By Susan Fawcett

This Advent, you may spend time each day with the daily readings. You may have a devotional book of some sort. You may light the candles on an Advent wreath. Or, you might just find yourself plugging in your iPod.

Last year, a group of young priests, recent graduates from Virginia Theological Seminary, created daily Advent podcasts. The Rev. Lonnie Lacy and the Revs. Casey and Melody Shobe came up with the idea.

Lonnie explains: "When I was in college, only 7 or 8 years ago, we didn't have iPods. Walking across campus, you'd pass people and say hello. Everyone was engaged with one another. But now that I'm on this large campus as a chaplain, everybody walks around with their iPods on and their earbuds in. It struck me as an opportunity because I thought, if people are walking around so isolated because they've got the earbuds in and they're not engaging one another or the world-maybe we can put out some good content that would challenge them to think about what it does mean to engage the world."

Additionally, communicating a spiritual message through a tech-savvy platform meets people where they already are. "We wanted to create something that would be relevant and accessible, to fit into daily life and work," said Melody Shobe. Lonnie agreed. "These podcasts are an attempt to integrate the holy into our daily lives and activities. Driving to Walmart isn't in itself a holy experience. But to invite God with you, to try to shape your perspective in a way that is absolutely contrary to the way Walmart shapes our perspective, IS a holy exercise. There is nothing wrong in the world with people trying to integrate the holy into their everyday ordinary activities."

Just 5-7 minutes long, with a focus on a brief segment of the daily readings from Lesser Feasts and Fasts, and always including some piece of contemporary music, the 'Devo-to-Go' podcasts were available on iTunes. The creators got very positive feedback, and expanded their base of contributors for a Lenten podcast series. By the end of Lent, their listenership was up to 600 people. "What blew my mind," Lonnie said, "is that we had listeners in Japan and South Africa; they must have found it via iTunes. I felt like we were just a bunch of kids playing with headphones and computers. But the fact is that we give these 7-minute glimpses into what life can be life in the midst of a culture that is becoming more isolated. So it's a gift."

Melody said that, as opposed to preaching, podcasting "gives me the freedom to have a little more fun-to be a little more creative in how I respond to a text. It's partially the anonymity of it-I can tell a story about my childhood that I might feel a little less comfortable saying in a worship setting. It's the distance that technology gives." Lonnie added that podcasting can be a surprisingly more intimate medium than preaching: "You're talking right into someone's ear. So, writing for a podcast is more like trying to share something intimate with a close friend, rather than trying to shape the hearts and minds of a large group of people."

Casey Shobe, another of the original creators of Devo-to-Go, said that "As the weeks of Advent went on, the effort of writing and mixing the podcasts became a sort of spiritual practice in itself. It was very fulfilling that something that spoke to my personal spiritual life was then able to speak to others and help them experience the seasons of Advent and Lent."

With an expanded list of over a dozen writers, clergy and lay, from all over
the country, the Devo-To-Go podcasts will be available again this Advent at several locations, including the Diocese of Washington’s online Advent calendar, and on iTunes.

"I think that this exercise has been a good example of how much the young clergy of our church have to offer, both to the church and to the world," Melody said. "Most of the contributors are under 30 years old, and their work is definitely quality. I listened to every one and was fed by every one. It was a gift that the young clergy of the church have given me. It's a reminder that experience isn't the only voice that has to speak; the fresh
perspective and enthusiasm and passion that we have to offer is important too."

Preach it, sister.

The Rev. Lonnie Lacy serves as Episcopal Chaplain to Georgia Southern University and the Assistant Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Statesboro, GA. The Rev. Casey Shobe is the Priest Associate, Christ Church Cathedral, Houston, Texas. The. Rev. Melody Wilson Shobe is the Assistant to the Rector at St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas. The Rev. Susan Fawcett keeps the blog This Passage. She serves a parish the Diocese of Virginia, and supports the work of the General Convention publication The Center Aisle.

By Deirdre Good

Rowan Williams' book, Christ On Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement, published in 2000 has become a classic, as Alison Goodlad observed recently on the Web site of Ekklesia. It is a best seller, read throughout the Anglican Communion. I saw it recently as a Lent reading choice on the library table of the parish I attend in Maine during the summer.

Stanley Hauerwas has nothing but praise for the statement in it that "the hardest thing in the world is to be where we are." He commends this as an invitation to learn to live in ordinary time, in the confusion and complexity of the present in his new 2007 book The State of the University: Academic Knowledge and the Knowledge of God. Williams asks, he says, how can our ordinary lives express the truth that violence has been overwhelmed and silenced by Christ? Dramatic gestures will not make our lives more authentic. Instead we are called not just to speak the truth but to the more demanding task of hearing the truth in each other by overcoming distrust and so to work for peace.

"We constantly try to start from somewhere other than we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is there in the present moment." (Christ On Trial pp 85-6)

Williams' book discusses the trial scenes showing how, in each of the four gospels, the interrogation of Christ is reversed and the interrogator becomes, unsettlingly, the interrogated. In Mark's gospel, Jesus' declaration to the High Priest's question, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" is an affirmation that overcomes all the secrecy of Mark's gospel about Jesus' identity: "I am," he says (14:62). Jesus' declaration at the trial and not earlier in the gospel means that he cannot be misunderstood as a wonderworker in competition with other sorts of power in the world. The one who says "I am" in the trial is neither wise nor holy nor admirable nor impressive. If we listen to Mark's Jesus as the voice of God it is we who are silenced.

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus' answer to the question about his identity, "I adjure you by the Living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God" is "So you say" or "the words are your own" (26:64). Jesus' answer reverses the question: the High Priest has the language and the means to make sense of the world but no actual understanding of the words. That language in Matthew is the language of what Wisdom has done through human agents; it is a question to all who are religious insiders who cannot read this story although it is part of their/our tradition.

Each chapter includes references to poets, novelists, movies and writers. The chapter on Mark opens by noting that the mood of Pasolini's film, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, best represents Mark's gospel. The chapter on Luke opens with the lines from Sydney Carter's song Knocking on the Window. Alison Goodlad astutely observes that Williams' approach to the trial narratives of the gospels indicates that they are not the starting point for his reflections but rather as points that distil "the understanding he has derived from other sources such as the gospel narratives as a whole, general scriptural reading, Christian tradition and reflection, and wisdom derived from poetry and fictional works."

This is most evident in his approach to Luke's gospel in which the words of Jesus to the council's questioning whether he is the Messiah, "If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer" (22:67) are construed as "I have nothing to say to you that you will be able to hear or to which you will be able to respond. Luke's Jesus places himself with those whose language cannot be heard." (Christ On Trial p. 54).

In this answer, we are told that Jesus indicates God's presence with those who do not have a voice and who are left out of our ways of organizing our own moral and social life. In a following section, "Allowing the Rights of Others," stories from those who have little or no experience of being insiders amplify Williams' approach to Luke. If we are unsettled by someone who cannot speak our language, by those who are mentally and physically impaired, for example, or by making space for children, then it is we who are on trial. In a subsequent section, "The threat of Jesus," Williams observes that Jesus' mistreatment in all the Gospel narratives including being beaten, flogged, and crowned with thorns is not surprising: he is beaten because he is powerless; his powerlessness is not in competition for the same space that his judges and captors are defending and he is thus a bigger threat than any rival because he calls into question the whole world of rivalry and defense.

The problem with this reading of Luke is that Jesus is never flogged or crowned with thorns in Luke's trial narrative. True, Pilate announces his intention to have Jesus chastised and released (23:16) but commentators note that this chastisement is a "minor beating" and not the flogging of which Matthew (27:26) and Mark (15:15) speak that is part of the sentence of crucifixion Jesus undergoes. But in Luke's narrative this chastisement is never carried out. Herod's soldiers treat Jesus with contempt and make a mockery (23:11) but Pilate in the next section views Herod's treatment of Jesus, including the putting on of a robe, as an indication of Jesus' innocence. The result of Jesus' being sent from Herod to Pilate is that they both became friends on that day with one another.

Of course, Luke's gospel does describe God's compassion for the socially and economically marginalized and its disquieting consequences for us but the trial narrative may not be the best place to locate this concern. Instead, Luke's account of Jesus' passion presents a Jesus in control of events where he would in general be passive: Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane is the agony of a heroic martyr not the anguish of Mark or Matthew; the arrest in Gethsemane includes Jesus' interruption and healing of the violent cutting off the ear of the High Priest's servant; the crucifixion scene includes Jesus' dialogue with the criminals on either side of him; Jesus' last words on the cross indicate confidence not abandonment: "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit."

I am not suggesting that this is the only or the right reading of Luke's trial narrative, only that it offers a disconcerting reading that takes more of that narrative into account. Jesus' words to the council are of a piece with Luke's portrait of Jesus' composure under duress. Jesus expects a negative response: the authorities will never believe and never answer. Neither here nor in response to an earlier question by what authority he does things like cleansing the temple (20:1-8), does Jesus cooperate. Indeed, Jesus' declarations in response to his interrogators may be the only weapon he has. But Jesus' answer, couched in the appearance of control, is a Lucan allusion to a larger narrative of healing and forgiveness from and around the Savior for the slave of the High Priest, for Herod and Pilate, for the criminal on the cross, and extending to those who seek to slaughter other martyrs like Stephen in Acts. Yet underneath Luke lies an alternative account in which the Spirit blows where it wills and Judas repents. What is perhaps uncomfortable for all of us is grappling with the implications of Luke's contrived stability.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. While she is an American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and loves marmite which may explain certain features of her blog, On Not Being a Sausage.

