By P. Joshua Griffin

Before I went to seminary my discernment committee gave me an assignment. I was relatively new to the Episcopal Church and they thought it would be a good idea if I interviewed several priests from different walks of life about their calling to ordained ministry. One of the priests I met with told me this: “I was committed to the Black Power movement. I had a full scholarship to law school and also to seminary. In the end, it seemed that my call was to the priesthood. It was the best way I could support the legitimate the grievances of the Black Power struggle—and to the extent that the Church was willing to accept that struggle as its own, legitimate the Church.”

Today our churches are facing a similar crisis of legitimacy. With our roots in an established State-church, whenever ‘power’ is in crisis, the Episcopal Church will be in crisis. Though we are concerned for ‘the oppressed,’ many parts of the Body enjoy a tremendous amount of privilege, remaining insulated from the lived experience of oppression, injustice, and violence. As an institution we enjoy a good deal of ‘spatial privilege.’ We have a lot of buildings where we worship and freely spread Christ’s Gospel of Love. We are often generous with what we have and we love to ‘speak out,’ but we are slow to take action toward those institutions that create the conditions we decry—poverty, injustice, and oppression. We focus a good deal on charity, but far less on addressing the power imbalances that render anemic the continued possibility of democracy in this fragile Republic.

The Occupy Movement is a radical-democratic movement, grounded in the principles of truth and justice, and direct action. It is the kind of movement that we venerate in history, yet many people who live comfortably fear it in the present. For my entire life, the last 30 years, our collective striving “for justice and peace among all people” has been modest because it has been divided. One church group works on racism, one on economic justice, one on climate change, one on immigration, one on Native-American wellbeing, and another one works against war—yet the struggle for justice is one. We have written letters, we have lobbied, we have voted. Ultimately we placed our faith in politicians above the Kingdom of God, and we were wrong.

Occupy is no mere ‘protest.’ The brilliance of the movement is its refusal to be reduced to specific policy demands. Occupy remains an insatiable movement of liberating creativity, an irreducible process for generating justice. Yet paradoxically, Occupy is also at it's best when it momentarily coheres into concrete demands—ie. liberating a particular foreclosed home for an unhoused family, reversing Citizens United, or closing the West Coast ports in solidarity with exploited port truckers. It is a replicable model for creating democratic space in a country and world dominated by unaccountable corporations.

We may remember from the Book of Genesis that creativity, to the uninitiated, may appear at times, as chaos. Occupy is not without its imperfections—but this is precisely why we as a church should embrace it and support it, as many have already done. Occupy Wall Street has presented Trinity Wall Street with a thoughtful, conscientious, and respectful blueprint for using a small parcel of property in order to reestablish their visible, public presence in the heart of global finance. The symbolic, or sacramental, importance of such a space cannot be overstated.

This movement is too important to be shunned to the periphery, or rendered invisible—especially with Congress’ alarming attempts this week to suppress political dissent through the National Defense Authorization Act. As Christians we have a responsibility to protect demonstrators from our governments’ reckless use of militarized policing—as evidenced by the brutal beating off a Methodist pastor in Seattle on Monday. Furthermore, it is only by embracing and engaging that we can help ensure Occupy’s commitment to nonviolence, as well as contribute our share of the spiritual resources needed for this transformational long-term struggle for justice. And finally, by providing safe-haven we can help insure participation from those communities who are so often terrorized by law enforcement—especially African-American youth and Latino/a immigrants.

Trinity Wall Street has a long history of supporting progressive dialog through its annual conference series. Over the years Trinity has used its extravagant wealth to support mission projects that serve the most vulnerable around the world. Charlotte’s Place has been a refuge for the Occcupiers even as they organize a campaign to compel Trinity to open its property to them! But let’s be honest. Like most of us, Trinity Wall Street is deeply dependent on the system that Occupy Wall Street is seeking to transform. To allow an encampment to be established on Trinity property may unfortunately require a greater depth of self-examination than the parish is willing to undertake.

This Advent, we remember a struggling migrant family who was turned away from the Inn, and a homeless infant King who was born in a stable. With Archbishop Tutu I invite Trinity to reexamine its position—there is far too much at stake. After he was ruthlessly beaten by Seattle Police on Monday evening, the Rev. John Helmiere, a chaplain at Occupy Seattle, had this message: listen deeply, get upset, and generate Love. The Episcopal Church is very good at listening, and pretty good at loving. Our ironic misfortune is that we may not have experienced enough suffering to always know when and how to get upset. Let there be peace among us, and may we not be instruments of our own, or anyone else’s oppression.

The Rev. P. Joshua Griffin is priest associate at St. David of Wales Episcopal Church in Portland, OR, and a Ph.D. student integrating environmental anthropology and religious studies at the University of Washington.

By Derek Olsen

A clergy friend, Robert Hendrickson at Christ Church New Haven, has been doing some artwork for his church and putting the results up on Facebook. I can say without qualification that he’s got more artistic sense in his little finger than I have in my whole body because these things are terrific. Simple, restrained, black-and-white photos with just a splash of muted color, these images from parish worship are paired with tag-lines that are clever—ironic, even, as their main target is the young-to-hipster set for whom irony is a native tongue.

The reason why I think these posters are so great is because they do such an effective job at communicating the parish ethos.

Where we participate in corporate worship and the experience that we find there has a major effect on our experience of the Christian life with God and shapes our theology and spirituality. Yes, we all use the Book of Common Prayer, but the question is how we use it. How do we embody the texts of our liturgy? How do we clothe it? How do we own and incarnate the words and phrases to bring them to life in the peculiar particularities in which we live our lives?

The ethos or “character” of a place is a combination of factors. It seems to me that a classic description of the old English Anglo-Catholic stronghold, All Saints Margaret Street, was one attempt to define a community’s ethos: “Music by Mozart, Decor by Comper; Choreography by Fortescue; but, my dear boy, libretto by Cranmer.”

It’s fair to say that an ethos is a combination of:

• Architecture
• Music
• Ceremonial
• Liturgy
• Decoration
• Attitude and Execution of the Liturgy by the Clergy
• Attitude and Execution of the Liturgy by the Congregation

After hearing and participating in “worship wars” for well over a decade, I think such discussions often fail by being too narrowly focused. That is, people argue over music, liturgy, and ceremonial. But more often I think what they really intend is the overall package—the ethos of a worshipping community—and considering elements in abstraction can’t grapple fully with the issue of ethos.

