My address to the Clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington
The parable of the crude little life-saving station, known to few even after 57 years of circulation, is a remarkably adept appraisal of the tendency of faith communities to turn insular and artificial. The reasons I find it so appealing (as the Episcopal Church Center’s Officer for Church Planting and Ministry Redevelopment) are as follows:
1.) It was written by one of our own, the past president of the House of Deputies to General Convention.
2.) It uses “parable” format to explore what is, as well as what might be.
3.) It skillfully critiques the tendency of religious communities to move toward a “Club” mentality.
4.) It asks us to evaluate the “real time” contribution of faith communities by the actual difference they make in the lives of their surrounding community.
In the parable, there is a moment when what was a life-saving station turns into a Club. From there forward, the primary reason for joining that club was the benefit of membership. Previously, the primary motivation was that of serving the souls who normally would have been lost to shipwreck on that rocky seacoast. The impact of that shift is that, eventually, those rescued (now by independent contractors) were no longer welcomed into the Clubhouse. They first had to be cleaned up and made respectable!
Painful as that sounds, it is a remarkable depiction of the challenge facing religious leaders in the Christian movement today. That “Club” identity has been to known to society for so long that many of our finer churches are viewed by the large community as “a sort of club.” I personally want that to change, and in my lifetime!
Apparently, that challenge is not the exclusive domain of the Episcopal Church. Leaders in our Mother Church (the Church of England) have been naming this as their reality for years. On page 11 of Mission-shaped church, Reverend Gordon Bates (then Bishop of Whitby in the Church of England) is quoted (from the Church Army News, April 1998) as claiming the following for his Church:
The consequences for a national church, used to operating among people and institutions on the assumptions of Christendom, are acute. The Church of England bases a significant part of its identity on its physical presence in every community, and on a ‘come to us’ strategy. But as community becomes more complex, mere geographical presence is no longer a guarantee that we can connect. The reality is that mainstream culture no longer brings people to the church door. We can no longer assume that we can automatically reproduce ourselves, because the pool of people who regard church as relevant or important is decreasing with every generation.
The Church has got to realize its missionary responsibilities. We live in a society, whether that be urban or rural, which is now basically second or even third generation pagan once again; and we cannot simply work on the premise that all we have to do to bring people to Christ is to ask them to remember their long-held, but dormant faith. Very many people have no residue of Christian faith at all; it’s not just dormant, it’s nonexistent; in so many instances we have to go back to basics; we are in a critical missionary situation. (The text may be found, in its entirety, here: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/papers/mission_shaped_church.pdf)
I think the irony of Bishop Bates’ words is primarily lost on the Insider and the members of our exclusive Clubs! To the rest of the world, that irony is crystal clear: “We live in a society . . . which is now basically second or even third generation pagan once again” and that shift took place during centuries when we had a church in every neighborhood, offering Church-approved sermons and teachings and ministries every week.
We often hear sociologists and religious pundits proclaim the woes of postmodernity and their impact on congregational vitality. I have recently realized that my heart is hardened to such explanations. I’m convinced that the real problem is not the relativism of postmodernity. Nope, it’s much simpler than that. We have a near Pagan culture today primarily because we clergy have, for generations, managed clubs, not life-saving stations! Their sermons have reinforced the public’s growing sense of the church’s irrelevance. We have developed “club theology” that makes reverencing of the liturgical lifeboat a matter of personal and corporate piety. We have created high standards for membership which have little to do with the original values of the crude little life-saving station. We have placed burdens upon those recently rescued which we ourselves could not bear (to quote that crazy Rabbi from Nazareth). We have hired independent contractors to do the life-saving work and we wonder why the surrounding community would rather give to UNICEF than to support their local parish!
How did we come to the place where, both here and abroad, Church has become so irrelevant that families and couples and singles of all ages and orientations are more attracted to Yoga, “Sweat your Prayers” and Reading Rooms than to the somber tones of the local cleric proclaiming the glories of years past and the moral virtues of the privileged?
Bad theology and vending machine meals, I say. First, bad theology.
For a long time we've known that conformity is the obsession of religious institutions. It is the impulse behind credal 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 concerned with 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 referencess 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 into the right movement!
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!
What might Jesus have been offering his followers? A Divine call to repentance, I’d say! Repent, not of sins that the “holy” fuss and fume about, from their pulpits! Those are symptoms of brokenness, not the cause! Repent of the cause – that of living a life based on Fear – the human dynamic most diametrically opposed to love. Fear that they would run out. Fear of dying. Fear of failure. Fear that would keep us from trusting the Spirit so totally that we too might give up our lives for the sake of finding Life.
Now here is the hard part. I serve an anxious institution – the Episcopal Church. It is being served and led by some really remarkable people who struggle to address these questions, faithfully, these days. It is not an easy calling or vocation to offer, mostly because it is really hard to sort out the Club practices and values from those of the crude little life-saving station. Much of the time, we live in the gray realm between those two. But I, and others, constantly ask, “How would we behave and what would we do differently if we really got over our fear and moved to a deep and passionate love for the world that the Spirit loves so dearly?”
Here are my quick answers. I welcome yours.
1.) Invest our material resources (our buildings and property and bank accounts) in developing new communities of faith that are contemporary embodiments of the crude little life-saving stations described in the parable.
2.) Give up our need to define and control orthodoxy. Get rid of club membership rolls.
3.) Bless (whether you call it “ordination” or not) all those offering ministry of any kind.
4.) Start conducting ourselves as if we really believed that “we are the stories that we tell.” Start trusting the indigenous nature of “doing theology” and better develop the capacity to “sense” the Spirit at work.
5.) Learn what it means to become “Birthing Centers” for the midwifing of new ministry.
6.) Get comfortable with recycling clubs back into life saving stations, where the focus is on the outsider, more than on the needs of the insider.
Let me offer, in closing, that I feel quite vulnerable in sharing this publicly. I know that it may not be seen as in keeping with the Scripture, Tradition and Reason stool that we pride ourselves in as Episcopalians. But, as a friend of mine recently asked, “What are we supporting with that stool we love so much?” My motivation is not to critique our denomination and its traditions so much as it is to provoke us to get back to the mission and practices of the crude little life-saving station. My dream is that we (presently, members of clubs) might long for the rewriting of the parable. My dream is that, in my lifetime, or in my daughter’s lifetime, a new leader would reflect on this Kairos moment and rewrite the parable, “History continued to repeat itself, but if you visit that sea coast today, you will find a number of crude little life-saving stations as well as clubs along that shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people are pulled to safety. Oh Happy Day!
Let us pray: “Oh God, open our eyes to see Your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” Amen
(from Eucharistic Prayer C, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer)