By Greg Jones

The 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10 which many have cited in the recent divisions over human sexuality -- as being the normative Anglican teaching -- also committed the entire Anglican Communion to something called the 'listening process.' According to the official Anglican Communion website, Lambeth 1998 "recognised that there are people who recognise themselves as having 'homosexual orientation' and that that they look to the church for pastoral care, moral direction and God's transforming power for the living of their lives and the ordering of relationships." As such, Lambeth 1998 1.10 says,

We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ.

This is as important as any other teaching of the Church affirmed at that conference. The Primates of the Anglican Communion meeting in 2005 called for a facilitator to monitor and check up on the process "to honour the process of mutual listening, including 'listening to the experience of homosexual persons' and the experience of local churches around the world in reflecting on these matters in the light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason."

At the last Primates meeting further movement on the process was called for, and the Lambeth 2008 meeting of bishops is supposed to have a study guide to consider from all of the findings.

In all the focus of the past fews years on the Episcopal Church's supposed shortcomings, it has frequently been ignored that several provinces of the Communion have not at all fulfilled or participated in this process -- thus ignoring the supposedly 'normative' teaching of the Communion on the matter. Notably, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, the Southern Cone, and a couple others perhaps, have markedly rejected the process, just as they have rejected key portions of the Windsor Report.

The mother Church has done significant work in the process, however, and one of the valuable British submissions, in my view, is this report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists .

The Royal College of Psychiatrists is "the professional and educational body for psychiatrists in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland." Their findings mirror reports from the American counterpart organization.

The value of such a report goes to the area of 'reason.' If Anglican theology is to include reason -- which includes 'reasoned response to experience' -- then the findings of a prestigious scientific organization do have obvious possible implications for our theology.

The importance of the listening process is that there is a complexity to the moral issues of the day, especially those that currently divide the Church, which invites far more consideration and discernment. It has long been the Anglican way to employ the gift of reasoned discourse in our discernment of God's will.

I believe that it would be as hard to discern the meaning of Scripture without faith in Christ as it is to discern its meaning without the gift of reason.

We have been through this kind of thing before -- which is what makes today's situation so disappointing. After all, Copernicus discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe and the Roman Catholic authorities tried to squelch his findings in the name of Scriptural literalism. When Galileo put forth Copernicanism -- he was charged with heresy, made to recant, and spent his life under house arrest.

Yet, today, even the Roman Catholic Church fully acknowledges that Copernicus was right, that Galileo was wrongly treated, and that the earth does rotate around the sun. Amazingly, the Roman Catholic Church -- and all we else who agree with Copernicus -- have managed very well to cherish the Gospel and profess Christ as the incarnate, crucified, resurrected and ascended Lord -- whether the earth rotates 'round the sun or no.

The use of reason and the willingness to reinterpret Scripture in light of certain 'scientific' findings is not inherently wrong. It is not inherently a capitulation to culture or the adoption of paganism.

The calling we all share -- who love Christ and call Him Lord -- is to set our hope on Him, and pray that our minds will be illuminated by the Holy Spirit as we discern how to live rightly. Anglicans have always believed, I always thought, that not every scenario is scripted in Scripture, nor is every letter of the Law the self-evident vehicle through which the Spirit of the Law is mediated. As such, we have always sought to learn God's will for our lives by the careful interpretation of Holy Scripture, in light of the traditions of the Church and the gift of reason.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") became a member of Christ's Body at St. Columba's in Washington, D.C., and he was educated at the University of North Carolina and the General Theological Seminary, where he is on the Board. Greg is husband of Melanie, father of Coco & Anna, rector of St. Michael's Raleigh, and author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004). He blogs at fatherjones.com.

By Steven Charleston

At their most recent diocesan convention, the people of Utah voted to request that the next Lambeth Conference be cancelled. In a nutshell, they expressed the opinion that no good could come from hosting Lambeth at this time. In fact, they expected that just the reverse could happen: that Lambeth would prove to be another cause for a further rift in relationships. Therefore, they asked that we just call the whole thing off.

Will this request be acknowledged? Will the powers that be take it seriously?

In the ever shifting tides of political positioning that has come to be considered normal in Anglican church politics, it is too soon to tell. But if the ground swell of dissatisfaction with the way things have been going continues to rise, it could very well be a genuine possibility. The current Archbishop of Canterbury has approval ratings close to the dismal performance evaluations of George Bush or the U.S. Congress. It is not hard to imagine that people, being justifiably suspicious of his ability to be clear, fair and effective, might decide that Utah doesn’t have such a bad idea after all.

But would cancelling Lambeth be a mistake? Should we not come to the table, perhaps most especially when we disagree? The knee jerk answer should be yes, that sounds right, but the realities of past experience should caution us to think twice before we respond. The performance of some bishops at Primates’ gatherings demonstrates that unless there is a firm hand at the tiller of Lambeth, any amount of childish posturing and manipulating is likely to reoccur. In addition, the sad sight of bishops refusing to worship with one another is hardly a global invitation to join such a fractured community. And finally, with special authority being granted and cited for pronouncements coming from non-legislative meetings like Lambeth, running the risk that some partisan “resolution” will be adopted and enshrined into dogma is a risk not worth taking.

But perhaps the most persuasive thing about the Utah suggestion is that it forces us to confront our own dysfunction. More meetings enable more silly behavior. The waffling of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the manipulation of meetings by some bishops, and the lame rhetoric of other bishops who have made a cottage industry out of doom and gloom prophecies has to be faced. For too long we have all been watching this soap opera called Anglican leadership and wondering when the adults would come back into the room to make the kids play nice.

That may not happen unless we take some serious steps. What the diocese of Utah raised is an idea for just this kind of wake up call and action. Perhaps if we call off the party, some people will sober up. It may be disconcerting to many that we have decided not to have another Lambeth right away, but after all, when did we start to worship Lambeth anyway? Even more disconcerting would be the spectacle of global religious leaders playing political gotcha over issues that most Anglicans find pointless and diverting from the mission of the gospel.

Should we stay home with the folks from Utah? I wouldn’t mind keeping them company. How about you?

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, former Bishop of Alaska, is president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School, and keeper of the podcasting blog EDS's Stepping Stones. A citizen of the Choctaw Nation, Bishop Charleston is widely recognized as a leading proponent for justice issues and for spiritual renewal in the church.

By Howard Anderson

Archbishop Emeritus, Desmond Tutu was at the National Cathedral for five days to help us celebrate our Centennial year. He was given the first annual Cathedral Prize for The Advancement of Religious Understanding and Action. This physically diminutive man, in his 76th year has more energy, ideas, joy and wonder at the world than any three or four of us. What struck me most about him as I was privileged to spend much of his five day sojourn here with him, was the way he moves through time and space.

He prays! He prays in a daily Eucharist. He prays before and after any event, auto trip, talk, visit or meal. He prays for hours each day! In John Allen's excellent and authorized biography of the archbishop, aptly entitled Rabble Rouser For Peace, it is revealed that over his entire ministry he has dedicated hours each day to simply sitting in prayer, listening to what The Holy One might have to say to him. He waits with great patience. He waits in silence or in outwardly voiced prayer. He waits with a smile on his face. He is not impatient like so many of us.

I was driving him to the White House for a meeting while he was here. The traffic was bad, and I was feeling responsible to find a way to get him through it. He seemed not to be noticing much of anything, because he was working on his address on "The Spirituality of Reconciliation," but without looking up, sensing I suspect, my anxiety, patted my hand and said, "Father, count to ten slowly. Breathe. God will get us where we need to be when we need to me there. Be patient." And I realized how right he was. I often repeat that one of my favorite theologians, Lilly Tomlin, has said, "The trouble with this rat race of a life of ours, is that even when you are winning, you are a rat!" Even more poignant is the reminder from Brother David Steindl-Rast in his book Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness, that the two Chinese characters for busyness are "heart," and "killing." Clearly, the Archbishop has this in mind, as he moves peacefully through a most hectic schedule that would wear out someone in their forties, let alone someone in their seventies.

But what is most striking about Archbishop Tutu, is what a radically different vision of how God works in the world, and what the Church should be he has than some of the other Primates of Anglican Provinces in the Global South, and Africa in particular. Let's compare. Archbishop Tutu was the Primate of the Province of Southern Africa. Archbishop Peter Akinola is Primate of the Province of Nigeria. Comparing the two you see stark differences in the spirit of the province as seen in the stances and theological positions each primate takes. One could scarcely believe that these two men belong to the same religion, let alone the same Communion on the same continent.

In his address to the National Cathedral, Archbishop Tutu spoke of a loving God whose divine intention for us is liberation. He speaks of a God who loves us as we are, yet calls us far beyond where we are to do God's work and live a life emulating God. We are to combat injustice, oppression, evil, "those aberrations of divine will," and live lives where the norm is the good, love, compassion, laughter, generosity, caring. Most poignantly, Archbishop Tutu challenged us to love those we would call enemies, and in a moving set of stories told of forgiveness offered by victims of the violence of both the Apartheid government and the liberation movements, sins and harm far beyond the human threshold, but through God's Holy Spirit, they were able to move on, even befriending those who harmed them or tortured and killed their loved ones. The message is about a God infinitely mysterious, infinitely beyond any human ability to emulate, and yet, so loving and forgiving that we would still strive to "Be ye perfect as Your Heavenly Father is Perfect," (the title of one section of his address).

