Category Archives: Grace Church

Is this your car? “Paper-Cut” Racism in Madison

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Yesterday, we began a conversation about race and racism at Grace Church. Today, Paul Fanlund of the Capital Times wrote a piece about the little indignities African-Americans encounter in their daily lives in Madison. It confirms some of what we heard yesterday.

Grace is blessed to include among our active membership a number of people of color, several of whom participated in the conversation. We began by talking about white privilege and as is often the case, there was some pushback about the concept. But as we listened, we heard some heartbreaking and shocking stories about the treatment of children of color in the schools.

But one of the most emotional moments was when one man asked us, “What does the police officer ask you when he pulls you over in a traffic stop?”

We responded, “May I see your driver’s license and registration?”

“No,” he said. “I’m always asked, ‘Is this your car?'”

That anecdote hit home for us the vast gulf separating the experience of whites and people of color in Madison and Dane County. To be treated suspiciously in virtually every encounter with authority is not just an irritation, it is an attack on one’s self-esteem and reinforces the powerlessness and despair people of color face.

The little indignities experienced on a daily basis are more than a nuisance. They are a daily reminder that people of color, African-Americans, live in a culture in which they can never feel truly at home.

At Grace, as we seek to participate in our community’s conversation around racism and efforts to create a more just community, it is important to begin by listening to the experience of the people of color who are part of our congregation. By acknowledging their voices and hearing their stories, we help to create in our midst the beloved community called into being by Jesus Christ. My hope that even as we reach out to engage others, especially the broader African-American community, we will deepen our ties and common life and serve as a model for others.

 

Resources on Racism in Madison and the US

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In our adult forum today, we’re joining the conversation about racism and inequity that has been taking place in Madison and across the country over the last year. I’m posting here some resources that might help us think about these issues in our own lives and in our community.

First of all, white privilege. Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” introduced the term: white-privilege

Second,the conversation was jumpstarted in Madison by an article by the Rev. Alex Gee, Jr. That is available here. In the year since its publications, Gee has formed a new orgnizationt, Justified Anger, that seeks to keep issues of race and inequity at the center of our political and cultural life in Madison.

About the same time that this conversation began, the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families released its Race to Equity Report that provided a shocking look at racial disparities in Dane County, WI (where Madison is located). The report is available for download here: WCCF-R2E-Report.

Some books to read:

James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

If you’ve never read it, or if you haven’t read it recently, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a powerful challenge to whites, especially white Christians, who criticized the nonviolent protests and boycotts in Birmingham in 1963. More than fifty years later, in the wake of Ferguson and Eric Garner, its words retain their power and are as relevant as ever. Read it here: king

 

Torn-Apart Heavens: A Sermon for the Baptism of Our Lord, 2015

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Today is an exciting day in the one hundred and seventy five year history of Grace Church. It is also a day tinged with just a little bit of sadness and regret. We are celebrating the success of our Giving Light Giving Hope capital campaign that has raised nearly a million dollars and laid the foundation for renovations to our spaces that will equip us to engage in mission and ministry in the coming decades of our rapidly changing world. Continue reading →

Metanoiete! A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

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I want to begin today by painting two images for you. The first is from last Monday. It was MLK Day; the Central library and most of the other social service agencies that serve homeless people were closed in observation of the holiday. After a scramble the week before, I offered Grace Church as space, and staff from First Methodist, Bethel Lutheran, several other agencies, and a team of volunteers offered their support. Over the course of the day, more than 120 people signed in. They received food, coffee, some fellowship. There were all ages. A beautiful little girl, a toddler, blonde hair, was with her mother. She ran around the room, quite at ease as so many of the others there knew her. There were elderly men there, disabled, blind. Continue reading →

A man died on the steps of Grace Church Sunday night

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Sunday night, a homeless man died on the steps just outside the entrance to the Men’s Drop-In Shelter. I don’t know much more than that. Apparently he had left Grace to go to one of the overflow shelters to spend the night. I don’t know what the cause of death was. I don’t know if his death was at all related to the brutally cold weather. I don’t know if others have died already in this brutal cold.