The posters communicate an ethos. The black-and-white shots depict worship that is traditional—very traditional—yet the faces in the photos and the “voices” of the tag-lines are young. The ethos communicated is of a parish that worships well, that cares deeply about its liturgy and the traditions that inform it. It’s traditional, but not traditionalist; it takes God seriously, and itself a little less seriously.

In and amongst the photos of silver and smoke, we are invited to a mystery. Not so it can be explained away or talked to death—but that we can dive within it and find at the center of the mystery the key to our longing.

(From the comments - here is a link to all the ads. ~ed.)

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

By Ellen Painter Dollar

Until poor health curtailed her activities, my mother-in-law Ruby was the head of her church’s Bereavement Committee. We got a kick out of watching this woman—prone to rambling reminiscences offered from the ancient recliner where she spent about 80 percent of her waking hours—spring into high gear after receiving a phone call reporting that someone in the church had died. As far as we could tell, the sole responsibility of the Bereavement Committee was to provide bounteous food to grieving families. More than once, we overheard my mother-in-law berate some unfortunate committee member for not pulling her weight, leaving those poor families without paper products, for example, with which to serve the bereavement bounty.

We thought it was quaint, this idea that the most vital service a church community could offer its members during times of grief was platters of ham biscuits and pitchers of sweet tea. Once again, though, I’ve discovered that Ruby knows a thing or two about what’s important.

Last October, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a non-invasive, curable cancer. I knew I would recover fully, after some surgery and radiation (and I have). I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, to appear needier than I really was. But when I had to cancel a lunch date with our church’s assistant rector because of multiple doctors’ appointments, I let her know what was going on. She asked if I wanted her to pass my name on to our Casserole Ministry, so I could be free of cooking chores during my recuperation.

At first, I didn’t think I was sick enough to need this kind of help. My surgeries were straightforward, requiring only a couple of days to recover, during which my husband would be home to help out. The main side effect of radiation therapy is fatigue, but it often doesn’t kick in until the final days of the regimen. Besides, because I have a physical disability and chronic pain, a fair amount of fatigue is normal for me. Surely, the Casserole Ministry was meant for people who are really sick. Not for me.

Eventually, though, it became clear that others’ response to my illness and treatment was out of my hands. A good friend (not part of my church) started an account on a web site that allows people to sign up for specific dates to bring someone a meal if they are sick, recovering from surgery, just had a baby, etc. She publicized it through Facebook, and soon a dozen friends had signed up to bring my family a meal. When the assistant rector asked again about the Casserole Ministry, I directed her to my friend’s web site, and watched as church members snapped up many of the blank dates.

For seven weeks, I had people showing up on my doorstep most evenings bearing food. Some were good friends, but many of the church volunteers were people I had never formally met. A friend asked me if it felt weird to have people, especially near-strangers, feeding my family. Yes, it did. Particularly since I didn't look or feel terribly sick. It took some getting used to. But it turned out to be really welcome.

The hardest part of radiation treatment was its dailiness—every weekday for seven weeks. Having it smack in the middle of every morning made it hard to get anything done when the kids were at school. I could rarely get momentum going on writing, cleaning, or other necessities, because as soon as I got started, it was time for radiation, some vital errand, or school pick-up. The treatment did cause some fatigue, so my evenings were also pretty much shot. Being able to focus limited energy on things other than cooking, and give my full attention to the kids after school without having to think about dinner too, really helped.

People at church told me they were praying for my recovery and my family, and those prayers were welcome. But it was the regular, substantial, concrete delivery of meals that really made apparent how our church community was supporting us. Being on the receiving end of the Casserole Ministry also made me feel more at home at our church (which we’ve attended for a little over two years). Now, as I sit in my pew on Sunday mornings, I can look around and see half a dozen people whose names I now know, whose baking dishes are stacked in a corner of my kitchen, ready to be returned to their owners, and who spent a few minutes in my kitchen asking after my health and my kids’ well-being when they dropped off their goodies.

I am currently reading Sara Miles' memoir Take This Bread, which is an account of the author's Christian conversion and the centrality of of giving and receiving food (through both communion and a church-based food pantry) in that conversion. My own parish is planting a vegetable garden in a few short weeks, with plans to deliver fresh produce to a family service center in one of our city's poorest neighborhoods. I could wax theological about the symbolism of food for Christians, for whom sharing bread and wine is a fundamental act of faith. But instead I’ll just say that receiving food from my church community during my cancer treatment has done more to make me feel at home in this church, to feel the love of Christ made real through his people, than any adult education class, worship service, or potluck dinner ever has.

I now understand why my mother-in-law was so serious about making sure that grieving families had plenty of paper plates, pasta salad, and pound cake. It’s hard to know what to do in the face of someone else’s suffering. We want to fix it, and we can’t. So we are called simply to love them in whatever way we can. While food isn’t love exactly, it sure comes close.

(One practical observation for readers who have or are considering starting a Casserole Ministry in their church: Every meal was made with love, delicious, and welcome. But the most welcome foods were actually not casseroles. One family provided hand-breaded chicken cutlets, which I could cut up and call “chicken nuggets” for my kids, or serve on hamburger buns. A huge Greek salad provided me with an entire week’s worth of healthy lunches. Other ready-made green and fruit salads meant I could serve nutritious produce at every meal without the work of cutting it all up. Loaves of fresh bread, besides being delicious and comforting, gave the kids something to fill up on, even if the main dish was not to their liking. And meals that included brownies, cookies, or a small cake made for a celebratory vibe even on regular old weeknights.)

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

By Donald Schell

I’d visited Joe in the hospital several times before he fell into the coma. The cancer was taking him quickly. Joe had co-chaired the parish search committee that had taken the big risk of calling me, a divorced twenty-nine year old priest from across the country, to be their rector. It hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped, I guess. After Joe died, I learned that he and his co-chair had taken the big risk of insisting that their good friend, my predecessor, retire for the good of the congregation. When I came, the congregation was mostly people in their 60’s (the age I am now). The search committee was looking for someone to lead change and attract new young families.

Joe’s co-chair on the search committee was mayor of a small town a couple of miles out from our parish. Small town politics and conflict in his police department had made him courageous even when he was a target, which was a good a thing, because change came hard to our little congregation. We introduced the brand new 1976 Proposed Book of Common Prayer to the parish, instituted every Sunday communion and shared it with young children, and sang more of the liturgy than some believed was appropriate. I was grateful that Joe’s co-chair was ready to cover my back; he and I talked over everything. Sometimes he counseled patience or steered me from crazy risks, sometimes he stubbornly made me see the good in someone in the parish who was angry, upset, and speculating that I’d come to destroy the church, and even when his friends made no sense to him or he thought I was being headstrong again, he stood beside me in conflict.

