Here are links to various things I talked about last night.
And if you’re a hardcore Episco-geek, here’s the link to the General Convention website (mature audiences only)
And the blogs I mentioned (where to follow the debate)
This evening, I will be making a presentation to a small group of interested Episcopalians on Mission, Structure, and Budget. We’re meeting on Tuesdays in May to talk about the key issues that will be discussed at this summer’s General Convention. This one promises to be a major focus, even though on the surface, it doesn’t seem particularly interesting.
So today, I’m preparing. I’ve got charts and graphs, lots of statistics (I won’t present very much budget detail). But I’m also reading a lot, re-reading the debate that’s been taking place at least since the fall of 2011, and reading other pieces. For example, Seaburynext offers a series of reflections on their “Great Awakening” conference that took place this past January. At it, Bishop Jeff Lee (of Chicago) invited participants to write for themselves permission slips. Bishop Lee, Diana Butler Bass, and others have been reflecting on what was written.
McLaren has this to say:
The same with structure. In the modern/colonial era, colonial structures competed for “religious market share” and each claimed greater legitimacy than the others. As we emerge from that “my structure is better than yours” mindset, we realize that any structure can become problematic … and that any structure (including episcopal ones!) can serve our essential message, meaning, and mission.
That’s why an Episcopal Church that uses organ, incense, and vestments can be more of an emerging church than one that uses a rock and roll band, blue jeans, and uber-casual style. If it’s focused on a missional understanding of the church derived from a Kingdom-of-God understanding of the gospel, it’s emerging from the old paradigms.
If we take those understandings as seriously as we should, we may see Episcopal Churches finding permission to experiment, explore, and evolve into new styles and structures. In that way, Episcopal identity may become more like the fair food or healthy eating movements (united by a common vision and values) and less like the old McDonald’s (united by the externals – the same menu, pricing, uniforms, and golden arches).
I’m struck by what Brian says, given the news we learned today that shows a lack of interest in revising The Hymnal 1982. Those under 30 were most opposed. To use his language, The Hymnal 1982 can be “missional” if it helps us proclaim the Gospel and if we are allowed to experiment and develop new styles alongside it.
Among the things for which people asked permission:
As I read what people wrote on their permission slips, I’m struck by how much we long for permission to turn loose of fear. “Permission to say where the church is failing,” one person requested. “I want permission to try radically new ways of “doing” and “being” (the) Church whether or not they succeed. I want to be allowed the grace to fail,” wrote another. “Permission not to be afraid of failure,” another requested.
Meanwhile, Steven Ayers has some things to say about the role of the clergy in the Episcopal Church of the future.
Fifty years later, homes across North America began to fit themselves out with a new technology that saved women more time than any technology that came before it – the microwave oven. Food producers responded quickly with prepackaged foods that were easily prepared in a microwave oven in a matter of minutes.
Before we knew it family dinners were appearing on the dining room table without having a mom at home cooking all afternoon.
The authors of the Bloomberg piece, University of Pennsylvania professors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, are absolutely right when they argue that marriage changed as a result of these economic influences.
The traditional economic arrangement where women exercised their comparative advantage in home production while men exercised their comparative advantage in the labor force production has gone the way of the dinosaur, taking with it our view of what it means to work together as a couple.
Once society started to shift way from the “male bread winner” model of the family it was natural to start thinking about new ways to arrange families. Couples in which both partners are the same gender, after all, are not really so different from modern day heterosexual partnerships, at least not in terms of economic organization.
Here’s the article.
Obama had this to say about the role his faith played in his decision:
you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.
CNN asked black pastors from across the country to weigh in.
Rachel Held Evans asks whether the short-term political victory of the Religious Right in North Carolina this week means the defection of a generation: “How to win a culture war and lose a generation.” Her blog, rachelheldevans.com, is worth following:
When I speak at Christian colleges, I often take time to chat with students in the cafeteria. When I ask them what issues are most important to them, they consistently report that they are frustrated by how the Church has treated their gay and lesbian friends. Some of these students would say they most identify with what groups like the Gay Christian Network term “Side A” (they believe homosexual relationships have the same value as heterosexual relations in the sight of God). Others better identify with “Side B” (they believe only male/female relationship in marriage is God’s intent for sexuality). But every single student I have spoken with believes that the Church has mishandled its response to homosexuality.
