Tag Archives: sacred space

Radical Hospitality, Radical Mission

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Yesterday was a remarkable day at Grace Church. On an August Sunday, two weeks before the start of school, we had attendance that rivaled our average Sunday attendance. There were visitors from out of town as well as newcomers and church shoppers. There were also visitors from other Episcopal churches who joined us before participating in the Capitol Pride march.

After our 8:00 and 10:00 services, we introduced members and visitors to the master planning process on which we are about to embark and invited them to dream about the future of Grace Church, how, as I like to put it, we might become sacred space for our whole community.

While we were talking, people gathered for Capitol Pride. Some of our members joined the parade at its start; others joined after participating in the conversations we were having inside the building. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the two events. We were talking about mission in our neighborhood, while thousands gathered and marched outside. Here’s a photo from the parade (from Fred-Allen Self):

And I thought about something else, the way our building enables and limits our mission. I’m linking below to a couple of blog posts that challenge us to rethink the way we do mission or evangelism. It’s not enough to claim to be welcoming, our to assert our radical hospitality, we have to go out into the community and into the square, talk about our faith and invite people to encounter Jesus Christ with us.

Reaching Out to the Unchurched – Dr. James Emery White Christian Blog.

In today’s paper, there were probably dozens of ads for new cars.  If you read the paper, did you notice them?  It’s doubtful – unless you are in the market for a car.  (These days, it’s doubtful you even read a newspaper – but let’s play this out).

If you’re not in the market for a car, it doesn’t matter to you if a dealer is having a sale, promises a rebate, has a radio on-site broadcast, hangs out balloons, says they’re better than everyone else, promises that they will be different and not harass you or make you bargain over the price, or sends you a brochure or push email.

Why?  You’re not in the market for a car.

It’s no different with a church.  People today are divorced from seeing it as a need in their life, even when they are open to and interested in spiritual things.  They no longer tie that to the need to find a particular faith, much less a particular church.

And:

So how do you grow a church from the unchurched?

I’ll assume you know the “pray like mad” part.

Here’s step two:

Crawl underneath the hood of any growing church that is actually growing from the unchurched and you will find that the number one reason newcomers attend is because they were invited by a friend.

Churches grow from the unchurched because their members and attenders talk about it to their unchurched friends.  It comes up in their conversations like the mention of a good movie, a favorite restaurant, or a treasured vacation spot.

There is a culture of invitation.

Earlier, Scott Benhase said similar things in A Theology of Attraction:

Our churches ought to be places of pure welcome and grace. We truly ought to be communities of “radical hospitality” to the stranger.

And yet, the theology behind this practice, however right and good, has tended to mask something else that we need to acknowledge and address. For the sake of argument, I would call the theology behind the movement of “radical hospitality” a “Theology of Attraction.”

Such a theology holds that if we’re just open and welcoming enough people will naturally be attracted to us and want to come and join our churches. So, with this theology we declare that all people are welcome and we will offer them “radical hospitality” when they come into our churches.

Instead, he advocates a Theology of Mission:

We need a “Theology of Mission” like the early church had, in which modern day “apostles” (literally “ones who are sent out”) leave the friendly confines of our church buildings and go to where people are. We need to go to where people are because they are not coming to us, no matter how attractive we might be.

September 16 is Back to Church Sunday

F. Scott Fitzgerald gets religion

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The New Yorker published a Fitzgerald short story that it rejected back in 1936. In it, the BVM lights a cigarette for a corset and girdle saleswoman.

It had been a long time since she had prayed. She scarcely knew what to pray for, so she prayed for her employer, and for the clients in Des Moines and Kansas City. When she had finished praying, she knelt up. An image of the Madonna gazed down upon her from a niche, six feet above her head.

Vaguely she regarded it. Then she got up from her knees and sank back wearily in the corner of the pew. In her imagination, the Virgin came down, like in the play “The Miracle,” and took her place and sold corsets and girdles for her and was tired, just as she was. Then for a few minutes Mrs. Hanson must have slept.

