Category Archives: Anglican

The Archbishop of Canterbury–Retrospectives and Prospects

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Theo Hobson places Rowan Williams in the larger context of twentieth-century Anglican theology:

In the 1980s, Williams mastered this new intellectual idiom. He presented Christianity as a cultural tradition, the place where a very specific form of meaning is made, shared, passed on; where supreme authority belongs to the “central symbol” of cross and resurrection, which the church performs in the eucharist. When many, such as his Cambridge colleague Don Cupitt, were arguing against traditional metaphysical belief, or defending it in rather dated terms, he changed the subject. The question of what we believe is secondary to the question of what we do, what forms of symbolic communication we participate in, what cultural language we speak. We must rethink our tradition in these semiotic terms. Jesus was “a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind”, he writes in an essay of 1987. And Christian culture echoes his sign-making. This communal sign-making is, for Christians, the most authentically basic bit of culture. Is it just another bit of human culture? Yes and no: for here, we believe, the true myth is performed, the fullest meaning is made.

Andrew Brown writes on Anglicanism in the English countryside:

The least glamorous parts of the Church of England are the rural dioceses – Lincoln, Truro, Carlisle, and Hereford. Their problems were exhaustively analysed by a statistically trained vicar in Lincolnshire. Unlike more central or pleasant places, they don’t attract priests from the outside, even to retire. Oxford, for example, has more than 500 retired clergy on its books, almost all of whom are available for minimally paid work.

In the deep countryside, congregations are shrinking and ageing. The other Christian denominations have all already disappeared from rural England. The Anglican vicar who is left will have as many as 20 churches to look after, and if they are not careful they will spend all their time driving frantically between them. The congregations are elderly. They have watched all their lives as fresh initiatives came from London to bring people back to church – and they have seen their children and grandchildren move elsewhere anyway.

And this:

Yet for all this gloom on the ground, the church still seems more important in rural areas than in the cities or suburbs. Lowson says he was surprised to discover, when he moved to Lincoln, that the local press wanted his opinions on all sorts of stories. “In the countryside, the bishop is still a local leader, expected to comment on things, in a way which is no longer true in the cities. Church is still a real part, beyond its own church life, in congregations.”

In some respects, the situation in England is not unlike that which we face in the small towns of the Diocese of Milwaukee. Aging congregations, aging buildings, not enough money to pay full-time clergy. The difference may be the continued central role of the parish church in rural England, because of the Church of England’s history and establishment.

Hobson writes in part to elucidate one of the great problems facing the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the un-churching of England, and especially of the countryside. Whoever will be chosen faces enormous challenges.

John Milbank offered his prescription for a revised Anglicanism in late September. I keep meaning to engage more fully with it but lack the time. The full article is here but its gist is an Anglicanism that looks like Roman Catholicism, with something like a Cardinalate and an enhanced teaching office (ie, Magisterium). And in fact, Milbank’s goal is unity with Rome under Roman primacy.

There is speculation that the Crown Nominations Commission will soon announce its choice for Williams’ successor. It should be interesting.

Love Free or Die

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PBS aired the documentary on Bishop Gene Robinson this evening. Although there were moments of brilliance, humor, and power, I found it by and large unconvincing. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because by focusing on Bishop Robinson’s story, it failed to examine the larger issues at stake. The Archbishop of Canterbury was a caricature and the focus on the Lambeth Conference (a big chunk of the first half of the film) pitted the lone martyr and prophet (Robinson) against the institutional forces of the Church. There was very little attention to the real tension within the church and within individuals over Bishop Robinson’s election and the deep divisions it caused in the world-wide Anglican Communion. Apart from a couple of quotations from Robert Duncan and from some non-Episcopalian protestors at General Convention in Anaheim, or the protestor at Bishop Robinson’s sermon in England, there was no voice given either to the opposition or to the many people who have struggled with the implications of LGBT inclusion in the Episcopal Church.

I also found Robinson’s theological statements, sermons, et al, less than convincing. But he got in a good line on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show: “There was a queen on the board.”