Jonathan Fitzgerald reminds us that at base, gay marriage is a political issue, not a religious one.
I’ll be curious to see the effect of President Obama’s statement on debates within The Episcopal Church on same-gender blessings. President Obama was referring to “civil marriage.” Part of the issue for us is that clergy act as agents of the state when we sign marriage certificates. I don’t know why the Freedom From Religion Foundation and other advocates for strict church-state separation don’t go after that. I’m uncomfortable with that role and would be happy to be rid of the responsibility.
May 13, 2012
We live in a rapidly-changing culture, and sometimes it’s not clear whether any of the rules we used to live by, the cultural norms and values we used to share, sometimes it seems like none of that matters anymore, and we are cut adrift from our past as individuals, as a society, and as a church, with no clear map to guide us forward, no polestar by which to orient us in these turbulent seas. Technology brings us closer together, so we are able to connect with friends and family hundreds, even thousands of miles away. We know what’s happening in Greece, or Africa, or China, but all of that knowledge seems to deaden us to the world around us. Continue reading
I came across this quotation on a blog I recently discovered (More than 95 theses) :
“In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was done with very little animosity towards the people who did the work. There was a distinct difference between working on something that turned out bad and had to be discarded (fine – admirable, even) and doing bad work (bad)…I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.”- Jamie Montgomerie: Apple, Failure, and Perfect Cookies (via buzz)
Mark Oppenheimer writes about religion and Jon Stewart:
Stewart and his writers have realized that good theology — getting people’s beliefs right — happens to make for good humor. Consider a bit that aired last October, in which Stewart interviewed cast members Samantha Bee and Wyatt Cenac on the differences between Mormonism and traditional Christianity. Bee, a fair-complected Canadian, was playing a Mormon, wearing a shirt that said “Team Mormon”; and Cenac, a black man of Haitian ancestry, was wearing a shirt that said “Team Normal.” Bee began by complaining about the tee shirts they were made to wear: “Why is Wyatt ‘Team Normal’? That implies that Mormons aren’t normal … We are not a cult. Mormonism is a proud religion founded by a great man who was guided by the Angel Moroni to golden plates buried in upstate New York that he placed in the bottom of a hat where he read them using a seer stone.” Matters devolved from there. Team Mormon and Team Normal began arguing about which group is crazier: the one that believes Jesus was born of a virgin and the Holy Ghost, and that he rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven, or the one that believes all that plus the story that he then returned to Missouri.
It gets better from there.
One of Oppenheimer’s insights:
the point is that Stewart and his writers convey more specifics about religious practice in less than four minutes than any documentary or nightly-news segment I’ve ever seen.
And the implicit message is one that religion scholars are always trying to convey: all religions have beliefs that seem bizarre to outsiders, and “cult” is often just a word to describe the other guy’s religion. The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.
I’m spending the afternoon and evening today with folks from the Episcopal Church Foundation, the Bishop, and executive council, and the diocesan strategic planning task force. I’m excited about what we’ll be doing–rethinking what it means to be a diocese in the twenty-first century.
I’m also excited because I’ve been thinking about a couple of blog posts I’ve read in the past couple of days. First of all, from my dear old friend, Crusty Old Dean,, who produced another of his impassioned posts on restructuring. His point 4 is what we will be talking about:
4) End parishes as clubs for members with a chaplain to minister to them, set up as Ponzi schemes for committees, which sees recruitment as getting people to serve on committees. Would many of the towns where our Episcopal churches are located even notice, or care, if they were to close? How many of our parishes function solely as clubs for the gathered? How many dioceses have 10%, 15%, 20%, of their parishes on diocesan support? How many dioceses are struggling to function? We have to change not only the diocesan structure, but fundamentally reshape what it means to be a parish and a diocese.
But read the whole thing. He argues that the problem is bigger than we’re imagining. He predicts “total collapse.” As a historian, he provides necessary context, reminding us that the growth and success the Episcopal Church saw in the 20th century was a blip. It was an anomaly, far different from the experience of the church in the nineteenth century.
A post on another blog asks similar questions from a slightly different perspective: “Where have all the rectors gone?”