Joe’s particular goodness made him more shepherd than warrior or diplomat - Joe was faithful to his old friends. His ear was ready with sympathy for anyone who was upset, angry, or condemning of changes we were making. His heart went out to old-timers, and he made their pain and grief at every change his own. When the new younger adults began asking for a voice in running things, Joe reminisced with old-timers about building the church, brick by brick with their own hands twenty years before.

For a while he became their messenger
- They don’t know where you’re getting all this stuff.
- They just don’t feel like it’s their church anymore.
- We had our ways.
- Most of us chose the Episcopal Church.
- You keep telling us the church is change and we don’t see why.
- They don’t see why.
- They just don’t trust you.
- We built this church with our own hands.

The messages shifted back and forth that way between “they” and “we.” Eventually Joe’s being their ready ear and voice made him their leader.

Joe’s shepherding fit him well. Years before he’d literally spent a summer herding sheep. Before Joe and I quit talking, he’d told me of an early Rocky Mountain snowstorm that summer that had stranded him and the sheep in a high altitude pasture.

Sudden snow had made it impossible to get the sheep down the mountain and back to his camp. As darkness descended he drew the sheep in close in a tight circle on the ground, picked his way into the center of the circle, and wiggled in to lie on the ground surrounded by warm sheep bodies, sheep breath and wet wool. Snow continued to fall through the night. Joe recited the 23rd Psalm quietly to himself and then said his “Now I lay me down to sleep,” hoping he would not actually “die before I wake.”

Next morning he woke covered with a layer of snow, but alive and well. He stood in the radiance of morning sunshine and shook off the snow as the sheep did the same.

“The one good thing about this new Prayer Book of yours,” he’d told me, “is that we’ve got ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,’ in the words we all know.” He appreciated that the Rite I burial office included the King James Version of Psalm 23.

As Joe’s friends got angrier, and with me welcoming new strangers who volunteered for tasks and wanted to run for vestry, Joe found it harder and harder to talk to me. I called on Joe trying to talk it through. The last of those visits, when I knocked at his front door, Joe’s wife came to the door shaking her head. “He doesn’t see the point.” “You mean he won’t talk with me?” “I guess not.”

About a year later I got word of his cancer. It was probably that long since I’d seen Joe. I drove out to his place and knocked on the familiar door. This time he welcomed me himself. “I’m surprised you’d come,” he said smiling wryly. He invited me in to sit and talk and be quiet.

I watched him walk across the living room. He was hunched over with pain in his abdomen and his steps were slow and sitting down slower, but we talked, and from that day we fell into a routine of me visiting him a couple of times a week. I’d taken some risk knocking on his door. Joe took the bigger risk - he let me, the kid, the troublemaker, be his pastor. He began telling me stories again, rich stories of his life as a rancher and cattle broker, more sheep herding stories, memories of rocky desert and huge sky and mountain pastures that he loved, stories of ranching friends and homesteading farmer friends, memories of pulling over to watch a radiant red sunsets as he returned from a cattle buying expedition to a remote ranch. As he felt himself nearing death he told me stories of people he loved who had died well.

Eventually his pain got too great for him to be at home, and he was getting too weak to stand or sit. We didn’t have hospice care in our town. Getting adequate pain management meant he’d die in the hospital. I visited him there daily and continued visiting after he fell into a coma. I’d take Joe’s hand and pray aloud with him and then just sit for a little while longer holding his hand. When it was time to leave I’d pat his hand again and say “good-by” out loud. It was what I’d learned in CPE not so many years before - “Talk to people in coma. Hearing seems to be the last of our senses to go.”

The day I’m remembering was my second to the last visit with Joe. Something had changed. His breathing was labored. The nurse said death was close. When I sat with Joe and took his hand, something reminded me of Joe’s story of sheep in the snowstorm. With my free hand I opened my Prayer Book to Psalm 23 and slowly and deliberately read the version he loved -

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He began so quietly I’m not sure when I first noticed Joe’s voice speaking with me, his lips barely moving.

He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

We spent that moment together somewhere far beyond our disagreements. I felt it as a moment of our seeing and knowing one another, a final remaking or restoration of care and respect for one another. And the moment was powered by memory, and by spoken words and by memorization.

The twenty-third psalm had become a part of Joe’s body and soul. He’d rooted it in his neurology where it became a means of our making peace.

I think on my startled hearing of Joe’s voice and remember finishing that evening as I left his room, walking the hospital corridor calling to mind prayers and songs I knew by heart to find what I could speak from coma.

Something from that night lives in questions I’ve worked on ever since: How do we form people in community? And what’s our liturgy for?

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

By George Clifford

During the course of a recent weekend in the English town of Ludlow, I visited six Church of England (CofE) parish church buildings, each hundreds of years old and two more than a thousand years old. All six benefices now belong to “team ministries,” a group of churches served by a clergy team. Unlike most U.S. churches, all six facilities consist of only a worship building; none include a parish hall, offices, or education spaces; any children’s programming occurs in a corner, side aisle, or former chapel.

I attended the Sunday Family Communion service at St. Laurence in Ludlow, where I found a thriving, welcoming congregation with good music and respectable preaching. This parish, prominently located in the town center, is the principal parish for a team ministry comprised of fourteen parishes served by three full-time and numerous retired clergy. St. Laurence also has two musicians; the clergy team benefits from a full-time administrator and part-time secretary.

Another parish church, St. Mary Magdalene in Eardisley, which I visited on Sunday afternoon was exceptionally clean, tastefully decorated for their harvest festival held that morning, and appeared to host as numerous and active congregation as one might expect in a small village. Even empty, the church felt welcoming and like a place of prayer.

My other four church visits were uniformly depressing. All four buildings are still used. Two are located some distance from the nearest village, each adjacent to a large country house; two are in small villages. Although I did not attend worship in any of these four churches, none gave any sign of especial love or care. Books and pamphlets were dusty, dirty, or even moldy. Several altar hangings were decrepit. Notice boards listed the worship schedule, usually one or two Sunday services per month in each place. In two, I could find no indication of children being regularly present. Each church had distinctive architectural features; a grant from the English lottery was funding a partial renovation of one. To avoid unhelpfully shaming any of these four churches and their small, probably elderly, and definitely struggling congregations, I will not name them.

