By Bill Carroll

Snow brings out the best in people. Here in Athens, Ohio, I spend a dozen hours or so each winter clearing our driveway, sidewalks, and walkways. All around our neighborhood you can hear the familiar sounds of metal snow shovels on concrete.

The first year Tracey and I were married, we lived in Hyde Park, on Chicago’s south side. Like most people in that wonderful and bizarre little neighborhood, we parked our car on the city streets, observing arcane rules about which side of the street we could park on when the city needed to plow. We had to slow down and be very careful, because snow removal came late to Hyde Park (reportedly, because our alderman didn’t always vote with the mayor).

Sometimes, large sheets of ice would form and cars would skate through red lights or a four way stop, even if we were only going 5-10 miles per hour. We kept old cardboard boxes in our trunk, in case an ice pit formed in the gutter where we were parked. We’d layer the cardboard under the tires to improve traction, but sometimes that wasn’t enough. If we were still stuck, we could ask anyone walking by and they’d likely give us a push.

Hyde Park was by no means perfect. There were racial tensions and a history of difficult relationships between the University and the surrounding neighborhoods. Our neighbors, and we ourselves, had our vices and flaws, and we were involved in systemic injustices of many kinds. After a snowfall, however, we helped each other.

For most of us, snow brings out our latent tendency to live as neighbors. It summons us to responsibility. We look after snow removal, because we don’t want people to fall. We help one another, because one person needs help and another can provide it. We don’t count the cost. We don’t stop to ask “What’s in it for me?” Snow brings with it the possibility of moving from self-centeredness, for which we have powerful cultural inducements, to other-centeredness. As horrible as they are, natural disasters bring out similar good things in people. They awaken generosity of spirit, even self-sacrifice. Who would not risk his or her life to save a child, even someone else’s child? But snowfall seldom poses serious risks to life and limb. It gives rise to an ordinary level of caution, concern, and neighborliness. Most of the time, no sacrifice is needed, just a helping hand.

Snow also brings us opportunities for play. We throw snowballs and make people and angels in the snow. How difficult it is to contain the excitement of small children, especially when they have the day off from school!

When Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, he isn’t saying anything new. He is reminding the People of Israel of something God has already commanded them (See Leviticus 19:18). Even the pagan world knew nothing of our isolation and rugged individualism here in the contemporary U.S.A.. In the ancient world, people were bound by a set of social obligations to everyone around them. Sometimes, these were oppressive (there is a reason the Enlightenment fought for individual rights, however limited and imperfect its vision); nevertheless, these real obligations gave people a sense of belonging and meaning.

What is new with Jesus is the command to love the enemy, and, if necessary, die for those who hate us. This is what it means “to love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Also new with Jesus is his insistence that the commandment to love our neighbor, together with the commandment to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, summarizes the entire law and gives us the key to understanding the whole of God’s will. Paul puts the same point this way: “Love does no wrong to the neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:10; cp. Galatians 5:14)

Just because a teaching is old doesn’t mean don’t still need to hear it. A functioning community involves obligations to our neighbor, but we often fail to fulfill them. Moreover, we also need Jesus’ radical redefinition of who counts as our neighbor. (See Luke 10:29-37.) Otherwise, we retreat into closed communities, impoverished by lack of difference, and help those who are sufficiently like ourselves.

The lessons of the snow are something we easily forget. Seeking our neighbor’s good, even when it conflicts with our own, is not something we have to wait to do. Every snowfall gives witness to the possibility of community and love. The Church, despite the teaching and example of Jesus, is not always good at practicing active, Christ-like love.

We could learn a lot about following Jesus in milder seasons by paying attention to what we do when it snows.

The Rev. Dr. R. William Carroll is rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His sermons appear on his parish blog. He also blogs at Living the Gospel. He is a member of the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis.

By Sam Candler

BURNING BUSHES

On the Saturday before the Third Sunday in Lent, I stood around helping my brother burn off some of the woods. My father was there, too. My brother-in-law, my mother, my wife were there. A family afternoon. Burning the woods is a regular affair on the farm where I grew up. I was glad to turn aside that day.

My brother had a nifty device filled with two-thirds diesel and one-third regular gasoline. When lit, its twisted nozzle functioned like a flame thrower, but it really just dripped fire out into the pine straw and bushes and sweet gum saplings. We always have to get rid of the sweet gums. My brother had already driven around the designated patch of woods with his tractor and plow, carving out a shallow fire line.

Burning the woods is critical to clearing out the underbrush that might start another, more serious, fire in those woods. But its main accomplishment is to clear out the underbrush for more birdlife and wildlife, and to provide for sturdier pines and primary trees.

We watched the wind, and we set the fire on the leeward side. That way, the fire would stay controlled and burn backwards into the wind. Fire likes to feed into the wind, probably like all of us do. And fire really does start quickly. I watched with my folks, mesmerized by the sheer chemical reaction spreading before us. We talked randomly about whatever was on our minds. Younger folks might call it "hanging out." Hanging out is much more enthralling when a fire is burning before you.

Occasional sparks drifted out over the fire line, and we put them out. A few of the larger pines caught fire at their bases. The water from the back of my fathers's four-wheeler put it out easily. That four-wheeler is really a mule, but it's a different sort of mule from the one that trudged through these same fields so long ago.

We heard a pileated woodpecker and then saw it sail through the glade in front of us. We listened to still another flock of sandhill cranes, but we never saw them, above the thick pines towering over us. We wondered why several deer sat nonchalantly in a nearby thicket, watching us, but never running away. Too many tame deer these days.

The next day I was at church, hearing about Moses, who turned aside from tending his family's flocks one day. He watched a bush being burned and yet not being consumed, He heard an angel remind him of his father's God. "I am who I am," Yahweh said. Holy ground.

Holy ground is where fathers and sons can stand around together. Mothers and daughters, too. With nothing important to do except burn something. With nothing important to say, except maybe "It is what it is." The standing around is more fascinating than the words. Something powerful is burning all around us. It burns, but it does not consume. Instead, it enthralls and inspires. Fire destroys the straw, but it germinates the seed. Fire creates fertility. Burning bushes makes for holy ground.

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He chaired the House of Deputies' Committee on Prayerbook, Liturgy and Church Music at the General Convention. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.

By Adam Thomas

In the film Men in Black, Jay discovers that aliens exist and many of them live on Manhattan Island. When he confronts Kay about this unnerving new detail, of which he (Jay) was previously unaware, Kay deadpans: “A thousand years ago everybody knew, as a fact, that the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”

The season of Lent invites us to examine what we know, or, put more precisely, what we think we know. When we tackle this examination, we open ourselves up to encounters with Christ, which tend to augment, rearrange, and expand our knowledge with the addition of deeper faith. The Gospel contains myriad stories of Jesus blasting people with new knowledge, so we should expect nothing different in our own lives. One such story co-stars the Pharisee Nicodemus (read up on John 3 before you continue).

As a general rule, if someone in the Gospel besides Jesus says “I know” or “we know,” then that person either knows a small fraction of the whole or, more commonly, nothing at all. Strangely enough, knowing nothing at all can even manifest itself when the statement made is quite true and correct. Such is the case with this leader of the Jews, who comes to see Jesus one night.

