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The Church Bubble - Annual Report/Sermon

2012-02-07T15:03:27-06:00

This is my sermon from last Sunday. It's a combination sermon and Annual Report that talks about the "Church Bubble" that has burst, and the realities of dealing with a new social environment for the church.

"If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! " In his 1959 Book, "The Status Seekers," Social Critic Vance Packard describes the religious culture of the time: "America, we keep reading, is undergoing a remendous religious renaissance. Membership is growing by a million a year, and is now up to more than 104,000,000. Per member contributions are up. Nearly a billion dollars' worth of new structures are going up in the United States each year." Vance writes that Sunday Morning was not only divided by race, but also by class. You could tell someone's social class by which church they attended. In 1959, there was really no question where the Episcopal Church was in terms of social status.

Vance's chapter on religion and class is tellingly titled, "The Long Road from Pentecostal to Episcopal." Vance wrote: "The upper class in most United States communities is drawn more powerfully to the Episcopal church than to any other. Consider the evidence: A sociological analysis made of the leading wedding announcements involving socially prominent families in The New York Times revealed that three quarters of the weddings taking place in known Protestant churches occurred in Episcopal churches. E. Digby Baltzell found, in his study of Philadelphia society, that two thirds of the Philadelphians who were in both the Social Register and Who's Who were Episcopalian. Corporate executives are ten times as likely to list 'Episcopal' as their religious preference as are Americans at large. Episcopalian, in fact, is by far the preferred denomination of executives."

This was still detectable as late as the 90s. In my home town, the mayor, the county executive, and many of the doctors and lawyers in the county attended our Episcopal Church. It was daunting for us to pull our little rusty 1980 Honda Civic into the church parking lot every Sunday to wedge it in-between the Lexuses and Jaguars.

But things changed for the Episcopal Church. The first crack was when we took a denominational stand in favor of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, guaranteeing African-Americans the right to vote. Several schisms happened during that time, quite often predicated on the idea that the church should never speak on political matters. Prayer book revision and women's ordination created further schisms, as has the acceptance of divorce and remarriage as well as the debate over the place of people of same sex affection. On the other hand, many people have been attracted to the Episcopal Church due to the culture that has been created by those decisions. Today's Episcopal Church is much more diverse, both in terms of race and class than it was in 1959.

There are those that note the decline in money and attendance in the Episcopal church over the last several decades, and claim that the decline is due to some sort of loss of faithfulness to the Gospel. But that idea completely ignores what's going on in society around us. Almost all religious organizations are in decline. That 1959 excerpt describes a society in the middle of a huge "Church Bubble," starting with the GI's returning home after WWII and augmented by the new mobility possible in widespread ownership of automobiles. For several decades, church membership became socially expected, and people belonged to churches at a rate that was higher than at any other point in American history. But that bubble has burst - the social advantages of attending a church have disappeared. From the most conservative to the most liberal, denominations are showing flat growth at best, and steep decline at the worst.

Before we start to wonder if God has abandoned the Church, we must look even wider in society. Almost all social organizations, from bowling leagues to fraternal organizations peaked in the late 1950s and are in decline. The Masons had 4 Million members in 1963. They had 1.5 Million in 2011. If you ask a teenager what the Knights of Phythias are, they would probably guess they are some sort of band. That's because they and many other organizations like the Elks, the Oddfellows and even the VFWs and American Legion are facing possible extinction. So what conclusions can we draw from this? First, All organizations that have a mission to create social bonds are in decline. People are finding new, less formal ways to form those bonds. Second, Religious organizations are not exempt from this effect, especially if they act primarily as a group that seeks to reinforce society and status. This is where our challenge is.

St. Matthias was part of the religious bubble, riding the success of all groups that reinforced the status seeking society of the late 50s and early 60s. We, like the entire Episcopal Church, remade ourselves on a corporate model that imitated the society at large. Members Joined, Committees multiplied, social opportunities blossomed, complex programs were created and executed. But now we are placed in a society that no longer wants those things. People are working more hours than people have since before WWII, quite often on Sunday mornings. Kids are involved in a multiplicity of organized activities on all days and at all times. Parents do not look to the church to find a way to take up slack time. We are connected constantly, 24/7 by the Internet which we no longer have to even be sitting down at a computer to access. The church is no longer the communications hub it was decades ago. We are in a completely different world than we were in 1959, but we are slow to adjust. What adjustments are necessary? Let's work with three.

First, St. matthias must give up the idea that we are a large church temporarily small, and come to grips with the fact that we are a small church growing larger. There is still a lot of grief over the loss of the past, and some still hope for a future that looks like that past. But that past is gone - it no longer exists anywhere. However, there are advantages to being a smaller church, filled with dedicated and talented people with a passion for the place. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the world, ministry is now more like venture capital than traditional investment. We have the ability to experiment, and if we can accept that many programs will fail in order to find others that succeed, it is possible we may thrive in this new world.

