Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

More evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Higher Education?

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We are learning, day by day, more about the rotten core of higher education (at least its administration). The corporatization of higher education, the constant need for more money and “better” students has have taken a lasting toll. My stomach turned watching the video of events at UC Davis. If you haven’t seen it, here’s video of the assault.

The students’ response shows that there is hope yet. Their resolute non-violence during the attacks, and their actions after the Chancellor’s press conference (which was breath-taking in its venality), prove that whatever they’ve learned in college so far, it isn’t the immorality of their institution’s administrators.

Video of the chancellor’s departure from a news conference. It turns out she was accompanied by a campus minister.

One Assistant Professor has not succumbed to the rule to lay low until you have tenure.

A new translation of the Roman Missal

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For those out of the loop, that would be the Latin Mass. It’s been in the works for some time, but next Sunday marks the beginning of its official use. The controversy has already begun among Roman Catholics, and perhaps not too surprisingly, among Anglicans as well.

Some background and early reactions to the new translation are here. A video providing some in-depth material is here. The full list of changes is here: peoplesparts

It’s interesting that the CNN piece refers to “confusion” in the pews. We’ve been dealing with “confusion” in the pews for decades now, in the Episcopal Church as well as with conflict over the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which many people call “new” although it’s over 30 years old.

One of the most significant aspects of these changes is that it marks another break between Roman Catholics and other Christians in the English-speaking world who had relied on similar translations of many of the key liturgical texts (the Lord’s Prayer, the creed, et al).

Here is one person’s response to participating in its use in a parish already.

There are some significant changes, like the people’s response to the celebrant’s “The Lord be with you.” It becomes “And with your spirit.” That’s a more literal translation of the Latin, of course, and exactly the same as Rite One in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Other changes are less obvious, and more controversial: “consubstantial” replaces “of one being” in the Nicene Creed. Again, it’s more literal, but what person lacking a theological education understands it; and what person with a rudimentary theological education will not immediately think of Lutheran Eucharistic theology.

The Bishop of London (Church of England) has had to warn his clergy not to use the new missal in Anglican worship.

 

Rethinking and Restructuring the Anglican Communion

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Various dioceses (Eastern Oregon, California, and the executive council of the Episcopal Church have weighed in, urging rejection of the Anglican Covenant at General Convention next summer.

In New Zealand, the Maori have rejected it as well. Because of the complicated structure of the Anglican Church in New Zealand and Polynesia, that decision means that the province as a whole rejects it as well.

In the Church of England, dioceses are also rejecting it (St. Edmondsbury and Ipswich, Birmingham).

In fact, there is considerable discussion about the Covenant both here and abroad.

Michael Poon, in Rebooting the Anglican Communication, asks three important questions:

1. To Church leaders in sub-Saharan Africa: Do strong protests against Western decadence in fact reveal a deep anxiety about ecclesial identity?

 

2. Is GAFCON the only valid expression of Anglican evangelicalism?

 

3. Are North American Christians in fact using the churches worldwide as theaters for their domestic religious wars?

For Poon, the heart of the problem is communication: “Sound bites mask private ambitions and secular undercurrents that in fact shape our disputes.” His analysis of the situation among Anglicans suggests that we mirror the political discourse in secular culture. Of course, he is correct that “communion” points to a deeper relationship, a deeper reality, and whatever Anglican Communion ought to be, it ought to embrace and incarnate the mystery of God’s love.

Tobias Haller spoke at a meeting of the Diocese of Albany on Anglican Disunion: The Issues behind “the Issue.” He outlines there what he calls the “Anglican Triad:” humility, provinciality, and variety, distinguishing these three characteristics from the “Instruments of Communion” stressed in the Anglican Covenant and elsewhere as providing the unity of the Communion.

Savi Hensman points to an earlier attempt to define what unites us as Anglican. The 2005 Anglican Consultative Council said this:

Nourished by Scripture and Sacrament, we pledge ourselves to:

1. Recognise Jesus in each other’s contexts and lives
2. Support one another in our participation in God’s mission
3. Encourage expressions of our new life in Christ
4. Meet to share common purpose and explore differences and disagreements.
5. Be willing to change in response to critique and challenge from others
6. Celebrate our strengths and mourn over our failures.
7. Share equitably our God-given resources.
8. Work together for the sustainability of God’s creation.
9. Live into the promise of God’s reconciliation for ourselves and for the world.

We make this covenant in the promise of our mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ.

All of this discussion has to do with our relationships with Anglicans world-wide. Meanwhile, here at home, there are lively and creative conversations taking place around restructuring the church. Most of the latter have to do with de-emphasizing the centralizing structures in order to focus on ministry and mission at the local level, and create ways of communicating and relating horizontally. The impetus for this discussion is partly financial, partly in response to changing demographics, and partly a function of a rapidly changing culture.

It seems to me that what is taking place locally and horizontally is also, in some ways, occurring globally. The Anglican Covenant was an attempt to respond to one set of elements in our rapidly changing world–globalization and the communications revolution–but did so without reference to some of the other elements in the changing context even though those elements were also driving much of the conflict (non-official relationships among like-minded people throughout the world, for example).

I would be curious to see how all of those folk currently ruminating on re-structuring in the Episcopal Church would imagine re-structuring of the Anglican Communion.

The ABC on the KJV

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There was a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Authorized Version in Westminster Abbey this past week. Queen Elizabeth was in attendance. Rowan Williams preached a sermon that is worth reading.

He alludes to the problems inherent in translation and the importance of interpretation but he is much more interested in the role of the text in the life of the community:

But what the 1611 translators grasped was that hearing the Word of God was a lifelong calling that had to be undertaken in the company of other readers and was never something that left us where we started.