I blogged last week about last-minute scrambling to make sure there were facilities open during the day on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. On Sunday, Porchlight adjusted their hours so that men could stay indoors until the Central Library opened at 1 pm. And yesterday, provisions were made by the County and by Porchlight to provide transportation between the shelter at Grace (where intake occurs, meals are provided, and there are shower and laundry facilities) and the two overflow shelters at St. John’s Lutheran and First United Methodist Church.

Yesterday was the first Monday of the month, Grace’s night to provide the meal for shelter guests and other community people. Because of the cold and worries about transportation for our volunteers, we made alternative arrangements to serve the meal down in the shelter. The menu was already less elaborate than we usually like to provide. The guys had pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw and chips. Our sexton Russ was the chef.

Volunteers and advocates had spent a couple of days visiting remote campsites to urge people to seek shelter and providing additional supplies for those who declined to move. Most of us worry that people will die either at campsites like that, or in the cars where some live. We assume that if they come to the shelters, they will survive the cold weather. But lSunday, someone who came to the Drop-In Shelter died on the doorstep outside.

Our immediate tendency is to want to place blame when deaths like this occur. Why does Porchlight operate its shelters in this way? Why didn’t the city or county prepare better for the cold weather that had been predicted for a week? If transportation had been provided, would this man have survived?

These are hard questions and need to be asked. But there’s an even more uncomfortable question that needs to be asked, not of social service agencies or city and county government. It’s the question we need to ask ourselves as a community. Why do we lack adequate facilities for the neediest people among us? Why do we lack a men’s shelter that provides adequate space for all who need it? Why do we lack a permanent day center that offers the full array of services needed by homeless people?

And there’s a question I need to ask myself. I received an email from a homeless advocate Sunday afternoon asking if I knew of special provisions for transportation between Grace and the overflow shelters. My response was simply, “I’m not in the loop on this.” If I had pursued it; if I had contacted Porchlight staff, government officials, other advocates, could I have helped prevent that death? Even if the death was completely unrelated to the cold weather, someone died at Grace–alone, uncomforted, on a cold night. That should never happen.

In addition, Brenda Konkel drew my attention to this report from the National Coalition for the Homeless that surveyed what communities do in the winter and offers recommendations for best practices. There’s a lot in the document we can learn from, especially the recommendation to have a plan in place well before the onset of winter.

On December 30, many of us received a request from the county asking whether we might be able to open our churches because of the lack of facilities open on New Year’s Eve and Day. On Sunday afternoon, advocates scrambled to provide for transportation between the shelters and Monday afternoon, the County finally made that happen for Monday night and Tuesday. New Year’s comes every year and every winter sees severe weather. How hard would it be to prepare a severe weather plan in advance and publicize it widely so people know what will happen?

Conversations about Same Gender Blessings in the Diocese of Milwaukee (update)

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In November, I posted about the Diocesan Standing Committee’s survey of vestries and clergy. You can read about that here. 

We held a meeting at Grace on November 19. Here’s the letter of explanation I sent to the parish: letteronssbs. About thirty people attended the meeting that was marked by lively conversation and careful listening. The vestry and I sent our separate responses to the Standing Committee after the December vestry meeting. That was all we were asked to do. However, at the November meeting, most of the participants urged that Grace Church make some sort of public statement about our commitment to the full inclusion of LGBT Christians in our congregation and our desire to support their loving and life-giving relationships with the church’s blessing and the congregation’s support and care.