Second, We must give up ideas of program that are based in the church as the singular social hub of the 50s, and find ways to tell the story of Jesus that resonate with today's social reality. Already, we have a presence on the Internet that is eye-popping to many traditional churches. We have a dynamic web site, an e-mail list, and twitter and facebook feeds that are updated frequently. On our visitor cards, our guests indicate nearly nine times out of ten that our internet presence was how they found out about us and/or decided to give us a try.

Third, we must rediscover the fact that St. Matthias is part of a greater whole. We are Episcopalians, which literally means "people with a bishop." We are not congregationaly oriented, but ordered by our membership in a diocese. Bishop Miller and his staff have been working diligently for greater transparency and accountability in a diocese where such thing have not been the norm for decades. As resources become tighter, we need to be unafraid to collaborate with Episcopalians around us. We are not competing for people - as the scripture says, the harvest is great and the laborers are few. We should be concentrating on those outside the church rather than a continuous process of trading Episcoplians.

In addition, we need to be able to work ecumenically with other churches in Waukesha. With our Epiphany and Taize services, we have made strides in resurrecting worship links in the downtown. The newly-restored downtown ministers association pulled off nothing short of a small miracle by spearheading funding for the operation of the overflow homeless shelter this year. The downtown churches are flexing their atrophied muscles, and finding that we still have strength. Future success lies not in turning inward, but sharing with our fellow Episcopalians and other Christians in the proclamation of the Good News of Christ.

So if we make those adjustments, what then? What is it that God is calling us to be in this age and culture and society? The simple answer is, the same thing that God has always called the Church to do - to tell the Good News of Jesus Christ. People are thirsty to find meaning to their increasingly chaotic, scattered and segmented lives. Jesus offers the way, as he always has, to find the true meaning of our lives as beloved creations of a loving God. How do we do this? What do we do to make Christ known? I'll suggest three areas for the coming year.

The first is worship. Worship is the central act by which a church is a church. Worship reminds us that we are not ultimately about a function of "what," but about a relationship with "whom." We do worship well. We provide varied Episcopal worship that is solemn, but not fussy, beautiful, but not precious, familiar, but not sloppy. Our worship reflects both the transcendence and immanence of God. I thank God daily for all the people that make this all possible, and are so flexible with the realities of a small church. The challenge is, how do we get more people to experience it and give them a chance to fall in love with it? People will not simply walk into our doors in large numbers like they did in the 40s and 50s.

The second area is service. Several times in my four years here, we have had twenty-somethings come into our church and remark on the beauty of the service. They then ask what we do for the community and how they can get directly involved. When we have been unable to provide a tie-in for direct service, they eventually go somewhere else. Younger people believe, and rightly so from reading the Bible, that direct service is what the church should be doing.

This last year, the vestry has been challenged by deacon Kevin Stewart on how to restart this part of our Christian vocation. Unsuprisingly, homelessness was a natural focus for us, as it has been since the establishment of Hebron House. Over the next few months, our focus will be one of hospitality - getting our physical plant ready for Hebron House to move their corporate offices to our church. This will require a lot of work and some sacrifice on our part as we fit a lot of people into the space. But I believe their presence among us will be a daily reminder that Christ calls us to serve those who need us.
Beyond that, the Vestry has identified education for the homeless as an area we can help in. Some ideas include a parents night off for residents at Hebron House as well as a tutoring program, but those ideas are still a while away and will probably wait until Hebron House is settled down. In order to serve Christ, we must orient ourselves towards service of those he particularly is concerned about - the poor and oppressed.

The third area is education. Education is the key to so many things in life. It is the key to growth in Christian Faith and life. Already, we have a truly excellent Children's Education program for a church our size. Our Education For Ministry program has eleven adults doing some very intense work around scripture, history and theology. This year, we hope to re-tool much of our more "casual" adult education, starting with a new program called "Living Compass" that we will be rolling out in Lent that looks at our lives from a holistic perspective. It is my belief that if we pay attention to these three areas, we will find ourselves a church very much more alive, very much more faithful, and very much more attractive to those who are seeking something deeper in their lives.

This parish was established in 1844 under some very trying circumstances. It has survived multiple ups and downs, some much more severe than anything we have experienced in the last decade. If we put Christ at the center and order our church accordingly, I believe God will continue to bless us, and we will see our ministry to downtown Waukesha thrive and prosper. Being people of faith, we cannot put our fundamental trust in any sociological theory, or any organization model, but only in the person we follow - our Lord Jesus Christ. May Christ continue to bless us in our ministry.