Reflecting on my six visits, I found the plight of the CofE – at least in that corner of the Diocese of Hereford, though visits to numerous other rural and urban CofE churches and two years of service as a CofE priest suggest that the these six parishes are not atypical – thought provoking. First, the CofE’s resource base does not align well with England’s current population. The CofE has too many churches located where few people live and too little money with which to fund ministry adequately in more densely populated areas.

The Episcopal Church (TEC) faces a similar problem. Shifting demographics have left TEC with too many small congregations in geographic areas in which the population is at best stable and often declining. Conversely, TEC has often failed to plant new churches, or to plant them effectively, in growing suburban and urban areas. Worship attendance, not the number of worship facilities is the objective measure of vitality in any Church.

Second, neither the CofE nor TEC exists to promote cultural or local history. God calls the Church to promote the good news of God’s love manifest in Jesus and to incarnate that love by loving others. Consequently, both the CofE and TEC should act aggressively to close small congregations. (Of course, the devil is in the details. What is “small”?) Organizations and people committed to preserving cultural or local heritage should maintain any closed church building deemed important. When a putative disciple sought leave to bury a deceased family member, Jesus replied, “Let the dead bury their dead.”

Obviously, not all members of every small congregation are spiritually dead. At least a few among the relative handful of people in each small CofE and TEC congregation quite likely lament the demanding congregational focus on building maintenance rather than a mission focused on incarnating God’s love in a broken world. (Small parishes are not alone in worshiping stone idols in lieu of the living God, but that’s another problem.)

Closing underutilized buildings emphasizes that buildings are a means to an end, not the raison d’être for the body of Christ. Those committed to Christ’s cause may feel saddened, even aggrieved, by closing a building that has many significant spiritual memories for them. But committed Christians will not abandon the Church. In England, they will travel a few miles to another parish. In the U.S., they may travel to another parish or perhaps move to a different branch of the Church. Remember, we Anglicans have never claimed to be the only branch of the vine that is Christ. In both countries, a number of new house churches may emerge, permitting healthier small congregations freed from underutilized, financially draining buildings.

Third, neither the CofE nor TEC acts as if they fully recognize the costs of operating so many small congregations. These costs, monetary and other, include:

1. Attempting, often unsuccessfully in England and struggling mightily in much of the U.S., to repair and operate aging buildings, expending funds and costly staff time on tattered vestiges of once important fabric rather than investing in people;
2. Unintentionally signaling, thereby, to the larger society that the Church values maintaining its legacy of underutilized buildings more than it values life-giving missions to hurting, dying people in underserved urban and suburban areas;
3. Dilution of focus (e.g., “small church ministry” is generally a euphemism for serving a dying congregation) rather than clarity of vision and singleness of purpose (e.g., “small church ministry” connoting planting new congregations in under-churched areas).
4. Providing members of small congregations “third-rate” worship and spiritual opportunities because these congregations generally lack the numerical and fiscal strengths to ensure high quality choral and instrumental music, excellent and diverse youth, religious education, and parish life programming, and first-rate pastoral and priestly ministry. If they had such resources, most of these small congregations would no longer be small!

I like old church buildings, both in the States and abroad. I enjoy seeing what was important for different spiritual expressions and traditions; as an amateur ecclesial architect formerly responsible for several church/chapel construction projects, art and architecture interest me. If I did not appreciate old churches, I would not visit so many of them. But as a Christian, I know that I must distinguish between pleasurable avocations and the Church’s real business of incarnating God’s love for the world.

George Clifford, a priest in the Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years and is now a visiting professor of ethics and public policy at the Naval Postgraduate School, blogging at Ethical Musings (http://blog.ethicalmusings.com/).

By Donald Schell

We began making explicit invitation to everyone present to receive communion at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco in 1981. After the Eucharistic Prayer and breaking of the bread and immediately before communion, we began saying something like this - ‘Jesus welcomes everyone to his Table, so we offer the bread and wine which are his body and blood to everyone, and to everyone by name. If we need help with your name, please help us out.’ We knew we’d chosen to step across a line, going beyond the canons of the Episcopal Church and the rubrics of the Prayer Book, and beyond that, remaking longstanding Christian tradition.

My colleague Rick Fabian and I have both offered theological and scriptural defense of the practice elsewhere and we’ll continue to engage the ongoing conversation in our church now, when many others have also written to raise theological questions and argue for or against the practice. I’m writing this today as a practice narrative, to tell the mix of circumstances, discoveries, accident, and theory that moved us to make a change we didn’t expect to be making.

When Rick and I first worked together at Episcopal Church at Yale (Rick 1970-1976 and me as his associate in 1972-1976), our church was in the early stages of Trial Use. For the generation who’ve known no other Prayer Book, Trial Use was the church’s official process for exploring how the new liturgy would go beyond the 1928 Prayer Book we all knew.

Six nights a week for six years at Yale’s Dwight Chapel 25-45 students completed our liturgy surrounding the altar table for the Eucharistic prayer, and then offering communion student-to-student around the circle. One of our regulars was a Jewish undergraduate who had converted to Christianity in his religious studies major. He received communion for well over a year before deciding to seek baptism. There were other unbatpized students we knew were receiving. Generally we had a sense of who and why, so perhaps pastorally we were practicing open communion, but we made no liturgical invitation or announcement of it.

After the Yale chaplaincy, my work as mission vicar at St. David’s, Caldwell, Idaho gave me the opportunity to introduce that congregation to now familiar Episcopal church practices like communion every Sunday at the main liturgy and offering communion to baptized but not confirmed children. In fact the latter practice was new to our church in 1970 and was unknown (and almost unthinkable) to the people of St. David’s when I arrived.

Rick, meanwhile, was working for Bishop Kilmer Myers of California. His title of ‘chaplain to the bishop’ included driving the night-blind bishop long distances for parish visits, helping the bishop prepare for highly conflicted meetings with parishes poised to withdraw over the ordination of women, discussing theological issues on the road, and drafting responses to the bishop’s correspondence.

So after our work together at Yale, Rick and I in quite different settings both saw a lot of parish conflict and theological pain. And both found ourselves asking questions about evangelism and parish structure and how practice might empower or limit evangelism.

The year after he completed his assignment as bishop’s chaplain, with then diocesan executive George Hunt’s strong encouragement Rick wrote a proposal to the diocese to found an experimental mission dedicated to Gregory of Nyssa. The mission church would try innovative liturgical practices to further evangelism, Christian formation, and service, and it would draw on organizational and group research to order governance and common life in ways that would bring conflict to the surface more quickly and work with it creatively.