I prepared a draft statement, distributed it to everyone who attended the meeting in November (as well as several who were unable to attend but expressed interest) and to the vestry. We discussed that document at our December meeting as well. I proposed that we have a second meeting where we might discuss the draft statement as well as the next steps we might take. The statement includes the following paragraphs:

There are at least two important reasons for making such a statement. First is a common misconception in our culture that Christianity stands for intolerance and bigotry and that contemporary Christians are united in their strong opposition to LGBT people living out their lives with openness and integrity. The second is that our silence obscures our commitment to the full inclusion of all people in the life of our congregation and our desire to offer the church’s blessing to same-sex couples.

 

Our silence on this issue means that many Christians and seekers might wonder where we stand. They might not know whether they are welcome to join us for worship or become members of our congregation. Our silence means that our effort to share the love of God in Jesus Christ may be ignored or unnoticed by many of those who are seeking God. Our silence means that LGBT Christians who have been members of Grace may not feel fully welcome or full members of the Body of Christ.

 

We know that many LGBT people have been deeply wounded by communities of faith that have rejected, denounced, or ignored them. We hope that by speaking out we may extend God’s love to people who need it, that through our witness, we may comfort the broken-hearted and help to heal wounds. Our public statement might be a word of hope to someone in despair.

 

Even as we express publicly our commitment to welcome and include all people in our common life and shared faith, we acknowledge that there are some among us who have different views. There are some who struggle to understand how the full inclusion of LGBT people is warranted by scripture, tradition, and reason, the three sources of Anglican and Episcopal theology. We want to emphasize as strongly as possible that the inclusion of LGBT people does not mean the exclusion of anyone else. As St. Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male and female.” We believe that Christ calls us to embody an inclusive community of differing views and perspectives, united by our shared experience of Christ’s love and our coming together as one body in the Eucharistic feast. By modeling that inclusion, we may be a witness of God’s love and God’s beloved community in our deeply divided culture.

 

The entire document is available here: LGBTstatement_revised_01062014

This is a draft and will likely undergo some revision. In addition, we have not decided how the document will be signed: by the Rector, Wardens, and Vestry? By individual members? By a combination of both?

Badgers, Gamecocks, and Episcopalians

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The University of Wisconsin and the University of South Carolina will meet for the first time on the gridiron in the Capital One Bowl on New Year’s Day. No doubt there are many connections between the two universities but their football teams share at least one connection, the Rev. Hope Henry Lumpkin, who played for the Gamecocks (he graduated in 1904). Lumpkin was an assistant coach for the Badgers in the 1920s while also serving as Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison.

A graduate of the School of Theology at Sewanee, Rev. Lumpkin served parishes in SC and then went as a missionary to Alaska in 1914. He became rector of Grace in 1920. He took ill in 1931, apparently caused in part by exhaustion. In the summer of 1932, he returned to Columbia, SC, where he died on October 11.

Coincidentally, I came to Grace Church, Madison from Greenville South Carolina in 2009 where I was neither a South Carolina or a Clemson fan and the only college football game I’ve ever attended was between UW and Wofford College which is located in Spartanburg, SC, where I lived for several years.

I’m quite confident that many more Episcopalians will be rooting for the Gamecocks than for the Badgers on New Year’s Day but perhaps we can join in a toast to the memory of Hope Henry Lumpkin, who is described in a history of Grace as:

a man of rare and varied talents; an orator of exceptional gifts, the possessor of a beautiful tenor voice and a speaking voice of great sweetness; he could play the piano, draw, paint, write poetry, and preach a wonderfully uplifting sermon

All that, and a football coach, too!

Rector’s Annual Report

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This is the fifth time I have come before you at Annual Meeting to give a report. I wonder whether that is as surprising to you as it is to me. In some respects, it seems like only a few days ago that I first walked through the doors of Grace Church; in other ways, it seems like we’ve been working and worshiping together for a very long time. Grace Church will celebrate the 175th anniversary of its organization as a parish in the coming year, and seen from that perspective, my tenure as rector is barely worth mention in our parish’s history. Historical perspective is always humbling.