All religion is local: the sacraments of space and place

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Amidst all of the back and forth over General Convention, the commentaries and the rebuttals, I came across several pieces that help to refocus our attention on what really matters. The story of mainline denominations, of Christianity in America, can be told in different ways. There are the long-term trends of course that can be detected from a birds-eye view or from a historical perspective. Such analysis has its place. Indeed, it helps us understand what’s happening in the larger world and how those larger trends are shaping our immediate experience.

But there is also the local, the particular. Many of those who responded to the weeping and gnashing of teeth pointed to experiences in parishes and in the lives of people who have been transformed by the gospel. Tip O’Neill famously quipped that “all politics is local.” In spite of the fact that the Episcopal Church is spread across sixteen countries and bound together to a greater or lesser extent with the worldwide Anglican Communion, at its heart is the local church, the congregation that meets together to worship, to celebrate the Eucharist, to love God and our neighbor. For most people, their experience of church, of being in the Body of Christ, takes place almost entirely in the local congregation. It is there that they experience and see Christ, and seek to follow him.

By focusing on the local, the incarnational, we might avoid some of the political debates that we find ourselves in. At least that’s what David Finch thinks. Writing in Christianity Today about The Sacraments of Place, he argues that Christianity in America has become more ideology than faith:

Unfortunately, the church in North America is now defined more by what we are against than who we are or what we are for. This kind of ideology happens all the time in our churches. We notice it when someone says, “Oh, that church is the Bible-preaching church—they believe in the Bible,” implying that the others don’t. “That church? They’re the gay church and that one is the church that is anti-gay. We’re the church that plants gardens and loves the environment”; and, “Oh, by the way, you’re the church of the SUVs.” On and on it goes as our churches get identified by what we are against. We get caught up in perverse enjoyments like “I am glad we’re not them!” or “See, I told you we were right!” In the process we get distracted from the fact that things haven’t really changed at all, that our lives are caught up in gamesmanship, not the work of God’s salvation in our own lives and his work (mission Dei) to save the world. This cycle of ideologization works against the church. It is short-lived and breeds an antagonistic relationship to the world. In the process we become a hostile people incapable of being the church of Jesus Christ in mission.

He argues that the remedy to ideology, both for evangelicals and progressives, is to refocus on the local:

I suggest we can do this by “going local.” We can resist the ideologizing of the church by refocusing our attention on our local contexts. In going local, we inherently refuse to organize around what we are against and instead intentionally gather to participate in God’s mission in our neighborhoods, our streets, among the people that we live our daily lives with. Here we gather not around ideas extracted from actual practice in life that we then turn into ideological banners, but around participation in the bounteous new life God has given us in Jesus Christ and his mission. We participate in his reign, the kingdom, by actually practicing the reconciliation, new creation, justice, and righteousness God is doing and made possible in Jesus Christ. Here we become a people of the gospel again. It is only by doing this that God breaks the cycle of the ideological church.

Andrew W. E. Carlson agrees. In A Sense of Place, he writes about his experience in a church on Aurora Ave in Seattle and reflects on his experience using Flannery O’Connor’s writing:

Jesus mingled with the socially demoralized, living alongside them in their present state of reality. The challenge of our work, which centers itself on that story of incarnation, is that we have to learn how to balance the neighborhood as it is with our hope for the way things one day will become. Our church community has found that committing to remain in this tension between those two ways of seeing the world is surprisingly radical. It deviates from the well-intentioned imperialist dreams of those who wish to drive out the “problems” in order to, as representatives of the city would say, “revitalize Aurora.” But one of the first things Ben clarified when he got this community in motion is that we are not out to impose our view of what a redeemed Aurora should look like, rather we’re attempting to discover that redemption together with our neighbors. Ben says we are searching for the marks of incarnation in Aurora under the assumption that, despite the general public’s perceptions, “a faithful and loving God is already at work. We simply wake up to what the Spirit is already doing.”[2]