For the mission’s founding liturgy on St. Gregory’s day, March 9th, 1978, I flew down to preside, and Rick served as deacon and preacher. In October that year the new congregation was admitted as a specialized mission and given seat and vote in California’s diocesan convention.

After his consecration in September of 1979, California’s new bishop, Bill Swing generously accepted oversight of St. Gregory's, the tiny specialized mission he inherited from Bishop Kilmer Myers.

In July of 1980 my wife Ellen and I moved from Idaho to join the project of founding St. Gregory’s. As planned Rick and I worked as founding vicars from that point. Ellen and my arrival increased St. Gregory’s membership from 10 to 12 people, and our two children doubled the size of the Sunday School.

Shortly after I arrived, Rick and I went to talk with Bishop Swing about St. Gregory's purposes, about innovation, and our declared commitment to testing innovation beyond the limits of canons and rubrics (all this had been in the mission proposal and was begun with the blessing of his predecessor and diocesan convention).

Bishop Swing told us what he would expect of us as we continued to experiment beyond the new 1979 Book of Common Prayer and canons of the Episcopal Church. His one firm rule was that we were not to invite lay people preside at the Eucharist. For all other innovation or experiment he asked us to keep him well informed of what we were doing and the reasons we were doing it so he could always say, “Yes, I know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.” We were careful and deliberate to keep him informed.

Meanwhile, in clergy gatherings around the diocese our new bishop repeatedly said, "If you don't have a valid missionary reason, you must obey the rubrics. If you have a valid missionary reason, you must disobey the rubrics."

From 1978 through 1980, though we were not making an explicit to all to receive communion, nor had we planned to. But we had no printed or spoken announcement like 'all baptized Christians are welcome to receive.' People simply received if they put their hands out or passed the bread and wine on to the next person, and we quickly realized that our efforts to attract unchurched people to our Eucharist-every-Sunday community were paying off well enough that our regulars were frequently giving communion to an unbaptized visitor, the stranger standing next in the circle. Some of those visitors would return regularly and began to ask about membership. We’d seen that pattern before in the Yale chaplaincy.

Concurrently, as part of our teaching work, we began offering an eight week course called "Jesus and Paul, the Christian Source." It was our introduction to Jesus’ teaching and practice concluding with some Paul's more intriguing and caring interpretation of Jesus’ work. The course was based on our distillation of the best New Testament scholarship we could find. Norman Perrin’s Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (1967) significantly shaped “Jesus and Paul,” particularly his critical method, and argument and conclusions about realized eschatology and the prophetic/messianic sign of Jesus’ meals.

Perrin argued that it was Jesus’ enactment of Isaiah’s feast for all people’s, the divine banquet where God welcomed all, including the unworthy, the unprepared, the unfit, in sum all the ‘wrong’ people prompted some Jewish religious leaders and local Roman authority (for different reasons and different understanding of the threat Jesus posed) to work together in a conspiracy to stop and eventually kill him. “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them,” Perrin concluded from language and other evidence was likely an accusation Jesus’ adversaries had hurled against him. Perrin’s conclusion has become a central consensus among Gospel scholars.

In our teaching of Jesus class we began to notice that our communion practice of getting all the lay people present to administer consecrated bread and wine to one another kept prompting all of us, clergy and lay participants to wonder what we should do with Perrin’s conclusion that the meal was Jesus’ crucial practice, literally what he did that took him to the cross. By 1981, what we were seeing in practice and hearing ourselves say in teaching finally provoked a conscious decision to make our communion invitation consistent with what we were reading in the Gospels and teaching in 'Jesus and Paul.'

We were quite aware of the rubrical and canonical boundary we were crossing. We were open about what we were doing. And to steady ourselves we looked to others in the tradition who crossed official, received sacramental boundaries like John Wesley instituting presbyteral ordination when he couldn’t get his bishop to give him the clergy he needed for his mission to England’s industrial poor, and like John Mason Neale brought up on court charges for rubrical and civil law violations introducing ritual richness, hymnody, colors in church, cross and candle on the table, etc., and like Bishop Ronald Hall ordaining Li Tim Oi's a priest, and finally like Li Tim Oi herself disappearing into communist China where she was needed to function as a priest, simply ignoring Canterbury’s insistence that she stop.

We were acting, as each of these before us had, publicly, offering our rationale for what we were doing, and still taking certain risks for the sake of what appeared (and yes, still does appear) to us to be faithful leadership.

Other early witnesses to the practice may have more stories to tell. So far as we know, the explicit invitation we began to make in 1981 at St. Gregory's, San Francisco was the first time in our Episcopal church that we made a deliberate, explicit invitation to all to communion. But others may have begun independently and perhaps before us. I’d welcome hearing those stories and expect the ‘how’ of those decisions will be significant too.

We’re all still forging the theology of communion and baptism (not to mention the confusing separate work on confirmation). Much of the theology must rest on interpretation or reinterpretation of scripture and tradition. But practice and the stories of practice belong too. Sara Miles’ telling the story of her first communion, conversion, beginning the St. Gregory’s food pantry and subsequent baptism has meant touched many and inspired other story telling.

As we continue to work, and talk and sometimes argue theology, I hope this account of a beginning - almost twenty years before Sara came to St. Gregory’s as an unbaptized stranger, received communion, and was converted - may inspire others to tell stories of when and how their practice of communion changed.

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

By Richard Helmer

I commented on a thread at Episcopal Cafe on Monday on the subject of church growth. Frankly, the subject is starting to wear quite thin on me, because it so often turns to matters of institutional preservation, which is not only deadly dull, but I am increasingly convinced deadly spiritually.

Standard congregational development schema I was taught to appreciate involve the transitions between various sizes of parishes -- family, pastoral, program, etc. The jargon goes on from there, and leads. . .well, where? Nowhere much in my view, and many of our leaders are left scratching their heads and wondering why. We often talk about "cultural change" in our congregations as though it is somehow divorced from and devoid of the language of the Gospel, which is not simply about system theories or whatever else is hot right now, but about the mysterious transformation of the human heart and transformation of the human family by God's loving grace and our active embrace of that through prayer and service to others.

I write this all with a straight face. I am a child, both literally and figuratively, of the institutional church. I am beholden to it at present both by vow and income, and I indeed wish to see it thrive and flourish. But it will most certainly not by navel gazing and hand-wringing, nor by romanticizing the blip of high mainline attendance in the 1950's, from which we are still declining. . .or perhaps a better word is recovering, as we move towards a more real place in a world where people are free to seek out spiritual community that nourishes their hearts, minds, and being.