In many ways, the past year has been consumed with work around the master plan. Later in today’s meeting, you will receive an update on where we are at—many of you have already had a chance to look at the revised plans for a first phase of renovations. We will also hear about the feasibility study for a Capital Campaign that will take place in the coming weeks. Throughout this process, I have challenged us to view any renovations in light of our mission here on Capitol Square. Even more important, we should be asking how our plans might help people in Madison, our friends, neighbors, and strangers, to connect with God, to encounter the sacred, and to develop and deepen their relationships with Jesus Christ. This is evangelism, even if most Episcopalians think that’s a dirty word. It might seem odd to think about our building as a tool for evangelism, but by opening our doors to the community, we are also opening up the possibility of conversations about God and encounters with God.

Evangelism has to be about more than opening our doors. It begins when we go outside our walls and into the community. When I stand outside on the corner before services, I do it to greet you as you enter; but I also greet those who are walking toward other destinations. On Ash Wednesday, when I offer to put ashes on the foreheads of passers-by, I am inviting them to think about the sacred in the midst of their daily routine, to encounter the divine in the middle of their day, in the middle of their week. I am inviting them to ponder time and eternity. When I walk into a coffee shop and the barrista asks me if I am an Episcopal priest, I invite her to enter into a conversation about where she is now, where she came from, and how her life now might be a place where she experiences the love of God. I cite these examples not in order  to invite you to think about how the encounters you have each day, how your daily routine might be a place where your friends, acquaintances, and coworkers might experience the love and grace of God.

A couple of weeks ago, a parishioner told me about a conversation he’d recently had with a co-worker. He was asked, “So, you’re a pretty smart guy, you’ve got it together, why do you go to church?” And he didn’t know what to say in reply. No doubt some of you could share similar stories; some of you might even say that your co-workers, your friends, don’t know you go to church. Now there are several reasons for this. One is that there are large portions of our culture for which Christianity is meaningless. They have no idea why one might go to church. Even worse, if Christianity does mean anything, it means narrow-mindedness, religious and political conservatives, opponents of LGBT inclusion, gay marriage, and the like. In our context, it’s very difficult to know what to say, how to talk about our faith when we’re not sure how it will be heard or whether we’ll be understood. Let’s work together in the coming year on becoming more open to talking about our faith, more open to asking the hard questions, and inviting others to explore those questions with us.

One of the things that has struck me about Grace’s uniqueness is the presence among us every Sunday of people who are visiting for the first time, or perhaps second or third. Even last week, when many of you stayed away because of the Marathon, there were people at both 8:00 and at 10:00 who were relative, or absolute newcomers. Some Sundays, especially in the summers, I’d guess that up to 20% of our 10:00 attendance are people who are unknown to me. That’s quite remarkable. Now, many of those who visit us are here for a short time—the weekend, a business trip, what have you. Many others are trying us out or have come because there’s something going on in their lives that makes them want to attend services, seeking God. We do a pretty good job welcoming visitors. Some of you have taken responsibility to seek out unfamiliar faces, introduce yourselves, and engage in conversation. What we’re less effective at is bringing visitors into our community. We struggle at incorporating those new people into the body of Christ. In the coming year, I hope to make this a priority for the new vestry and I also encourage you, if this is something that you’re interested in, to contact me about how you might get involved.

Outside our doors is another immense opportunity. The thousands of young adults who make Madison their home, college students, of course, but also grad students, young people who have chosen to make Madison their home because of its opportunities for interesting work, outdoor activities, and vibrant culture. I’ve probably mentioned this age group in every annual report. They weigh heavy on my heart because I believe that Grace can offer young adults a rich spiritual life, opportunities for outreach, and connections with other demographic groups that are rewarding and fulfilling. I’m calling on those of you who share this passion to work with me on developing new opportunities for worship and community that would focus on young adults.