I’ve never met Bishop Robinson. The documentary did a great job of showing his humanity and the toll the years of controversy took on him. But I doubt he was a single issue bishop, and I would have liked to see more of his ministry in the New Hampshire context. The vignettes from his parish visitations were priceless. Perhaps I would have found a straightforward biography more interesting than the LGBT rights focus of the film.

Do buildings matter, or don’t they?

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We have begun a master-planning process to envision how we might adapt our space to the possibilities of mission and ministry in the twenty-first century (I know, we’re already 12 years into the century, but still). Such an effort might seem silly, even foolhardy given the times, the economic realities, and the decline of mainline Christianity. And then there is the question whether we should put time, effort, and money into buildings at all. As one Episcopal site recently explained “Why our buildings don’t matter.”

But let’s face reality. At the end of the day our buildings just don’t matter. The people outside our beautiful buildings are what matters. Because let’s face it—it’s all about relationships, not real estate.

Now, I’ll be the first person to say that our buildings don’t matter–“Where two or three are gathered” and all that. On the other hand, I recently saw a documentary on the architect who was responsible for what became the model downtown hotel–the Hyatt in Atlanta, with a multifloor open atrium and glass elevators. He said something like, in our society, public space is created by private people and policed privately. He was thinking about hotels and malls, of course. But it’s true.

Human beings have sought to delineate space for special uses from the earliest times. The great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade pointed out in The Sacred and the Profane, that one of the key aspects of human religious experience is the demarcation of the sacred from the profane. In traditional societies, even in pre-modern societies, sacred space was set off from ordinary space. He also argued that in the modern world, we’ve lost that sense of distinction between the sacred and profane. Our cities are planned on the grid system with each plot or block of equal importance. Madison differs from that norm in some respects, but the recent conflict over the right to demonstrate in the State Capitol suggests an ongoing battle between the notion of private and public space, space for civic engagement.

One of the remarkable things about church buildings like Grace is the way in which they continue to convey and communicate a sense of the sacred to people who have no sense of the holy. I’ve blogged about it before, but just this week, I saw it happening in the visit of a high school class from Lodi, WI, and in a funeral that was attended by hundreds. When people enter Grace, they encounter the sacred. That doesn’t happen in malls or schools or even in many churches that have been designed to look like movie theaters.

The question for us is how we can adapt our space to enable such encounters with the sacred, and to develop ways of helping people to move beyond an encounter with the sacred to encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ.

I’ve been interested to read about a recent report about the significance of Anglican cathedrals in English life and culture. The full report is here. Media reports are here and here. Remarkably, eleven million residents of England visited the cathedrals during the period surveyed. The report details how cathedrals have become sacred space for the nation, even for non-religious or non-Christians.

This report should give us Episcopalians pause as we reflect on the future of Anglicanism in the US but I’ve not seen much engagement with it on this side of the pond. Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Mary’s in Glasgow, Scotland, ponders the role of cathedrals in the rather different context of Scotland.

The importance of worship–or Wendell Berry and the Anglican Marks of Mission

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The Rev. Bosco Peters from the Anglican Church of New Zealand, has begun a campaign to include worship as one of the “Anglican Marks of Mission.” Here’s his rationale:

I propose that worship, liturgy, is not a means to further the mission of the church. It is not a means to further any or all of the dimensions in the five-fold mission statement. Worship, in and of itself, is an essential dimension of our mission and should find its place in our accepted mission statement.

Worship, liturgy, especially the Eucharist, is understood, by the majority of Christians, to be “the source and summit of the Christian life” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 11). St Ignatius Loyola understood “The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God” (The Principle and Foundation in his Spiritual Exercises).

Although worship is not a means, giving it centrality does lead to desirable effects. On the other hand, I would argue, the loss of the pivotal place of worship and liturgy leads to consequences, such as the loss of the unifying power of common prayer, of common worship.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about place, context for ministry. And if there’s any point at which my theological reflection on ministry is undergoing transformation, it is about the importance of understanding and responding to the particularity of local context.

