The twenty-sixth is apparently this one.
Here’s the list: Henri Nouwen makes the list, but Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, MLK, don’t? And nothing at all between the sixth and fourteenth centuries.
25 Books every Christian Should read
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Monthly Archives: November 2011
Numerical Decline and the local congregation
The dramatic numbers reported last week continue to reverberate across the Episcopal Church.
From Jim Naughton’s lede on Mariann Bude:
I’d ask you to read Michelle Boorstein’s story about the situation that confronts the bishop and the church, and then look at the Q and As in The Post and the Examiner. Several things struck me as I listened to her give these interviews. She is unabashed about the need to rebuild the church. Unlike some of our leaders, she does not theologize our decline. She is also clear in her opinion that the church does not lack a heart for mission. Rather, it lacks capacity because so many of its congregations are weak and struggling simply to keep their doors open. It makes no sense (this is my opinion, not hers) to tell these people that if they look inward they will flounder, but if they look outward they will thrive, because they may be in no position to look effectively in either direction.
It’s hard to focus on mission and outreach when all of a congregation’s energy is going into survival. Or to put it another way, given how thinly stretched resources are in a typical congregation, resources in terms of staff, clergy, and volunteers, it’s almost impossible to do things well, let alone innovate, when so much effort is expended on making sure the doors are open.
Donald Romanik says much the same thing, challenging us to focus on the local, not the national or international:
for the overwhelming majority of members of our congregations, the Episcopal Church is equivalent to their local faith community and the mission and ministry of that local congregation is measured by the impact it makes on the people it touches both on Sunday, and, more importantly, throughout the week.
As leaders of our local faith communities, our primary responsibility is to bring the message of Jesus and his healing presence to our immediate surroundings and engage our neighbors and friends in the work of God’s reconciliation in the world. And we do this through a constant cycle of prayer, worship, education, fellowship, outreach, and evangelism – that awful “e-word.” The Episcopal Church has a powerful message of hope to a broken world. Likewise, our local faith communities also share this important message.
I suppose I began my annual report to the parish with those same statistics because I wanted to provide some larger context for our struggles at Grace, but also, at least implicitly, to remind people of the great resources we have at Grace to reach out into the world, and that we are already doing many of those very things, including evangelism.
Pastors need to be challenged and disrupted
Patheos is running an online symposium on the future of seminary education. Like higher education in general, graduate education for clergy is in a crisis–rising tuition, rising debt for students, shrinking enrollments.
Reading the various entries brought home to me how inadequate my education at Harvard Divinity School was. We knew it was at the time; HDS offered very little in the way of courses in the practice of ministry. But it finally dawned on me that there was an even larger disconnect. I remember thinking at the time I was doing my field ed in a struggling mainline parish in Boston’s Back Bay that it seemed that the only people attending church were elderly or so disfunctional because of mental illness, substance abuse, or other forms of abuse, that what we were learning at HDS had no relevance in the pews or on the streets.
Fifteen years in the south were somewhat deceptive. Attending church was still culturally acceptable, even expected. It was easy to imagine that the Church could survive, perhaps even thrive in the American landscape. I remember how surprised I was when I began teaching at Sewanee to find seminarians who had come from suburban churches and were expecting to return to similar congregations where they would face no greater challenge than making sure acolytes were wearing black shoes. It seemed like we were still in the 1950s. Sometimes I wonder how many of those students I taught are still in the priesthood and whether their education has prepared them well for the challenges facing the church in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
I wonder whether seminaries, by their very nature blind students and faculty to the reality of the outside world. For denominational seminaries, even those in the throes of survival struggle, there still may be a sense that if we can just get it right, the institution will survive. I know that for many who enter the ordination process in the Episcopal Church, think of it not as an ongoing challenge, but only as a series of hoops through which to jump on one’s way to the promised land of a a settled cure somewhere. The ordination is designed to create clergy invested in the denomination as it stands, because the promise of an well-paying job and a secure pension are the pot at the end of the rainbow.
The most recent entry in the symposium comes from Kurt Fredrickson of Fuller Theological Seminary, who advocates for those institutions “to serve and resource the whole church.” But the most compelling thing he said is the phrase that appears as the title of this blog post: “Pastors need to be challenged and disrupted.”