Tripp Hudgins moves from the local space of neighborhood to the even more local space of the church building. He asks important questions:

Is architecture a worthy artform? Does it convey the Holy? Can it? Or do the present-day economics of architecture preclude a healthy faithful expression of awe, wonder, and expectation? Do these symbols (steeples, education wings, etc) actually speak of economic excess? These may be helpful questions for us to ask for they ask us whether or not our relationship with our sacred spaces is indeed ethical as Sandlin challenges us. Have we let our appreciation of beauty and wonder morph into a false sense of entitlement or (more gently) sentimentality? Are our spaces capable of serving the Risen Lord who is and was Jesus the Christ who had no place to lay his head?

I think the answers to his questions lie in the relationship of the building and the congregation that gathers in it with the neighborhood that surrounds it. How is the building “sacred space”–not just for the worshiping community, but for the whole neighborhood? How does it make the sacred present for those who walk by? How does it incarnate Jesus Christ for its neighbors?

One of the things that has struck me since becoming the Rector of Grace Church three years ago, after working and living in very different environments for many years (primarily academic communities), is the complicated relationship of an urban church to its surroundings. Grace provides an oasis of beauty to the community primarily through our garden. At the same time, our food pantry and the homeless shelter that we house provide services and occasionally an experience of the sacred to those who come to us. Many of the same people who enjoy Grace’s beauty complain about the eyesore of a line of men waiting to enter the shelter on a cold winter’s night.

One of the challenges facing us is how to make our space “sacred space” for our community and neighbors, offering a place of respite, peace, and grace in the midst of an urban landscape that is partisan battleground, instrumentalized for profit, and a playground for the wealthy and the young. Yes, it would be cheaper to do our ministry elsewhere (although where better to have a homeless shelter than in the middle of a downtown, and if not us, who would provide that space).

But we have a building that is more than 150 years old. Other churches have moved off Capitol Square over the decades, and our urban landscape is less interesting, less beautiful, poorer as a result. Those of us in urban churches have to wrestle with the question of our ministry and mission, in the context of our neighborhood, and in the context of our space.

Exciting Times: A sermon for Proper 10, Year B

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July 15, 2012

We are at an exciting time in the life of our church. It’s not just that today we are again celebrating a baptism—which we are doing. Baptisms are always wonderful joy-filled occasions when we share in the happiness of the one being baptized and her family. They are also a time when we remember other baptisms, those of our children or loved ones, for some of us, we can even remember our own baptism. They are also occasions when we recall, and reaffirm the vows we made in our baptism, when we reaffirm the baptismal covenant, which is something of a job description for Christians. Continue reading →

The importance of place

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We are working on our parish mission statement. I pointed out at a recent vestry meeting that the current version, and the drafts we are working on are disembodied, general, not particular. When we have conversations about Grace’s mission, inevitably we talk about our location, on the Capitol Square of Madison, but our location hasn’t been articulated as part of our mission. The sense of place we have has not been clearly defined for ourselves and others.

Jeremiah Sierra had a brief reflection today that addresses the “sense of place.” He talks about his sense of sacred space, memories of the scent of his church in childhood, and the nomadic existence of the church he now attends, which meets in a Zen Center in Brooklyn. He concludes:

It’s useful for every community to periodically reflect on its relationship to its place (and not simply by asking whether it is time for another capital campaign): What kind of space best serves your community? Can you use your building to nurture other worthwhile organizations? Could your community survive without its building? How is your community welcoming others into its sanctuary or parish hall?

 

Read it all here.

Craig Bartholomew has some similar things to say is working on a theology of place. Here’s an interview with him.

Among his comments:

What we are experiencing in our world is a wide sense of displacement, which does not lead to human flourishing. Outside Christian circles, the literature on the crisis of place is huge, but within Christianity, it’s only starting to get attention.