When I read Archbishop Akinola, and for that matter, people like Bishop Duncan, I see a model of a God I do not recognize. A God who would ask God's people not to emulate compassion, or combat injustice, oppression and evil, but rather, to judge those who fall outside of what can only be called a modern version of purity codes. It is an Old Testament God of wrath, of judgment, of tribe and clan that emerges. "You aren't as we are and so we will not reach out to you. In fact, we want nothing to do with you. It is as if the Body of Christ's arm is saying to the foot, "we have no need of you. You are not an arm and so be gone. We will not only not share Eucharist with you, we will condemn you and try to harm you because God is on our side. You are wrong. We are right. We are righteous." What sort of God is it that Archbishop Akinola proclaims? I do not recognize that God. This is not the God revealed in the "big story," the whole sweep of Scripture. Let us grant Archbishop Akinola the dubious claims he makes. Is he not duty bound to pursue the apostate Episcopal Church rather than dismiss it to such an extent that he will not even engage in important mission with us?

There is none of this venom in Archbishop Tutu. He speaks for a Church, the province of Southern Africa that is deeply engaged in combating oppression, disease, sexism, even homophobia, those things which harm the children of God. And Archbishop Akinola? He has advocated for a law that would criminalize any manifestation of same-sex affection. Where is reconciliation in that? It is power being exerted against the marginal, the rejected, the despised of his society. Didn't Jesus reach out to those who were rejected by the Temple?

It is about time that voices other than those of Archbishop Akinola and other "neo-Puritan" Primates from the Global South are heard. We all know that the terrible carnage of colonialism will lead to a rejection of the colonizing power's ways. We all know that the missionary society that was responsible for evangelizing an area has great impact on the theology which emerges. But are we not, as Anglican Christians, called by bonds of affection to forebear in love with one another even when we differ? I think Archbishop Tutu's voice, and other voices from the Global South need to be heard. While the intimidating presence of men of power like Archbishop Akinola thunder, Anglicans by the thousand in Nigeria leave the Church to find the "Good News" being lived out and preached in Pentecostal and other churches. Nigerian friends of mine tell of visits home in formerly Anglican areas that are now predominantly Pentecostal, for those churches are trying to meet the needs of the people, not to find new ways to condemn others.

Franz Fanon, the Algerian psychiatrist who took part in the revolution in Algeria as they pushed the French colonizers out of their nation wrote a book that still deserves a wide reading, The Wretched of the Earth. In this prescient book, he predicts how the "native elite, more French than the French or more British than the Brits," will emerge to lead, but be swept away by a second wave of leaders who are in reaction to the colonial powers. I think Archbishop Akinola is one of the latter. But the good news is that Fanon suggests that this type of reactionary, reactive leader will soon be replaced by a more thoughtful and purely indigenous leader, who draws from the tradition of the people the style and method of leadership. In the Church, that would be Jesus last time I checked!

While Fanon is writing about government, I think it applies to the church in post-colonial areas of the Global South. I think the Akinolas will soon give way to a less power hungry, more egalitarian leader, and with that, a polity which is more democratic, where clergy and laity, not just primates and bishops, discern God's will for the Church. We must be patient. And even as men like Archbishop Akinola castigate us, reject our way of being Anglican Christian, we must pray for them. I must be patient like Archbishop Tutu told me to be. So I say to myself, "be patient Father, count to ten slowly." Amen. I will. God's time is not our time.

How does one account for a Desmond Tutu and a Nelson Mandela to emerge to lead South Africa to freedom without a blood bath? How does one account for someone like Archbishop Tutu who frequently risked his life to save those who were against the cause of freedom for all South Africans, the spies of the Apartheid government? When asked such a question, Archbishop Tutu shrugs, smiles, and tells the story of a white South African woman who was crippled and blinded by a bomb set at a whites only country club by African National Congress "soldiers." She came to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and said, "I want to meet the people who did this to me, because I want to forgive them and tell them how being disabled has enriched my life and made me realize that I must rely upon God alone." Then he says with his hands making the appropriate motions, "Wow. Wow again. No doubt she was a part of God's cosmic movement of love." How does one account for this very different Primate's voice from the Global South? I say, "Wow! And Wow again. It must be a part of God's cosmic movement love."

The Rev. Dr. Howard Anderson is Warden and President of the Cathedral College at Washington National Cathedral.

By Jean Fitzpatrick

Rutting season has arrived in the Hudson Valley, and police are warning drivers to keep an eye out for deer who are crazier than usual. Frantic to breed, they chase one another through woods and across meadows, darting out from stands of golden birches, sprinting across winding roads. If you spot a doe, you'd better brake for a stag in hot pursuit. It's a glorious time. We're living in a wonderland straight out of Bambi, love busting out all over the forest, the whole leafy world gone goofy.

Remember those days? Remember when you first fell in love and felt an irresistible pull toward your partner, who was surely the most wonderful and amazing creature God ever created? And yet almost as irresistibly, somewhere along the way you came to recognize his or her flaws -- the annoying tendency to leave underwear on the floor, to arrive late, to hog the remote. At that point, it can feel as though an early winter has descended on the relationship.

Not so fast. That's where Thanksgiving comes in. Thanking our partner is one of the most powerful ways to restore joy and closeness in a marriage. I know, Thanksgiving is supposed to be about thanking God: isn't that the easy part sometimes? Thanking God seems to enlarge us, to remind us we're blessed. Thanking our spouse, on the other hand, is another story. Lacking a special occasion -- a clean garage, a perfect roast turkey, a gift -- we often assume our appreciation is unnecessary, or obvious. Or, worse, we keep score: Why should I think my partner? Look at all the thankless tasks I do! Nobody thanks me. Besides, look at all the annoying things my partner does, not to mention the chores he or she doesn't accomplish. And so on. It's exhausting. What happened to the breathless joy of the chase?

Well, it's over. Marriage, like any spiritual path, demands a willingness to open our hearts and the discipline to move beyond instant gratification. The good news is that, like any spiritual path, it rewards us with deep sustenance. Understood from this perspective, thanking our partner becomes a daily practice, a response to ordinary things -- for putting in a day's work, for picking up the kids, for giving a back rub, for buying the groceries, for taking out the garbage, for doing the laundry. We can't express our thanks enough. Over time, we discover we're growing closer. Our partner feels special, important to us. We're filling up a reservoir of good will for the times when we do want to raise concerns. Say thank you several times a day, and there's no telling what might happen. The two of you might even feel young and goofy again.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, sees couples and individuals in her private practice. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

I wrote this column a few years ago for Beliefnet, and it is reprinted here with permission.

By Jim Naughton

A few years ago, while I was on an academic fellowship, my family and I spent Thanksgiving with other fellows and their families. In religious terms, we were a mixed bunch: Christians, Unitarians, Jews, agnostics, and atheists.

A multi-religious dinner table always presents a bit of a problem when it is time to say the grace before meals. But Thanksgiving presents a particularly sticky situation, because it is the one occasion on which even the irreligious feel that some sort of invocation should be made. But who, or what, should we invoke?

After several minutes of communal hemming and hawing, one of the braver of our number delivered a prayer to the earth, thanking it for its bounty and seeking its forgiveness for our environmental sins. In all, it sounded more Green Party than pagan. Having crossed that hastily improvised bridge, we tucked into our feast.

But the moment stayed with me, for it illustrated what a peculiar, not to mention sneaky, holiday we were celebrating.

Thanksgiving is not a purely civic holiday like Memorial Day or Independence Day, although we are, in part, celebrating the fortitude of our Pilgrim forebears. Nor, like Christmas or Passover, does it come freighted with the content of a particular faith. Rather, Thanksgiving straddles these two categories; it is civic and religious. To paraphrase Jesus, Thanksgiving gives both to Caesar and to God.

In doing so, it discomfits believer and unbeliever equally. For giving thanks assumes the existence of one (One?) who deserves our gratitude--anathema to atheists. But giving thanks as a nation assumes that we stand before God as citizens of a country, as well as members of a faith. And that should offend anyone who believes that salvation flows from the church and not from the state.

Thanksgiving, in other words, assumes the existence of something that doesn't exist: an American faith.

On these grounds, I suppose one could argue that this holiday violates the establishment clause of the Constitution. I leave that task for some particularly dogmatic member of Americans for the Separation of Church and State. What interests me is the ubiquity of gratitude, the understanding, even among witnessing atheists, that it is important to be grateful for our good fortune.

For me, the desire to give thanks is evidence, at a minimum, that human beings are innately religious. The theologian Karl Rahner wrote that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every one of us. With Rahner, I believe that it is God who put it there.

You can take that argument or leave it. But if you leave it, help me to understand why we experience this particular species of gratitude. I'm not talking about the kind of gratitude we feel toward someone who has done us a favor. I mean the sort of global gratitude inspired by gifts we could not have known enough to ask for, or the kind we feel when matters beyond our control end well for us.

Who do you thank for your sweetheart's brown eyes; for growing up where it snows (or doesn't); for being alive at the same time as Bruce Springsteen; or for seeing your children born into a country that is prosperous and at peace?

You might argue that there is no one to be thanked. Maybe all our purported blessings are a matter of random chance. Perhaps the desire to extend gratitude beyond the human is an evolutionary glitch--a useful social trait that got too big for its britches.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps we awaken one day and realize that we are not now, nor have never been, masters of our own destinies; that our successes were not entirely of our own making; that our souls magnify the Lord, whether we like it or not.

Again, you can take this argument or leave it. It is easier to believe in chance than in grace. Chance requires nothing from us. In fact, if life is a succession of random events, than any response to good fortune is superfluous.