Nicodemus uses his “knowledge” displayed at the beginning of the conversation as a weapon to corner Jesus into a particular set of expectations. The Pharisee says, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Apparently, so far so good. This statement is true: Jesus has come from God and most definitely stands forever in the presence of God. But there’s irony in the statement, also. Nicodemus calls Jesus “teacher” twice — once in Hebrew (Rabbi) and once in Greek (didaskalos, from which comes the word “didactic”). But at the same time, Nicodemus’s conversational opener allows no room for Jesus to teach. Instead, Nicodemus is the one attempting to teach Jesus, to pigeonhole him into what Nicodemus and his colleagues have labeled him.

But Jesus refuses to be put on the defensive. In usual fashion, he completely ignores Nicodemus’s opening salvo and immediately expands the conversation to a depth and height that Nicodemus is not expecting. Jesus says, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above/again.” There’s a delightful ambiguity here: in Greek, “from above” and “again” are the same word (anothen). They both work in the context, and Jesus probably means both when he says the word. How better to jostle someone loose from his rigidity than with a small helping of ambiguity?

But Nicodemus grasps at the more mundane of the two meanings and responds: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” This may seem like a sarcastic response, but at least this Pharisee, who has always been the one answering questions, is now (albeit haltingly) beginning to ask some of his own. But Jesus doesn’t seem interested in staying on the terrestrial plane, so he ignores Nicodemus questions and pushes him to a new level of understanding. “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” At this point, I imagine Nicodemus’s brain starts hurting.

But Jesus keeps pushing him. Nicodemus’s opening “we know” now sounds empty in comparison to the mysteries Jesus is revealing to him. To begin to absorb these mysteries, Nicodemus must turn this empty “we know” into an “I don’t know” full of desire and curiosity. With his next words, Jesus gives Nicodemus license to let go of what he thinks he knows: “The wind/Spirit blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (Here’s another delightful ambiguity—in Greek, “wind” and “spirit” are the same word, pneuma.) Nicodemus must now consent to trusting in things he can never quite figure out. Indeed, he must realize that the truest things that have ever been or ever will be can be believed without being adequately explained. In a word, Jesus asks Nicodemus to have faith that the words he speaks are true, no matter how difficult, preposterous, or confusing they may sound.

And Nicodemus takes a tentative step into the shallows of faith in Jesus. He asks one of the sincerest questions in the Gospel: “How can these things be?” With this question, Nicodemus allows the cognitive dissonance that has been cresting to break on him like a wave. This dissonance is the necessary distress that happens when he realizes he doesn’t know something he thought he knew. But dissonance isn’t a bad thing. In music, dissonance is the interesting part, the part that pushes the piece onward. A pleasing harmony (called “consonance”) can hang in the air indefinitely, but a dissonance begs to move forward to the next consonant chord.

So it is with Nicodemus and anyone who opens up himself or herself to the possibility of the unknown. Allowing the cognitive dissonance to enter our comfortable worldviews pushes us to grow into the next consonant chords in our lives. When Jesus confronts us, like Nicodemus, with the mysteries of the faith, we can either step backward into the comfort of what we think we know or step forward, fully expecting the boundaries of possibility to be far wider than we can perceive. This confrontation goes by another name: revelation.

Every encounter with Jesus, whether in the text or in life, promises an opportunity for revelation, which obeys no boundaries of possibility. Revelation is that thing you know, but don’t know how you know it. Revelation is visceral as well as mental because the brain alone is ill-equipped to handle it. Revelation infuses us with an odd mixture of peace and exhilaration—peace because we know God is there, exhilaration because we know God is calling us to serve. Cognitive dissonance is the birthplace of such revelation. The dissonance reminds us that what we know is far less than the whole. When we can acknowledge that we don’t, in fact, know where the wind comes from or where it goes, we are primed for receiving the revelation of God’s love that Jesus is forever revealing to the world. This is a scary proposition, for if we do, indeed, remain attentive we might actually hear God calling us to serve in a way that doesn’t fit our plans.

But revelation bursts our ability and our desire to control because it blows where it chooses on the wind of the Spirit. When Nicodemus says to Jesus, “We know,” he is seeking to control the conversation that will follow. But he immediately discovers he’s in over his head. When we acknowledge that Jesus has things to reveal to us that we couldn’t possibly imagine, we discover we’re also in over our heads. The trick is to learn to breathe in the wind of the Spirit while underwater (to grow gills and fins) and to find a new natural state submerged in the revelatory love of Christ.

When Nicodemus says to Jesus, “How can these things be,” he allows the possibility for revelation to strike him in his head and in his gut. His cognitive dissonance jettisons his need to control. He is open for Jesus to reveal new and wonderful things to him. And Jesus does — things about the Son of Man ascending to and descending from heaven, things about the Son of Man being lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, things about eternal life and self-giving love and believing and salvation.

I imagine Nicodemus left his encounter with Jesus in a daze, his heart and mind on overload attempting to process all he had seen and heard. Is he able fully to put his trust in Jesus, to allow the dissonance to resolve into a new and deeper consonance? Not quite yet. But we are lucky enough to meet Nicodemus twice more in the Gospel (check them out! John 7 & John 19). His journey towards the consonance of a life of faith following Jesus models for us our Lenten journeys of self-examination. If we open ourselves up to encounters with Christ during this season of Lent, then (as Kay says), “Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

The Rev. Adam Thomas, one of the first Millennials to be ordained priest, is the assistant to the rector at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Cohasset, Mass. He blogs at wherethewind.com.

By Susan Carter
It is painful to watch the transitions taking place here in Michigan, the Mitten State, the once proud home of America’s automotive prowess. The parishioners in our pews are facing challenges they never thought they would confront. A number encounter regular furlough days, or have had salaries reduced, or – worse – have lost their jobs. The cans and boxes of food they once brought to our food pantries they now take home with them.

And thus, we are broke. Or almost, so it seems. Detroit, once hailed as the “Paris of the Midwest” has seen its housing stock gutted, its jobs evaporate, and its people searching for a future different from the present. Michigan, as a state, lost more than 150,000 service, construction, and manufacturing jobs in 2009 alone. Of all the American manufacturing jobs that were exported or eliminated during the past decade, fully one-quarter of them were in Michigan.

Many are affected and seeing their lives or their landscape changed. Twenty-percent of our children, in both peninsulas, live in poverty. Flint – once the heartbeat of American automobile production – is looking to turn vacant lots back to farmland. Even the Episcopal Church is hurting. Staff cuts have hit all four Michigan dioceses, the Cathedral in Detroit is stressed to remain viable, and the majority of parishes seeking priests cannot afford full time clergy. Are we the canary in the mine or, we hope, the vision in the rearview mirror?

Yet we are rich in ways not measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the latest Consumer Confidence Index. Research from Michigan State University reveals that nine out of ten people have continued to give to charities, though admittedly in smaller amounts. Further, virtually one-half of Michiganians volunteer, a percentage that remains steady. (Notably, women are volunteering at higher rates than men, and that gap is widening.)

In our own churches, vestries are working hard to implement balanced budgets. In many parishes pledges have remained fairly steady, driven down principally when congregants lose their jobs or depart to find work elsewhere. We are managing.

In this confusing and jumbled time of transition, when a recession feels like a depression, God is giving us an opportunity to change, to step away from the Seven Last Words: “We Have Always Done It This Way.” It is apparent that if we, as Episcopalians, hunker down in a bunker mentality, we are not fully hearing God’s call to love one another – really love one another – and proclaim the Gospel.

