Midwifing the Movement of the Spirit, part 3

From Hospice Ward to Birthing Center

On my return to the United States, I immediately gathered a group of leaders in the Episcopal Church, as well as staff at the Episcopal Church Center. The point of our six conversations was to explore practical responses to my learnings in the United Kingdom to our US context. These leaders helped me reflect on my day-to-day encounters with both innovative and declining ministries across the Episcopal Church. I began to notice an awakening of sorts among many of our church’s leaders. There seems to be a new impatience with the old models of church and church leadership passed to us from the “inherited church.”[1]

 

Many of our church leaders are realizing that, for most of their careers, they have been offering a kind of hospice ministry to their congregations and dioceses. It is not just the flagging attendance and the graying of our denomination’s membership that push them to acknowledge the ennui of our beloved institutions. It is also the noted absence of fresh visions and dreams that would normally bubble up from our younger members. There seems to be a fresh hunger for the Spirit’s promise to give above and beyond anything that we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20-21).

At the same time, there are also many leaders who are eager to maintain our structures and habits just a little longer. Many of them left their seminary experiences years ago confident that, if they just offered excellent ministry and relevant preaching, there was hope of reversing the declining trends, at least on a local level. Today, they faithfully and persistently make up for declining offerings and pledges by working harder and longer towards a balanced budget and for their stipends. Their best-attended services seem to be those remembering the good old days – the High Holy Golden Days of the Church of Yesterday. There are others who are convinced that only a return to orthodoxy will secure God’s blessings on our ecclesiastical ventures.

    It is not so difficult to understand how the Church arrived at this state of affairs. Even today, most of our seminarians are trained to coordinate the ministries of churches whose identities were cast in a pre-modern era, the earliest days of Christendom. (By “Christendom” I refer to the offspring produced by the official marriage of the early Christian movement to the Roman Empire.) Furthermore, most of our mainline denominations were assembled on a theological framework cobbled together at a time when the Church’s authority was granted by the state and the Church operated from the center of society. In those halcyon days, the leaders of our churches were seen as the keepers of all that is good and whole and Godly. It was their calling to bring God to the world – to introduce the Christian life to the “lost” out there. The world changed, but the calling has yet to be recast. And so, many leaders find themselves engaged in hospice care for denominations and churches in their latter days.

Rest assured, I am convinced that hospice ministry to declining congregations is desperately needed today. It is a challenging and significant ministry, primarily because it calls us to face our own mortality, as well as our (as yet unredeemed) addictions to certainty and insured outcomes. We all want to think of ourselves as resurrection people. Sadly, many of us are so eager to arrive at Easter morning that we skip over the trauma of Good Friday – primarily because we dare not look into the face of death, especially the death of our church, our diocese or our denomination.

Friends of mine who make a living as hospice chaplains tell me that, when a patient dies, the most difficult family member to engage is the one who hid away from most of the patient’s dying process, acting as though their loved one would eventually get better. Though perhaps not in such a morbid way, I believe many of our theologians and church leaders struggle with that same urge. It is simply easier to turn away from the death and dying process in our midst, to pretend we are still at the center of society and that the world still cares deeply about our educated opinion. The alternative – facing the loss of roles that once defined us, loss of control, loss of what might have been – is too much to bear BUT, is that not exactly what we need, at this moment in our life together?

(to be continued, tomorrow)

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[1] This is a term used in the “Mission-shaped Church” report issued by the Archbishop’s Council in the Church of England. A downloadable version can be found at www.cofe.anglican.org/info/papers/mission_shaped_church.pdf.