I'm all for congregational development, building the church up and all that. Just ask anyone in the parish I serve. Our numbers right now are good and modestly improving, though, not because we've been good congregational developers and I've taught the theory well, but because we've identified the tangible spiritual needs in our community and have begun the hard work of addressing them. Because we've identified gifts in our community for leadership and ministry and empowered them. Because I've struggled to set aside the egotistical notion that I, as parish priest, can "save" the church and at times have managed to get the hell (literally and figuratively, again) out of the way.

At the end of the day, a lot of congregational development writing and talk is about ego -- feeding the ego by possessing "how to grow a church" through specialized knowledge or methodology. Or feeding the ego by romanticizing a supposedly greater past. Or feeding the ego by projecting current trends in a straight line and claiming we have control over the future, or at least some special knowledge about it. Or feeding the ego because "my family and I depend on this job." None serve us or the Christian Gospel at all well. We need to stop if we are to move forward. Idolatry is one way to talk about our egotistical obsessions. Idolatry is one way to talk about much of our chatter over church growth.

Growth is not the goal here. It is only the natural, God-given outcome of living faithfully into Christian mission. And growth has a great deal less to do with numbers than it does with the vibrancy of ministry and the freedom of the Spirit to move in community.

Here are my thoughts, for what they are worth:

No one wants to join a community wringing its hands and navel gazing over its own demise.

Nor does anyone want to simply become a number to prop up a flagging institution.

The real questions we need to be asking are those like these:

Are we endeavoring to be faithful to the Gospel and to our God?

Does our institution serve our mission of Christ Jesus to transform hearts and reflect God's work in the world? Or do we distort our mission to serve the institution? This is a simple (but not easy) matter of correctly ordering the carts and horses.

Are people finding spiritual nourishment, hope, and empowerment for ministry and service in their communities both within and beyond the walls of the Church?

If these criteria are being addressed with intention in people's real lives and grounded experience, growth of all kinds may very well follow. If they aren't, institutional death is a natural outcome.

We all fear death of institutions we love, of course. But at the end of the day, and indeed in God's gracious reign, we are not children of the institution.

We are God's children. We are people of the resurrection. And that's what truly matters, even as we face decline in many places.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer is rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. His sermons and reflections have been published widely online, and he blogs about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, church politics, music, and the misadventures of young parenthood at Caught by the Light.

By Andrew Gerns

There is an old ritual called “beating the bounds” where the members of a parish go out and mark the boundaries of a parish in a city or village. The idea is not just territorial, but pastoral. When the community “beats the bounds” they are saying that they are in some way responsible to God for the people inside those boundaries. Every now and then, God shows us just what that means.

Once I was walking down the alley to Joe’s Deli, which is a block away from the Church office, to buy my sandwich, when a guy leans out the open doorway of the kitchen in another restaurant next door. Holding aside a screen door, he says “Father!” I stop and look up at him. He is a young man. He is wearing a white paper hat, a white t-shirt and an apron. He bends way over towards me and asks me to bless a gold cross that he is wearing around his neck. So I look at his dark eyes and his smile while he holds the cross out away from his neck. There is the hint of a scar on his face and much body art. I say a blessing prayer and our eyes meet for just a moment and he nods a thank you. Every time I walk by that screen door, I wonder about the young man, his scar and his cross. There is a story there. I have no idea what it is. God knows.

There was once a woman who used to come to our church wearing only white clothes. She wore white because she read in the Bible somewhere that people who are close to God wear white raiment. But she never spoke in church because she read somewhere else in the Bible that women are not supposed to talk in church, which worked fine until someone told her that our soup kitchen was in a church so she stopped speaking when she came to eat. There is a story there. I have no idea what it is. God knows.

One day I got a phone call from the Weed’n’Seed cop asking me to come to Easton’s center square. Seems the lady in white raiment was coming up to people carrying a pitcher of water and a big bowl and demanding to wash their feet, which the tourists and locals sitting in the square did not seem to appreciate. Instead of arresting her, the officer thought that I might have a better solution to the disturbance. Not knowing what else to do, I asked her to wash my feet. So she did. She read somewhere in the Bible that Christians are supposed to wash each other’s feet. True enough, I say. But you can’t make people want to have their feet washed. They have to want to. She said I had a point and then suggested that we might want to do this in church sometime instead of on the Square. Good idea, I said.

A single dad comes up to me while his daughter is practicing at our pipe organ after a lesson. He says that someone in church reprimanded him because his son sits through the church service reading books. I look over and watch the boy start to climb a tree to retrieve a plastic bag caught in a branch. I’ve known this family for eons, and I know their stories and I know God does too. I have no idea who’d reprimand a kid for reading in church instead of turning the pews into a jungle gym, but that’s beside the point. Well, I ask, do you talk about what happened in the service afterwards, like on the way home? The dad nods. Sometimes he knows more than I do, he says. Then let him read, I say. God knows he is picking up far more than most of the grown ups.

There is an older fellow who lives around the corner and he has taken on the job of feeding the cats that live in the neighborhood and like to hang around the church. He walked up to me once and began to scold me because we were trapping the cats and taking them away. He told me with some pride and a tone of defiance that he was tripping the Have-a-Heart traps so we would not take away the cats. I explained (as the signs say on the traps in English and Spanish) that we trap the cats to give them shots and spay and neuter them and then release them back into the neighborhood. A vet in the parish does this with the help of some parishioners. We want the cats to be healthy, I tell him. He tells me that they are God’s creatures and that we should not take them away. I thank him for caring for God’s creatures. He eyes me suspiciously. I don’t think he believes me.

During last night’s Vestry meeting, the doorbell rang. Someone went to answer it and then he came back and said “There is a woman at the front door who wants a Bible.” I went to the door and there was a very young woman, with a baby asleep in a stroller and four very energetic children—three girls and a boy—sitting on the stoop and all talking at once. Before I could say anything, the boy looks at me and says “I am Elijah, and I am the oldest.” Now each kid announces their name and their ages, leaving an embarrassed Mom to introduce herself and her baby. So what can you do? I sit down on the stoop and we talked.

Mom talks fast, as if there is much pent up inside of her just waiting to come out. As if she is trying to say what she can before she is interrupted or told to be quiet. It is a clear, warm spring evening, a good time to sit on the stoop and hear her story. She tells me she is new to the neighborhood. That the women’s program housed next door to church helped her get an apartment around the corner, and that she and her family had Christmas dinner with us at the dinner we serve on Christmas Day. That she wonders if it would be okay to bring her kids to church because she would like them to learn about God and how to do right. And that of all the things the women’s program gave her, she did not have a Bible and she lost her Bible when she left the old place. I have no idea where the old place is. There is probably a story there. God knows.

