Monastic Life in a Lay World ... Sort of

This reflection comes on the heels of the Christmas rush. Just a preview, I arrived at the Cathedral at 2 PM on Christmas Eve to assist with preparing the altar, and to prepare dinner for the clergy and choir, feeding the clergy and choir beginning about 7:45 PM to about 10:30 PM. Taking small breaks in between to say a quickie Vespers and complete the Service of Preparation for Holy Communion (which is truly a beautiful Eastern practice). Midnight Mass at 11 PM, and this goes on. The next morning I arise early (after a 2 1/2 hour nap) to say the Matins of Christmas and to feed the homeless, and the list goes on. Today was the first day I really had "off" per se.

The point isn't to regale you with "110 degrees up hill in 2 feet of snow", but it has caused me reflection on my life, which I consider to be semi-monastic. Those who know me well, know that I spend a lot of time at Church and reading theology and doing church things. Only recently have I taken up a secular-ish hobby (calligraphy - but then that leaps into church things too), hiking (which I do on occasion), but I spend a lot of my free time in prayer, service, or something similar. Now I'm contemplating starting the discipline of the Divine Office again and step by step (if I've learned anything it's not to just go full throttle into the whole thing), that is to say as many of the seven canonical hours each day as I can and build up. Some people call me intense, but this is something that makes me calm and gives me great insight. People wonder why I do what I do and why I'm so dedicated.

I feel very much connected and somehow fulfilled after these four days of service, and would love to do more. People ask if I ought to be a monastic, but I don't think so. As the Lord chooses to reveal more and more refined shades of what I'm called to do, I feel called to both as weird as that seems. I feel called to be a monastic, yet be of the world. That is, I feel called to minister to people around me, especially to the gay culture. I feel a call to a life fully dedicated to God, yet in that life also work in the public arena with regular people. I'm happy to be where I am on my journey and I think I'll keep going that direction, however, perhaps as time goes on my direction will be much more precise than it is now.

Pax Domini

Orthodoxy, Postmodernism and Missions

I know that this is a weird reflection given the festive nature of the Nativity season. But, I think it's something that's important that the Church needs to explore and wrestle with especially as we are faced with declining church attendance, lower preference for religious activity and with the potential death of the churches we call home. I don't mean to be the harbinger of doom, or to overly criticize what we do in a mean-spirited way. However, I do think there are many serious flaws in the way that we do mission and the way that we engage the culture around us and present a voice of hope, the same voice of hope that the Church has been (or at least should have been) for the past 2,000 or so years.
Right now, our society is in the midst of a fundamental change and indeed I can see this. Postmodernism is becoming more and more part of the fabric of our culture and our thought. We are seeing the shift from meta-narrative to mini-narrative. We can see this even in the context of modern theology. We see the importance of seeing how the mini-narrative theologies of different cultures and sub-groups (i.e. feminist theology, Latin-American theology, Asian theology, gay theology, and so on) help give us a bigger picture of God and how people interpret God. In modern culture, postmodern people are focused on that mini-narrative, their local story, their local issue. Of course, I don't pretend to be an expert on postmodernism or culture in general, but I can see what is changing. People of my generation don't respond to the same evangelism that their parents' generation did. As the concept of "relative truth" or subjective truth begins to prevail, it seemingly becomes more and more difficult for Josh McDowell style evangelists to succeed. Aside from that, many of the liberal / mainline approaches to evangelism are becoming less and less successful. Those which are, in my opinion, tend to offer freedom without the characteristic prophetic and redeeming voice of God's church. Some Churches offer freedom of belief without responsibility, they offer surface-level discipleship, or at worst they offer a country club style setting for the local elite on Sunday mornings.
We are now at a veritable fork in the road. Just a little sampling of what we're faced with - roughly 10% of those children raised in the church are staying in the Church beyond 9th grade. Up to 80% of college students have never attended a Church service or been members of a church. The attitude towards Christians is an attitude of disdain, and sometimes outright hate. We as the faithful are now paying the price for remaining silent as deceitful heretics like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy were allowed to spew their hateful rhetoric and stoke the fires of fundamentalism in our country. So what do we do? What can we do to reverse the trend? Well, this is by no means a working model, but definitely a start. Because what needs to happen is not choosing a new program or using a new manual for what we do, but rather a change in our understanding of the mission field and how we as Christians ought view the culture and society around us.
First and foremost, the Church needs to cast off the excesses of modernistic and philosophical theology brought to us by the likes of Rudolf Bultmann, John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and other figures like them. The Church needs to return to some form of orthodoxy in faith and practice. It needs to once again elevate scripture and tradition and demote reason back to a place where it is equal to scripture and tradition and not in a position of superiority. Christians need to realize that theology is not an individual exercise, rather it is an exercise that should be done in the context of community. Orthodoxy has been able to weather the paradigm shifts in to medieval society, the renaissance, and into the enlightenment and it has been able to re-express itself in a way that makes sense to the society in which it existed. The solution to our missional woes is not in tearing down the proverbial house of the Church and taking out its foundation and moving it to what I consider sandy ground. Rather, we simply need to remodel. We need to find ways to express and be who we are while remaining committed to the same foundation of dogma and doctrine as established by the Fathers and our ancestors in the faith.
Second, Christians must be willing to change for the sake of continuing Christ's work on earth for posterity. Bishop Kirk Smith made a comment that some people find it difficult to make changes and stubbornly won't, even though they need to in order to grow and become a growing group of people again. The Church that ceases to evangelize loses its scriptural warrant to exist. Some have said that they would have contemporary music in their churches over their dead bodies, others have said that they don't want to evangelize for fear of having the "wrong kind of people" in the church, well unfortunately these people may have to die in order for the Church to grow. It is a harsh statement, I grant, but it is true. Similarly, the Church must re-discover its connection to the Fathers and find a way to express the timeless teachings of the Church in a way that makes sense to people who bear the hallmarks of a postmodern outlook. In other words, the Church must embody Christ's teaching of "I have become all things to all people". If we cease to be relevant, we cease to exist.