 

it was meant to be read aloud. And that means that it was meant to be part of an event, a shared experience. Gathered as a Christian community, the parish would listen, in the context of praise, reflection and instruction, to scripture being read: it provided the picture of a whole renewed universe within which all the other activities made sense. It would not be immediately intelligible by any means, but it marked out the territory of God’s work of grace.

 

The Guardian’s report on the celebration is here.

Williams reminds us of the open and unfinished nature of translation, to use other language, that translation always involves interpretation. That means scripture always eludes our efforts to capture and contain it, to define and fix its meaning. More importantly, he also urges us to take seriously our obligation to devote our lives to engaging the text, wrestling with its meanings. As Williams puts it, scripture invites us “to a pilgrimage further and further into the mysteries of [God’s] mind and love.”

An outsider’s perspective on Occupy Wall Street and Religion

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From Michael Greenberg on The New York Review of Books (oddly the post on the website has gone missing):

organizers had been in talks with some of New York’s religious leaders for at least two weeks, negotiating support for the movement around the city. On Tuesday, coincidentally, they had been planning “a move” as one organizer put it to me. “The clergy would give us [an alternative] space to de-concentrate Zuccotti, to lessen the need for Zuccotti, to diminish its importance.”

According to Ellick, 1,400 “faith-based leaders in and around New York” were throwing their support behind Occupy Wall Street. When I asked him what defined a “leader,” he answered, “anyone with a constituency.” But what did support mean? For Ellick and John Merz, an Episcopal priest at Ascension Church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it meant opening church kitchens and giving protesters a place to shower and sleep “even though we’re not a shelter.” It would involve public support as well, talking to the press and urging parishioners to join the protesters in their various anti-corporate actions.

And his take on Trinity Church, Wall Street:

Trinity Church, the historic Episcopal church located a block south of Zuccotti Park, had been cautious in its support of the occupation, allowing protesters to hold meetings on its steps and, on occasion, use its bathrooms. Trinity is one of the largest landowners in the city, and its main business is the management of its properties, among which is a large open space on Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. The space abuts Duarte Square, a half-acre city park. Organizers had been in negotiation with the church to expand their encampment to the Canal Street space. Despite pressure from more radical Episcopal priests from other parishes in New York, Trinity ultimately decided to forbid access to its land. One priest I spoke with who preferred not to be identified, was indignant at Trinity’s decision—“Its meekness,” he called it, “its fear of antagonizing authorities who are responsible for upholding so many of its privileges. Let’s face it,” he added, “they’re more a corporation than a place of faith. They have fewer parishioners than I do.” He said that meetings at Trinity had been heated. “This is a basic challenge to our values. If we don’t support Occupy Wall Street, what do we stand for?”

Trinity has made its views clear in a letter and in its acquiescence in the clearing of Duarte Square, property owned by Trinity, but leased to another group.

Meanwhile in London, the St. Paul’s controversy continues.

 

Sexual Abuse, abuse of power, and institutional self-preservation

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As we learn more about what happened at Penn State, and people reflect more on the events and what they might mean, there have been a number of essays that examine some of the underlying issues that may have led to the apparent cover-up by Penn State officials.

Matt Feeney blames big-time college sports in general:

What happened at Penn State was the scheme of big-money college sports working as it was designed to work. The act of looking away, repeated by so many in State College, is the perfect emblem for the cognitive politics of the NCAA. It should be on their flag.

Katha Pollitt also blames college athletics, not only for the Penn State crimes, but for its effects on academia in general. She goes further, attacking the masculine privilege inherent in athletics today:

There really is a message here about masculine privilege: the deification of a powerful old man who can do no wrong, an all-male hierarchy protecting itself (hello, pedophile priests), a culture of entitlement and a truly astonishing lack of concern about sexual violence. This last is old news, unfortunately: sexual assaults by athletes are regularly covered up or lightly punished by administrations, even in high school, and society really doesn’t care all that much. A federal appeals court declared that a Texas cheerleader could be kicked off the squad (and made to contribute to the school’s legal costs) for refusing to cheer her rapist when he took the field—and he’d pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault too, so why was he even still playing?

Jane Leavy, whose earlier essay may be found here, writes an open letter to Mike McQueary. Commenting on all those who have vilified him for not taking stronger action, she points out that

When you were called to testify by the grand jury, you didn’t just expose a predator, Kohn pointed out. You exposed the morally lax administrators, directly contradicting the testimony of the now-fired university president, the vice president, and the athletic director. “But for McQueary, the coach [Sandusky] may still be there,” Kohn said. “The athletic department would be unchanged. That he didn’t throw himself under the bus doesn’t surprise me in the least. Look at the janitors. They didn’t tell anybody.”

I can’t help reading the Presiding Bishop’s statement about Bede Parry without thinking of Penn State. Bede Parry was a Roman Catholic priest and monk, accused of sexual misconduct and eventually released from the monastery (He has confessed to committing sexual abuse during the late 1970s). He found his way to the Episcopal Church and was received as a priest by Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori when she was Bishop of Nevada. News about this broke several months ago when one of his victims filed a lawsuit. There’s background here.

What I find surprising is the absence of a psychiatric evaluation in Parry’s process. The PB states that he was required to undergo medical and psychological evaluations and a background check. The canons for reception of a priest (as for ordination) also provide for “psychiatric referral if desired or necessary.” When I was in the ordination process, a psychiatric evaluation was required. Mine was somewhat perfunctory, but all of the necessary questions were asked, and one would think that a bishop would want to have as much information as possible, especially if someone had undergone treatment.

If true and there’s no reason to doubt her, the PB has done no wrong here. But waiting since the allegations were first made public in July, till now to make an official statement sends the wrong message. The impulse for institutional self-preservation should not silence the truth.

Numerical Decline and the local congregation

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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

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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.