It is true that, as people of faith, we can hang on to what we have, improving at the margins, but not manifestly moving forward. Or, we can look to Paul and his experience with the Jerusalem Council. In Galatians 2 Paul, in his own words, lays out his encounter with the leaders in Jerusalem. He had taken the radical move of fully accepting the uncircumcised; they were different and not eligible to join, according to the rules. We are told in Acts that some from Judea even held that the uncircumcised could not be saved. The circle was narrowed, not widened.

Paul, along with Peter, wisely and bravely fought against the distinctions, instead trusting that salvation comes through grace and not blind obedience to rules. In so doing, these early leaders threw off the yoke of intransigence and flung wide the doors to all. There was no longer a Dr. Seuss differentiation between those with stars on their bellies, and those with none.

In Michigan, we are given the marvelous gift of being a laboratory, a modern Council of Jerusalem nearly two-thousand years later. We are called to meet the needs not only of those who look like us, share common background with us, or even worship with us. Rather, we are being asked by our loving God to meet God’s people where they are, not only inside our churches but, more especially, on the other side of our Red Doors. We are asked to feed the sheep, tend the sheep, to feed the lambs. All of the lambs.

If you feed them, I believe, they will come. And when they arrive, let’s fully open our arms so that those who come may experience Christ’s love.

The Rev. Susan Carter is rector of St. John’s, Howell, Mich. She teaches journalism at Michigan State University.

By Ellen Painter Dollar

In this final post encouraging Episcopalians to learn about and discuss reproductive ethics, I will briefly review some major ethical questions related to Christians’ use of reproductive and genetic technology, and end with a couple of recommendations.

Major Ethical Questions

As is clear from the review of various faith traditions’ handling of reproductive ethics, the ethical questions that reproductive and genetic technologies raise are closely linked with how each tradition views sexuality, marriage and procreation. Christian perspectives on suffering and disability come into play as well, raising questions, for example, about whether preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is good preventive medicine that uses our God-given scientific knowledge to alleviate suffering, or a eugenic process that emphasizes secular values of perfection and achievement over God’s abundant grace. Sometimes, as I write about these questions, I feel like I’m in some tortuous maze—I go down one path only to find four more paths I could travel down in search of answers. None of it is easy. None of it is simple.

But I’m going to try to simplify it anyway, breaking down the ethical questions into several broad categories.

The Nature of Disability and Suffering: What do Christians believe about genetic disorders that cause pain and suffering? Are they part of God’s plan, the result of a fallen world, or the natural result of a God-given genetic code that relies on change and diversity for its success? What is the nature of the suffering people experience as a result of disability? Are social stigma and exclusion as much factors in how we perceive disability as physical pain?

Desire, Vocation and the Choice to Have Children: Why do many people have such a strong desire for biological children? Is adoption the best answer for those dealing with infertility or genetic disease? Can parenthood be a vocation? Do parents have a duty to protect their future children from suffering?

The Blessing and Burden of Having More Choices: How do assisted reproduction and genetic screening affect our perception of humans? Of God? Is there a “voluntary eugenics” or quality control at work in reproductive and genetic technology? How does increased use of these technologies change our culture’s perspective on disabled people? Can parents be held responsible for disabled children (e.g., barred from public support for their children) if they choose not to use available technology to prevent disability? How do assisted reproduction and genetic screening contribute to or benefit from our culture’s commodification of children?

Money, Medicine and Consumer Culture: How does the money-making side of assisted reproduction affect the relationship between doctor and patient? What values are promoted in the standard procedures followed by most fertility clinics? Is there a “slippery slope” of assisted reproduction (i.e., nearly impossible to stop once you’ve started)? Can genetic screening at the embryonic stage be classified as primary preventive medicine (i.e., a better alternative than therapeutic abortion as the result of prenatal diagnosis)? Is there any evidence that technological reproduction has adverse health effects for parents or babies?

The Status and Selection of Embryos: Given that natural conception often involves selection of healthy embryos and destruction of unhealthy ones (e.g., many miscarriages are attributed to genetic anomalies), whose job is selection—God’s, nature’s, ours? How do patients, doctors and Christians view embryos? Do embryos have rights? Is there a continuum of traits that are acceptable/not acceptable to select for—e.g., life-threatening disorders, non-life-threatening disorders, gender, traits? Because our knowledge of embryos is limited (we can’t always identify the severity of disease in utero, we can’t know what personality or skills the embryo will have as a fully developed person) can we justify making selection decisions based on one characteristic, such as a particular genetic mutation?

Why Episcopalians Need to Care About Reproductive Ethics

As I hope that long list of questions illustrates, reproductive ethics are not only about debating pro-life and pro-choice arguments (although questions of who gets to choose and why are involved), nor are they focused only on whether we think an embryo has the rights of a human being (although that is an important question). Reproductive ethics raise questions about who we are, who God is, our health care system, the nature of procreation and parenthood, and how our culture perceives children. These are big questions—questions no person or couple should have to grapple with on their own, especially if they are part of a faith community.

The most compelling reason for Episcopalians to care about reproductive ethics is that reproductive and genetic technology is getting more sophisticated and available. We can now not only identify genes for life-threatening disorders that will kill or seriously disable an infant, but also for adult-onset diseases with a genetic component, such as breast cancer. In vitro fertilization, originally designed for young, otherwise fertile couples who had some clear physiological problem (a blocked fallopian tube, for example) is now routinely used to assist women in their 40s to have children with the use of donor eggs. While genetic screening has traditionally been available only to couples who have family history of a specific disorder or are part of an ethnic group predisposed to certain disorders (such as Tay-Sachs in the Jewish community), a company called Counsyl recently developed an inexpensive test that allows any couple to be tested for approximately 100 single-gene disorders. It is now possible for a couple to pay for eggs from an anonymous woman, sperm from an anonymous man, a womb from a surrogate mother, and go home nine months later with a child who is genetically unrelated but legally theirs.

More and more people sitting in the pews of Episcopal churches, and more and more people you know—your friends, your siblings, your children, yourself—will face the question of whether to use reproductive and genetic technology to fulfill their dream of heaving a healthy baby. If and when they come to the church, to their fellow believers, for guidance and support, we need to have something to offer them.

What To Do

Avoid easy answers. Infertility is not easy. Living with genetic disease is not easy. Figuring out the right thing to do in light of the long list of major, soul-searching questions raised by new technology is not easy. Easy answers don’t help. When it comes to easy but unhelpful responses, my two pet peeves are: “Why don’t you just adopt?” and “Everything happens for a reason.” I’ve written elsewhere about why I find these responses so unhelpful, misguided and even hurtful, and won’t go into it here. Just don’t say them, or any other easy answer that pops into your head. Please.

Learn and talk about reproductive ethics. There are lots of ways to do this at the congregational level. Sermons, adult forums and book groups are all places where questions raised by reproductive technology can be discussed. Invite an ethicist from a local college or seminary to give a talk or lead a discussion. My book (warning: shameless self-promotion ahead) is designed to be accessible to a diverse audience, and is written in a narrative, non-scholarly style. But it won’t be out until fall 2011, and there is lots of other reading material available: theological discussions, official church documents, memoirs, and short journal and magazine articles. I have developed a reading list of resources I have found inspiring or helpful; if you would like a copy, you can contact me through my Choices That Matter blog.