Grace is different. In receiving grace, we are challenged to become channels of grace. This is more than a matter of a few good deeds (although those help); it is an invitation to place one's self in God's hands, and devote one's self toward what we perceive as God's ends.

Thanksgiving, then, is a call to action: a gentle poke to awaken our collective conscience from its postprandial slumber. To whom much is given, etc. etc.

In a county as religiously diverse as ours, we may never be able to express our gratitude in words that are acceptable to everyone. Fortunately, deeds work even better.

By Sam Candler

It’s that time of year. It’s time to wear everybody down by asking incessantly what we are thankful for. From kindergartens to garden clubs, everyone will be pressing themselves to consider all the things we are – or should be—thankful for.

Isn’t giving thanks supposed to be a lovely activity? Well, not always. During this upcoming season of Thanksgiving and Christmas, I remind myself that what we give thanks for can also affect our spiritual lives negatively. For example, there may be a problem with giving thanks for over-abundance and over-supply. Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector reminds us that merely thanking God indiscriminately may not be the best prayer after all.

Therefore, I have decided this year to thank God in another way. I propose to thank God not for all the things I have. I want to thank God, instead, for all the things I do not have. I want to thank God for all the things I do not need!

I do not know about you, but I have received about a hundred pounds of retail catalogs in the last few weeks. The same catalogs are in the doctor’s offices. They are in the seat pocket of the airplane I flew a few weeks ago.

I thank God that I do not need all the products that those catalogs are offering. Have you noticed how much stuff is in those catalogs that you absolutely do not need?

Here’s a few of the items I thank God that I do not need: I do not need an all-in-one breakfast machine. This machine has slots for toast and eggs and sausages. Apparently, you put everything in, wash your hands, and then out pops your own ready-to-eat breakfast. I do not need that. In fact, I enjoy a breakfast that requires a little time to prepare. It’s usually just enough time for me to wake up. Machines that claim to save me time usually cost me a great deal more anxiety.

I am also thankful that I do not need a fifteen-thousand dollar exercise machine that promises to make me lose weight if I use it only ten minutes a day. Have you seen the advertisement for this machine? It looks like something the absent-minded professor has invented, full of arms and cables and strange hooks.

I must admit that I am actually a bit overweight myself. I should exercise some more. But I think good exercise should not cost fifteen thousand dollars. It really costs only time. I am thankful I do not need that contraption.

I am also thankful I do not need the fanciest GPS –global positioning system—in my car. Have you seen how complicated and fancy they have become? For one thing, I like to know where I am going before I start driving the car.

For a second thing, I really don’t want a strange voice telling me about every turn and every local attraction we pass. A friend of mine has one of these devices, and he took me for a ride in his fancy car. I could hardly have a conversation with him, due to that strange voice mildly droning out directions. Actually, we were up in north Georgia, and –I swear—we ended up on some God-forsaken dirt road that led us through a roller-coaster. I am thankful that I do not need a GPS voice in my car.

Here’s one. Mini-helmets. A six-inch football helmet signed by my favorite football player. I am thankful I do not need that. If I had one, it would probably be signed by Michael Vick.

Here’s another item I am thankful I do not need. It’s a new kind of shoe with industrial grade absorption springs in the heel. The ad says it defies gravity. Yeah, that’s just what I need. I hop over a crack in the street, and I end up bouncing into a plate-glass window. I am so thankful I do not need to wear gravity-defying shoes.

How about the world’s largest write-on map of the world? Do I need that? Actually, I thought I did need one of these, about ten years ago. We had children at home, and –how great!—we could have a huge map on the playroom wall, so they could actually learn something while they were staring into space! So I bought one. “World’s Largest” has to be correct. It was thirteen feet long and nine feet high. We didn’t have a wall it would fit on. We ended up trying to install it by curving around the corner and up into the ceiling. We did not need that thing. I am thankful I don’t need another one. By the way, I do not need a television screen that big either.

I am thankful that I do not need a runaway alarm clock. Have you seen it? Its cousin is an alarm clock that starts flying around the room when it goes off. The idea is that you have to get out of the bed and search for it in order to turn off the sound. That way, you are definitely awake. I am so thankful that I do not need that.

I am thankful that I do not need a “garage elevator.” Apparently this device is a steel platform that you install in your garage. After you put all your garage clutter into it, you hoist it up to the ceiling, so it’s out of your way. That way, I suppose, I can put more clutter on the floor and fill every cubic foot of the garage with other things I do not use. I don’t need a garage elevator, and I cannot imagine how to install it anyway.

I am thankful I do not need a nose-hair trimmer. Well, I take that back. My wife would probably say I do need a nose-hair trimmer. Would I pay more attention to that area of my personal hygiene if I had paid forty dollars for a special machine? Let’s give it another year before I put it on the Christmas list.

I am thankful I do not need a backpack bicycle. This little bicycle apparently folds up so you can put it in your backpack …and add twelve pounds to what you are already carrying. I guess if it got too heavy you could unfold it and try to bicycle out on the trails, but I am not sure the six inch tires would let you do that. I am thankful that I like to backpack and I like to bicycle, but I do not have to do both of them at the same time!

I am thankful that I do not need that new language teaching series that will have me speaking Portuguese in ten easy weeks. What a great headline: Learn Portuguese today! Today? I would have to spend a year in Portugal or Brazil before I could get by. I am thankful that I do not need a language teaching tape to prove to me how un-disciplined I am!

What else is being touted this year as “Gotta have it”? I actually do not need a pick up truck that has ten horsepower more than the one my neighbor has. It doesn’t need to be six inches wider either. I am so thankful that I do not need a cell phone with two hundred different ring tones.

Think of all the things we do not need this year! I do not need to paint the kitchen another color. I do not need another sweater. I do not need another channel on my cable television menu. I do not need to spend more money.

I simply do not need all this stuff that the world tells me constantly I do need. I am thankful, so thankful, that I really don’t need it! What a liberating experience it is to realize what I simply do not need. It makes me feel free!

Maybe this is what it is like to be close to the kingdom of God, where all is made new. When I realize how much I do not need, I am that much more free to acknowledge the simple wonders God has for me right now – the simple gifts like love and family, friends and community.

Maybe this is what real thanksgiving feels like. Thanksgiving is freedom from the unnecessary clutter of our lives, freedom from what we do not need, so that we can see anew the simple gifts God has for each of us.

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He helped start that city’s interfaith group, and leads regular community bible studies. He is also inspired by playing jazz piano, hunting, astronomy, and poetry. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.

By Heidi Shott

It all started when Jerry Hames decided to retire as the editor of Episcopal Life at the end of June. My friend Tracy Sukraw, editor of the Diocese of Massachusetts’ paper The Episcopal Times, and I wormed an invitation to his goodbye party in New York as the surprise guests. We figured a surprised and delighted Jerry Hames would be a marvelous sight to behold. And, you know, it was.

On the morning of, Tracy flew from Boston and I flew from Portland, Maine. We found each other and took the AirTrain (seven bucks from JFK to Manhattan!) to midtown. Because this was just a quick trip and we’d be walking around all day, we limited ourselves to one shoulder bag. Mine was stuffed, and I kept needing to take things out of it to get to what I wanted at the bottom. I sensed this was not a good way to live, but without a convenient place to drop our bags (we were spending the night way uptown), I had no choice. Perhaps that I would lose something was inevitable. But, as I discovered when I tried to start my car back at the Portland airport several days later, losing my key ring was truly unfortunate.

If Jerry Hames was less wonderful and if Tracy was less game, I would never have gone to New York last June and lost my all my keys…keys to both of our cars, keys to the Diocesan House, keys to the Genesis Fund and its post office box and the key to my mother-in-law’s house that I’m still afraid to tell her I lost. The only reason I didn’t lose the key to our house is because we never lock our doors. That small mercy compensates for hardly anything at all.

Three weeks ago when I arose at 4 a.m. to drive to Stittville, New York, (same state – different universe) to take my mother to the hospital for surgery, I jiggled my coat pocket to listen for my keys. Clang, clang they sounded and I figured I was good to go. At 5:30 a.m. when I inserted my car key into the ignition after a coffee run at the Kennebunkport rest stop, I thought, “Gee, this feels funny.” I turned on the light and discovered I was holding my husband’s key ring.

Rut-roe.

Because I had lost my key to his car in June, one of the keys splayed out on my palm was the only key to his car in existence. That his keys were in my coat pocket is an uninteresting story that involves impatience, laundry, and designated driving and I won’t bore you with it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was on a trip of undetermined length with the only key to my beloved’s car in my possession. Actually, when I woke Scott up at 6:30, he took it well. He knows Jerry Hames and likes him very much, “It’s Jerry Hames’ fault,” I said into my cell phone somewhere on I-495.

“I don’t think so,” my car-less husband said.

Scott borrowed a friend’s car to take our son to school and I fed-exed the keys from the road.

So yesterday afternoon, when I couldn’t find my wallet in my mother’s hospital room in Utica, New York, I thought back to the moment earlier that day as I sat in my car in the parking garage. “Should I take my wallet into the hospital or lock it in the car?” I pondered a moment, consulting my wiser self. “Take it, because you need someplace to put the money you get back from the cafeteria.”

Ah, the wisdom of moi.

The previous evening my brother Brad, his girlfriend Lisa, and I were in the hospital dining room while they were working on our mom in the Intensive Care Unit. It had been quite a bad day with a worrisome close shave with the dreaded and invasive ventilator. Three weeks after surgery and we were back to the ICU. Brad hadn’t eaten and the cafeteria was closed for business, but you could buy sandwiches from a sort of automat machine. “Here, Sweetie,” I said, “I’ll buy you a sandwich. The turkey doesn’t look too bad.”

