What might you have done differently . . . ?

There comes a moment for me – usually after I wake up from a vivid dream – when I ask myself, “What was that all about?!” The moment also comes to me when I’ve experienced something too big to take in, right then.  A friend of mine says that most of us have great difficulty recognizing the shape of the times we currently inhabit. (We seem to be a whole lot better at recognizing the shape of times past.)

 

Some of you know that, a few months ago, I spent three weeks in the UK, exploring the Church of England’s “Fresh Expressions” movement. It felt like I barely scratched the surface in my explorations!  I met so many wonderful people – sat in on challenging and inspiring conversations – I mean, overall it was more than I ever expected from this visit. I was welcomed by gracious hosts in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, London, Devon and various stops along the way. I went there with one question on the tip of my tongue – everywhere I went. I asked that same question in pretty much the same way, each time. It went something like this . . .

“If you knew twenty years ago what you know today about the impact of secularization on the relationship of Culture to Church and vice versa, what might you have done differently to prepare the institution for those emerging realities, back then?”

I asked this seemingly rhetorical question of nearly seventy people there in the Church of England. Some lay folks, a scattering of bishops and a whole lot of active clergy agreed to talk “for the record.” I filled a notebook with their responses – it was marvelous! There were a few who objected to the question and a few more who cautioned me against asking such a question from Church leaders engaged with a very different culture.

Nonetheless, I’ve been carrying that notebook around with me for the last three months, reading and rereading the responses. A few weeks ago, I began sorting what I’d written into major themes – sort of categories of answers. It was no surprise that the most powerful answers I encountered centered around the following paraphrased response:

Twenty years ago, we were actively pushing our young people out the doors of our churches and Dioceses. We didn’t mean to – it’s just that we wouldn’t make room for them in our activities; we didn’t include their voices in our public conversations; we didn’t ask them for stories of their encounters with the good news of God as known in Jesus Christ. As a result, we lost them. They went elsewhere to find expression for their gifts. Today, there is little likelihood of attracting them back into our Church. In their absence, we lost sight of the huge gap growing between the insider language of the Church and the realities of the Culture we are called to serve. Now that’s a huge loss, but it’s not the biggest loss we’ve experienced, subsequently.

The greater loss is that we forgot how to nurture the prophetic voice in our midst. We’ve forgotten how to foster new young leaders in nurturing and mutually-shaping communities. Today, we are working on bringing new young leaders into our churches but that’s not the same as nurturing the prophetic voice in community – training new leaders to cultivate community with a hoe instead of directing with the Verger’s mace. That takes time to develop! It’s an art of “being in community” that very few have ever experienced, nonetheless mastered.

 

So, (several of them concurred) if we could go back – if you could learn from us – we would encourage you to take action now; do not wait until you have it figured out. Invite faith-filled young leaders into your communities. Listen. Try on new ideas. Experiment. Be willing to fail – often and early. “Fail away” until patterns of meaning start to emerge from your communities in discernment. Listen for the Fresh Expressions of the Spirit in their sometimes awkward and clumsy offerings. Especially listen and observe the way they use ritual and music to make sense of the insanity of our lives.

(I’ll stop there – I think the point is clear!)

 

Like many of you, I am preparing for General Convention. It’s a big deal to so many of us Episcopalians. This time, though, I am attending (and working at) GenCon09 with a different perspective. I’m wondering how to move away from the drama of the tired old wrangling and rhetoric that seems to dominate our gatherings. I’m wondering how we might clear our heads of the institutional anxieties that fog our conversations, lately. I mean, how do I personally say “Yes!” to the advice I so carefully collected from the leaders of a Church further down this Road than we are?

 

I think I’ll spend my time looking for those young leaders on the edges of our beloved Church – you know the ones – those with the look on their faces that asks, “Is there still room for me in the middle of all of this institutional earnestness?”