I think that’s exactly right, and more true for denominational seminaries than for non-denominational ones or for divinity schools. In the latter, students will be challenged and disrupted by the encounter with students from other religious traditions. In the former, the tendency is to do little more than indoctrinate students in the denominational culture, which by any measure, is in radical decline.
The new bishop of the Diocese of Washington
Mariann Edgar Budde was consecrated Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington on Saturday. Here’s the report from The Washington Post.
The Post also printed her first sermon as Bishop, preached yesterday.
Here are two key excerpts:
We of the Episcopal Church have been entrusted with a particular expression of Christ’s gospel that is priceless. Think of what it means to you to have a spiritual home with such an appreciation of mystery and all that is beyond our knowing and curiosity about the world as we can know it through the rigorous inquiry of science. Think of what it means to you to have a spiritual home that lives the Via Media, the middle way among all expressions of Christianity, affirming the wholeness of faith that can only be fully experienced in the creative tension of polarities — heart and mind, Catholic and Protestant, word and sacrament, mysticism and service, contemplation and social engagement. Think of what it means to you to be part of a Church that does not ask its members to agree on matters of politics or theology or biblical interpretation, but rather to allow the grace of God to unite us at the altar of Christ in full appreciation of our differences and the God-given right of everyone to be welcome at God’s table.
And:
You have called me as your bishop at the time when the first priority for the Episcopal Church is the spiritual renewal and revitalization of our congregations and core ministries, not as a retreat from social and prophetic witness, but in order to be more faithful to that witness, with greater capacity not only to speak but to act in God’s name. This is a time when the cultural and societal context in which our churches find themselves is constantly changing, and we must learn how to sing our Lord’s song in a new land. It’s a time when we aren’t sure yet what we need to let go and what to keep, what is essential to our identity and what is secondary. It’s a time of deep spiritual longing yet superficial spiritual grounding, and that’s as true within our congregations as outside them.
Lectionary Reflections for Christ the King Sunday
This week’s lectionary readings.
Next Sunday is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, known as Christ the King. Next Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, begins a new lectionary cycle. Advent will begin with a focus on the coming of Jesus Christ—both his first coming and his second. Today’s lessons also focus on Christ’s second coming and our lessons emphasize Christ reigning in majesty and his reigning as a judge. This gospel reading is not only our last for this year. It is also the last substantive teaching that Jesus gives his disciples before his crucifixion. So, for Matthew, apart from a few commandments Jesus gives his disciples—the institution of the Eucharist and the Great Commission—this story is Jesus’ last words to his disciples.
So it’s an important story, not simply because it’s a favorite of those who see the Gospel message as primarily one of outreach to the needy. It’s important for Matthew, too. It’s an apocalyptic vision. Jesus is describing what the Parousia—the coming of the Son of Man will be like. First, he uses royal imagery. He will come in glory and sit on his heavenly throne. But immediately, that imagery is combined with another image, that of the shepherd. He will separate the people like a shepherd separates his flocks, the sheep from the goats.
This image may draw us back to the reading from Ezekiel, where another visionary sees God coming like a shepherd, judging between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, rescuing them from wherever they have been scattered, feeding them, binding up the injured. We might find it odd that these two images—the shepherd and the king—are linked together in the biblical tradition. As the reading from Ezekiel makes clear, one reason for that linkage is the tradition that the founder of the Davidic monarchy—King David, was a shepherd. But for Christians, when shepherd imagery is used of Jesus, it is almost always used to emphasize Jesus’ care for us and his intimate love for us.
Yet here in Ezekiel, the shepherd is a judge who culls his flocks, separating the fat from the lean sheep. So too in the gospel, the Shepherd King is a Judge who divides the sheep from the goats. In the Ezekiel passage the contrast between the care and tender concern the shepherd shows for the lean sheep and the harsh words with which he judges the fat.
The same is true in the gospel. The king judges harshly, unequivocally between the sheep and the goats. Christ appears to us here as a shepherd-king, but there are two other important images of Christ in the gospel. One is the obvious one. When the king says, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me, identifies the presence of Christ in the naked, the prisoner, the hungry, the sick. The third image is less obvious. The text begins with a reference to the Son of Man. In Matthew, when Jesus uses that title of himself, it almost always is in reference to his crucifixion. Christ the King is also the Crucified One and the least of these.