I put a ten in, retrieved the $2.25 sandwich, and waited for my $7.75…which didn’t come. The maintenance man patrolling the dining room told me to return the next day and the cafeteria people would refund my change. So that’s why I took my wallet into the hospital - because of the turkey sandwich situation. My wallet, it turns out, probably never made it past the parking garage. Later, I retraced my steps, talked with Security, poked through the garbage cans and finally left my name and number at the main desk. My mother had 20 bucks stashed away that I could use for tolls and I had a gas card in my glove compartment. I would make it back to Maine and I did.

Before I left the hospital, I called Scott at home. That morning we’d had a little tiff on the phone about some wet laundry I thought he should have noticed and put in the dryer without being prompted. “How do you walk past a basket of wet laundry a dozen times and not notice it?” I asked, befuddled.

“How was I supposed to know it was wet?” he cried.

From the parking garage I called to ask him to cancel our credit cards, I said, “Hi, it’s me. Please don’t be mad.” And when I told him what had happened, you know, he wasn’t.

Blame is a funny thing. As someone who has worked for the Church for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of blame passed back and forth. Anyone who follows the episcoblogs can’t escape the winding gyres of blame that circle each new development. I’ve always been pleased that I wrote an essay about which both Gene Robinson and Kendall Harmon seemed to agree.

The need to place blame is so human, so natural we’re hardly aware when we’re doing it.

Over the weekend I started reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.” Though I still work for the diocese as a consultant, my family and I, once so involved in parish life, have kept our distance for the past few years. Scott was senior warden and chair of the last Search Committee. He played guitar at the family Eucharist every Sunday for years. Then suddenly something broke for us, and we’ve never quite been able to figure out what it was. We’ve visited other nearby churches, warm and welcoming all, but ultimately we believe in being involved in the community where we live. This is our church, but we feel removed from it and we’re stuck in a hard, sad place.

Taylor’s book is certainly told from a clergy point-of-view but, having lived the oxymoronic life as a “lay professional,” I understand her journey. The need to blame others for my lapse as a churchgoer is palpable. If only, if only. But ultimately I’m responsible for my own stuff. That’s what we’re trying so hard and so rigorously to impress upon our young teenage sons. You don’t like that grade in math? Oh…maybe you should try harder. You want an I-tunes gift card? Oh…maybe you should mow a neighbor’s yard.

But here’s the thing: I hate being responsible when it’s so comforting to blame others for bad things happening or good things not being done. On Saturday night if Brad hadn’t said, “Let’s go down to the dining room,” I never would have lost my wallet. In June, if Jerry Hames hadn’t retired, I never would have lost my keys in New York.

But here’s one more thing: Once you start owning up, it gets a lot easier. On Saturday morning, I stepped into my mother’s hospital room with a chocolate frosted donut as a peace offering. The word on the sibling street was that she blamed me for all the complications that had caused her to be back in the hospital instead of living independently in her own home. I had pushed her into a dangerous surgery and look what had happened.

But when I stepped to the threshold of her door, she held up her index finger to me, as though she were on an important phone call…but she wasn’t. She was in the midst of a very, very serious bout of congestive heart failure and had called for help. Nurses and respiratory therapists streamed into the room on either side of me.

Her struggle for breath was frightening. It reminded me of the brief days seven years before when my father was poised between this life and the next: the feeling that together we – he on one side and I on the other – were on the verge of something else, something unknown and slightly reckless. On Saturday my mother struggled for breath under the oxygen mask while we waited for a room in the ICU and for the three diuretics they had given her to kick in to relieve the fluid buildup in her lungs. I sat on her bed and sang all the old hymns I still knew by heart. She pulled off her mask and whispered, “Sing ‘How Great Thou Art’”, and I obliged the best I could.

If, as my siblings had warned me, she blamed me for pushing her into this awful, vulnerable place, she didn’t say it then. My mother held my hand and whispered, “I knew you’d come.”

Maybe I am to blame for the complications of my mother’s medical condition. Maybe we’re to blame for our restlessness with our congregation. Maybe we are all to blame for the current fracture of our church. But maybe blame doesn’t matter. Maybe blame is irrelevant to God. Maybe what’s important is simply showing up to church every Sunday and to every goodbye party we can manage whether we’re invited or not.

Maybe Jerry Hames isn’t to blame for my lost keys after all and maybe ten dollars isn’t too much to pay for my brother’s turkey sandwich.

Heidi Shott is press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine and communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By John B. Chilton

This essay is the second half of my review of FACTS on Episcopal Church Growth, authored by C. Kirk Hadaway, Director of Research for The Episcopal Church. FACTS on Episcopal Church Growth is based on a 2005 survey. The survey was completed by 57% of congregations surveyed, usually by clergy. The 4,102 responses were weighted to reflect size and location in the population of Episcopal churches as a whole to improve the representativeness of the sample.

Growth in membership can be measured either as a rate or as a change. Small congregations can show large growth rates (or decline) even if it is just a change of a few members. And large congregations can have large growth in numbers with a small growth rate. Congregations were therefore classified as growing if they had “substantial growth in numbers” and at least a 5 percent rate of growth comparing 2000 membership to 2005.

Hadaway’s results are presented in five groupings of characteristics of congregations: demography, worship, orientation towards growing, conflict, and clergy leadership. In Part I of my review I focused on demographic factors. Here I consider the other factors. I find it curious, though, that one of the factors asked about in the survey, outreach, is not covered in the report. Wouldn't be interesting if churches with focus on mission were among those that were most likely to grow? Why outreach is not discussed is not explained.

Purpose, spiritual vitality, and openness to change. Churches that view themselves as fitting any one of these descriptors were very likely to grow.
Joy. Congregations that affirm their worship is joyful are more likely to be growing.

What direction, though, is the causation? Growth surely increases self esteem, sense of purpose and joy of the congregation. No doubt joy is attractive and causes growth. But can you choose joy?

Can a congregation choose to be open to change, or is that a characteristic that’s in its DNA? Likewise, spiritual vitality. All organizations face such questions. A course of action for growth may be clear to the leadership but it’s another thing to change the culture of the organization.

Conflict matters. Two sources of conflict were examined, (1) conflict over the actions of the General Convention 2003, and (2) conflict over the leadership style of the priest. Conflict is not conducive to growth (Hadaway writes “apparently even minor conflict tends to lead some people to leave the congregation”). Leadership conflict appears to have been more debilitating than conflict over GC2003. That is intriguing.

I wonder, though, if some respondents reported conflict over GC 2003 even though conflict was not so much within the parish, but with the diocesan or with the national church. Conflict with an external group could cause growth. Conflict within a parish over GC2003 could be worse than conflict over leadership style. The survey question on GC 2003 does not distinguish internal and external conflict.

Drawing a conclusion about the effect of leadership style of the priest is also problematic. It could be that decline or slow growth causes conflict and blame is placed on the priest. Alternatively, it could be that congregations that are falling below their potential are more likely to be confronted by the priest – it’s not the style, but the context.

Nevertheless, we all know of anecdotes where it was the rector’s style of leadership and failure to adapt a new style that was harmful to the health of the congregation. The survey result is consistent with this anecdotal evidence.

Clergy Enthusiasm. It helps.
Cooperation. Congregations whose rector or vicar “knows how to get people to work together” are most likely to grow.

For both enthusiasm and cooperation above causation could go both ways.

Clergy Tenure. Growth is unlikely in the priest’s first two years. In this sample, the likelihood of growth improved with tenure up to the fifth year. Thereafter it falls off.

This is useful to know. Your new rector cannot replace your old rector. Not everyone in the congregation will find the old rector suits them. This pattern is normal: there's nothing necessarily wrong if it happens.

Number of services. The more services, the greater the growth.

Size is related to number of services so this could be saying that larger congregations are more likely to be growing rather than that the number of services causes growth. Smaller congregations more likely to be in rural locations and smaller towns that are not growing, or not growing as fast as urban and suburban areas are.

Contemplative, formal liturgy, absence of percussion, predictable. Congregations affirming any of these characteristics were less likely to be growing. (Yes, even contemplative.)

Could it be that “stuffiness” hurts church growth and should be avoided if your desire is growth? Or could it be that churches do desire grow and are choosing the character of worship most conducive to growth but that “markets”- mission fields - where formal liturgy (for example) is best are not likely to be growing? The data cannot tell us. What we are alerted to is that if you want to grow it’s worth asking the stuffiness question and even to experiment to find out what works in your market. (As long as it doesn’t cause too much conflict in the congregation!)

Variety. Among churches with more than one weekend service the ones where the services differed considerably were most likely to be growing.

There is the suggestion that adding variety would help growth. And several services makes it easier to experiment and compare which service attracts newcomers. But again we cannot exclude the possibility that churches are making the best choice given their mission field and some mission fields aren’t growing.

Children’s participation. Churches in decline seldom have children or youth speak, read or perform during worship.

How much of that is due to choice as opposed to lack of children is not stated. The survey did also ask about the age distribution of the congregants. Thus the question of availability could have been addressed.

Desire. Congregations that affirm they welcome growth are more likely to be growing.

Evangelism. The greater the participation of the laity in seeking new member the more likely is growth.

Communications. Among congregations that opposed a website only 12% were growing.

That’s not to say websites make a difference; it could be that lack of a website is a better signal that the congregation isn’t interested in growth than asking the congregation if it is.

Visits. Churches that don’t make phone calls or visits to newcomers or visitors aren’t likely to grow. Half of all Episcopal churches make 2 or less such contacts per month. The number of ways of following up with visitors also matters (mail, phone, email, visit, handouts).