So I fetch a Bible, a business card and a church brochure and I ask Mom for her name and address and as she writes it down I sit on the stoop and talk with the kids while the Vestry meeting goes on without me. Eventually, a vestry-member peeks around the corner wondering if I am okay. I give him a thumbs-up. As Mom gathers her brood, she wonders if I could maybe bless a cross that she is wearing. So I say a blessing prayer for her and her kids and her cross.

When I go back in to the meeting, the members look at me as if to say “well…?” I share what little of their story that I know. I tell them that sometime we should go out and beat the bounds of the parish, not just as a group marking our boundaries, but as a community looking around at the faces and the people that God has given us in this neighborhood. Tonight the procession came to us.

The Rev. Canon Andrew Gerns is the rector of Trinity Church, Easton, Pa., and chair of the Evangelism Commission of the Diocese of Bethlehem. He keeps the blogs Andrew Plus and Share the Bread.

By Kathleen Staudt

I have been teaching for years about the ministry of the laity, resonating with Verna Dozier’s writing about “the Church, the people of God” as opposed to “the Church, the Institution.” I have explored with people the implications of our baptismal covenant and more recently reflected deeply on the catechism’s account of the ministry of the laity: “to represent Christ and his church, to bear witness to him wherever we may be, and -- oh yes – almost an afterthought, “according to the gifts given us, to take our place in the life, worship and governance of the Church.” (BCP, p.855) The work of the Church, I’ve been telling people for almost a generation, is primarily in the world, carried out by “the church, the people of God.” The institutional church & its leaders sustain and nurture us in our ministries. That’s the idea, anyway.

And now I find I am taking my own place in the “life, worship and governance of the Church,” by serving as the Rector’s Warden in my congregation. I've thought of myself mainly as a "spiritual formation person.," a mission-minded Christian. So why am I spending all this time on budgets, finance, "maintenance?" As we put all these resources into maintaining and sustaining a building, staff, and program, I need, for my own sanity, to ask: What are we doing here? Here, in this place where the church building stands: on a busy thoroughfare leading into Washington DC, just inside the Capital beltway, on the edge of a suburban neighborhood.

Some insights about this came to me recently on “parish beautification day,” when some of us came over to church on a Saturday morning to do some deep cleaning and setting-to-rights in the aftermath of major work on our new HVAC system, the centerpiece of our capital campaign. My assigned job was to take a rag, a bucket, and some Murphy’s oil soap and wash down the tops of our solid oak pews. I had to empty the wash water every other pew because it was black with the soil from all those human hands, supporting themselves as they stood, sat and knelt at worship. I thought of Gerard Manly Hopkins’s poem, “God’s Grandeur,” where he says that “all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil, /and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” Real people, bringing with them all the mess and muck of life, come here to worship and pray and be together at our lively worship services in this place, and we leave our marks. For a moment my job felt like the rite of foot-washing we are called to on Maundy Thursday, acknowledging the soiled humanness of all of us, our need to be washed in order to participate in Christ.

As I worked, together with my friends Quinton and Abudullah, washing floors and pews in various parts of the sanctuary, a woman came in the front door, which we had left open. She wondered if she could fill a bag of food from our food closet; she’d lost her job and this would help her to make ends meet this week. We welcomed her gave her a bag,, and showed her where the pantry was -- and reflected, among ourselves, at our own blessedness at having enough, right now, in these hard times, when so many people are struggling economically.

Indeed, it seems that many in the local community are turning to our presence on this corner in hopes of finding a place of help and welcome. More and more, in these difficult times, the rector reports that homeless people are coming to our door in search of food, warm clothing, access to social services. A community of homeless people is forming under the beltway overpass, just a quarter of a mile down the road. We are clearly being called to some deeper discernment about how we can best and most responsibly provide the right kind of help to our near neighbors in need. The church building, with its carving of Our Saviour, arms outstretched, over the front door, says to the world, “There is help here.” Somehow the building and the people alike are called to give solid form to that help.

“The church is not a building/ The church is not a steeple/ The church is not a resting-place/ The church is a people,” goes a song my children learned in Sunday school. But now it seems more complicated than that. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes somewhere that “the church of Jesus Christ takes up space in the world,” and our buildings and the way we use them is one way we do this. As I enter my 2nd year of a 3-year term in leadership, I am praying for clarity about how we are called to use what we have – in building, staff, and other resources—the nitty-gritty, institutional stuff that we support with our regular givings and thanks-givings – to be the presence of Christ on this corner, for those around us and for all who come through our doors.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Gregory C. Syler

Sitting with Hemingway’s breakthrough classic, The Sun Also Rises, once again, I noticed what must have always been there, though I hardly saw it before: a robust catholicism; a “grand religion” no less vital to Spanish culture than to a few of the American ex-pats who tried to renew life, at least for a while, in a fictional summer. Read of protagonist Jake Barnes’ experience in the Bayonne cathedral, relishing the cool stone, awkwardly feasting in quiet prayer, soaking up time-honed sacredness of place.

Hemingway began to write it in those early years spent abroad with his wife and child. Bored and brooding as 1925’s summer turned to fall, he headed off by himself to Chartres, and found the ancient pilgrimage site an excellent place to refine the novel. Biographer Michael Reynolds notes: “Catholicism held for Hemingway a strong emotional attraction. It was the religion of the bullfighters and royalty, a religion of the streets and courts.”

Something there speaks to me. Not the watered-down cultural religiosity but the honest appraisal of what is in the Episcopal Church, as well, a catholic truth: If we take Jesus seriously, we’ll find ourselves singing, praying and eating with the rich and poor, the homeless and those with mortgage woes, the ones we’d like to vacation with and the ones we’d rather serve lunch to, behind the protected wall of a parish hall’s kitchen counter.

You see, I’m the rector of a small but increasingly vibrant Episcopal parish in St. Mary’s County. Not much happens where we live and worship in the village of Valley Lee, but an Anglican church has been here, continuously, since 1638. No modern church planter would start a congregation in this precise spot, because it doesn’t marry with the modern layout of roadways in southern Maryland, but St. George’s is a simple whitewashed building almost exactly halfway between the great manor houses nearby. Sure, this was a church for the landed gentry, but it also was a congregation for the folks who tilled the land and worked the waters, those who got up with the sun and rested when the day was done.

