Thinking with the Church–Some reflections on the Pope’s Interview

Posted on September 20, 2013 by djgrieser

The internet and Christianity are abuzz with the interview Pope Francis gave with Jesuit publications.

What surprised me most was not the soundbytes pulled out by reporters about the hot-button issues but rather the thoroughly Ignatian tone of the entire piece. Pope Francis is not just remaking the Church and the Papacy, he is bringing to the fore the Jesuit mode of proceeding. His talk of discernment, his humility and simplicity, his approach to spirituality and prayer, his demeanor all point to his Jesuit background.

But at the same time as he is revolutionizing the Church, he is also revolutionizing the Ignatian tradition. There is no better example of that than in the section of the interview “Thinking with the Church.” James Martin, SJ says that what Pope Francis said here has “immense ramifications” for the Church.

Pope Francis is referring to a section appended to the Spiritual Exercises: “Rules for thinking with the Church.” Most famously, Rule 13 which reads:

To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed.

Pope Francis rewrites this rule, emphasizing that the Church is the whole people of God, not just the hierarchy, and that it is as the whole people of God that one needs to “think with the Church.”

Pope Francis:

“This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people. In turn, Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

As an aside, having taught Ignatius many times over the years, requiring students to read both the Autobiography and The Spiritual Exercises, I always struggled with students’ preconceptions about the Jesuits (“The shock troops of the Counter Reformation) and more broadly Roman Catholics. It was always a challenge to try to get them to understand the flexibility, adaptability, and moderation of the Jesuits, all of which were keys to their success in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The “Rules for Thinking with the Church” were in part Ignatius’ attempt to help later Jesuits learn from his experience. When we read, we should think white is black if that’s what the Church says, we assume the worst of the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church. A more charitable reading would be that we should submit our own reason and perspective to the long perspective and wider vision of the Church. Pope Francis, by taking “hierarchical” out of the equation, broadens the perspective still further.

The back story on how the interview came about is here.

From James Martin’s commentary:

But there is one thing of which Pope Francis is sure. In the best Jesuit tradition, which asks us to “find God in all things,” the pope speaks movingly of his commitment to finding God in every human being. That is his certainty. For me, this was the most moving part of the entire interview: “I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life…Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.”

“Discerning the Papal Interview” (From Eric Sundrup, SJ in The Jesuit Post)

There is much for all of us to ponder here. Pope Francis has had an enormous impact on the Roman Catholic Church in the few months of his papacy; he is also challenging all Christians to a more humble, careful, and discerning approach in the world.

Strategic Planning in the Diocese of Milwaukee

Posted on September 17, 2013 by djgrieser

I was one of the co-conveners of the Strategic Planning Task Force created by Bishop Miller in 2012. We completed our work earlier this year and issued a report to Diocesan Executive Council. At Clergy Day today, Bishop Miller announced that it will be the task of the Executive Council in 2014 to begin implementation of some aspects of the task force’s findings.

In this blog post, I am going to extract some paragraphs from that report. A full version of it is available here: taskforcereport_revised

From the Introduction:

As we worked together, we began to ask some hard questions of ourselves, of each other, and of Bishop Miller and diocesan staff. These conversations helped to deepen our understanding of our particular religious and cultural context. We began to delineate a series of values that we thought characterized our shared commitments as the Body of Christ in Southern Wisconsin and honored our Anglican and Episcopal roots. These conversations culminated in a values document that is included here.

There are significant challenges facing Christianity in twenty-first century America. The Episcopal Church, like other denominations, has seen significant decline in all numerical benchmarks, from membership and average Sunday attendance to financial support. In the wider context, survey after survey shows that increasing numbers of Americans no longer claim any religious affiliation (the so-called “nones”), with that percentage of the population rising to 20% in some recent polling. The number of young people without any religious affiliation is much higher, nearing 40% in a recent survey. Equally dramatic, the number of Americans claiming to be Protestant has fallen below 50% for the first time in the history of the US.

The trends in the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee reflect these larger national developments. Since 2001, total membership has declined from nearly 14,000 to around 10,000; average Sunday attendance from nearly 6,000 to 4,000. A number of our parishes are struggling financially. As population continues to shift within our region, churches that were built in 19^thor 20^th century population centers may not be well-positioned to connect with current areas of population growth that reflect contemporary lifestyle patterns.