Thank you for sticking with me through all three parts of this series. There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get started.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.

By Ellen Painter Dollar

In Part 1 of this series, I told my story of living with a genetic disorder and choosing to have biological children with a 50/50 chance of inheriting the disorder. My exploration of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD—in vitro fertilization with the added step of testing fertilized eggs for a particular mutation) led me to focus on reproductive ethics in my work as a writer. Here in Part 2, I’ll summarize current ethical perspectives of the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish traditions.

The Roman Catholic Tradition

Catholic opposition to artificial contraception, abortion, and any type of assisted reproduction, from artificial insemination up to IVF, PGD and surrogacy, stems from several basic principles:

• Marriage, instituted by God to unite one man and one woman, has two necessary and complementary purposes: unitive (two people becoming one flesh) and procreative (producing children). Each conjugal act that takes place in a marriage needs to be open to the potential for procreation, even if each act does not (or even, in the case of an infertile couple, cannot) result in conception.

• Sexual intercourse and procreation, both God-given blessings reserved for marriage, cannot be separated. Sex should not occur without the potential for procreation (hence the objection to artificial contraception), and procreation should not occur without sex (hence the objection to any method of assisted reproduction in which conception occurs independently of intercourse).

• When people separate the unitive and procreative purposes of marriage, deciding when they are and are not open to having a child through calculated use of artificial contraception, children become a project to be achieved or a product to be obtained to fulfill parental desires, rather than a gift that arises naturally from the marital union.

• The temptation to view children as entitlements or commodities, rather than gifts, grows with the use of reproductive technology. Because IVF and PGD require embryos to be selected for implantation in the mother’s uterus, an element of quality control is introduced (i.e., choosing the “best” or potentially healthiest embryos). This element, again, transforms children from gifts of a loving God to products manufactured by medical personnel to parental specifications.

• Because intercourse and conception are inextricably linked with each other, and intended for an exclusive marriage relationship, any reproductive technology that introduces a third party into conception, such as with donor gametes or surrogate motherhood, is unacceptable.

• An embryo is fully human, with all the rights of a human being created in God’s image, from the moment of conception. Any use, destruction or manipulation of an embryo, including freezing, genetic testing, disposal, abortion or medical research, violates the embryo’s dignity as a human being.

Many Catholics argue that they are not so much against all these technologies as they are for a perspective on marriage and sexuality that is radically different from that of mainstream culture. For example, Catholics who advocate natural family planning (NFP) argue that couples can make wise decisions about family size and pregnancy timing while also being open to God’s design for sex and procreation within marriage. In NFP, couples avoid conception at certain times by abstaining from sex during the wife’s fertile period, which she determines through detailed observation of such factors as body temperature and cervical mucus. Those who practice NFP argue that by subordinating their sexual desires to the God-given fertility cycle and their sense of when and how God calls them to parenthood, NFP enhances marital intimacy and interdependence, bringing marriage closer to the way God intended it.

Mainline Protestant Traditions

Mainline Protestantism, of course, comprises a diverse group of churches, so there is no one perspective on reproductive ethics. There are, however, some common assumptions and values that inform many Protestant churches’ discussion of the topic, as well as some specific conclusions that several mainline Protestant denominations share.

• Mainline Protestant churches tend to value individual autonomy and choice, and assert that individual Christians can inform their own consciences to grapple with moral decisions with the guidance of the church, scripture, tradition and reason.

• Given the value of autonomy and conscience, many Protestant churches encourage both clergy and laypeople to educate themselves about reproductive technology and related ethical concerns. Pastoral and genetic counseling are held up as vital resources for church members dealing with infertility or family history of genetic disease.

• Protestant traditions tend to emphasize marital companionship more than procreation, and allow more leeway in how the purposes of marriage play out for individual couples. For example, some argue that while it’s important for married couples to be open to the possibility of children, such openness occurs in the context of a lifelong marriage relationship, not just when the couple engages in discrete acts of intercourse. Therefore, using contraception to limit family size and time pregnancy is acceptable (and some argue further that because Catholic natural family planning, or NFP, attempts to control fertility just as artificial contraception does, there is no moral difference between the two). It is also acceptable to separate sex and procreation in limited instances, by using assisted reproduction to overcome infertility within a marriage.

• Many Protestant churches approve the use of assisted reproduction techniques to help couples conceive children within a marriage. However, techniques that compromise the exclusive marriage relationship or that allow for childbearing outside of marriage (such as donor gametes and surrogacy) are viewed with concern or disapproved altogether.

• Genetic screening is generally acceptable for disorders that significantly affect health and well-being, but should not be used either for gender selection (except in the case of sex-linked genetic disorders) or screening for non-disease-related traits. Human cloning is unacceptable.

• Embryos have moral status and should be treated reverently, but their status is not equal to that of a more developed human life. Embryos should not be created for the purpose of being destroyed through scientific research. Donation of embryos left over from IVF cycles is viewed more favorably, but efforts should be made not to produce more embryos than can reasonably be used in an IVF cycle.

• Protestant documents tend to emphasize issues of justice, recognizing the potential for assisted reproduction and genetic screening to be used in ways that compromise the inherent dignity of every human being, such as by ensuring that certain types, classes or races of people are not born.

Evangelical Protestant Traditions

With their strong pro-life ethic, evangelical Protestants tend to have more in common with Roman Catholics than with mainline Protestants when it comes to reproductive ethics. Concern for the human dignity of embryos fuels evangelical opposition to reproductive technology, such as IVF, that leaves behind thousands of unused, frozen embryos, as well as to the use of those embryos in stem-cell or other medical research. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is problematic both because it requires discarding embryos testing positive for a particular genetic disorder, and because of its potentially eugenic nature (i.e., the potential for people’s worth to be judged based on their genetic history, leading to the breeding of people for certain traits perceived as positive and the elimination of people with traits perceived as negative).

There is also an emerging openness among younger evangelicals to the Catholic practice of natural family planning (NFP) and the vision of marriage and parenthood that it entails.

Jewish Traditions

Judaism emphasizes the procreative purposes of marriage—its role in fulfilling God’s command to be fruitful and multiply—to a greater extent than either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. Having children is one of the 613 mitzvot (commandments or rules) that Jews are to live by. Persecution of Jews has reinforced their emphasis on maintaining Jewish identity and community by having Jewish children.

Judaism tends to view assisted reproduction as a tool to help Jews fulfill God’s procreative purpose for marriage. In fact, Israel has an unusually high birth rate of babies conceived through assisted reproduction (about 5 percent, compared with about 1.5 percent of U.S. babies). Because the procreative purpose of marriage is valued so highly, Jewish authorities have few reservations about separating the reproductive process from the sexual union of married spouses. Because Jewish identity is passed down through the mother, however, Jewish authorities have expressed concern with third-party reproductive technology that uses donor gametes or surrogates, which might lead to confusion over the child’s Jewish identity.