We’ve seen such enormous social change before in the history of Christianity. and Christianity has been able to respond creatively and in quite unforeseen ways. Take the Evangelical and Methodist revival during the Industrial Revolution in England, when the CoE was still structured like the Medieval Church. Or the twelfth century, when rapid population change and the growth of cities saw the birth of movements like the Franciscans. What will emerge in this rapidly changing cultural context?
I’m somewhat bemused today to realize that my life is coming back full circle. I grew up in the Mennonite Church. In college and graduate school, I attended congregations that grew out of the house church movement, which was an attempt to return both to the Anabaptist roots of the Mennonite Church, and to the experience of the early church, before Christians started building churches and creating elaborate structures. The house churches eventually grew and developed. One I attended rents space from another church and is able to have paid clergy, after decades of volunteers. The same is true of the Mennonite congregation here in Madison. They don’t have the enormous physical plant overhead of most Episcopal parishes.
What might an Episcopal equivalent look like? The problem is that we tend to measure success in terms of structure, program, and buildings, not in changed lives, ministry, and making the good news incarnate in our communities and in the world. That may look very different in different places.
We need to ask the kinds of hard questions Crusty Old Dean is asking. We need to ask them, not only of the structures above us (the Presiding Bishop, 815, General Convention). We also need to ask them at the diocesan level and in our local communities. It’s difficult to grow a congregation in an area that is in the midst of long-term economic and demographic decline, as many small towns are. What is sustainable in such places? What might the metrics for a “thriving” congregation in such a context be? And what might be possible if that congregation no longer needed to focus on paying utility bills and fixing the roof?
This evening, Episcopalians from Madison’s parishes gathered to discuss the proposed liturgy for the Blessing of Same Gender Unions that will be debated and voted on at General Convention 2012. In that liturgy, we read:
Dear friends in Christ,
we have gathered together today
to witness N. N. and N. N. publically committing themselves to one another
and, in the name of the Church, to bless their union:
a relationship of mutual fidelity and steadfast love,
forsaking all others,
holding one another in tenderness and respect,
in strength and bravery,
come what may,
as long as they live.
Ahead of them is a life of joy and sorrow,
of blessing and struggle,
of gain and loss,
demanding of them the kind of self-giving love
made manifest to us in the life of Jesus.
Christ stands among us today,
calling these two people always to witness in their life together
to the generosity of his life for the sake of the world,
a life in which Christ calls us all to share.
Our discussion focused on the differences between this liturgy and the marriage rite in the Book of Common Prayer, and it became clear as we talked that there was considerable uncertainty about the Church’s theology of marriage, and how this proposed rite relates to that theology. We also heard from some who struggle with how the church’s teaching relates to their own experiences and the relationships in which they live and love.
I came home to learn of the passage of Amendment 1 in North Carolina, and read on facebook and twitter of the pain that creates for so many. I will admit my own conflicted nature, because I know that this is an issue that divides people, but also because I don’t think the Church has worked out its theology of marriage adequately. One of the things clergy in attendance at the meeting tonight seemed united on was our discomfort with acting on behalf of the state in signing marriage licenses. Until we’re clear on what marriage means for us theologically, it’s hard to make a case for how we should think about same gender unions.
I will say this about the resources provided by the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music. I find the proposed liturgy beautiful, well-conceived (at least for the most part), and perfectly adaptable for a marriage rite between heterosexuals as well as LGBT couples. What troubles me most is the theological reflection, which I find odd. It seems to me it ought to begin with the nature of God (relationship inherent in the Trinity) and in human nature–that God creates and calls humans to be in relationship with other humans.
The SCLM resources are available here and in the “Blue Book.”
Blogger Tony Jones points us to a brilliant article by Alan Kirby: The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now.
Jones, a leader in emergent Christianity continues to fight battles with conservative Christians and deploys Kirby on his side. However, what I found most interesting in Kirby’s piece was the last paragraph:
This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.
It’s a scathing analysis of contemporary culture and the contemporary self, with devastating implications for Christianity, beginning with his notion that the typical emotional state is “the trance” and the concluding riff: there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.
And speaking of postmodernism, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions recently passed. An assessment of its impact on science, philosophy, and culture by David Weinberger.
Preaching Grace on the Square 