Family enrichment. Congregations offering parenting or marriage enrichment as a key program were much more likely to be growing.

Correlation, again, is not causation; it could be that these programs are not a draw to newcomers, but rather exist because the congregation is comprised mainly of younger families.

Throughout this essay I have taken a skeptic’s perspective on what a survey of this sort can tell us. There is the question of the direction of causation. There is the question of what things are within the control of the congregation. I have pointed out that correlation can arise because of an omitted factor (such as the underlying conditions of the local market).

At the level of the congregation it would be easy to take these arguments and take a complacent attitude, or an attitude that the status quo does not need to change, or that whatever we do it’s not going to make a difference. Or that surveys like this simply aren’t useful to a congregation.

My conclusion is different. My conclusion is that there are no easy answers. Surveys like this are useful. First, they permit some degree of benchmarking for the congregation. How are you doing in comparison with similar congregations, be it similarity in terms of demographics or in terms the factors discussed above? Are you lagging behind similar congregations? If so, are there local conditions that might explain that? Are you ahead of other similar congregations? If so, this is something to feel good about and to share.

Second, while such a survey cannot tell you that, say, adding percussion to the worship service will lead to growth, it does plant the suggestion that it might. In conjunction with local knowledge of the congregation and its mission field the congregation must decide what course of action to take if it wants to grow.

I'm no expert in evangelism nor do I think of myself as a good practitioner. I've offered my thoughts on some of the research available from The Episcopal Church and urge you to take a look for yourself if you are interested in seeing your church grow. Here are some links to follow:

Studying Your Congregation and Community

Research & Statistics

Dr. John B. Chilton is an economist specializing in applied game theory. In January he will conclude six years of service at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) and return home to Orkney Springs, the location of Shrine Mont Episcopal Conference Center of the Diocese of Virginia.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Your responses to two questions in my previous column about preparing for death, were inspirational and helpful. Here is a sampling, and to all of you who wrote in – thank you!

I asked: “What do you wish you’d asked your parent before he or she died?”

Readers responded:

I’d ask my mother:
* How she learned to survive with my father all those years?
* To tell me more about her faith in God, which sustained her and held Dad up.
* If she would write a letter to my sister and me? (She died when we were teenagers.)
* How did you show such fortitude and calm during your last illness?

I’d ask my father:
* What he thought about his relationship with Mom – only duty and interdependence?
* About family heirlooms disconnected from meaning discovered after his death?
* About the other women in his life and how many half siblings I have?
* About his childhood after his mother died and his stepmother treated him cruelly?

I’d ask each parent:
* What they believed about life after death?
* About my grandparents and all relatives whose history is lost with their deaths?
* What was your life like when you were young?
* What were your favorites things to do? The disappointments, roads not taken?

I asked: “Did you leave anything undone that you wish you’d done?”

And this reader’s words beautifully summarize many responses: “I wish I had done more to reinforce with my mother her value to the family and to me with words and more hugs and anything else that would have helped reassure her of her own worth. She often thanked me for the help I was extending to her and my response was that I was doing it because I loved her. Then, we simply went on with whatever it was we were doing. That would have been the perfect time, however, to talk more about her value from a whole variety of perspectives. I think I was somewhat lazy in not thinking of this until after her death.”

Another reader wrote a testimony to peace: “One thing I learned from my mother’s death is how to be when my own children gather round (I hope!) to see me off. Let them know I’m not disappointed or fearful or needing anything more than their presence...going with grace. Mother was a clear writer, but I never read anything more perfectly worded from her than this final letter she had left on her desk…the clear intention being to free us from worry and regret:

To my family, my physician, my clergyman, my lawyer – If the time comes when I can no longer take part in decisions for my own future, let this statement stand as the testament of my wishes: If there is no very good expectation of my making an excellent recovery from physical or mental disability, I demand that I be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence and hopeless pain. I ask that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of death. You who care for me will, I hope, feel morally bound to follow this mandate. I recognize that it places a heavy burden of responsibility upon you, and it is with the intention of sharing that responsibility and of mitigating any feelings of guilt that this statement is made. In case of cardiac arrest which is instantly detected, I permit two minutes maximum attempts to resuscitate me."

And if you do have regrets? Many people have found it helpful to write letters to deceased loved ones, then to write another letter from that person back to themselves. This process can be freeing, like the following words from Canon Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918):

“Death is nothing at all: I have only slipped away into the next room: I am I and you are you: whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name; speak to me in the easy way, which you always used…. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.”

Margaret M. (Peggy) Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice. She writes a monthly column for Washington Window
and teaches a course, "Congregational Leadership: Family Systems Theory for Clergy" at Virginia Theological Seminary's Center for Lifetime Theological Education.

By Kit Carlson

It is mid-November. Halloween is past, and Veterans' Day is just behind us. Down my street, my neighbor has illuminated his Christmas display. The seasonal banners are hanging from street lights all over town. "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" has already aired on TBS.

It makes me feel extremely Grinchy.

I used to love Christmas, the sense of eager anticipation, the joyous hustle and bustle of much to get ready in a short time, of a great festival lurking around the corner like the eschaton ... almost here but not quite.

But of course, that was when the season started on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. That was before radio stations started playing 'round the clock Christmas songs starting in the middle of November. Although this all had roots in pagan celebrations to fight back the darkness of the winter solstice, our current celebrations now dawdle their way through the crisp and colorful autumn, practically from the equinox. It makes one wonder ... hmmm, shall I blow leaves, or shall I inflate the penguin snow globe on my lawn?

We have lost the sense of holy anticipation, one that was once evoked even by our culture ("Only 22 shopping days until Christmas!") until just a few years ago.

But I find myself feeling all kind of tingly inside anyway. I am anticipatory, looking forward with great joy and eagerness to the upcoming season ...

to Advent.

Advent is coming! Four weeks of secret retreat and refreshment among the cultural commercial festival. Four weeks of quiet prayer, of hymns that have nothing to do with Santa Claus coming to town, but that sing instead of Jesus coming to town, often in a big and judgmental, wrapping-it-all-up-in-a-big-finish-kind-of-way. Forget the drive-through light festival in the local park. We've got the moon running red with blood and stars falling from the sky.

Advent is coming! With hairy, scary John the Baptist filling two full weeks with his cries of "hurry up!" and "turn around!" and "the Messiah's coming right quick!" It's urgent, it's important, and it has nothing to do with getting my shopping done. It's bigger. It's cosmic. It's fantastic.

Advent is coming! And this year we get Joseph, mulling and puzzling -- not over what to get old Aunt Martha -- but what to give Mary, his fiancee. A quiet divorce, an annulment of their betrothal, or the gift of a name, a husband, a father for her child? Will he share in the gift that God wants to give the world, or will he turn away, caught up in the demands and dreams of the culture that surrounds him?

Advent is coming! With carols and hymns you'll never hear on the local, all-Xmas, all-the-time radio station: "Lo, he comes with clouds descending," "Creator of the stars of night" "On Jordan's bank, the Baptist's cry," "Wake, awake, for night is flying." With candles lit, one by one, week by week -- lights shining in the darkness. With early twilights and trees etched like black lace against the fading sunsets.

Advent is the church's gift to us this holiday season, a holy, sacred, secret observance nestled quietly in the heart of ho-ho-ho and Santa Baby and too much angst and stress and nonsense.

Advent is coming, and I can't wait!

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary. In 2003, she played the apostle Paul on the world's first internet reality series, The Ark, a project of the Christian humor website Ship of Fools.

By Derek Olsen

Join with me for a moment in a dream, in a vision. We’ve been talking more and more in the Episcopal Church of that dreaded “e” word that strikes terror into the hearts of the staid faithful—evangelism. For some it conjures fearful scenes of complex theological refutation, of fast and furious verbal sparring until—pressed and pinked by verbal weapons of dialectic—our opponent throws up his arms, confessing Jesus as an act of intellectual surrender. The prospect of such a thing makes the average church-going heart quail—is that really what’s expected? How do they expect me to do that?!?

The answer from calmer quarters is: relax, that’s not what evangelism is fundamentally about. Evangelism isn’t about beating opponents into submission—intellectual or otherwise. At its heart, it’s about sharing love, communicating who God is and how God is about the work of redemption and reconciliation. It’s less about what we know than who we know—and how he has made himself known through the power of the resurrection at work in our lives. That having been said, there is some knowledge, there are some fundamentals that have to be covered.

Turning to the Scriptures, St. Peter suggests that among the basic equipment of the Christian is having at hand and in mind “an account for the hope that is in you with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15). That is, when questions arise about our faith we need something to fall back on, something to guide our way in explaining what we believe. Now—here’s my dream; here’s my vision. If I were the Evangelism Czar for the Episcopal Church, I’d try and put together a brief yet comprehensive statement of what we think on things. I’d want it to be broad—we need to cover our major bases, and yet I’d want it to be beautiful too. I’d want it, in its simplicity, to hint at depths of thought and experience that could be evoked and not exhausted by a tantalizing turn of phrase. If I could pare it down to something around one hundred words, I’d send out this “account for hope” to all the Episcopal churches with instructions that it be memorized so it could be readily called to mind whenever a useful opportunity might arise.

But, hey—why stop there? Why not have a second version as well? Maybe something twice the length of the first that might clear up a few more connections but also evoke greater mysteries and introduce some language that cuts to the heart of the human religious experience—light, breath, life abundant… Embed some deeper poetry, some metaphors to be chewed upon and savored, and you might have a worthy follow-up to the first that again, isn’t just about knowledge, but that evokes a new way of being and relating to the world in which we live. Of course—I’d want that one to be memorized too.