There’s a great ongoing project This is our city that focuses on how evangelicals are reclaiming ministry in urban contexts. I’ve learned a great deal from it.

Today, I read this piece by Jake Meador on what Wendell Berry might have to say to urban evangelicals. Meador writes:

But in recent years, some Christian writers have warned that we shouldn’t mistake right thinking and right behavior for the holistic well being of a person, or a city, for that matter. James Davison Hunter and Andy Crouch (executive director of the City project) each made this point in To Change the World and Culture Making, respectively. Philosopher Jamie Smith devoted a whole book, Desiring the Kingdom, to this point, stressing that human beings are not chiefly thinkers or believers but worshipers. It’s here, I argue, that Berry’s vision of community life and creation is most vital for urban evangelicals. For all the things we do well, I’m not convinced that we know how to live as communities of worshipers day to day. Enter Port William.

What I see in Berry, and what I’ve been learning to live out, little by little, is the centrality of worship to personal and communal health. By that I mean something like one of Clyde Kilby’s resolutions for mental health: “At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.”

Peters points out the importance of shared liturgy to the identity and unity of Anglicanism. Meador points in a different direction–to the fact that worship occurs in particular contexts and that it flows out of particular experiences.

Now I’m not much of a Calvinist, but I do think there is some truth in the Westminster Confession’s statement that our “chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Surely glorifying God includes worship.

“dreaming a new church into being” –and the Diocese of South Carolina

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The official word is that the Title IV Disciplinary Board has certified that Bishop Mark Lawrence of the Diocese of South Carolina has “abandoned” the Episcopal Church. The news article is here. Crusty Old Dean provides background on the notion of abandonment. He also points out that we’ve all seen it coming but no one seemed able to prevent it.

And now the war of words escalates.  Mark Harris asks Bishop Lawrence to admit he lied during the process that led to his consecration as bishop. The Episcopal Lead assembles the evidence pro and contra. The Diocese of South Carolina cries foul and criticizes the “assault” on their bishop.

I find it interesting that these events are taking place this week against a backdrop of the first meeting of TEC’s Executive Council after General Convention 2012. There were also stories about the work that took place this week: conversations about budget, mission, and restructuring. All of that talk about “putting everything on the table,” the end of Christendom, imagining a new way way of being church for the twenty-first century.

Ah, that word–restructuring. It seems to me that here is a prime opportunity to think creatively about structure, the way we do business, and imagining what a twenty-first century Episcopal Church might look like.

Here’s my question. Why not let the Diocese of South Carolina go? It’s been clear for at least a decade that they don’t want to be part of the Episcopal Church. Their recent actions suggest the plan is to incorporate as a separate denomination (The Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of South Carolina).

What’s coming next is years of litigation, increased acrimony, conflict played out in the press. The lawyers will make money; bloggers will get lots of website hits; there will be anger, pain, and bad publicity all around.

So why not stop it all now? Why not imagine what a church would be like that could allow those who want out to go, leaving behind all of those who want to remain in the Episcopal Church? Let them have their property and go their separate way. And after they go, let’s imagine what an Episcopal mission might look like in the low country of South Carolina–an Episcopal mission freed from the oppressive traditions of slavery, racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

Why not put our limited resources toward that vision of a future church rather than paying lawyers and fighting to hold on to a vision of an eighteenth or nineteenth century Church?

South Carolina secedes!

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Curious that the only story about this comes from the Diocese of South Carolina’s website:

On Monday, October 15, 2012, Bishop Mark J. Lawrence, the 14th Bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina was notified by the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, that on September 18, 2012 the Disciplinary Board for Bishops  had certified his abandonment of The Episcopal Church. This action by The Episcopal Church triggered two pre-existing corporate resolutions of the Diocese, which simultaneously disaffiliated the Diocese from The Episcopal Church and called a Special Convention. That Convention will be held at St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, on Saturday, November 17, 2012.