The entire report is available here: Annual Report_2013

Stressed-Out Jesus: A Sermon for Proper 15, Year C

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What glorious summer weather we’ve been having the last few weeks! Corrie and I have been taking advantage of it, with gardening, long summer evenings on our screened-in porch. We’ve enjoyed the Union Terrace on a couple of Friday evenings. And I’ve written most of my sermons in my Amish rocking chair on the porch with its view of a riotous garden growing out of control. The weather and the fact that summer brings with it a somewhat slower pace, seems to lower stress levels and anxiety. But the arrival of August 15, and move-in day means that school, and the fall, and all its busy-ness are just around the corner. I hope the weather stays cool so I can continue to enjoy my evenings on the porch. Continue reading →

Are millennials really all that different from the rest of us (at least when it comes to church)?

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In part 2 of her blog posts at CNN, Rachel Held Evans tells us (and millennials) why they still need the church. Guess what! It’s all about community and the sacraments! She links to some other responses to her earlier piece here.

Yesterday, Richard Beck asked, “What does Rachel Held Evans want?” His answer:

So what does she want? Let me try to put it this way, and I’m just guessing with this. I think what Rachel wants is what a lot of us want. We want a mainline theological and social sensibility combined with an evangelical church expression.

In short, a progressive vision of the evangelical church.

That got me thinking back to my own experience as a baby boomer (and a Mennonite, which did not quite fit the Evangelical camp back in those days). My disaffection with the church began when I was a teenager. In college, there was a term I took a shift in the dining hall on Sunday mornings so I wouldn’t submit to the temptation of going to church (where I would inevitably be disappointed by everything except the hymns).

In Divinity School, my friends and I joked that the Mennonite congregation in town was more like Mennonites Anonymous than the Body of Christ (but we still sang with gusto and emotion). Reading Beck reminded me of why I left the Mennonite Church, and why it took so long for me to make the final break. I was formed by that community, its worship, theology, and ethics, but there came a point where I could no longer find a home in it. I had changed theologically, having discovered the great treasure of Christian theology and spirituality from across the whole of the Christian tradition.

I recently was asked by an old Mennonite friend as we were talking about the decline of Christianity in the US and the struggles in the Episcopal Church, if I regretted having become Episcopalian and become a priest. I’m not sure what precisely I said in response, perhaps that I had no choice in the matter. I should have said that I find God’s grace in the sacraments, that the Book of Common Prayer has shaped my experience of Jesus Christ, and that in the local parish, and in the institutional church, I can still discern God’s grace at work.

Still, I hold my commitment to the institution of the Episcopal Church very lightly. I’m not interested in its long-term survival (except for the Church Pension Fund, of course). What I am committed to is the vision of Christianity expressed by Anglicanism. I believe that vision will survive and can thrive in other institutional forms than those that currently exist. I also believe that we can provide a place where people encounter the love of Jesus Christ and the grace of God in life-changing ways. That’s why I’m a priest.

We have certainly seen a transformation in the way individuals relate to institutions in the last fifty years. It began with baby boomers but has accelerated in subsequent generations. Still, most humans will always seek community of some sort as well as a deeper purpose or meaning in life. What’s changed is that churches are no longer assumed to be the primary places where individuals might seek or find those things. There are other places to go, other ways of connecting with people. As an essay I pointed to earlier this week argues, with more and more people raised as non-religious by religiously unaffiliated parents, many might not imagine that the church, any church, is relevant to their lives and their journeys.

It’s likely that young adults today in and the immediate future will be as lightly committed to local congregations or religious communities as I am to the institutional church beyond my parish. I’m already seeing that to some degree at Grace with many young adults attending regularly or semi-regularly but developing no relationships with others in the congregation. That’s not always the case, not even the majority. And I don’t mean this by way of criticism. Young adults may connect with the sacred and with God at Grace. Some of them may be searching for community elsewhere; perhaps they’ll be surprised by God’s grace and find it among us.

Sometimes the rest of us do too; and sometimes we’re as surprised to find God’s grace here as we are to find connection with other humans.