Contemporary life roots against this deep implacement through the speed of culture, technology, the automobile, and the state of economics. The middle class is always on the go through places and are not generally deeply rooted in a particular place.

 

And this:

The diagnosis is that we have lost a robust doctrine of creation. Place is rooted in the doctrine of creation. If we recover that doctrine of creation and see the wonderful redemption in Christ as God recovering his purposes for his whole creation, then suddenly all these issues—like city, home, gardening, and farming—are spiritual and thus not second-rate.

Of the several hundred thousand churches in the United States, many are property owners. Just imagine if each of these churches attended closely to their property as a place and develop it in healthy—not necessarily expensive—ways. This would make a major contribution to the commons of our culture and bear plausible witness to Christ. Just as the creation constantly declares God’s goodness and power (Psalm 19), so too our places would continually bear witness to this extraordinary God who has come to us in Christ.

Bartholomew connects the importance of place to the doctrine of creation. But it’s also a matter of the Incarnation. How do we incarnate the body of Christ in this particular place, at this time? One of the important challenges to Christianity in the present context is the rise of social media and technology which can create virtual community across wide distances. Yet ours is an embodied faith, an embodied religion, and there must be a way to express our faith concretely, and to experience the sacraments in their materiality.

Rearranging (redesigning) the church furniture

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I love the creative incongruity of the internet, which often is reflected either in my Google Reader or facebook feeds. To wit: Today two facebook friends linked to things they had written about seating in churches. Nadia Bolz-Weber has a post on Patheos about the restrictions placed on worship and community by traditional church pews. Scott Gunn highlights news that the Church of England is seeking new designs for church chairs. Gunn is having some fun at the CoE’s expense, but Bolz-Weber is completely serious as she points out the clear message sent to contemporary culture by traditional interior church architecture and design:

There is a critical “why” to the reason we do things this way that extends far beyond taste.  It’s missional.  In a postmodern context people are increasingly leery of organized religion and it’s attendant obsession with hierarchy.  We have peeked behind the curtain and seen only scared little men. So a shared, communitarian experience of liturgy in which we live as the Priesthood of all Believers is inviting in a way that the formality of the traditional church is not.  (To be clear, this is not the same as saying that we no longer need clergy – I still hold the office of Word and Sacrament but I hold it on behalf of the whole community and with their permission).  This population of urban, postmodern young-ish people have a deep critique of consumer culture and as such are far more interested in being producers than consumers.  This goes for church as well. And being able to worship in the round creates an accountability of presence to each other and a shared experience which allows for the community to create the thing they are experiencing rather than consuming what others have produced for them.

It’s an interesting perspective on the debate that’s going on over at the Cafe about “what’s up for grabs.”

There’s more to say about the historical development of the pew. Bolz-Weber aligns it to the Protestant Reformation and the importance of preaching. In fact, preaching was important before the rise of Protestants–the Dominicans, for example, are officially known as the Order of Preachers. Medieval preachers, and many Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century complained, often in their sermons, about the lack of attention paid to their words by the assembled congregation. Pews were in part an attempt not to make the sermon more central but to force disciplined behavior on churchgoers and to establish a clear hierarchical relationship between clergy and people, which undergirds Bolz-Weber’s larger point.

On the other hand, one of the odder moments in the debate between radical reformer Conrad Grebel and Huldreich Zwingli had to to with Grebel’s insistence that communion should be received while seated, just as the disciples were seated at the Last Supper.

The Bearable Closeness of Being: Why Cities Create Community

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This week, I’ve been thinking about one particular aspect of urban ministry that is frustrating and challenging, but also offers interesting opportunities. Among the issues raised in the discussion over the St. Francis house development (previous blog posts here and here) are increased noise, traffic, congestion, parking difficulties and vandalism. None of these is unique to the block on which the proposed development will be built. Urban churches deal with them every day and few are as affected by them as Grace Church. Three of the last four Sundays have seen parking restrictions and re-routed traffic on the streets around the church. We have had noise (and smells) from the Taste of Madison on September 4, and on September 11, in addition to the nightmare of the Ironman Triathlon, there were 9-11 services at the Capitol during our 8:00 service.