Our tendency is to interpret these trends as a narrative of decline from a glorious past. But the history of our diocese teaches a different lesson. The Episcopal Church in Wisconsin began with the heroic efforts of Bishop Kemper to plant churches on the frontier. Lay people shared his vision and sacrificed time, energy, and financial resources that built many of the churches and institutions that now make up the Diocese of Milwaukee. Along the way, many other churches and institutions (schools, mission efforts, and the like) were founded. Some thrived for a time and died; others were transformed to meet the needs of new situations and communities. Our history is a story of innovation, creativity, and mission. It is a story of success and failure.

Our greatest challenge in thinking about the future is simply this: we lack signposts and maps that lead us forward. It is fairly easy to read the “signs of the times.” It is much less clear how we might venture into the uncharted territory of the future and create an Anglicanism that is faithful to the gospel and to our tradition and that speaks an authentic gospel clearly, convincingly, and compellingly in our new context.

What is a diocese in the twenty-first century?

We discerned in the initial stages of our conversation that the idea of “diocese” is itself a matter of considerable confusion. When we say “diocese,” do we mean the Bishop and Staff? The congregations, ministries, and entities that are the institutional forms of our life as Episcopalians? Do we mean the clergy? The lay people? Do we mean the geographical borders within which we live? Do we mean all the people who live in our area, or only the Episcopalians? Often, we use the term “diocese” to refer to Nicholson House, Bishop Miller and his staff, and use the term to distinguish between those structures and people and the local congregation.

Our current, perhaps unstated, model of the diocese is based on the life of Corporate America, with Nicholson House as the “home office” and Bishop Miller as our CEO. That model is more a reflection of twentieth-century American institution building than it is of Episcopal history, the history of the Christian Church, or indeed, of Scripture. Are there other models that are more faithful to our tradition and to scripture, and more adaptive to our current context? How can we all, clergy and laity, in all of our congregations, claim our shared identity and shared responsibility to be the Diocese of Milwaukee?

Our conversations about what we mean by “diocese” coalesced in the following mission statement:

As the body of Christ in Southern Wisconsin, the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee witnesses to the love of God in Jesus Christ through faithful, effective, and innovative ministry, carried out by congregations, clergy and laity, worshiping communities and other mission-focused ministries.

The Way Forward:

We are truly at a crossroads. The path that has brought us here is clear but we cannot turn around and retrace our steps. Looking ahead, in one direction lies a clear road, a journey of decline, irrelevance, and ultimately death. We have resources adequate to oversee quiet and comfortable internments of most of our congregations and ministries, in five, ten, or twenty years. Some may be able to hold out longer but their ends are assured as well.

But we have a choice. In another direction lies an uncharted path, full of possible dangers and completely unknown. The Christian Church, Anglicanism, the Episcopal Church have all faced such crossroads in the past. We are here today because our fore-parents chose the path into the unknown, leaving behind the comfort and certainty of past and present for an unknown, uncharted, and challenging future. We are faithful to their legacy only if we repeat their choice. If we do so, we will be like Jesus’ first disciples who instead of wallowing in fear and sadness when he departed them, obeyed his command to

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Mt. 28:19-20)

Task Force Recommendations:

Every member and entity of the Diocese must recognize that together we make up the Body of Christ in this area. As Paul writes in I Corinthians 12:20-21: “As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’.” The strong must support the weak, and the weak should not reject help that is offered to them.

The Executive Council will accept responsibility for working with challenged parishes to identify current problems and begin thinking about more effective approaches. The financial stability of some congregations increases the urgency of this task.

The Bishop, Diocesan staff, and leadership will encourage and engage in innovative and creative new ministry initiatives.

The Executive Council, with the assistance of Diocesan staff, will develop and promote methods by which two, three or more parishes and entities may join to do ministry in a collaborative fashion.

The Bishop, Diocesan staff and Executive Council will to creating an atmosphere of trust, collegiality and teamwork as it works with all parishes on these issues.

The Diocese will commit to developing effective communications between Diocesan offices and congregations and among congregations, clergy, and laity.

The Bishop, staff, lay and clergy leadership will commit to learning from, sharing with, and encouraging conversations with other dioceses engaged in re-imagining and innovating ministries in our changing cultural contexts.

God Seeks Sinners, not Saints: A Sermon for Proper 19, Year C

Posted on September 15, 2013 by djgrieser

The Rev. Thomas Ferguson, Dean of Bexley Seabury, an Episcopal educational center in the Midwest, preached this morning at Grace Church. Here’s what he said.

