Tom's notes for his words to Washington Convention (linked above) are well worth a read.

under the headings of 'bad theology' and 'vending machine meals' (marks of how we perpetuate our clubhouse) Tom
says:

(ON BAD THEOLOGY:)

"For a long time we've known that conformity is the obsession of religious institutions. It is the impulse behind creedal confessions and our present rites of initiation, as well as our “Holy Orders process.” Institutions lose their power (or so they believe) when they give it away. They have less authority if they make it too easy to join the ranks of the elite – the clerics and insiders that manage ritual practice. (For more on that, read Peter Berger’s Noise of solemn assemblies.)"

"The insistence on Conformity is also the impulse behind our fascination with orthodoxy. The institutional battles faced by each of our American Christian denominations are not around how best to feed the poor or alleviate suffering or how to bring the greatest amount of hope and joy into “pagan” communities as Bishop Bates refers to them. Instead, we fight to retain franchise rights – who’s “in” and who’s “out” of the franchise – the One True Church. In reality, to misquote Forrest Gump, “orthodoxy is as orthodoxy does.” To whom does it make the greater difference whether or not a community member believes correctly regarding the “of one substance” controversy? Is it the rescue worker “hanging ten” on the rocky seacoast, poised to pull one more shipwrecked soul out of the storm? Or is it the Club manager concerned to maintain the purity of the membership’s rolls?"

"In reality, theology is relationship language that needs to be rescued from the grip of academia and philosophy. The formation of theology is, at its best, indigenous – that is, locally formed and tested in relationship. It cannot be reified any more than manna could have been stockpiled for peoples of another culture, or another time. It cannot be “fixed” or established or codified. Jesus must have known this since we have no record of his having turned to a scribe (anywhere or anytime in his ministry) to ask that he correctly record his teachings so that the movement would get started on the right theological footing. We also have no record that Jesus ever baptized any of his followers."

(ON VENDING MACHINE MEALS:)

"Now to my point on vending machine meals. There is nothing more dull than going forward to receive “a crisp and a shot” from robed holy people, in my humble opinion, though we have made it desirable and “holy” through many years of tradition and back-pedaled theology. Those of you Insiders who love the Eucharistic celebration as it is, please block your ears and bear with me! The Liturgical Lifeboat is still a means of grace for you and I honor that."

"In reality, most of the outsiders who might come to our Eucharistic Celebrations are actually looking for the Johannine “Feeding of the 5000” rather than the “Last Supper.” And, if you show up longing to share meals around a new family table because your life is spinning out of control or because you just found out that your birth family isn’t the family you always thought it was or because you don’t have the resources to buy your own next meal, a “crisp and a shot” just doesn’t quite do it. Instead, it feels sort of like punching a button on a machine owned by a Pepsi distributing franchise."

"Based on all of that, I ask myself constantly, “What would it take for these ‘pagans” to try out a community of faith, once again?” Before I can even get to that question, I have to ask, “Why would a community of faith want to reconnect with the ‘pagans’ in their community?” (I have well-earned misgivings about clubhouse Christianity’s tendency to mimic Procrustes’ bait and switch hospitality!)"

"That was the very question that Jesus addresses when, against his followers’ better judgment, he feeds everybody present, not just the true confessing followers! He offers them a meal so exuberantly generous that there are 12 baskets left over! There’s no vending machine mentality here! There’s a sense of Divine wastefulness that draws even the most curmudgeonly among us to give of our best, and freely!"

Tom is asking the questions that moved the Diocese of New Hampshire to elect Gene Robinson, Northern Michignan Kevin Thew Forrester, and Los Angeles, Mary Glasspool, the questions that have moved some of us to challenge the liturgical use of the Nicene Creed (or any communal liturgical recitation of sanctified religious opinion that's not framed as prayer). He's asking the questions about the prophetic sign of Jesus' meal hospitality that have moved many to reframe our invitations to communion, and the questions that provoke our people to push us clergy to open the church doors to turn the sanctuary, the holy place into a weekday food pantry or a soup kitchen, or to launch a new congregation as a 'dinner church' where Eucharist is shared around a table where strangers and friends have cooked and share a hearty, delicious meal.

Tom Brackett is a prophet. Let those who have ears listen. Money, or lack thereof, may well force the church to reconsider the way forward in mission. The mainstream churches, with the exception of certain outstanding communities which serve as models for us, are dying a slow death. I pray that new life may spring forth from the seed that falls to the ground. I pray that much of the new life begins in shabby, life-saving huts.