Tolkien and Lewis - Myth vs. Lies

2012-02-01T10:18:41-06:00

A reader wrote in with a question about the ubiquity of stories similar to the Christian one in other myths. For instance, the dying and reborn god Balder, or the miraculous birth of Horus. This is a fairly common strain of questioning. My response is to usually talk about the conversations between CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that dealt with this very subject. Here are a couple of YouTube videos that deal with those conversations.

via www.askthepriest.org

"Being an Anglican"

2012-01-21T12:56:36-06:00

Crusty Old Dean comments on the resolution from the Church of England's (CofE) Synod to reaffirm their relationsip with the Episcopal Church while, "the Synod motion has given Church of England affirmation to the desire of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) to remain in some sense within the Anglican family." Tom puts it this way:

This report is good news. Translated from Church of England speak, it basically means, "Nothing's gonna happen with ACNA for a long, long time. This is what "open ended" engagement means.

via crustyoldean.blogspot.com

"Affirming" a "desire" does nothing other than acknoledge that ACNA wants to be in the communion. "Anglican Family" is as undefined a term in Anglican Ecclesiology as "Enemy Combatant" is in the Geneva Convention. This is a pretty vague pat on the back from Lambeth.

Tom spends some time in the article comparing the Anglican Communion to the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and points out that all members of the Federation recognize the orders of the other, even if their jurisdictions overlap. The problem with the case of the ACNA is that many of them would refuse to recognize our orders, many of them being held by women.

The root is in the myth of an "Anglican Church" that many people hold. The Anglican Church is the CofE. The Anglican Communion is a family of autonomous churches bound by "bonds of affection." We really are a federation, whether we want to admit it or not, as the LWF is also a "Communion of Churches." To claim we were more than this, (i.e., a church) juridical power would have to be exercised in between provinces, which is something not even contenanced in the proposed covenant. Those in ACNA that claim we are an "Anglican Church" don't want to be added to the Anglican Communion, they want to replace us.

There is a lot of romaticism out there about being an "Anglican." But in the strictest sense, only members of the CofE are truly Anglican. In my experience, when an American starts waxing abouty being "Anglican," It usually boils down to some sort of vague appreciation for tea, evensong and the 1637 Scottish eucharisitc canon. They seem to do this quite often without understading that they are not using the 1662 English canon, and what a thumbing of the nose at the CofE adopting that canon was. Anglophilia does not make one Anglican.

This is why people can join the new Anglican Ordinariate, play act as Anglicans, and not recognize that they have left something essential behind. If Anglicanism is nothing but a minor derivation of the Western Rite, then they are correct. But if Anglicanism is the actual religion espoused by Hooker and Donne and Taylor and Ferrar as a Via Media, then leaving the Anglican Communion for whatever wtipe of purity they seek is not a reaffirmation, but a repudiation (perhaps a refudiation?)

In America, if you are a member of the Episcopal Church, you are an Episcopalian. Because of our participation in the Communion's "Instruments of Unity," we can lay some claim to being "Anglican." Beyond that, all of those who follow the trappings of Anglicanism might certainly be called part of the "Anglican Family," which really does not contain any recognition with it. After all, everyone you are related to is part of your family, whether they are healthy and sane or not.

Behold! The LOTR Aragorn LEGO Poster! | Hobbit Movie News and Rumors | TheOneRing.net™

2012-01-10T14:30:22-06:00

Those of us who are anxiously awaiting the upcoming The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit LEGO sets get an additional tease today! Hot off the presses, here is LEGO The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Aragorn Poster. I think it is safe to say that Viggo never looked so good as a LEGO! If you were not aware, LEGO has announced recently they will be producing items for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the upcoming The Hobbit films. Collectibles are set to be released this coming Summer. Jump on over to LEGO’s official site for The Lord of the Rings and keep watching TheOneRing.net for more updates! [Official Site] [Download the Poster PDF] [Read the Announcement]

via www.theonering.net

OMG! LOTR LEGOS!

WotC Announces 5th Edition D&D: Should We Care? | GeekDad | Wired.com

2012-01-10T14:01:15-06:00

On Monday, Wizards of the Coast announced that work is already under way on the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. An article in the New York Times by GeekDad contributor Ethan Gilsdorf details some of the recent history and philosophy that underlies the new development, while a Legends & Lore article by Mike Mearls reveals that part of the process will involve an open play-testing, with rules, classes, monsters and other material being revealed through the D&D website for playtesters to try at their own tables and provide feedback, thereby shaping the development of the game.

via www.wired.com

Schism as a Virus

2012-01-06T16:31:24-06:00

Watching the "Withdrawal" or whatever it is of the Anglican Mission In America (AMIA) from the Anglican Church of Rwanda has been interesting. For those of you not in the know, the AMIA was formed in 2000 as a reaction to the "theological liberalism" of the Episcopal Church. In order to be strictly "Anglican," one has to be in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury through a church in the Anglican Communion. AMIA's tie was through Rawanda, but that relationship flew to pieces last month over what appears to be personality conflicts among bishops. While many try to put a brave face on it, AMIA member Mark Galli calls it for what it is:

I think it critical in such times that we say what a thing is–only the truth will set us free. And this thing that happened has a name: schism. All the AMIA bishops who have resigned are schismatics.