Who am I kidding, though, right? There’s no way this crazy scheme could work, is there?

Actually…it’s already been done. The texts have already been written. Not only that—they’ve already been infiltrated into your Book of Common Prayer. Many of you have already even accomplished the hard part—the memorizing part. There’s just one little catch. The infiltration has been so successful, has been so complete, that few realize the treasure that we got. Instead of recognizing this amazing “account for hope” for what it is, it’s something that we mumble through between the sermon and prayers at Eucharist, or stick between prayers in the Daily Office.

Yes, I’m talking about the creeds. We’ve got them. Many of us know them by heart—by rote, even—and therein lies the problem. We know them so well, have become so accustomed to them, that we’ve lost sight of their power—and their potential when it comes to evangelism. So let’s review quickly what it is that we have and how we might begin the process of rediscovering them.

The Apostles’ Creed was an early baptismal formula of the church in Rome. This was the basic outline of faith that converts (and in those days they were all converts) would embrace in order to be received into the faith. It served to nail down some fundamentals to establish Christian belief and to refute some potential misunderstandings. First, it asserted that God, the good God, the Father of Jesus Christ was also the God who Creates in distinction from philosophies that suggested that created matter was not just indifferent but downright evil—that bodies were prisons for souls. No, the creed affirmed, the good God made us bodies and—not only that—second, God even took on a body in the person of Jesus the Messiah. Like us, he was born, lived, and died as a historical person in a real place with Roman officials and everything. Third, that the breath, the spirit of God isn’t just a good idea or a nice metaphor—the Spirit is the reality of God moving, living and active.

Our other creed—what we call the Nicene Creed—is more properly called the Nicene-Chalcedonian Symbol. That sounds pretentious but is really just an affirmation that the church called together four world-wide councils to make sure that the faith they were handing down was the faith that they had received from their own teachers extending back to the apostles. Built on the framework like the Apostles’ Creed, it introduces the language of Greek philosophy, not for the sake of getting all complicated, but to somehow encapsulate in word and thought how the church had experienced the power of God moving in its worlds and ways.

Please—don’t underestimate second and fourth century people, though. Even without particle physics or flush toilets they knew that there were things in these affirmations that were at odds with the daily world they experienced; for the creeds—both of them—invite us into a mystery that they neither solve nor resolve: a mystery that begins with the assertion that Jesus is both God and man. Born, yes, but of a virgin—a clear impossibility according to the mechanics of the life we know. Died, yes, but rose again on the third day—another impossibility. Ascended to the Father? We know that can’t happen…unless our grasp of the mechanics of life is somehow incomplete. Unless there is a more full understanding of reality to which we may awake, to find ourselves caught up in, a reality where life wins, where love wins, despite what our senses tell us. Even back then, they knew that these affirmations were asking them to step beyond the threshold of life as they knew it into a bigger, a broader, a wilder world where they didn’t know all the rules.

What the creeds evoke, what they invite us into, is hope. Hope that there’s more to reality than what can be touched and quantified. Hope that death does not win in the end. Hope that we are not merely isolated islands in trajectories of decay but that as our life is caught up in the reality of God we are somehow bound closer to our fellow creatures as well. But the creeds do not simply give us hope; they give us language and a framework for understanding the spiritual stirrings and movings that we detect in our lives. They give us a vocabulary to understand the movement of the Spirit, the breaking forth of resurrection power. For the creeds are grounded in our experiences of the God of whom they speak.

This, in turn, is our own offering to a world that is in need of hope: the hope and the promise that there is a reality, a deeper reality, than what can be measured, quantified, and mathematically modeled. Actually—this is evangelism; it’s the sharing of the hope that we find in Christ Jesus. It’s telling the stories of how God has shown us a deeper reality in our lives. It’s communicating the hope of resurrection even in the face of death. So next time you find yourself in worship or in prayer and you encounter the creeds, take a minute, I beg you. Think about the words. Think about what they say and the realities and hopes to which they point. Ponder the phrases and fit them to your own life’s tale . And lastly, share them. With gentleness, with reverence, give an account for the hope that is in you.

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University where he is an adjunct professor at the Candler School of Theology. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

I’m teaching an Honors seminar at the University of Maryland this semester called “Ideas of God in Scripture and Literature,” and we spend the first six weeks or so on Scripture and interpretive traditions in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I brought in a Muslim colleague and a Jewish rabbi, on separate days, to speak to the class on the idea of God in the Qu’ran and on the rabbinic interpretive tradition, or midrash.

Describing the rabbis’ attention to the Hebrew text, every “jot and tittle” of it in their often creative interpretations, the Rabbi told the students “the conceit is that God speaks Hebrew,” so the words of the Hebrew text are themselves sacred. At the previous class, the students had heard from my Muslim colleague that in effect God speaks Arabic, since Muslims regard the text of the Qu’ran as literally God’s words, dictated to the Prophet Muhammad. In conversations with these colleagues and my students we also explored the idea that each monotheistic tradition reveres a means of revelation – a way that the transcendent, distant God has made godself available to human perceptions: for the Jews, it is through Torah. For the Muslims, it is through the Qu’ran. For Christians, it is through a human being, Jesus, the Word of God incarnate. Whenever I engage in these interfaith conversations (as I do each time I teach the course), I find myself believing, and joyfully, that deep down, it is all the same revelation, that God just keeps trying to get through to us, calling us home.

Each time the class comes to this interfaith conversation, I gain new insights. This year it has been about this question of the language God “speaks.” If the Jews say that God speaks Hebrew, and the Muslims that God speaks Arabic, what language do we Christians say that God speaks? Our revelation is not so much through a text as through a human being, Jesus, (and, however unlikely this seems sometimes, through his body, the Church visible and invisible). What is the human language that translates this revelation? What is the language God speaks, for us?

After some reflection, I decided that the language God speaks, in Christianity, is the language of Pentecost: the gospel is proclaimed in all the languages, through all the cultural frameworks, of the world. As people learn to read Scripture for themselves, in translation, this is magnified, as each reader brings his/her own life experience and point of view to the reading of the story of the gospel. But we read the gospel story, revealed in Scripture, each in our own language, in order to come to know and follow the Living Christ.. That has made the interpretation of the gospel both challenging and lively as Christianity has spread across classes and cultures, some core of it always surviving, miraculously it sometimes seems.

The Rabbinic tradition of midrash holds that every new interpretation of Scripture, if it is faithful and connected to the text, adds to the sum of human knowledge of the divine revelation – even when the new insight contradicts the insight of other rabbis. Without admitting it, I think Christians at our best also adopt that attitude: Brian McLaren, in A Generous Orthodoxy, speaks of 21st century Christianity as a potluck supper to which each tradition brings something valuable, and the point is that we share the feast together, I would add, we share it in the company of the same Host. Not that truth isn’t important; of course it is. But since none of us will ever completely grasp the mystery of God and God’s love for us, isn’t the most important thing the lively and engaged pursuit of understanding, and of genuine Christian discipleship, in fellowship with one another?

I don’t think this is the vision that my Honors students have of Christianity. They see us as being mainly occupied with who’s in and who’s out, who is going to Heaven and who is going to Hell. And that is the underside of the language of our faith: that we have heard the gospel in so many different languages, we scramble to find some kind of ordering principle that will distinguish "us" from "them," "myself" from the "other."

But, good Anglican that I am, I believe that there is a "both/and" that is the bottom line in our faith, the one we should be claiming in the 21st century. We quote Galatians 3:28 in the service of many agendas, but it continues to hold out a vision for us of who we are called to be. When will the world see Christians living as if this were truly our core belief: that God speaks the language of every people and every nation, and that differences, though real, are not the bottom line: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise" (Gal 3:28-29)

Dr Kathleen Henderson Staudt works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature and theology at Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture. Her blog is at poetproph.blogspot.com.

By Howard Anderson

I’ve always thought that institutions should focus on what they are best at. When you don’t you end up backtracking. St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, banned Archbishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on their campus because he compared the treatment of Palestinians in Israel to the treatment of non-whites in apartheid-era South Africa. Banning a Nobel Peace Prize winner takes amnesia about academic freedom. They forgot what a university does. Happily, not everyone forgot, and they had to re-invite him when local Twin Cities Jewish groups, their students and alumni and scores of others advocated for St. Thomas to have the archbishop speak after all.

Now there are some institutions who have been very successful at keeping people out of their ranks. My wife, Linda, comes from a long line of Missouri Synod Lutherans. They have managed to keep women out of their ordained ranks as successfully as the Roman Catholics have. There doesn’t even seem to be much pressure to ordain women, even among female members and only very recently, in a very few places, have women claimed any significant lay leadership roles. Missouri Synod Lutherans also deny communion to those who do not believe as they do about matters of faith, and sometimes will even require an interview, in advance of a service, to determine if you are orthodox enough to be admitted to communion with them. They are very good at keeping people out.

How different we Episcopalians are from that. We are simply TERRIBLE at keeping people out. We banished African Americans to the balconies of our churches, only to find, somehow, before the end of the 18th Century even, Absalom Jones and a great host of gifted and committed African Americans not only on the main floor, but leading congregations with great skill. And when we tried to keep African Americans from the Episcopate with the clever little suffragan gambit, that didn’t work either. Some of the most effective, most inspiring bishops in the last century, and certainly today, were and are African American. What a failure we are at keeping people out of leadership in our church! Gee, we even elected the Rt. Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris the first female bishop in the entire history of the Anglican Communion…not only a woman, but African American to boot! We are the leaky sieve in the Anglican wall trying to keep people out of leadership! Thank God those Primates in the Global South are showing some ability to keep people out. We surely are not.