Even though Jews have been targets of eugenic policies and prejudices for centuries, they have embraced the use of both genetic testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to help eradicate disorders common in the Jewish community. For example, Dor Yeshorim is a Brooklyn-based organization that has helped lower the incidence of Tay-Sachs disease (a fatal genetic disorder that primarily occurs in Jewish families) and other recessive genetic disorders through a proactive screening process. Young, unmarried Jews consent to genetic testing to identify whether they carry genes for any of a list of recessive disorders. If a couple determines, early in their dating relationship, that there is potential for marriage, they can call a special phone number, type in a PIN, and find out if both the man and the woman carry any recessive genes in common. If they do—meaning their children would have a 25 percent chance of inheriting the disorder in question—it is recommended that the couple end their relationship. The program has been successful because many couples do just that.

The Need for More Discussion

My goal in this series, again, is not to argue for any one approach as better than the others. (Although, as a good Episcopalian, I do tend toward a moderate, nuanced view of what is acceptable and unacceptable. This may doom my work to failure because, as my husband remarked recently, our culture does not do nuance very well.) Rather, I am motivated by that fact that, though Protestant resources in particular recognize the need for education, prayerful consideration and supportive counsel for both congregations and individuals making reproductive decisions, many Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church, have not engaged as fully as they can with the moral quandaries raised by evolving technology. In the final, third part of this series, I will briefly review what the major moral quandaries are, and suggest some steps that congregations and individual Christians can take to move the discussion forward.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.

By Ellen Painter Dollar

If the title of my post has you concerned that you will be subjected to a treatise on the politicized, polarizing topic of abortion, I hope you’ll stick with me anyway. Reproductive ethics go far beyond pro-life/pro-choice debates. They also address the rapidly expanding, increasingly accessible and highly lucrative field of reproductive and genetic technology. Beyond that—and the main reason Episcopalians and all Christians should pay attention to this topic—reproductive ethics touch on fundamental questions of our identity as human beings made in the image of God and loved by God just as we are, how our sacred and secular cultures provide (or don’t provide) hospitality to people made in God’s image, and how we welcome children into our families, churches and communities.

Still with me? Good! You may be wondering why I’m writing about this topic—who I am and my professional background. Pastor? Theologian? Ethicist? Doctor? Genetic counselor? Nope, nope, nope, nope, and nope. I am a writer who focuses on reproductive and genetic ethics on my Choices That Matter blog, and I am writing a book that will be published by Westminster John Knox Press in 2011. But though I have some skill at putting words to paper, I write about reproductive ethics primarily because I have a story—a story that led me to ask wrenching, sometimes unanswerable questions of myself and my God, and then led me to read everything I can get my hands on about how people of faith have answered those questions. So I’ll start there—with the story.

My 10-year-old daughter and I have had, between us, about four dozen broken bones. We have a genetic bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), which causes fragile bones, short stature, bone deformities, spinal curvature and generalized weakness. We have the mildest type of OI; babies with more severe types are often born with dozens of fractures, and one form is fatal shortly after birth. But even relatively mild OI is no picnic. In addition to about 35 broken bones, I’ve had more than a dozen surgeries to insert and replace metal rods to stabilize my leg bones, and now, at 41 years old, I live with chronic pain as my joint cartilage, worn down by years of my uneven gait, falls to pieces. My daughter Leah, who inherited OI from me, broke her first bone on her second birthday, and since then has had nine more fractures. Two resulted from a scooter accident, but the others came about in the most ridiculously mundane ways possible. She slipped on a piece of paper, fell while dancing in her sister’s room, even broke a leg mid-stride—the leg broke and then she fell, not the other way around.

Because OI is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder, any child of mine has a 50 percent chance of inheriting it. My husband and I started contemplating having another child just as Leah was going through a cycle of six fractures between her second and fourth birthdays. She was encased in a series of pink fiberglass casts for an entire summer. So while we knew we wanted more children, we were intimidated and heartsick at the idea of having another child who would suffer as she was suffering (and, let’s be honest, we were suffering too, and it was no fun). We decided to look into preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is in vitro fertilization (IVF) with the added step of testing fertilized eggs for a particular genetic mutation.

In September 2002, three days after Leah broke her femur (thigh bone) when she slipped on a picture book left on the floor, I started injecting myself with hormones to launch our IVF/PGD cycle. About six weeks later, we learned that the cycle had failed. I was not pregnant. We planned to try another PGD cycle in a few months. But before we got the chance, I discovered in late January 2003 that I was already pregnant. Our second daughter, Meg, was born in October 2003, and we had a son, Ben, in 2006. Both were conceived naturally, and neither has OI.

But even before I discovered my unexpected pregnancy in January 2003, we were leaning toward abandoning the second PGD cycle. We were emotionally exhausted and financially drained. More important, I was increasingly uneasy with the ethical implications of our using reproductive technology to produce a child without my bone disorder. My brain was swimming with hard questions about using reproductive technology in light of my Christian faith: Was it ethical to spend thousands of dollars to prevent our child from inheriting a disabling but non-life-threatening disorder? By allowing embryos with my OI mutation to be destroyed, was I committing murder? By ensuring that my child would not be disabled, was I contributing to a culture that would eventually become intolerant of, and refuse to care for, children who are disabled? Was my sense that God was calling me to biological motherhood authentic, or just a way of cloaking my selfish desires in a spiritual mantle?

In my search for guidance and support, I discovered that the Episcopal Church, and Protestant Christianity in general, are not well-equipped to counsel someone like me. This is, of course, a generalization. There are certainly individual clergy who could provide excellent ethical discussion and pastoral support. Indeed, our own pastor asked some good questions of us. Though his knowledge of the ethical issues involved was limited, his pastoral concern and acceptance were abundant. But for the most part, the Protestant clergy and laypeople we talked with seemed uncertain of what questions we should even be asking about reproductive ethics, much less what the answers might be.

The progressive Religious Institute recently issued a report confirming that, due to lack of training and education, as well as discomfort with issues related to sexuality and the controversy they stir up, clergy and other religious leaders are often ill-equipped to engage topics of sexual justice and ethics, including reproductive ethics. In a 2009 report specifically addressing assisted reproduction, the Religious Institute noted that, “Unfortunately, these topics are usually not addressed in seminaries, and if they are, it is likely in the context of a medical ethics course that does not engage the pastoral issues that religious leaders will face.”

The exception to this is, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, which has plenty to say about reproductive ethics. In the past 18 months alone, the Catholic Church has released two major doctrinal statements clarifying and expanding on their opposition to all forms of assisted reproduction and genetic screening. The 2008 encyclical Dignitas Personae came directly from the Vatican, while last fall, the U.S. Catholic bishops released their own document, titled Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology. Both documents provide extensive explanation of the theology, reasoning and ethical concerns behind the church’s position.

In contrast, the Episcopal Church has released three very brief, very general resolutions: A 1982 approval of the use of IVF to conceive children within a marriage; a 1991 resolution urging couples considering IVF to get counseling and consider adoption as an alternative; and a 2003 statement that genetic screening is appropriate for avoiding “clearly serious” disorders, and that human cloning is unacceptable. Well, I guess that’s something. But it’s not enough, given the complexity of reproductive ethics, and the fact that, as reproductive technology evolves, more and more people sitting in the pews of our Episcopal churches will be facing decisions about whether or not to use it.