We are called to hold these three images together, we might think of them as three facets of a prism that together refract the light. If we ignore one of them, the other two become less brilliant. Emphasizing one over the other is a common temptation for Christians, but the gospel itself warns against it. We might prefer one image over the other. Some might want to encounter Christ only in the face of the poor and hungry; others only in an image of the Crucifixion. There are even those who can conceive of Christ only as the judge who comes on a cloud of thunder and reigns in majesty.
Each image taken by itself will lead to a distortion of our faith. Those who focus only on the crucifixion will see Jesus only as the one who offers forgiveness for our sins. Those who focus on Christ in Majesty will think only about the second coming and making sure that they are on his right side. Those who focus only on outreach to others turn the Christian message into a social service agency.
The judge separates sheep from goats, those who reached out to the needy and those who didn’t. The surprising thing here is that all are surprised. Neither group knew that Christ was present in the naked, the stranger or the prisoner. So for those whom the King welcomed into the kingdom, their actions in reaching out to the needy were not a conscious response to Jesus’ teachings or the result of acting out of duty or in order to gain their salvation. Their actions were an unconscious, unknowing part of who they were as Jesus’ disciples.
Each year as Christ the King Sunday approaches my mind turns to the marvelous mosaics in the churches of Ravenna, Italy, created in the sixth century on behalf of Byzantine emperors. There are two that are especially appropriate on this occasion. The first is from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, depicting Christ as the Good Shepherd:
The second is in S. Apollonare Nuovo, showing Christ separating the sheep from the goats:
Atheists, Unitarian Universalists, Catholics
Atheist Convert: Jennifer Fulwiler.
My feelings of frustration and resentment towards God reached a head. And then, just at the right time, I happened to come across a quote from C.S. Lewis in which he pointed out:
[God] shows much more of Himself to some people than to others — not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
Of course. I’d been walking around talking trash, watching TV shows that portrayed all types of nastiness, indulging in selfish behavior…and yet wondering why I couldn’t feel the presence of the source of all goodness. I realized that, if I were serious about figuring out if God exists or not, it could not be an entirely intellectual exercise. I had to be willing to change.
I wasn’t sure if I was ready to sign up for that for the long haul, but I decided to give it a shot: I committed to go a month living according to the Catholic moral code. I bought a copy of the Catholic Catechism, a summary of the Church’s teachings, and studied it carefully, living my life according to what it taught, even in the cases where I wasn’t sure the Church was right.
My goal with the experiment had been to discover the presence of God; instead, I discovered myself — the real me. I had thought that cynicism, judgmentalness, and irritability were just parts of who I was, but I realized that there was a purer, better version of myself buried underneath all that filth — what the Church would call sins — that I had never before encountered.
I found that the rules of the Church, that I had once perceived to be a set of confining laws, were rules of love; the defined the boundaries between what is love and what is not. It had changed me, my life, and my marriage for the better. I may not have experienced God, but, by following the teachings of the Church that was supposedly founded by him, I had experienced real love.
An atheist responds: http://bigthink.com/ideas/41085
Also on the Big Think: Can an atheist be a Unitarian-Universalist? Part I. Part II. Not according to the Unitarian-Universalist, who seems unable to answer the Atheist’s questions reasonably. His argument: Atheism=Hitler and Stalin.
Annual Meeting: Now it’s time for a few days off!
Annual Meetings are necessary things, but it’s not always apparent why. We elected wardens, vestry members, diocesan and convocation delegates, heard about our financial situation and the draft budget for 2012. Ideally, they should be a time to reflect on where we’ve been over the past year and to talk about plans for the coming year. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on my own tenure at Grace. This was my third annual meeting and so, in some ways, I suppose, we are entering into a new phase in our shared ministry.
Here are some excerpts from the annual report I gave to the parish today. Blog readers will recognize many of the themes.
The news is dire. Church membership and attendance are going down. Membership in the Episcopal Church has dropped below 2,000,000, a 16% decline between 2000 and 2009. Average Sunday attendance has declined even more precipitously—23% in that same period. Closer to home, membership in the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee has shrunk by a third. Here at Grace, while membership has declined, attendance has remained rather stable and perhaps even ticked up in the last few years.