June Butler

There is simply no evidence that using the Creed is bad for evangelism. Many of the young adults we are seeing are hungry for tradition. What turns people off is obsessive policing of boundaries, not a community that can articulate its boundaries and hold them up as a norm. The mandatory use of the Creed on Sundays and major feasts is an expression of our intention to live out our faith Catholic Christians. People are hungry for sound teaching and life-giving sacramental practice. If the Episcopal Church doesn't want to offer that, we should simply close up shop.

The doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation are the basis of the Church's radical social vision. To quote Conrad Noel's comments on the Athanasian Creed:

"We look forward to a world of infinite variety in harmony, of living unity, not dead uniformity; if man is to create so delightful a world, he 'must thus think of the Trinity,' for it is the will of men to renew the world in such a way as to make it the perfect expression of His own Being.

"This was understood by the Catholic Church of the early ages, when its thinkers were developing the doctrine of the Godhead, borrowing from non-Christian sources, but weaving all that they borrowed into a distinctive Christian theology. It was also understood, or, at least, instinctively treasured by the workers, the common people of the market-place, craftsmen, porters, tanners, farmers, fishermen, stevedores, and the like; the philosophers thought it out, while the people fought it out, because they dimly perceived that the imperial world, dear to the Arian opponents, who thought of God as an Emperor Dictator in the sky, was crushing the life out of them, while the Catholic belief in the Triune God, put into action, would give them a world in which there would be no artificial differences or inequalities."

Conrad Noel, Jesus the Heretic (London: Temple Press, 1940), pp. 2-3.

The Life Saving station parable is not very motivating to me -(maybe it is because I have heard it for so many years). Most people are not so helpless as to need the church to save them - that is help them find wholeness in life. People have a spiritual life whether or not the church offers anything on their beach.

Bill,

I agree with you 100% that living Christian tradition and Trinitarian/Incarnational faith aren't our problem but a solution to live into.

That means I agree with you about people (young people included) feeling hunger for living and life-giving tradition. And it means I'd like to refocus this from your note -

"There is simply no evidence that using the Creed is bad for evangelism. Many of the young adults we are seeing are hungry for tradition. What turns people off is obsessive policing of boundaries, not a community that can articulate its boundaries and hold them up as a norm. The mandatory use of the Creed on Sundays and major feasts is an expression of our intention to live out our faith Catholic Christians. People are hungry for sound teaching and life-giving sacramental practice. If the Episcopal Church doesn't want to offer that, we should simply close up shop."

So, to refocus, I'd begin happily acknowledging that we nothing but anecdotal evidence that appropriating the creed to liturgical use is 'bad for evangelism.' And I know can match those anecdotes, seemingly person by person, story by story, with stories of people who have found saying the Creed helpful and have come to like it or love it.

Unfortunately both sets of anecdotes lock us into an argument about what sells. I'm suggesting that basing our conversation about using the Creed on how people feel about the Creed reflects a focus group reflex to define evangelistic effectiveness.

For me the decisive pastoral data is how people talk about the creed, those who love saying it, those who stumble over parts of it, and those who hate it and remain silent. Our conversation about what we're doing tells us that all three groups agree that the Church puts a very high value on religious opinions. That my convictions about how God is and works are a ticket to belonging.

My problem with the Creed isn't what the Creed says. In its frame of Greek philosophical language, the Creed takes on a popular distortion of Christian faith and practice that made more sense to mainstream Greek philosophical discourse. The church repudiated Arius (and Athanasius stood by that repudiation when the church backed down and tried to repudiate Nicaea itself) because Arius was teaching a hyper-rationalistic, elitist, quasi-gnostic, propositional 'faith,' and not trust in the mystery of God coming among us to love us.

What liturgical recitation of the Creed seems to drive out (as I hear all the subjective pro and con of people's experience saying it) is any sense at all that it's talking about who we can trust. At an apparent hinge point of 'getting ready for communion' we have to give assent to a series of propositions about God to legitimize our presence to what we're already doing, enacting and saying relationally in prayer (and in the scripture, hymns and prayers' full breadth of language from all sorts of historic periods and parts of our tradition.

The Creed is successfully forming people who imagine that 'faith' is the sum of their religious opinions or convictions, that is, not fundamentally relational.

With you, I see faith as much more decisive and evident in action than mere assent. And that's why I don't agree that our DOCTRINES of the Trinity and the Incarnation drive Christianity's radical social vision.

What is stunningly evident to me that our coming to know-and-love God Incarnate who loves, forgives, blesses, and empowers us to be like him, and encountering the mystery of God's love in God's Trinitarian presence and work among us do drive the Christian social vision.

Wittgenstein wrote, "About that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent." I think a lot of people take this as prescriptive, but his later thought makes it more clear that it was a descriptive statement. If we can't talk about something, we have to remain silent about it.

