By Sarabeth Goodwin

I am Latino missioner at St. Stephen and the Incarnation in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Just a year and a half old, the Misa Alegria is the youngest of the six Latino/Hispano congregations in the Diocese of Washington. By the grace of God and those who travel the way with me, I have been given a special gift: an invitation to cross into a different culture. I share in the journeys of many who live in the shadowlands—a parallel world often hidden from the mainstream where pain and challenge are daily bread, but faith endures. Here there are crossroads where the biblical stories intersect lives not as metaphors, but as realities.

The recent failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform in this country has been followed by increased raids in homes, workplaces and on playgrounds in our area and elsewhere. Fear and anxiety are commonplace in our community. Current laws do not encourage the integrity of families. We have a broken system that ensures cheap labor while establishing an underclass that labors dutifully without benefit of rights and protections. How we treat the sojourner in our land is a moral question which we as Christians must examine through the light of Scripture and the bond of our baptismal covenant, humbly seeking the guidance of the Spirit.

I share here a story from the Misa Alegría family.

Raids, detention and deportation have been lurking around the Misa Alegría for many months now—nephews, daughters-in-law, friends—but until recently nobody from our immediate family had been affected by our broken immigration system.

Late in August, we felt the impact. Sunday, Aug. 19, we bid a sad farewell to two of our own, a farewell that will mean long years of separation to a young family. Sandy made the painful decision to return to Ecuador with her 3-year-old daughter, Camila. Her husband, Daniel (not his real name) must remain here in the U.S.

Misa Alegría welcomed Sandy and Daniel to our congregation last January. We baptized Camila on July 15. Because of her solid Christian formation, I asked Sandy to help us with church school for the youngest. She was hesitant. The next week she explained why. Her mother was gravely ill and she needed to return to Ecuador to be with her.

Sandy had come to the United States some years ago to work and to study. She met and fell in love with Daniel and overstayed her visa. Three years ago, Camila was born. When Sandy’s mother became sick, the family found itself in a dilemma. Should Sandy stay here and never see her mother again? Should she return to be with her mother, knowing that under the current laws she would be banned from reentering the U.S. for 10 years for having overstayed her visa? And would this country even issue her another visa? And what about Camila, a U.S. citizen?

Together Daniel and Sandy made the agonizing decision for her to return to Ecuador with Camila.

Daniel must remain here. He is the only member of his family in this country. His mother is undergoing cancer treatment in Mexico City and he is financially responsible for her medical care. Only by Daniel’s working here can the family afford her medical care. He must now assist his family in Ecuador as well. If he leaves this country to visit either his family in Mexico or his family in Ecuador, he will not be allowed to return.

The family’s final Sunday at Misa Alegría – the “joyful mass” – was very difficult. We prayed for a safe journey for Sandy and Camila. Then I wrapped my stole around Sandy and Daniel’s joined hands and blessed their marriage. I could hardly see to read the prayer for the tears. When they stood up and kissed each other, I can only describe the response of our congregation as a collective sob.

One bright spot for Sandy is that the Episcopal Church, which she has come to appreciate, is only three blocks from her house in Quito.

Daniel continues to worship with our congregation. He hopes to save enough money to join Sandy and Camila in Ecuador in several years. They talk on the phone every day. Camila misses her daddy. Please keep them in your prayers.

Editor's note: Shortly after returning to Ecuador, Camila underwent a complete battery of tests and scans to identify a malady that is affecting her bones and neuromuscular system. Both Sandy and Daniel will need to undergo genetic testing to help identify and treat the specific syndrome. You can help this family with your prayers and by making a donation to Camila's Care, c/o The Rev. Sarabeth Goodwin, St.Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, 1525 Newton Street, NW, Washington, DC 20010.

By Kit Carlson

Forces are at play in our world and in our church, and one of the best assessments I have heard lately of those forces came from a community reform expert. Peter Plastrik, co-author of Banishing Bureaucracy and The Reinventors’ Fieldbook, spoke recently at a training session for community leaders in East Lansing, Michigan. He outlined five forces, five “Gs”, that are affecting communities across America.

As he spoke, it struck me that these forces are the same ones affecting our church.

Plastrik’s “Five G’s” are:

Grand Rapids – as a metaphor for the global economy. The internet, easy international travel, and the ability to move jobs anywhere in the world have changed the economies of communities once based on manufacturing and local enterprises.

Goat meat – as a metaphor for immigration and all the challenges it brings. Consumption of goat meat in the U.S. has skyrocketed as immigrants from countries that eat goat arrive, bringing their national cuisines with them.

Greenland – as a metaphor for global warming. The ice on this large Arctic island is vanishing, and with climate change comes a host of new challenges for each community.

Gay people – as a metaphor for all the cultural challenges surrounding gender, age, and sexuality.

Geoffrey Canada – creator of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a community-based organization that seeks to serve 9,000 children, providing support from birth through college. Canada serves as a metaphor for self-empowered citizens, who don’t wait for government or other institutions to solve community problems.

A member of the audience added a sixth “G”, the Graying of America, as the long-promised demographic shift of the Baby Boom into old age begins at last.

Plastrik’s “G-forces” made a lot of sense to me. When people ask, “What is happening to our church?” they often think in terms of political movements -- liberals versus conservatives, progressives versus traditionalists. Instead, one might look at the power of these forces, playing out in the parishes and dioceses and provinces of The Episcopal Church and of the Anglican Communion.