But it’s not just the Episcopal Church. All of the mainline denominations are getting smaller and even the Southern Baptist Convention has seen decline in membership in each of the last four years. Wider studies bear witness to this phenomenon: more Americans than ever before, as many as 20%, claim no religious affiliation.
To begin the annual rector’s report with these statistics may seem a bit odd, even depressing. I cite them not as an excuse or explanation, but to help us understand the world in which we live and the reality that faces us. Whatever struggles we have are shared by churches across the country, in all denominations and traditions. At the same time, Grace is positioned well to meet the future, to adapt to this changing environment and to share the Good News of Jesus Christ in a fearful and hurting world.
This new reality invites us to experiment with new ways of being God’s people. Old patterns and structures, no matter how well they may have worked in the past, may no longer be adequate to reach people. We have already begun to do just that.
One of the most important ways in which we can experiment is through cooperation. Thanks to Andy Jones, Rector of St. Andrew’s, who reached out to me and to Paula Harris, who began as Rector of St. Luke’s on the same day I did, the Madison Episcopal Churches have forged new bonds of fellowship and have begun to cooperate in joint ministries. The Madison Episcopal Teens, or MET, as it is now called began as our attempt to create a youth experience for our teens that could achieve critical mass and create relationships and community across parish lines. Now under the direction of our own Lauren Cochran, MET meets monthly, with average attendance of 15 from at least four parishes. Thanks to the vision of Michael Ramsey Mulshoff, a group representing four parishes began meeting to talk about ways of making our congregations more inviting to LGBT persons, and especially to teens struggling with sexual identity. Eventually this group took the name Gay Straight Episcopalians, participated in Madison’s Capitol Pride march. Over the years, we have cooperated on Vacation Bible School and Lenten programming. We will continue to seek out ways of cooperating on outreach projects as well as formation.
The past year has also seen increased ecumenical cooperation. Grace became a gathering place for clergy and people of faith during the protests, and with the help of other clergy I organized a successful interfaith service on the tenth anniversary of 9-11. These are important steps, but more important are other efforts to find common ground and cooperate on ministry and mission. I convened a meeting of representatives from the four downtown churches this fall as we began conversations about the effects of the library and capital closures on the downtown homeless population. I hope that meeting is a first step in a developing relationship among our parishes. We also welcomed to our services the Rev. Franklin Wilson of Luther Memorial Church, and although our relations with LMC were strained by the proposal for development of the St. Francis House site, we will continue to work on ways in which we might cooperate. Next week, representatives from the Lubar Institute will be presenting an adult forum on interfaith relations and I hope many of you will participate in that session. For all of the differences among the religions, in some respects we have more in common with one another than with the secular outlook that pervades much of our society.
Next October, Diocesan Convention will be headquartered in Middleton, but we are already making plans to celebrate the Convention Eucharist here at Grace. Convention will be an opportunity for us to work even more closely together as Madison Episcopalians, and to highlight that cooperation to the rest of the diocese.
In addition to experimentation in our relationships outside the parish, this year has also been a time of experimentation within the congregation. The book of annual reports records many of the achievements in our ministries and programs. I would like to highlight three. First, thanks to the vision and hard work of Junior Warden Bruce Croushore, Grace Presents, our concert series has gotten off to a marvelous start. Experimenting with different kinds of music from classical to Gypsy Swing, and with different times including Saturday mornings and most recently a Wednesday evening, the series has opened our doors to new audiences and created a space where musicians can offer their gifts and skills.
With the retirement of the Rev. Pat Size last year, the Hispanic Ministry could have ended, but its membership decided to continue. Mary Ray Worley has provided much needed leadership and organization, and that group continues to show its strength, resilience, and passion for being a Spanish-language presence on the Capitol Square. Lay leadership has developed to officiate at Morning Prayer and to offer meditations during those services. In addition, the Rev. Charles Granger has recently stepped forward to offer regular Spanish-language Eucharists at 12 noon on Sundays.