As I research reproductive ethics for my book and blog, the most consistent and informed sources tend to be Roman Catholic. In fact, the person who ended up being most helpful to me and my husband in making our decisions was a good friend who also happens to be a Roman Catholic sexual ethicist. He and I disagree—vehemently in some cases—on the answers to some difficult ethical questions. But he, my other Catholic friends, and the Roman Catholic web sites and bloggers I follow have been my most valuable resource. I may not always agree, but because the Catholic Church gives priority to reproductive ethics, these resources are generally well-informed and thoughtful—two qualities especially important when discussing the emotionally charged questions of whether, why and how people should have babies.

In writing about reproductive ethics, I am not aiming to convince anyone of a particular position. In fact, I am still working out exactly what my position is. Rather, my aim is to convince people—especially my fellow Protestant believers—that reproductive ethics are worth talking about seriously so that people who have to make difficult reproductive choices do so with the guidance of their brothers and sisters in Christ, within a supportive community responding with common values.

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll review the Roman Catholic position—whether you agree with it or not, their position lays out some important questions and provides food for thought—as well as summarize both Protestant and Jewish approaches to reproductive technology. I’ll finish up in Part 3, with a brief discussion of the major ethical questions raised by reproductive technology, and recommendations for moving the discussion forward in our Episcopal congregations. I hope you’ll stick around, because all of us, both clergy and laypeople, are vital partners in providing loving, supportive, knowledgeable counsel to people struggling with complex reproductive decisions.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.

By Derek Olsen

The first half of Ephesians 4 clearly lays out the purpose of the institutional Church: that we may all come “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph 4:13). Appropriately, then, we find it in our baptismal liturgy where parents and godparents solemnly promise that they will “help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ” (p. 302).
But what does this mean? What does this look like? If this is a central purpose of the Church, what guidance does the Church give us for what this may be?

In my doctoral dissertation on how early medieval monks read Scripture, I spent a large portion of chapter 2 looking at how the monks talked about saints. The monastic hagiographies—the accounts read in the liturgical Offices—gave communities a picture of sanctity, a glimpse of how the full stature of Christ looked, incarnate in different places and different times. Now, the history that I found in these could sometimes be…a little questionable, and I discovered that (for my purposes, at least) the less the monks knew historically, the better off I was. The least historical accounts were the most ideal: these texts sketched mostly clearly the idealized holy goals of monastic living.

Now—the Episcopal Church doesn’t talk about saints so much. In fact, within our prayer book only the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Apostles, Evangelists, Mary Magdalene, and Stephen the Protomartyr are so honored. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have them… Even before the authorization of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Episcopal Church envisioned a supplementary volume that would include Days of Optional Observance to liturgically commemorate heroes of the faith. With the authorization of the Prayer Book, General Convention also authorized this volume known as Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1979-A056) which commemorates Christians East and West from the earliest times down to the twentieth century.

Striving for clarity, 1994’s General Convention passed a set of criteria for subsequent additions to the book. The 1994 General Convention Resolution (A074a) can be found in full here. The money section is contained in the 8 bullets under Guidelines; the contents of these bullets describe qualities held by suitable candidates for inclusion:

1. Heroic Faith. This means bearing witness to God in Christ "against the odds." Historically, the greatest exemplars of such faith have been martyrs, who have suffered death for the cause of Christ, and confessors, who have endured imprisonment, torture, or exile for the sake of Christ. Following this precedent, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America has been very specific and has restricted the designation of martyrdom to persons who have chosen to die rather than give up the Christian faith, and has not applied it to persons whose death may have resulted from their heroic faith but who did not consciously choose martyrdom. There are other situations where choosing and persisting in a Christian manner of life involves confessing Christ "against the odds," even to the point of risking one's life. For this reason the Anglican Communion traditionally has honored monks and nuns like Antony, Benedict, Hilda, Constance and her companions, missionaries like George Augustus Selwyn, and people as diverse as Monnica, Richard of Chichester, and Nicholas Ferrar. More recently the Church has learned to honor social reformers like William Wilberforce and Jonathan Daniels for the same reason. Heroic faith is, therefore, a quality manifested in many different situations.

2. Love. "If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing...So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:2b-3, 13).

3. Goodness of life. People worthy of commemoration will have worked for the good of others. It is important to recognize that the Church looks not only for goodness but also for growth in goodness. A scandalous life prior to conversion does not disqualify one from consideration for the Calendar; rather, the witness of perseverance to the end will confirm holiness of life and the transforming power of Christ.

4. Joyousness. As faith is incomplete without love, so does love involve "rejoicing in the Spirit"--whether in the midst of extraordinary trials, or in the midst of the ordinary rounds of daily life. A Christian may not fail in the works of love, but still lack the joy of it--thereby falling short of true Christian sanctity. Such joy, however, is as much a discipline of life as an emotion. It need not lie on the surface of a person's life, but may run deeply and be discerned by others only gradually.

5. Service to others for Christ's sake. "There are varieties of gifts...and there are varieties of service" (1 Cor. 12:4-5). There is no true holiness without service to others in their needfulness. The Church recognizes that just as human needs are diverse, so also are forms of Christian service--both within the Church and in the world.

6. Devotion. People who are worthy of commemoration have shown evidence of seeking God through the means of grace which the Church recognizes, having "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). We look both for regularity and for growth in the discipline of prayer and meditation upon God's Word; and we look for this devotion to be manifested not only in a person's private life but also in visible company and communion with his or her fellow Christians.

7. Recognition by the faithful. Initiating the commemoration of particular saints is the privilege of those who knew, loved, and discerned the special grace of Christ in a member of their community, and who desire to continue in the communion of prayer with that member now departed. Such instinctive recognition by the faithful begins naturally at the local and regional levels. Evidence of both (a) such commemoration growing locally and (b) such recognition of sanctity spreading beyond the immediate community is essential before the national Church has an obligation to take heed. It may, in fact, decide that the commemoration in question is best left to local observance.

8. Historical perspective. In a resolution on the Calendar, the 1958 Lambeth Conference of Bishops stated, "The addition of a new name should normally result from a widespread desire expressed in the region concerned over a reasonable period of time." Generally this has been two generations or fifty years after death.

Clearly items seven and eight are particular to the sanctoral process—otherwise, these criteria are a solid start towards what we’re looking for. This gives us a set of qualities that are specific enough to ground one’s character, yet broad enough to envision myriad ways in which they can be implemented.

This past year, General Convention authorized a new book. This text supersedes Lesser Feasts and Fasts and is entitled Holy Women, Holy Men. While it took some twenty years for guidelines to be placed in LFF, this new book has criteria in it from the start. Even at first glance it’s clear that something has changed, though. Here are the principles of revision from Holy Women, Holy Men which begin on pg 131 of the PDF from the Blue Book:

1. Historicity: Christianity is a radically historical religion, so in almost every instance it is not theological realities or spiritual movements but exemplary witness to the Gospel of Christ in lives actually lived that is commemorated in the Calendar.

2. Christian Discipleship: The death of the saints, precious in God’s sight, is the ultimate witness to the power of the Resurrection. What is being commemorated, therefore, is the completion in death of a particular Christian’s living out of the promises of baptism. Baptism is, therefore, a necessary prerequisite for inclusion in the Calendar.

3. Significance: Those commemorated should have been in their lifetime extraordinary, even heroic servants of God and God’s people for the sake, and after the example, of Jesus Christ. In this way they have testified to the Lordship of Christ over all of history, and continue to inspire us as we carry forward God’s mission in the world.