That’s something to be celebrated, a truly Christian community in which the wealthy and not-so-prosperous gathered around the same altar. Even today, long after the slave galleries were ripped out and the manor barons’ wealth all but dried up, St. Mary’s is a booming mix of U.S. Navy, military contractors, retirees and folks who can still trace their line to the founding of the colony. And they gather, still, around the same altar – those with doctorates and oversight of multimillion dollar defense contracts right next to those who learned from their grandparents how to stuff a ham and whose parents showed them how to catch rockfish according to native American customs.

To me, it’s both amazing and humbling because, like many, I chose the Episcopal Church as an adult Christian and (let’s be honest) many of us, myself included, relish that our church is a fairly elite group that still prides itself on how many U.S. Presidents we claim, how intellectually curious we can be, how upper-crust we still seem, and that Vanderbilt, Washington and Lee all count as members of our clan. As the relative wealth of colonial manor homes gave way to the contemporary wealth of Navy contracts down here, it’s refreshing to know that the Episcopal Church has, all along, also been founded on watermen and tobacco farmers, on honest, simple folks (myself most certainly included) as well as the elite; a “religion of the streets and courts.”

This also is refreshing, I should hope, to congregations in the Episcopal Church that don’t necessarily share the colonial heritage that quaint little St. George’s, Valley Lee does, for number-trackers continue to alarm faithful Episcopalians (and diocesan staffs) when they show the average attendance at an Episcopal church today as something like 70 folks on a Sunday morning and an increasingly aging population and, well, never mind the rest of the statistics but throw up your hands and cry “Oh, my, the ship really is sinking!”

If you look at it another way, however, you realize that a lot of church-folk in southern Maryland learned the lesson, long ago, that a church of 70 or so on a Sunday morning can still be the recipe for a pretty amazing Christian body, and they don’t have to come with deep pockets. In Valley Lee and other hamlets here, we are growing in spirit as well as in numbers, and we’re doing it through readily identifiable Christian work: education, outreach, worship and pastoral care; not just finding the next wealthy manor lord. We may not be the Upper Crust Church and, like others, our overall attendance may have slipped from previous decades, but we are still fairly successful Christian congregations who are passionately committed to reaching out in Jesus’ name.

Maybe numbers and size and average-education-level don’t matter so much as faithfulness and vibrancy. And maybe a new door is being opened for the Episcopal Church just as the old one is closing, slowly, decade after decade. Maybe congregations like “quaint little St. George’s” will become the model for the rest of us – that the rich faithfulness and robust quality of Christian faith matters, above all else, and those qualities can be found chiefly at those altars where the streets meet the courts.

The Rev. Greg Syler is rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Valley Lee, Md.

By Kathleen Staudt

“Good Morning, Church!” This greeting has become familiar in my congregation. Members who originally come from West Africa are accustomed to beginning announcements that way. And it’s catching on. “Good morning Church!” the lay leader says.

“Church.” That would be us. And we respond heartily “Good morning!”

In the aftermath of Lambeth, and Archbishop Rowan Williams’s suggestion that a Covenant might make us “more like a church”, I’ve been musing about my own sense of what it means to “be a Church,” and where it comes from.

I came into the Episcopal Church in 1978, as the “new prayer book” was just coming into use. Coming from a Reformed and Confessional tradition, I was drawn by the beauty of liturgy and what I understood us to be saying at worship about what it meant to “be Church.” What holds Anglicans together, I learned in confirmation class, is not set doctrine but common worship, though of course we are always in conversation about doctrine and tradition. That has been what I’ve understood about being Anglican, and that’s been my experience at worship. So some of what’s coming out of Lambeth about being “more like a church” seems befuddling to me. I had thought there was consensus that as church we are not unified by doctrine or discipline sent from on high, but by our practice and worship. That’s what I take people to mean, discussing Lambeth, when they say we are “a communion, not a church.” But of course we are a church (as in “the Church, the people of God” to use Verna Dozier’s language). We’re not “not a church.” Clearly much remains to be discerned.

As is my habit, I go to back to the liturgy for help, to see what poetic images have rooted themselves into my imagination and memory. And here I find some metaphors that seem worth pondering in these times. They are from important prayers that I think are not always as familiar as they might be to people in congregations – and now might be a good time to revisit them in our corporate life in congregations.

The first comes from the baptism service, a passage that sometimes gets lost in actual practice, when the priest says “Let us welcome the newly baptized” and the congregation responds with applause. (I’ve seen this happen at a number of baptism services, in a number of congregations). But the words of welcome are Biblical, and important:

We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.” (BCP 308)

The “household” of God. Yes. A good image of the Anglican Communion right now, as well as of many a congregation. We live together, we share the same food, and we have conflicts and celebrations, upheavals and challenges. But we belong to the same household. The rest of the welcome prayer is a catechism in itself – worth spending years unpacking: Confess, proclaim, share. We live out a “priesthood” as Christians, a life that involves bearing the Holy into the world, and sharing it with others, as Bill Countryman has described so well in Living on the Borders of the Holy. We are carrying out into the world the transforming love that is expressed in the faith of Christ crucified and the good news of his Resurrection. Being church means being the presence of Christ in the world, or in another metaphor I like, from Robert Capon, to be the Church is to be “the hat on the Invisible Man” for the world.

The fullness of that calling is expressed in my favorite prayer in the book, which I often use when I teach workshops on discernment and discipleship:

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual ordering of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. (BCP 280, 291, 515, 528, 540)

This prayer is appointed for Good Friday, just after the solemn collects, and Holy Saturday, just before the baptism service. We also say it at ordinations. (Marshall Scott has a good discussion of this in an earlier post on the Daily Episcopalian). It’s worth pointing out and holding up this prayer in a time when we’re reflecting on “being Church” because people who don’t attend a lot of ordinations may not be aware of having heard it or offered it.

I love the poetry of this prayer: the suggestion that radical transformation – things cast down, raised up, grown old, made new—can be carried out “in tranquility.” That in itself is a prayer for a miracle! This prayer acknowledges that our life as Church is held in the Divine life. To acknowledge this requires humility, as we craft ways to be together as the “household of God.” That’s why I also love the prayer’s description of the Church as “that wonderful and sacred mystery.”

The scrappiness and challenge of a “household”, held in “that wonderful and sacred mystery.” Holding these two metaphors together may help keep us open and humble, in this time after Lambeth and in the lives of our churches generally. as we continue to discern together what it means to “be a Church.”

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature, theology and writing 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.