Growing out of conversations around pastoral care, Darby Puglielli has gathered a group of people to meet each Monday to pray together. The presence of this prayer group at Grace may be a spark for all of us to deepen our prayer lives, both for ourselves and on behalf of others and the church. Prayer helps to bring us together, and even if you aren’t able to join with the group at Grace physically on Mondays, you may pray with them at home, work, school, or wherever you might find yourself.
Each of these efforts has been led and nurtured by lay people. The staff and clergy have offered assistance, insight, and moral support, but most of the envisioning, planning and implementation has been done by lay people. That fact reminds us of the power of lay people to develop and sustain ministries and programs, to catch sight of a vision and to make that vision a reality.
As we look ahead into 2012, it is important that we capitalize on the momentum we have already gained, and seek new ways of expanding our efforts to engage the wider community. One crucial step in that process is to make our space more inviting and welcoming to visitors. The last major renovation of our facilities took place almost twenty-five years ago. Crucial areas of our program and ministry—the undercroft which is home to our nursery and Sunday School, the reception area, to cite two examples—need to be re-imagined as places of invitation and welcome. In the coming months, our Aesthetics Committee and Buildings and Grounds will develop a plan to create in those areas spaces that invite the our congregation and the larger community to make them spaces of respite, life, and sanctuary for the twenty-first century.
The presence at Grace for the next year and a half of the St. Francis House Episcopal Campus Ministry is also an opportunity for us to think carefully and creatively about outreach to young adults. We already do that well. Someone recently mentioned to me after a 10-O’Clock service that our young adults embrace and engage young adult visitors enthusiastically. The fact of the matter is, however, that for many young adults, Sunday morning services are never going to be the center of their spiritual lives. We need to think about ways of engaging them in non-traditional ways, and at non-traditional times. With the help of a new full-time chaplain arriving some time in the New Year, we may be able to create other opportunities for worship, outreach, and spiritual development among college students and young adults.
One of our greatest strengths is our liturgy and worship, thanks to the strong music leadership offered by Berkley and Greg, and all of those people who are involved in preparing and offering worship—from the altar guild, to acolytes, lectors, and Eucharistic ministers. I cannot tell you how many times visitors tell me how wonderful our services are. Still, we need to do more, explore ways of making our worship more accessible to outsiders, more meaningful to all, and ensure that what we do on Sunday morning and at other times speaks to the deep spiritual needs of our culture, needs that may not be met in traditional ways. For example, our new sound system will allow us to offer our services online which may allow us to connect both with parishioners who are unable to attend on Sunday morning and to reach out more widely into the community. In addition, during Advent, and if successful on a continuing basis, we will offer a weekly evening Eucharist.
Losing My Religion: Generation Ex-Christian
Drew Dyck is the author of Generation X-Christian. He was interviewed a month ago on Patheos. I skimmed it and marked it for later reading and finally got around to looking at it again. His analysis is on target:
There are three things that make this generation different. First, young adults today are dropping religion at a greater rate than young adults of yesteryear, “five to six times the historic rate,” according to sociologists David Putnam and Robert Campbell. Second, young adulthood is not what it used to be—it’s much longer. Marriage, career, children—the primary sociological forces that drive adults back to religious commitment—are now delayed until the late 20s, even into the 30s. Returning to the fold after a two- or three-year hiatus is one thing. Coming back after more than a decade is considerably more unlikely. Third, there’s been a shift in the culture. Past generations may have rebelled for a season, but they still inhabited a predominantly Judeo-Christian culture. For those reared in pluralistic, post-Christian America, the cultural gravity that has pulled previous generations back to the faith has weakened. So I’m not banking on an automatic return. I think it’s a scandal that these young adults are adrift spiritually and missing from our churches.
Nicole Havelka says much the same. The idea that young people will return to regular church-going when they get married and have children is probably a relic of an early generation when such things did happen, even among baby-boomers. We now live in a post-Christian culture in many respects, and churches cannot have the power to attract young people who were never members or participants in the first place.
Havelka writes:
We should acknowledge that young adults are not going to return to church (or visit for the first time) without some effort on the part of our local churches. We can offer substantive programs to help young families and single adults form their new adult faith. We can reach out to college students. We can be sensitive to the needs of our communities and tailor our ministries to meet those needs.