This is a hard sentence to write and to read, because these are otherwise godly men, whose leadership we have admired. Some we call friends and colleagues. But there is no other word to describe what they’ve done other than the word schism.

This is troubling, first, because it contradicts Jesus’ expressed prayer for the unity of the church. Second, it threatens to make a lie of AMIA’s posture when we first left the Episcopal Church. Some accused us of schism at the time, and we responded in one of two ways: (1) It is not schism if the church we departed had lost its Christian moorings. Or (2) if it is schism, then it is one of the rare exceptions in which schism is the lesser evil. In either case, we held aloft a couple of theological ideals that were motivating us: The authority of Scripture and sexual/moral integrity. We did not leave on a point of personal inspiration.

In my opinion, "Threatens to make a lie of AMIA's posture when we first left the Episcopal Church" should be changed to "Removes the theological smokescreen our leadership used to justify schism." I'm in the process of reading Douglas Bess' Divided We Stand, which is a history of the "Continuing Anglican Movement." It's reads kind of like a "bodice ripper" version of Don Armentrout's Episcopal Splinter Groups. The AMIA is just one of many groups who have left the Episcopal Church over the years for various presenting reasons, from the Reformed Episcopal Church in the 1800s to the Anglican Ordinariates just a few days ago. However, whatever the presenting reasons, there's always a subtext of bishops behaving badly, and it always seems to follow a particular course:

Dissident leaders become frustrated by lack of personal advancement in Episcopal Church.
Dissident movement latches onto theological debate du jour.
When enough dissidents gather, a loose confederation is formed around their dislike of the Episcopal Church, even if there is little else in common.
Dissident confederation leaves Episcopal Church claiming that they are not leaving, but that the church has left them.
Dissident confederation creates looser ecclesiological structure and canons that empowers dissident leaders.
Dissident confederation ordains many more bishops than it needs, often using Episcopi Vagantes.
Dissident confederation cracks apart along papered-over faultlines ignored when the confederation is formed.
Remaining dissident groups merge and fracture with amazing frequency, with the bishops sometimes becoming Episcopi Vagantes themselves.

It almost seems to be a viral process designed to create more Episcopi Vagantes. The speed varies. The Reformed Episcopal Church is still around, although it has lately become part of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). (Interestingly, the ACNA was also the name of a group formed after the St. Louis Congress in 1977 in opposition to women's ordination and which split apart later over churchmanship issues.) But ACNA faces it's own internal problems with women's ordination and other issues that didn't seem so huge when the Episcopal Church was the big bad wolf, but are starting to rear their ugly heads now that they have had time to start getting to know each other.

Perhaps schism really is viral.

Mitt Romney as a D&D Character? NYC Show Celebrates Art and Gaming | GeekDad | Wired.com

2012-01-06T15:48:50-06:00

Today and tomorrow mark what looks to be an exciting series of events in New York City that celebrate the impact and continued relevance of Dungeons & Dragons on the culture.

via www.wired.com

Happy Birthday, JRR Tolkien

2012-01-03T21:25:31-06:00

From TheOneRing

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on January 3, 1892. He would eventually move to England, become an accomplished linguist and scholar, an Oxford professor and a beloved husband and father. While in his twenties, he began developing a series of stories that went on to become the rich, complex history of a place called Middle-earth: a world that millions would eventually visit, both on the written page and on the big screen, and come to love. TheOneRing.net raises a glass to “The Professor!” today, in honor of all the enjoyment and camaradarie his birth, and life, has lead to. Thank you, professor Tolkien!

louie, louie: Poetry is not, and is against, magic

2012-01-03T16:16:45-06:00

Poetry is not, and is against, magic

Photo by Thomas Merton

I am reading Rowan Williams’ book of essays about Merton now. Rowan is a noted critic of poetry and there is an essay about poetry, where Williams says [that Merton says] that poetry isn’t, and is against, magic.

“‘It is the businessman, the propagandist, the politician, not the poet, who devoutly believes in the magic of words.’, writes Merton, ‘for the poet, there is precisely no magic, only life in all its unpredictability and freedom. All magic is a ruthless venture into manipulation, a vicious circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Words that ‘work’, independent of their transparency to truth, are magical words. They live without anchorage in reality. They exist in order to exercise power, to control or develop a situation according to the will of the speaker.”

via fatherlouie.blogspot.com

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T00:15:23-06:00

The Nativity by Gustave Doré