I wonder when the story will hit the Episcowebs.

“Full and Empty:”James Wood on the 350th Anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer

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The 1662 edition, that is. But Wood’s focus is on the genius of Cranmer. He also discusses the lingering influence of the BCP on English writers, including Austen and Woolf:

For Austen, belief was stable enough so that the liturgy could be mocked, fondly and without danger, exactly as a silly vicar could be safely made fun of. Both Woolf and Beckett approach Cranmer’s words without easy mockery but with something closer to reverent irony. Yet they both use the language of the Prayer Book to enact prayers that have no hope of answer: at best, we are “vouchsafed” something, but cannot say what it is. The words persist, but the belief they vouchsafe has long gone. A loss, one supposes—and yet, paradoxically, the words are, in the absence of belief, as richly usable as they were three hundred and fifty years ago. All at once, it seems, they are full and empty. They comfort, disappoint, haunt, irritate, disappear, linger.

Other reflections on the anniversary and the significance of the BCP for culture, language, literature include James Fallows in The Atlantic and Daniel Swift on Huffington Post.

Breathing life into Diocesan Convention?

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Yesterday, the 165th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee met. Details of the gathering are here.

There were two resolutions: one a change to the canons to permit vestries of six members; the other the annual minimum compensation for clergy. Neither elicited any debate. There were only two contested elections (for a lay member of Executive Committee, and for a clergy slot on Standing Committee).

I wasn’t able to stay for the discussion of the budget but from my twitter feed, it seems that there was little debate on that. In fact, a newcomer to the diocese observed that the explanation of the rules for debate took up more time than the debate itself. It’s as if we were going through the motions–doing things that needed to be done without any energy or excitement.

The only time it seemed the room began to fill with ideas and energy was as we talked around our tables about three questions Bishop Miller gave us at the end of his address. Here they are:

How is your congregation experiencing new life?
How do we, continually ourselves and others to see the new life God is calling forth and deepen our relationship with God?
How can diocesan structures and ministries help you in these efforts?

The questions were oriented toward the diocese’s ongoing strategic planning process in which I participate as a member of the task force.

It got me thinking, though. We’ve been talking a great deal about restructuring the church, on the congregation, diocesan, and church-wide level. Diocesan conventions seem ripe for complete rethinking. Every year, several hundred of the most committed Episcopalian Christians gather in each diocese to elect members to various bodies, debate resolutions, and pass budgets. I’ve never met anyone who said they love the business session of a convention. We do it because we have to do it, because we can’t imagine another way of doing it. But here we are, several hundred of us, gathered to work and worship. We hang out together, rekindle relationships, make new friends. How might we use our time together more effectively: for teaching and learning, for asking big questions and hearing about new initiatives? For praying? Studying the Bible? Instead, we go through the motions of doing business. In our diocese, we hear the Bishop twice, preaching the sermon during the Eucharist and his pastoral address during the business session. Instead of listening, how might we foster more conversation, dialogue, and listen for the movement of the Holy Spirit?

Here’s Bishop Miller’s Pastoral Address to the convention.

Bishops behaving badly: Civil War Edition

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On the NYTimes Opinionator, a profile of Leonidas Polk. In Sewanee, I knew him as the Battling Bishop, but the Opinionator calls him the Fighting Bishop. Either way, he was apparently one of the worst generals in the Confederate Army.

A graduate of West Point, he attended Virginia Theological Seminary and was first the Missionary Bishop of the Southwest, then the first Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana. The article notes the important role he played in founding The University of the South

His portrait hangs (I assume still) in Convocation Hall of the University of the South:

Of his military skills, one historian wrote:

In his history of the Army of Tennessee, Thomas Connelly condemned Polk’s “remarkable ability to evade the blame for situations that were the result of … flaws in his character.” Polk, Connelly claimed, could be “stubborn, aloof, insubordinate, quarrelsome, and childish.” He was, put simply, “the most dangerous man in the Army of Tennessee.”

No word in the article about his skills or gifts as a bishop.