Encounters with homelessness
Working at Grace Church means that homelessness is always at the forefront of my consciousness and my ministry. When I arrive in the morning, whenever I leave, during the day or at the end of the day, I encounter homeless people lingering on the streets around the church. It’s fairly easy to pass them by with a nod or a “Good Morning” but it’s just as likely that we will engage in a conversation or that I will be asked for help.
I was asked this week about whether that constant presence and the repeated requests for assistance have made me more callous to the reality of the need I encounter each day. I don’t know. I have heard many stories of distress and hardship and I often jokingly say, “and some of what I’ve heard is true.” We do put up barriers to the depth of the pain and suffering, and as individuals and as agencies, we also set limits to what we can do. Survival requires such measures.
Still, an encounter or a series of encounters can be profoundly unsettling. The desire to help can overwhelm and the reality that whatever we can do–a meal–will not solve the problems.
In the past few days, I’ve read two powerful essays written by people who work with homeless people. Amy Scheer shares her experience working in a women’s shelter, dealing with the needs of women and the necessity of rules to maintain order. How can she offer what little food they have to a pregnant woman without causing conflict with the other women who might be as hungry as she?
James Lang reflects in America on his experience volunteering through his parish with the Interfaith Hospitality Network:
To me, homelessness would mean one more faceless man asking for change on a street corner were it not for those nights I spent (not) sleeping in the parish center; it would mean an article on page four of the daily newspaper; it would mean a pleasant argument about politics with my friends, sitting at a party over drinks and appetizers. As a result of those nights, however, homelessness now means a 5-year-old girl with a ponytail and missing front teeth, knocking on my door at 6:30 a.m. and pulling a fairy wand out of a box of toys someone had donated. Because of those nights, homelessness has a face; homelessness has entered my life.
Truthfulness, Dignity, and Aesthetic Quality: Marilynne Robinson on the possibilities of Christianity
Marilynne Robinson, the author of the beautiful novels Gilead and Home, recently visited Duke University where she gave a reading and was interviewed by Jason Byassee. In the course of that interview, she said
What people need in this culture is truthfulness, dignity and aesthetic quality. Not everything in the world, but many things are depleting exactly those aspects of life now.
The churches are in a position to give people what they urgently need and give them something that is only consistent with their dignity as human beings.
This intrigues me because of what she suggests about what the churches might offer humans “truthfulness and dignity” and the importance of beauty. One of the great challenges facing us as individuals and as a civilization is the extent to which everything in our world tends towards our diminishment–the reduction of human desire to consumption, of human community to immediate self-satisfaction, and of human fulfillment to wealth accumulation.
There’s a sense in which our encounter with beauty, whether that be the beauty of nature, of art or architecture, of literature or music, invites us to self-transcendence. It’s what I see when I watch a wanderer off the street encounter the interior of Grace Church, or chat with a visitor after our choral Eucharist. It’s also something of what Grace has offered in the midst of the political turmoil over the last year.
The entire interview is here. And her reading of parallel passages from Gilead and Home available as a podcast.
Robinson has also published a rambling essay in the most recent issue of The Nation. In this piece she reflects on developments in the culture of the West in the wake of financial turmoil by playing the present off against the cultural conflict of the Cold War.
She writes:
I have always identified the United States with its best institutions and traditions, its best thought, believing, and having seen, that they could act as a corrective to the less admirable aspects of the culture. I have profoundly enjoyed the wealth of experience that has been offered to me, and I hope I have made some use of it. Yet it seems to me, on the darkest nights, and sometimes in the clear light of day, that we are losing the ethos that has sustained what is most to be valued in our civilization. This may sound alarmist. But it is true, to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, that fear is very much to be feared, not least because it is a potent stimulant. Nothing is so effective at foregrounding self-interest. Yet fear is the motive behind most self-inflicted harm. Western society at its best expresses the serene sort of courage that allows us to grant one another real safety, real autonomy, the means to think and act as judgment and conscience dictate. It assumes that this great mutual courtesy will bear its best fruit if we respect, educate, inform and trust one another. This is the ethos that is at risk as the civil institutions in which it is realized increasingly come under attack by the real and imagined urgencies of the moment. We were centuries in building these courtesies. Without them “Western civilization” would be an empty phrase.
Preaching Grace on the Square 