The Nicene and Apostles' Creeds give us a basic set of assumptions that all Christians share. Generally speaking, I'd say that anyone who can't say it with a straight face—not to say believes every word, but can't say it with a straight face—should be asking himself or herself some serious questions about commitment to Christianity. It's just that basic. There's a reason why Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches tend to structure their catechisms around the Creeds: they are the basic statements, a catechism in a wildly compacted miniature. If they seem confusing and difficult, it's because we've failed to educate our fellow-Christians.

I think there is a tendency toward a namby-pamby ecumenical liberal Protestantism that is chilling, because it chills our ability to talk about God. This is in part because it assumes that ethics can form a basis for understanding God, when it can't; there's a reason the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart and mind, and the second is like it—to love your neighbor as yourself. If you have no language for expressing what you love, if you have no name, not even an analogy of its face, i.e., if you don't have the Creeds, how do you know? You just love one another. It's a good start and secular humanism is a faith, but it's not Christian. You have to know God too.

Finally, Christ is the only way I know of for sure not to go to eternal death. Maybe there are other ways, maybe God will save other people outside the Church, I don't know. But it is the only way we know for sure, and the Bible tells us to tell it to the world, for their sake. It is indeed a lifeboat.

Mike Lockaby

But maybe lots of people don't feel a need to belong to the Church of "Mike Knows of For Sure"? ;-/

In a probably vain hope to split the difference between Bill and Donald, I wonder if the problem isn't so much w/ the Creed---or even the Creed in the liturgy---but HOW the Creed is used in the liturgy.

Now, I like the Nicene Creed. When *I* hear "maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen...God from God, Light from Light" . . . I hear a song, or a prayer. Something to join into, collectively, something to meditate, or muse on. To ponder, with awe and wonder.

But our Post-Enlightenment minds have turned it into a test: True or False, Check One, and ONLY One! Especially as located after the Lessons and Homily, it seems to be some kind of referendum (or even punching the ticket of Mike's "Church of Fer Shur!")

I think it's that (futile, for mortals!) Quest for Certitude, that puts God in the Infinitely-Too-Small Box...

...but that's not the Creed's problem. It's ours. Should we be Creedal Christians . . . or Christians Who Sing a Song---in many keys, w/ harmony AND some disharmony---of "We Believe in One God..."?

JC Fisher

Most people are not so helpless as to need the church to save them....

Ann, that may be true, but it seems to me that the church needs to do a better job of seeking out and finding those who do need the church to save them.

JC, I agree with you. in an earlier discussion of this, I mentioned getting a composer friend to write a sung congregational refrain to, "Lord, we trust you, your love is life," and having a cantor (or better still a Trinity of cantors) in turn sing chunks of the three sections of the creed, nine sections, three Father, three Son, three Spirit and the people respond with the sung refrain. If it's prayer it looks and feels startling different. We're no longer cataloguing our religious opinions or principles and I think everyone has some sense that anything we call God, any image or name we offer is at least somewhat provisional. The couple of times I've done this as a guest liturgist, people who say they've always stumbled at saying the creed have told me after, 'it worked. it made a different kind of sense.'

in Tom's parable, the lifesaving station is about relationships and trust, the club and clubhouse are about who 'we are' and how 'we belong.'

I find this discussion fascinating. I'm serving in a church that has very much of a "clubhouse" mentality, yet membership is meaningless (no dues required, no commitment, it's not even clear who belongs and who doesn't because membership records have been a shambles for decades).

What surprises me is that in spite of that, in spite of generations of perceptions of being the church for the elite, every Sunday we get visitors of all sorts and conditions--college students, young adults, retired people who have relocated here, homeless men from the shelter, as well as our regulars--all of them looking for something: connection, beauty, God.
My question is how we get them to come back next week. And what about all those folks who would rather be doing something else on Sunday morning but are still on intense spiritual journeys?
Jonathan Grieser

I want it to be clear that I have nothing but love and respect for Donald. I think his last suggestion is a nice one, though I'd prefer a setting where all sing it together.

Even Calvin said the Creed was better sung than recited.

Even a monotone, which is the standard musical setting in our tradition, improves it, though Bach's setting in the B-minor mass is better.

It is the People's response to the homily.

"It is the people's response to the homily."

That is precisely what I find difficult about the creed --- it invariably seems to be unrelated to the homily. A good homily should be a call - to a change in knowledge and hopefully behavior. If recitation of ancient language about 'belief' is an adequate response it quickly becomes cheap grace. A homily should call us to "do something" as a response to the love of God. God wants more from us than rote repetition of words that for most people have little connection to the reality of loving God, neighbor, and mercy - to say nothing of doing justice.