4. Memorability: The Calendar should include those who, through their devotion to Christ and their joyful and loving participation in the community of the faithful, deserve to be remembered by The Episcopal Church today. However, in order to celebrate the whole history of salvation, it is important also to include those “whose memory may have faded in the shifting fashions of public concern, but whose witness is deemed important to the life and mission of the Church” (Thomas Talley).

5. Range of Inclusion: Particular attention should be paid to Episcopalians and other members of the Anglican Communion. Attention should also be paid to gender and race, to the inclusion of lay people (witnessing in this way to our baptismal understanding of the Church), and to ecumenical representation. In this way the Calendar will reflect the reality of our time: that instant communication and extensive travel are leading to an ever deeper international and ecumenical consciousness among Christian people.

6. Local Observance: Similarly, it should normatively be the case that significant commemoration of a particular person already exists at the local and regional levels before that person is included in the Calendar of the Episcopal Church as a whole.

7. Perspective: It should normatively be the case that a person be included in the Calendar only after two generations or fifty years have elapsed since that person’s death.

8. Levels of Commemoration: Principal Feasts, Sundays and Holy Days have primacy of place in the Church’s liturgical observance. It does not seem appropriate to distinguish between the various other commemorations by regarding some as having either a greater or a lesser claim on our observance of them. Each commemoration should be given equal weight as far as the provision of liturgical propers is concerned (including the listing of three lessons).

9. Combined Commemorations: Not all those included in the Calendar need to be commemorated “in isolation.” Where there are close and natural links between persons to be remembered, a joint commemoration would make excellent sense (e.g., the Reformation martyrs—Latimer and Ridley; bishops of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste and Hugh).

The first thing that jumps to mind is that we have a genre change. This is not, as the list before it was, a list of criteria that gives us that snapshot of Christian maturity; this is very much a process for selecting historical personages for commemoration. Thus, these lists don't function in the same way, either rhetorically or catechetically. The new principles focus on process rather than qualities of life. As a result, the explicit naming of components of the mature Christian life have been curtailed. In their place we have business notes.

Naming sanctoral qualities is neither an abstract task, nor simply a liturgical one: it is a fundamentally theological and ultimately Christological task. The people the Church identifies as models—whether we call them saints or not—say something important about how we construct our understanding of the Christian life. How we construct the Christian life, in turn, speaks volumes about how we understand Christ. Just as we strive to see Christ in all persons, it is in the composite image of the saints that we find Christ at work in our own time, place, and station.

It’s not that I’m against the new criteria (although I’m not convinced that “memorability” is a theological category…), it’s just that I feel we’ve lost something. The guidelines of 1994 were like a few quick brushstrokes, or like the charcoal wisps on a sketch-pad that suggest a scene, a figure, leaving the rest to the imagination. They weren’t a full picture of Christian maturity—but they gave us at least a few key dots that suggest a shape. Leaning on Ephesians, looking back at the monks, I have to wonder: do we have anything like this now in our church—a clear sense of the goal; a useful, sufficient, and functional picture of Christian maturity? Have the new principles moved us forward or back?

Dr. Derek Olsen recently finished his Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Adrian Worsfold

I found the recent address to the Church of England General Synod by "David and Richard", clerical President and lay Vice President of the Methodist Conference, bizarrely childish. It was a presentation, one to the other and back again, much about basics of Methodism that many a Synod member should be aware, that is reminiscent of one of the awful methods of delivery given to trainee teachers in the manner that this is how it should be done to children in the classroom.

Beyond that was a basic message that Methodism in Britain would self destruct for higher ecumenical purposes, and not simply because of thoroughgoing decline.

I know about thoroughgoing decline in British religion, if only because I have returned to a denomination that started small and now has undergone structural faults at its central serving institutions. It has had to become more sparing and flexible, whilst interesting aspects are noted about how congregations hitting the floor do actually recover, over short periods, some even going on to prosper in comparative terms. When congregations decline that have continued on as doggedly sub-cultural, as sort-of-Protestants full of rules of process and cliques, they suddenly at a point of desperation learn to value the visitor, find flexibility, distribute roles and contributions, cut the little hierarchies, and use the unpredicted Internet to advertise an unconditional liberal unique selling point that relates to today's issues of new denominational identity. A congregation that sets its mind to the task can, with some luck and geographical fortune, turn itself around even in the tough environment of British non-involvement in churches. Well, if it doesn't it closes, and that's that.

Other denominations are much larger, and have always been so. The Methodists are one of the largest after the Church of England. The problem is that its attending population is top-heavy, and populations collapse in percentage terms. It has had an active policy of closing and disposing of unwanted chapels, but proportionately it can end up with one chapel per town (or less) as easily as the smallest denomination. Once the percentage decline hits the bottom, it hits the bottom. People die pretty much at once, no matter what the number.

Religious Trends used a survey in 2005 that demonstrated that a 4 million at least monthly attendance then would drop to under a million by 2050, a figure just about reached by Hindus (doubling in number) with nearly three times as many Muslim attenders as Christians. The reality of such a decline (should it come about) is that denominations will simply structurally collapse.

It is interesting how in Scotland there are continuous mergers taking place among so called mainline or reasonably moderate Protestant groups ('mainline' is a nonsense term these days - they are all tiny minorities) so that there will be the United Reformed Church (URC) and Church of Scotland there, but the URC is imploding already and establishment doesn't do a great deal for the Church of Scotland. The Scottish Episcopal Church is already quite tiny.

The decline is not helped by a few successful and somewhat deluded media churches, dotted here and there, nor even by the odd successful suburban church. Go to Bradford where evangelical churches struggle, because there is one media church that acts as a kind of vacuum cleaner over what's left.

One has to ask what is the unique selling point of Methodism, or the URC for that matter. Well, British Methodism has the uniqueness that its missing bishops are in its Conference. Whoopee, that'll attract them in. It does have an increased lay involvement, and rotates ministers on short contracts for little pay and increasing stress. Or take the URC, which preserves the notion that there are two rather than three orders of ministry. I bet that makes a difference. The URC is the merging of Scottish Presbyterians sent into England (most once Calvinist English Presbyterians became Unitarian) and Congregationalists (many of whom credally had resisted the liberal drift) that has since carried out more mergers, including into Scotland. The fact is that all these denominations were set up according to old arguments at the time, many of which have ceased to be relevant, many of which are now mergers waiting to merge again. The collapse of the Sunday school movement, or connections between church choirs and schools, has meant that there is no basic Christian memory across the population, never mind debate on the finer points of dividing up denominations.

Suggested figures by 2050 are just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left, Anglicans at 87,800, Catholics at 101,700, Presbyterians (URC etc.)diminshed to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000. Whilst big pinches of salt are needed for all such predictions (the Catholic figures included many Polish immigrants who have already gone home!), nevertheless the question has to be asked about what these denominations are for.

The Catholic Church knows what to do regarding Europe and the West. It is going on a mop-up operation to find and bring across remnants and others in different denominations sympathetic to itself, that can also bolster its conservative identity. It wants to be purer, if smaller, but it will take the Anglicans available and whatever other small groups exist. It makes sense - it also tackles its chronic clergy training shortage. It is amazing how rapidly Catholicism collapses after liberations as in Poland and, before it, Spain. Protestantism in East Germany, that allowed at least some popular democratic training under communism, is rapidly vanishing too.