Still, the opportunities outweigh the challenges. In spite of the fact that people had incredible difficulty arriving for our 5:00 interfaith service on 9-11, there were around 150 people in attendance. All of that foot traffic around the square for Taste of Madison or the Triathlon is free publicity for our church and an opportunity to tell our story (at no monetary expense) to passers-by. Our courtyard garden is an important part of our mission, ministry, and outreach. I received a letter this week from a neighbor who praised its beauty and the hard work of our volunteer gardeners.

I was intrigued by an essay by Richard Krawiec that explores the community created in urban settings. He argues that our random or regular encounters with people in the city create a certain kind of community:

In the city, community is created when the clerk who knows your face lets you take the sandwich, trusting you’ll be back tomorrow to pay.  When the guy at the newspaper kiosk remembers your interest in the Red Sox and sums up last night’s game for you as he hands you the Boston Globe.  When the owner of the small café invites you in after he has closed and personally cooks you something to eat.

It is a set of interactions, human behaviours that have meaning and expectations between its members. Not just action, but actions based on shared expectations, values, beliefs and meanings between individuals.  Interdependent.

He contrasts that sort of community and those random encounters with suburbia. It is something I’ve noticed as well. We know our neighbors better in the year we’ve lived in our Madison home than we got to know in 5 years in a Greenville County subdivision. The complete essay is here: The Bearable Closeness of Being: Why Cities Create Community

There is a challenge that faces us, however. It is that many of our neighbors are students, who grew up in suburbia and may not realize that they are living in a community that includes people other than other students, and that living in such a community brings with it shared responsibility and some shared values. Each class needs to be educated about that, both by the university and by the larger community.

The Bearable Closeness of Being: Why Cities Create Community | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.

The Empty Cathedrals of Europe

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The Empty Cathedrals of Europe.

Brian Jay Stanley visited Europe’s cathedrals and pondered the absence of God:

Europe’s cathedrals sublimely evoke the absence of God. They are temples that have decayed into museums. Tourists, not worshippers, fill their naves, driven by curiosity, not faith. One does not pay alms anymore but admission fees. The altar is roped off, not because it is sacred, but fragile. The silence of emptiness has replaced the silence of holiness.

Upon further reading, he learns that there was a great deal of human interest and motivation involved in their construction: competition between cities for prestige, desire for aristocrats to show off their wealth and “buy their salvation;” etc. He finds all this unsavory and unreligious:

“A secular and a religious society are equally profane, for a secular society banishes the sacred, while a religious society defiles it with the human.”

In fact, religious desires can only be expressed by human beings using our human energies, abilities, and, yes, weaknesses.

But this seemed to open up an interesting question, or relate to the ongoing debate in England about the riots last week. Mark Vernon points to an essay by Gordon Lynch on the development of values in individuals and communities which includes this:

If broader, sacred values can also bind us into a deeper sense of shared moral community across society, we might also ask how these can be nurtured. Our society has distinguished itself in creating built environments that show the least signs of any sense of sacred meaning of any period in history. Our high streets are dominated by chain stores and global corporations who promise convenience but little meaning. New-build properties offer modernist-lite conceptions of style, devoid of any sense of modernism’s original moral purpose. The explosion of public art has left our towns and cities with works that are all too often vacuous and un-compelling. Policy makers are clearly aware of this gap and have tried to address it, usually through repeated and unsuccessful attempts to re-launch a sense of ‘British-ness’. But convincing moral visions for society cannot be created in ersatz fashion through short-term policy ideas. They are already at hand, woven through the moral significance that is variously given to the nation, nature and humanity in the stories that our society tells about itself. Learning to see where these sacred meanings still move us, as well as the shadow-side of sacred commitments, is another long task for a remoralising society.