It’s a pleasure to be back in the great city of Madison, which my wife and I called home for five wonderful years. My wife Shannon served as director of Christian formation for the diocese of Milwaukee, including running summer camps at camp webb, and I was interim chaplain for a time at St Francis House, the chaplaincy at UW Madison. Continue reading →

Thank You, Mr. Mayor!

Posted on September 14, 2013 by djgrieser

I’ll admit I’ve been critical of Mayor Soglin’s statements and policies regarding homelessness. At times, it has seemed that he has wanted to avoid the issue entirely or evade the city’s share of responsibility to address homelessness and the underlying issues that contribute to it. In recent weeks, however, he has seemed to have something of a change of heart.

The inclusion in the city’s capital budget of money towards the construction of up to 100 units of single room occupancy for homeless or recently homeless people is a very important step. With a rental occupancy rate of around 2%, there are simply not enough vacant units to house people in Madison and little incentive for landlords to rent to low-income people.

Even more encouraging is what happened yesterday. Mayor Soglin involved himself personally in the plight of a homeless family. After seeing them at a bus stop on his way to work, Mayor Soglin went to the office, turned around, and spent considerable time ferrying them to various agencies in an effort to find them housing. The article is here.

He learned first-hand about the limited services available and about how difficult it is to access those services. These are things those of us who work with homeless people know all too well. Indeed, the family Mayor Soglin worked with yesterday had stopped by Grace earlier in the week. He also probably experienced the frustration and anguish many of us do when our efforts to find housing or other help fail.

Of course, the city can’t solve the problem of homelessness by itself but it needs to engage constructively with the county, with social services, and with advocates to address both the lack of housing as well as the underlying reasons that contribute to homelessness.

I’m grateful to Mayor Soglin for his pledge to address these issues, and for taking the time to get to know and to try to help a homeless family yesterday.

The shelter system and the prison system

Posted on September 13, 2013 by djgrieser

A really fine article by Pat Schneider on the direct line from the prison system to the homeless shelter.

Linda Ketcham, executive director of Madison-area Urban Ministry, a nonprofit agency that assists criminal offenders returning to the community, estimates that 75 to 80 percent of people her agency assists in its offender “re-entry” programs are homeless. “The shelter system is the only option“ for many of them, she said.

I’ve blogged about this before here. I can confirm several points in the article. I know that guys come straight from the parole office to the shelter. I know that sex offenders that are released to their own communities come to Madison because there’s no place for them back home.

I remember several years ago a young man, a teenager, brought by corrections officials to the shelter from whatever prison he’d been in elsewhere in the state. His parents came down too. They wanted to know about the shelter, how he would fare, what would happen to him. For whatever reason, he wasn’t released to them. What I remember most about him was the look of fear on his face. Whatever he’d faced in prison was nothing like the uncertainty he was facing now. I have no idea what happened to him.

His reaction is quite common among those I’ve talked to who have just been released from prison. They’re facing incredible odds in their efforts to put their lives back together. In addition to all the social services they need, they also need a support system to help them, to encourage them, and to offer a helping hand when they make mistakes. Instead, they come to the shelter where they’re anonymous, where they’re surrounded by people who may or may not want to help them, and where access to the services they need is a maze in a city they probably don’t know.

The re-entry program run by MUM mentioned in the article does amazing things.

Grace Church: A Transient Hotel with a Steeple

Posted on September 9, 2013 by djgrieser

The author of a recent letter to the editor published in the Wisconsin State Journal was intending to be witty, sarcastic, even bitingly critical when he described Grace Church in that way. I doubt he had any clue that it’s an apt description of a church. St. Augustine of Hippo referred to the church as a hospital for sinners and interpreted the inn in the parable of the Good Samaritan as the church where peoples’ sins and wounds are healed. In the letter to the Hebrews, the Christian life is described repeatedly as a sojourn in a foreign country. Christians are homeless in this world, yearning for our eternal home.

Of course, the letter’s author wasn’t referring to spiritual homelessness. He was referring to the fact that since 1984, Grace Church has opened its doors to the homeless.

Why is the men’s shelter at Grace Church? One answer is that there’s nowhere else. The shelter opened its doors on a one-year trial basis in 1984. The need is as great now as it was then and over the years no alternative location has been found.

There’s another reason it’s at Grace. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells a parable of judgment in which the righteous are rewarded because they clothed the naked, fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger. The righteous asked when they had done those things to him and the king replies, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”

Like millions of other Christians in Madison and around the world, we shelter the homeless and we feed the hungry because in their faces we see the face of Jesus Christ.