 

I think I’ll mischievously Twitter my way through the hearings and legislative committees in the hopes of drumming up some fresh courage that will call us back to the “gathering and scattering” that Jesus’ followers learned at the “fierce whimsy” of their Crazy Rabbi.

I think I’ll bring my video camera and interview participants with questions like, “How are you saying ‘Yes!’ to what Brian McLaren calls ‘the Episcopal moment’ that the Spirit has opened for us in our Culture?”

I think I’ll be there, looking for you and pressing you for your stories so that, in twenty years, I don’t have some foreign priest asking me the same question that I now offer you … “What might you have done differently . . . ?“

 

 

With crazy hopes and growing cheer,

 

 

 

Tom

646-203-6266

Comments

[elizabeth]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for this post - their advice gives me chills. I'm 23, living in an intentional Christian community, and trying to fit back into a parish mold after incredibly formative, playful (and irreverent), Spirit-filled years in college ministry.

I've been part of this large, behemoth of an institution for as long as I can remember. My friends from other denominations see me wrestle with it and wonder why I haven't moved on. This is why: I cannot turn my back on the regular celebration of the Eucharist as the primary liturgical experience of my worship community. I will not turn my back on my family and our regular family dinners. I believe that God is at work, in spite of and through the Church, to make church in the world.

I believe that there are enough people who are interested in failing boldly and becoming mad-as-a-hatter fools for Christ to keep me around for a while. Look for us, Tom, and then bring us together.

[LKT]

Hi! I'm the managing director for Confirm not Conform www.confirmnotconform.com. I hope you'll come visit us at General Convention. Would love to get your take on things.

[Kristy]

Thank you for this! I'm 24, and I just finished a doing a diocesan internship program. I spent most of that time looking into faces of gifted leaders that wonder or, sometimes tragically, despair of ever having their gifts accepted by the church before they've even turned twenty-five. I doubt many of the latter will be at GC, but I hope those there are as open with you as the young adults in my community were with me.

[Graham]

Thank you for this. Different county (England), differeny denomination (Methodist), wrong age (43- but I'm still called young!), but same issues.

I have a massive church meeting tonight where we have spent a year looking at our church and our community and where we attempt to plot a way forward. I may cut and paste a lot of what you have said. Thanks!

[becky]

glad to hear the UK connection is working out. There's a lot we can learn from each other once we put church egos aside and truly listen to see where God is speaking.

[Drew Downs]

Excellent discoveries. As one that has been involved in youth ministry, I have found that your observations dovetail into the very issues involved with the youth that we are currently sending out into the world (this month, in fact!) with very little spiritual support. The catch-22 of having voiceless youth is that they develop a complacency in having no voice. Every time I encourage that voice, it is rejected (and echoed with "can't we just go to Cedar Point?").

But as you seem to suggest, it is the matching of the place of youth in our community with the community's lost voice that is so powerful! Perhaps the first thing many of our congregations can do in the short-run is to reclaim the prophetic voice.

[Tom Brackett]

"Reclaiming the prophetic voice" -- Dr Walter Brueggeman would like that. Have you seen his, "The Prophetic Imagination"?

A few years ago I worked in Palestine with young people learning non-violent responses to the IDF occupation. Our hosts were Israeli and Palestinian Women in Black. At the end of my visit, I asked one of the Palestinian organizers about her greatest challenges and how I could support her in her work. She named her challenge as that of getting Palestinian youth to dream again . . . of a future where individuals are valued, where children are cherished and their elders are honored. Her claim was that the youth of Palestine had forgotten how to Dream! 'Seems to me that we recover the prophetic voice when we learn to listen, as communities of faith. Herman Hesse claimed that "It is the hearers that make the prophet."

Do we start by valuing great listeners as much as we value our great speech makers?

Thanks for your response, Drew!

With greater hope,

Tom
646-203-6266

[Tom Brackett]

Graham,

'Hope your massive church meeting went well.

Tom
646-203-6266