I think this is exactly right for the USA as well as for England. And it points to one of the key problems with Stanley’s post. Whatever motivations were involved in the construction of the cathedrals, at their heart was a vision of a space in which one might encounter God, indeed a vision, in some sense, of the heavenly city itself.

The future of church…

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A couple of disparate pieces have got me thinking, especially in light of the role Grace has played on Capitol Square in the last month.

The first is a review by Bob Duggan of Denis McNamara’s How to Read Churches: A Crash Course in Ecclesiastical Architecture. He concludes:

Even if you are not a believer, McNamara’s How to Read Churches will make you wonder what we shall turn these monuments of the past into for us today—meaningless ruins or emblems of a passion and hope that we can, and should, recognize and incorporate into our lives.

The second is the ongoing debate on the effects of facebook on churches. Elizabeth Drescher asks the question on Religion Dispatches.

I think her conclusion is both valid and quite challenging:

It’s a start. But until churches and other religious groups, their leaders, and members feel comfortable interacting with one another around real questions of meaning and value—questions having little to do with doctrine and much to do with practices of compassion and justice—their social media participation will do no more to revitalize declining religious institutions than holding weekly Jazzercise classes in the parish hall.

Mobile computing and associated social media have not replaced the main draw of the traditional church: spiritual connection in social context. But they have made it more difficult to mask the modern, broadcast-era practice of social and spiritual disconnectedness that plays out as much in generic coffee hour chitchat about football scores and the latest lame Seth Rogan chucklefest as it does in Facebook pages that enable participants (really, the old Facebook “fan” terminology is more accurate) to see a church’s message and comment on it, but which don’t invite genuine, person-to-person or people-to-world interactivity.

I was struck, in the midst of that surreal Ash Wednesday service last week, that our congregation consisted overwhelmingly of young people, many of whom I had never seen before. They came for something; ashes, certainly, but also to be reminded of who they are and who God is, and they chose to come to a specific place, that was designed to connect with the sacred. We address profound questions in a liturgy like Ash Wednesday, that need not have any social dimension on the surface, but the very performance of them had enormous meaning, both within and outside our walls that night

The week at Grace

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One of the things I knew would be very different about serving at Grace from my most recent work at St. James Greenville, and at Furman, would be the many encounters with people on the street, and with people who came by the church looking for help. At St. James, we had a few regulars–people who would come by looking for financial support every six months or so–which was the limit we placed on such help. We also dealt with “cold-callers,” people who phoned every church in the Yellow Pages, until they got a positive response. What we didn’t get, or very often at least, were people who just dropped in because they were in the area.

That’s not true at Grace. There’s a constant stream of people coming to the door, looking for help. We’ve got a relationship with a social service agency who screens our requests for us, but still there are people who will show for help on a regular basis. Usually, such requests are simply routine–they need money for a bus ticket, for a utility bill, or for gas. But sometimes, the requests, and the stories behind them are remarkable. And sometimes, people come to Grace, not because they need financial help, but because there’s nowhere to turn.

We’ve had a couple of the latter in the past few weeks, and watching how Grace’s members respond in situations like this is amazing. One African-American family, whose story included both 9-11 in Manhattan AND Katrina, ended up at Grace looking for food. In the few weeks since they first visited, they have been welcomed in, embraced, and have pitched in. Now, the parents have jobs, they’ve moved from a shelter into an apartment, and things seem to be normalizing.

One recent Sunday after services, a parishioner encountered a woman trying to find a way into the church. It turns out she and her husband were visiting from the west coast, and he had a major medical emergency while in Madison. He was in ICU and the prognosis wasn’t clear. She’s been taken in, quite literally, by members of Grace, cared for and helped along the way.

The point is, if Grace weren’t where it is, neither of those encounters would have taken place. Our location can be a burden at times (especially when the square is closed off for an event), but we are in a unique place to do ministry and mission. People come to us; and our only response can be to welcome them in. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Grace so far is how welcoming the people of Grace are to almost anyone who comes in our doors.