patterns. I’m familiar with the church shopper, and will occasionally ask a visitor point-blank whether that’s what they’re doing, not to put them on the spot, but to put them at ease. People come to services for all sorts of reasons, often with no intention of making a deeper commitment to our parish. Sometimes they are checking us out; more often, I suspect, they are simply reaching out to fill a momentary need. All this runs against everything that I know about congregational development, and all of my past experience as a churchgoer, scholar, and priest. We are constantly told that the goal is to get visitors fully involved and hooked in. I’m no longer convinced that should be our primary goal. Rather, we should take seriously the implications of one of those mottoes that some churches like to use “You are welcome, wherever you are on your spiritual journey.” Our hospitality should extend as deeply to someone we may never see again, as it would to a young family we are hoping to attract into active membership.

Such attendance patterns put even more pressure on my commitment to excellence in worship and preaching. If we’ve only got one chance to reach them, we’d better pull out all of the stops (quite literally). But of course one never knows how the Spirit works. Even if things aren’t perfect, it’s quite possible that visitors and regular attenders alike are spiritually nourished.

Telling War Stories: The Civil War and the Meaning of Life

Posted on by
Reply

Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University and eminent Civil War historian, has written a profound essay reflecting on our continuing fascination with the Civil War. She begins with the centennial commemoration, juxtaposing a reenactment of the First Battle of the Bull Run with MLK’s March on Washington, then she briefly outlines the intervening 50 years of historical reinterpretation of the war. But her real interest is with humanity’s fascination with war in general:

How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane, and humanity’s highest creative aspirations of literature and imagination have been all but inseparable from its most terrible invention—the scourge of war? Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of association and aggression. But humans are unique in their creation of an institution of war that is designed to organize violence, define its purposes, declare its onset, ratify its conclusion, and establish its rules. War, like literature, is a distinctively human product.

Among her conjectures:

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and to repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart.

She discusses the “impossibility and necessity” of communicating war’s truths, for foot soldiers writing letters home, as well as for historians or novelists. Most importantly, she links war and narrative: “To rename violence as war is to give it teleology,” using the example of the invasion of Iraq to prove her point. The “war on terror” implies that “terrorism could be defeated, eliminated, that it need not be a permanent condition of modern life. We expect wars to come with endings.”

It’s well worth reading and pondering.