It is because Methodists came from the Church of England and have 'missing bishops' that they can contemplate coming back into the Church from which they were ejected. On the other hand, as High Methodism (as in the Wesleyan denomination) is now pretty much defunct, some of the Anglican hierarchical and (even) liberal-Catholic tendencies might be too much of a cuture shock. A local group to which I present papers diverted its discussion to this issue recently, and no matter which way around the ecumenism would go, it all came down to adding a Methodist style extra service in the local Anglican church until it died out. Indeed, up and down the land, ecumenism would add up to one denomination's building hosting the other's service until one or the other approach died out with a bigger council and clergy numbers for the time being. And despite the five minutes extra walk, we said that the beginning of the ecumenical arrangement would involve a proprtion of the people using the transition as the moment to stop their attendance altogether.

But there is another point. Which Methodists would join with which Anglicans? The Anglicans are undergoing a kind of internal war, with the inheritors of the Oxford Movement leaving and the evangelicals taking on the liberal-Catholics for legitimacy. Liberal Methodists already get on with liberal Anglicans, and the same happens with evangelicals. Where there is a division in a town, as between, say, an evangelical Methodist church and a liberal-Catholic Anglican church, the ecumenism tends to be rather light and occasional at best - a sort of good wishes and a once a year dutiful mixing. The same divisions are within the URC and Baptists.

No matter which way one looks at it, the denominations will find their bureaucracies starting to cave in - too expensive and bloated for what is below. Perhaps with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholic wing bust and exported, the Anglicans will be able to absorb the Methodists. Perhaps, instead of a takeover, Methodists might merge with the URC and continue to sell-off plant and machinery more rigorously. Whatever may be the theological justification for structural ecumenism, or may be the resistances from old purist points of view, the fact is that the elephant in the room is the chronic decline going on now - and obvious just by looking around - and therefore effectively the ending of many once important but now unimportant traditions in the religious life of the United Kingdom.

Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.

This is the second of two parts.

By Donald Schell

Though the attacks of September 11, 2001, had been a continent away, they had hit close to us in San Francisco. Two of our parishioners lost relatives who worked in the World Trade Center. Another parishioner’s best friend whom she’d just seen the week before was on one of the planes flown into the twin towers. ‘My best friend was killed by a terrorist,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened and I’m crying all the time, and I’m so angry I haven’t got the patience my kids need. And they’re frightened too.’ My cousin Bill was on the plane flown into the Pentagon. Bill was just my age. His younger sister Julia Caswell Daitch wrote about his death and the bitterly slow healing of angry grief in Not to Worry, I’m Just Collateral Damage.

The question persists – how do we live and love and serve without defining our lives by terror or a war on it? Don’t we really need to be afraid?

Another parishioner, an Israeli and former Israeli Air Force officer who had married to the daughter of an Episcopal priest, told us that San Francisco friends who knew he commuted to work across the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge kept asking him why he wasn’t afraid to cross the bridge. “Don’t you think it might be the terrorists next target?” they asked. He replied, “I’m from Jerusalem. You learn that you simply can’t live in constant fear.” My Jewish parishioner was speaking Gospel to us. ‘You can’t live in constant fear.’ And you can choose faith, hope, and love instead. I pray Ittai’s Jerusalem wisdom for us all.

Remember how often in 2001 we heard that ‘everything has changed.’ But what changed? Fear is so pervasive and deep for us humans that ‘Don’t be afraid’ seems to be the standard greeting for angels even bringing good news. Dare we protest that we’re more realistic than people two millennia and more ago, people who lived in cities that had been destroyed again and again by conquering armies. People whose babies died of simple, curable illnesses. People whose experience of the threat of every day life was as raw as our neighbors in Haiti or Somalia or Sudan or Thailand. Yes, we’ve always had really big things to fear. And probably there have always been people to make profit on our fears and use our fear to amass power. But when we accept fear as our baseline, defining condition, and as Clouzot and St. Paul suggest, our unconsciousness of the wages of fear will cost us dearly. And maybe that’s what ‘everything has changed’ meant it we accepted it. That fear become our postulate, the basic assumption underlying everything.

Fear fuels our country’s polarization. We’re so reluctant to trust one another that my good friend continued to suspect I’d re-written a national hymn for my own partisan purposes (and I have to acknowledge that I wished I had written those words). Fear undercuts friendship. Fear makes us xenophobic, anti-Islamic, anti-Republican (or anti-Democrat). Fear exults in the sloppy labels we paste on our enemies – Socialist! Fascist! Revisionist! Fundamentalist!

At worst our polarized church only offers its members and the broader society a different, more ‘Biblically’ or ‘theologically’ formulated list of fears from our polarized society’s politicians, public personalities and advertising firms.

In the early 1990’s our daughter Maria had a wonderful Croatian architecture teacher. She was a passionate, inspiring teacher though everything she had ever designed had been bombed to rubble in the methodical destruction of Sarajevo. She said she was finished with designing new buildings. “For me,” she said, “teaching the next generation is the only work I can do with integrity, that and telling anyone who can hear that what happened in Sarajevo could happen here.” She wasn’t afraid, and she hadn’t given up, but she knew that danger was real and that the chaos of war can eventually cross any border. So her teaching work was like Julian of Norwich’s ringing affirmation in the days of the Black Death, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Or as our twenty-two year old son says, “It’s all good.”

Neither Julian nor my Joshua imagine that ‘everything’s going to be fine.’ Their ‘well’ or ‘good’ are bigger than the simplistic security of gates communities (and our illusion that we can make the U.S. a continent wide gated community). Josh and Julian know that we live in a world where really hard things can happen.

In 2010’s continuing culture of fear, too often the church simply offers new fears for old, not inviting us into courageous trust and hope grounded in love, but the stern counsel that we’re fearing the wrong thing. Shouldn’t we fear the demise of our church? Global warming and other impending ecological disasters? Who wouldn’t fear tyranny and the loss of our liberties? Or priests who practice Buddhist meditation? Or leaders who mess with our Prayer Book? If perfect love casts out those fears, what will we have left?

Why are we so attached to our fears? And just what are we actually afraid of?

We might guess that the obvious answer is death, but my own experiences seems oddly distant when real threat of death presented itself -
- like when death on a bare ridge in Colorado was as close as the lightning hitting the ground all around us,
- or when I crested the hill in Idaho winter, saw the interstate traffic stopped dead for the jack-knifed big rig that blocked all lines, touched my brakes and felt the wheels lock on black ice, praying the Jesus prayer as I steered the icy 60 mile an hour slide from rear-ending a tiny sport scar and we skidded into a big, stopped truck,
- or when I was robbed at gunpoint walking home from the church one night.
In those moments the knowledge that death might come in the next moment only focused my praying. God felt alive and present in the trust or whatever could come (including death), the trust that’s sometimes hidden within or alongside faith.

So I don’t think it’s actually death that we fear.

We fear failure. We fear letting people down. We fear losing control? We fear that someone else may be right and we may be wrong? We fear getting found out or being judged or shunned. We fear decisions that may bring us and those we love suffering. We fear not knowing what to do.

In the moment he spoke it, and in that one phrase, Franklin Roosevelt wore the mantle of Anglican lay theologian – "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.