Up in the part of the world I come from, we tried to keep Native Americans out of the Church. Rascals like Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, the first Bishop of Minnesota, was encouraging Native people to become Episcopalians, at the time the state of Minnesota was perpetrating the largest mass execution in U.S. history on the losing side in the Great Sioux Rebellion in 1862. Why, Bishop Whipple was ordaining Enmegahbowh, and scores of other Native clergy, many trained at Seabury Seminary, which in the 19th Century was in Faribault, Minnesota. And across the country Native clergy were being ordained and giving fine leadership. Heavens, there have even been a host of Native American bishops, beginning with The Rt. Rev. Harold Jones (Lakota) of South Dakota, and including such bishops of native ancestry as Steven Charleston, (Choctaw), Mark MacDonald (several tribal lines), the late Steven Plummer (Navajo), Fred Borsch (Mohawk), Creighton Robertson (Dakota), Michael Smith (Pottawatomie), William Wantland (Seminole), Lani Hanchett (Native Hawaiian) and others whom I know I have forgotten. Better yet, we could not only not keep Native American men out of the episcopate, but the Rt. Rev. Carole Gallagher, (Cherokee) became the first indigenous woman to be elected bishop in the Anglican Communion. We are terribly inept at keeping anyone out. Why we tried to keep kids out of the General Convention and being considered full members, and now we baptize and chrismate them at Baptism, and we even succumbed and allow 16 year olds to vote. Once again, our ineptitude stymies our best efforts to keep people out.

Oh, but we can keep the gay and lesbian community out of leadership, right? Ooops…it turns out that while we all know we have always had gay bishops, we cannot even keep uncloseted gay folk from the episcopate. Gene Robinson is anything but the first gay bishop, but he was the first to be honest and out of the closet before his election. I guess The Episcopal Church is not only terrible at keeping people out of our pews and leadership ranks, we are also terrible at lying. No matter how hard we have tried, no matter how much pressure conservatives in our church or the wider Anglican Communion have tried, they cannot help us get any better at excluding people. People threaten us. People leave the Church. People withhold money, and darned if we still fail to figure out creative ways to keep people out.

Right from the beginning, when the colonies won the American Revolution and the Brits tried to strangle the Episcopal baby in the cradle, they failed to keep the Scottish Episcopalians from consecrating our first Episcopal bishops. We couldn’t even keep the Scots out of the U.S., and off we went on our long tale of woe and failure at keeping people out.

Maybe, just maybe, we should think about our Episcopal DNA . We inherited it from the British Isles. What were the British to do with Picts, Angles, Celts, Normans, Saxons of every stripe, some Vikings mixed in just for flavor. One size church did not fit all. And as the state church they had to figure out how to accommodate wide differences. So they took the only logical path, and began to accept differences as being okay. Militarily, they would like to have kept out all the invaders, but failed, and adapted. And when the English Reformation led to a period of see-sawing between Catholic and Protestant, with bloodshed and disruption being the result, it took a woman, Elizabeth I, to say, ‘Boys, boys, stop fighting. We are both Catholic and Protestant. Now go pray together! And don’t let me see you fighting over this again!” And The Church of England emerged as a non-confessional church that believed that praying shapes believing and did not require intellectual assent to a particular set of doctrines as a requirement for membership. Wouldn’t have worked if they tried. One also sees a great humility in our Anglican forebears about what we can know for certain about God. God is essentially a mystery in our tradition. And we still believe that the Holy Spirit moves in the Councils of the Church to guide us just as Jesus said.

We are a both/and church. It is in our DNA. We inherited it. We are just no damn good at keeping people out. Why not look at it this way. We are good at including people. Just like Jesus was good at including people the “decent,” law abiding Temple goers wanted to exclude.

Maybe the Holy One is saying, “My Spirit led New Hampshire to elect one of my dear ones as Bishop. He is a tiny bit different in one small way, and that has made the “decent” orthodox folks mad. But Jesus showed you that I rather enjoy breaking down barriers that you all set up thinking you are doing a good thing. Okay, just in case you thought Gene Robinson was a mistake, My Spirit is going to lead you to elect, oh let’s see, how about a Woman as Presiding Bishop. I think you are getting cold feet. You passed that B-033 at your convention restricting some people from being leaders in My Church (uh..remember, it IS MY CHURCH), so I thought it would be a good thing to burn some bridges so that you can’t go back to the same old ways you human beings have used to exclude people from leadership in MY CHURCH. Now-be MY CHURCH. Be the Church Jesus showed you--one where your petty little intellectual doctrines do not become more important than my love commandment. Be MY CHURCH and let all of humanity, gifted by My grace and able to lead can be called out by My Spirit and MY CHURCH to show the world that we are all one, that I love each and every one of you. I love those who are mad at you because you are following the guidance of My Spirit. I love them just as much as I love you. Don’t worry about them. I am God, you aren’t. Your Bishops aren’t either. I know they are trying to keep the family together. But right now, I want you to follow My Spirit, even if it is painful, and besides, you aren’t any good at keeping people out anyway. And that may just serve My purposes well.”

The Rev. Dr. Howard Anderson is Warden and President of the Cathedral College at Washington National Cathedral. He was a long time General Convention deputy and most importantly, is grandfather to a five year old theologian, Will.

By John B. Chilton

What do we know about how or why Episcopal congregations grow? We can start by asking which congregations are growing and what are their characteristics. I say “start” because correlation does not prove causation. For example, congregations with parenting programs are likely to be growing. But is this because congregations with parenting programs attract newcomers, or is it because congregations with young growing families adopt these programs?

In 2005 the research and statistics office of the Episcopal Church issued a report, FACTS on Episcopal Church Growth, authored by C. Kirk Hadaway, Director of Research. Faith Communities Today (FACT) is a project of Hartford Seminary and the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Thus far, FACT has conducted surveys of congregations in participating denominations in 2000 and 2005. FACTs on Episcopal Church Growth reports the results of the 2005 survey of Episcopal congregations. In this essay I summarize a portion of the report and offer some of my own thoughts.

The FACT 2005 survey form given to congregations is here. The survey was completed by 57% of congregations surveyed, usually by clergy. The 4,102 responses were weighted to reflect size and location in the population of Episcopal churches as a whole to improve the representativeness of the sample.

Growth in membership can be measured either as a rate or as a change. Small congregations can show large growth rates (or decline) even if it is just a change of a few members. And large congregations can have large growth in numbers with a small growth rate. Congregations were therefore classified as growing if they had “substantial growth in numbers” and at least a 5 percent rate of growth comparing 2000 membership to 2005.

Hadaway’s results are presented in five groupings of characteristics of congregations: demography, worship, orientation towards growing, conflict, and clergy leadership. In this essay we focus on demography. For my purposes this will include location (rural, suburb, etc.), year of establishment of the congregation, the age distribution of the membership, ethnicity, gender balance, the theological conservatism of members, and the conservatism of the diocese.

Location matters: New suburbs of cities have the largest proportion of growing congregations (39%). In downtowns the proportion was 30%. In other categories – rural, small town, old suburb, older residential in a city – the proportion growing ranged from 21 to 24 percent. Hadaway does not state whether, say, downtowns had both a large proportion growing and a large proportion in substantial decline.

Newer congregations grow: Of congregations formed since 1990, 48% were growing over the period 2000-2005; dioceses plant new congregations where the capacity for growth is greatest, often new neighborhoods. Of those formed earlier the proportion growing was 28% or less depending on the age interval examined. Older congregations in new suburbs are less likely to grow than new congregations in new suburbs. This may reflect behavioral differences between new and old congregations, or it could reflect the fact that dioceses choose to plant churches in those new suburbs whose residents are most likely to be open to the Episcopal Church, or simply that older congregations often literally don't have much room to grow. The clear suggestion however is that existing churches in growing neighborhoods should ask if they appear insular to outsiders.

Immigration and ethnicity: US Census figures tell us the white population is growing slower than the black population, the Hispanic population, and populations influenced by immigration (e.g., Asian). Hadaway finds growth of congregations is related to their ethnicity but “the relationship tends to be stronger in other denominations.” It has been said more than once that growth will not be found by going after the traditional constituency of mainline churches.

Presence of children: Of congregations with over 40% under the age of 18 the proportion that are growing is 40%. Other categories are much lower. Even in congregations with 20 to 40% under the age of 18 the proportion growing is 26%. But is it the presence of kids that attract new families? Or is it merely that congregations with children have many families that are growing? Or are we perhaps also seeing the effect that in new suburbs there is population growth and most residents of new suburbs are younger families?

Aging congregations don’t grow: In congregations with less than 25% of the membership over age 50 the proportion growing was 42%. Of congregations with 26% to 50% over the age of 50 the proportion drops to 31%. And it only gets worse if more than 50% of your congregation is over age 50. As Hadaway has underscored elsewhere, the birthrate among Episcopalians has fallen below the replacement rate. With that as given the age distribution membership of the typical congregation will shift towards older cohorts unless we evangelize. Yet many aging congregations are a reflection of their community so it is easier said than done that to grow these congregations you must attract young families.

Gender balance matters: It’s well known that regardless of denomination more females than males attend church. What Hadaway finds is that gender balance matters to growth. Of congregations that were more than 60% female, 50% were in decline. The proportion in decline is 45% if the congregation is more than 60% male (however unlikely that might b