G-1: The worldwide Anglican Communion was not so prominent 30 years ago. As the global economy has taken shape, a global Communion emerged in prominence and consideration along with it. And just as a global economy knows no borders, ecclesiastical relationships that cross borders and jurisdictions follow the same pattern of connections that criss-cross the planet and minimize the importance of local communities.

G-2: Rapid immigration into the United States brought Anglicans from around the world into American parishes. No longer is Anglican worship uniform across The Episcopal Church. Inculturation has come to us, and so we sing from many traditions, read scripture in other languages, practice Pentecost every day of the church year. The values and expectations of other cultures become part of our conversations about sex, worship, politics and a host of other issues.

G-3: The churches of the Gulf Coast still recovering from Katrina understand how climate change can affect our churches and communities. There is more to come, and Bishop Charles Jenkins of Louisiana has already seen it coming. His call for the church to focus on ministries of relief and development instead of on schism and division comes out of hard experience.

G-4: There is not much to say that hasn’t been said about the cultural challenges of inclusion and acceptance of GBLT people. Joan Chittister said it best perhaps … the Anglicans just got to the issue earlier than most.

G-5: Self-empowered citizens, entrepreneurial community activists … the church is full of them. Duncan, Iker, Minns and those who would develop an alternate structure are entrepreneurs in their way. Why wait for the agonizingly slow movement of the Communion and its provinces to address Windsor, gay bishops, a Covenant, or any other issue? Why not set up one’s own alternative diocese, alternative province, alternative Communion?

Finally, there is that sixth G-force, one that Plastrik dismissed as not of interest to him. But the Graying of America, the graying of the Episcopal Church, is a real force. As I look across the faces of my parish, I see a community that has failed to effectively share the gospel with the generations coming after it. There are faithful elders and faithful Boomers … most of whom have grown children who do not themselves attend church, who are not raising the grandchildren in any faith, and who have abandoned religion as irrelevant. The leading edge of the church is dying off, and it is not replenishing itself.

And so the question is probably not – what to do about gay bishops or authorized rites of blessing. The question is really: How will we navigate these powerful forces? In a global, migratory, entrepreneurial, aging, culturally conflicted, climactically threatened world … how are we going to be Church? How will we proclaim the good news of Christ in the face of forces beyond our control?

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. 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 Kit Carlson

For many years, I was a serious Anglophile. I loved being an Episcopalian, because we talked like Thomas Cranmer every single week (at least until the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book). I was obsessed with the Masterpiece Theater series on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and the connection between my local church and the its convulsive beginnings in the 15th Century was really powerful for me.

As I got older, I drifted in and out of churches. As a young 20-ish woman, there was nothing that spoke to me in most Sunday services. But on All Saints Sunday 1986, my husband and I wandered into Our Saviour Episcopal Church, just next to the Beltway in suburban Maryland. We had relocated to Silver Spring, I was pregnant with our first child, and I wanted to find a church we could settle down in as a family.

Our Saviour had a pipe organ. And a choir, one that needed a soprano. It worked for me. We joined.

Shortly after, something wonderful began to happen at Our Saviour. It had been founded in the late '50s as a "white flight" church, spun off from another Our Saviour in the Brookland area of Washington when things began to "change" in the neighborhood. But as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, Our Saviour-Hillandale also began to change. Folks started showing up, immigrants from Africa and China and India and the Caribbean.

It was another connection to British history, its history of empire and of conquest. For if once the sun never set on the British Empire, then it also never set on Britain's national church. There were Anglicans all over the world and as they moved to the United States, many of them made their home at Our Saviour.

Harwood Bowman, the founding rector, had planned for Our Saviour to be built next to the Capitol Beltway, then only a dream, because he wanted folks to come to Our Saviour from "all over." Folks were definitely coming to the church from "all over," from places Harwood had never imagined they might come, bringing their culture and customs with them. It became a Pentecostal church ... not the kind that rolls around in the ecstasy of the Spirit, but a church that looks like the feast of Pentecost, when each person heard the good news proclaimed to them in their own language.

Through these changes, Our Saviour flexed, painfully at times, but accommodated the shifts. When I worshipped there last month, for the first time in years (and for the last time for me as a resident of Maryland ...), it was very different and yet the same.

The congregation was more than three-quarters black. But not because the whites fled ... the old-timers were still filling the same pews. The parish had just grown and changed along with them.

The Mother's Union, another exported British tradition, had turned out to make a presentation. In their matching blue dresses and white hats, they claimed their pride of place as a force of feminine leadership. The sermon -- preached by the new young assistant, who is also the parish's pastor to its Latino congregation -- was free-form, delivered from the aisle, and powerful. The music was traditional (with ALL the verses of St. Patrick's Breastplate) and pietistic, with three hymns from LEVAS at communion, sung with great volume and joy. Some people waved their hands in the air. Others silently bowed their heads in prayer. It was my church. It was a homecoming.

Our Saviour is not a perfect parish. It has had its dissensions, its debates, its struggles over what is going on in the wider Communion and what is going on among its own members. But it is a community that has held together through those dissensions and struggles. It is Anglican in all the best definitions of that word ... international, comprehensive, thoughtful, traditional, yet open to the leading of the Spirit.

I am proud to have called it my church home. It has made me the Anglican I am today.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. She was associate and interim rector at the Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, Md., for seven years.