Maybe we should make it our new motto: “Grace Church, A Transient Hotel with a Steeple.”

“Or what king, going out to wage war…” A Sermon for Proper 18, Year C

Posted on September 8, 2013 by djgrieser

“Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.” Continue reading →

A Benediction by and for Robert Farrar Capon

Posted on September 7, 2013 by djgrieser

I wish you well. May your table be graced with lovely women and good men. May you drink well enough to drown the envy of youth in the satisfactions of maturity. May your men wear their weight with pride, secure in the knowledge that they have at last become considerable. May they rejoice that they will never again be taken for callow, black-haired boys. And your women? Ah! Women are like cheese strudels. When first baked, they are crisp and fresh on the outside, but the filling is unsettled and indigestible; in age, the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling comes at last into its won. May you relish them indeed. May we all sit long enough for reserved to give way to ribaldry and for gallantry to grow upon us. May there be singing at our table before the night is done, and old, broad jokes to fling at the stars and tell them we are men.

We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot. Ecce tu pulcher es, dilecte mi, et decorus. Lectulus noster floridus. Tigna domorum nostrarum cedrina, laquearia nostra cypressina. Ecce iste venit, saliens in montibus, transilens colles. [Behold, you are beautiful, my love, and fair. Our bed is blooming. The beams of our house are cedar, the ceiling is cypress. Behold, he is coming, leaping over the mountains, jumping across the hills. (From the Song of Solomon) — RD]

Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world, but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them all by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts — for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem.

Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He makes all things new, Our Last Home will be home indeed.

from The Supper of the Lamb. Thanks to Rod Dreher

Curioser and Curioser (about that fishy smell in the Episcopal Church)

Posted on September 6, 2013 by djgrieser

I’ve got no particular insight or perspective into this story, except as a loyal Episcopal priest who has overseen UTO ingatherings in two parishes, and has been proud to be able to say that almost every penny goes to mission. But when my wife read my post, she pointed out the historical perspective. The UTO is one of those institutions that developed because women were locked out of power and mission in American Protestant Christianity in the 19th century and that its independence was fiercely guarded in part because of that history. She also pointed out that one of the first targets when the fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s was the Women’s Missionary Union, which like the UTO was largely independent of other Baptist structures.

The Presiding Bishop is attempting to calm the waters.

But some folks are not having any of it. Elizabeth Kaeton and Ann Fontaine have both provided personal stories related to the UTO and their concerns about these recent events.

From Ann Fontaine:

Overall it moves total control to the Chief Operating Officer of the Episcopal Church with a small advisory role for the “Board,” where is the participation by UTO in the granting process? in communications? in any oversight of monies given to UTO?

It removes references to the main goal of heightening awareness of gratitude in our lives, it no longer has any relationship to the Episcopal Church Women (primary supporters of this ministry),

It removes the UTO role in development of materials and training local UTO coordinators, though the report to General Convention encouraged a continuing autonomy for UTO with interdependence – this removes all autonomy.

From Elizabeth Kaeton:

Many questions remain, these two among them:

1. How does the Memorandum of Understanding between DFMS and EWC/UTO embody the “creative tension” between the “increasing regulatory” function of DFMS and the “visionary, autonomous grassroots” function of UTO/ECW and be both/and: “autonomous but interdependent”? (INC-055 Ad-Hoc Committee on the Study of the United Thank Offering, GC 2012. If you haven’t read it, please do.)

2. What is contained in that Memorandum which caused 4 women – intelligent, educated women who are passionate about and dedicated to the mission of the Gospel – to resign because they believed that they needed to follow the high calling of being “whistle blowers”?

I agree that speculation holds with it the potential to be non-productive and dangerous. The primary danger, of course, is to those who benefit by not providing evidence.

I am still chilled by the knowledge that the conversations concerning the historic, autonomous, missionary leadership of women (UTO/ECW) becoming more a part of the “increasingly regulatory” body of DFMS had to be had with a group of 4 representatives from DFMS (3 of whom were men) under a signed agreement of confidentiality. And yet, the words “accountability” and “transparency” are being bandied about as somehow meaningful.

I understand. That may be “business as usual,” but when you are talking about the historic autonomy of women (which came about because women were excluded from leadership in existing church structures), and removing direct decision making and control over the money they raise, well, it just doesn’t bode well – especially in the church.

On this one, I’m with Ann and Elizabeth.

Robert Farrar Capon, 1925-2013