Just some musings, by no means a complete thought.

The Evangelical Speaks ... EfM - the Undoing of the Church

I thought that coming out gay to Episcopalians was daunting ... it was really a non event, a "so what" kind of deal. But come out to them as an Evangelical and the effect is roughly the same as a gay person would receive in a run-of-the-mill evangelical church. People look in amazement when I tell them that I believe Jesus was resurrected on Easter Sunday, and that the Bible is inerrant. Those doctrines are so last century ... I mean now we have Marcus Borg, Shelby Spong, and all these people to tell us that original sin is a lie and that the Bible was all a political power play. Hmm ... well, I think that's all popycock
I have to say that I am highly disappointed in the Education for Ministry program, and in many ways thankful that this is my last year. Don't get me wrong, I love my community of EfMers and I love each and every one of them, but the program is really getting on my nerves, and I mean really. The books take a decidedly anti-orthodox stance. I spend half my week arguing with the text about some interpretation of Church history. My question to the EfM authors is ... if the early Church was so bad, and was involved in all this political power playing and mysogyny, why is God's church still standing today? More importantly, how could they still claim to be Christian or yet Episcopalian? My EfM mentor has said that it's meant to open up our minds. But I asked what about opening people's minds to orthodoxy? To that there was no response. Many in the group think that I'm evangelical because I'm 22 and just going through that young adult revolutionary angst rebellion thing. Well, that's odd considering that I'm actually quite the conformist ... I mean, I'm trying to shape my Christian practice according to Scripture and Tradition and all that.
Fortunately, the Presiding Bishop has taken a stance to defend the diversity of theology in the Episcopal Church, and she has fired folks who have openly said they want conservatives out of the Church. Thank God! Hopefully the Presiding Bishop will also soon realize that although we are not a confessional Church in any sense, we are still a Church that must subscribe to a minimum of doctrine to remain in fellowship with other Christians and to strictly preserve that subscription for the sake of maintaining communion.

Just had to get that off my chest ...

It's Finally Here - The "Alternative" Province

Well what a wonderful and glorious day it is, not really. Today it was announced that the Common Cause Partnership has established an "alternate" province of Anglicans in the United States. Hmm ... quite interesting. They make no secret of the fact that they seek to supplant the Episcopal Church as the sole recognized province of the Anglican Communion in the States. Curious.
But nonetheless, this, I believe is doomed to failure. Why? Well, first of all we have a mish-mash of organizations with radically different ecclesiologies. The constitution is hardly solid and steadfast. It permits for secession even from within its own ranks and enshrines congregational authority ... this is certainly puzzling given their desire to be united with each other and so on. This is enshrined in its provisional constitution. They can't even agree on the ordination of women. The document states:

"1. The member dioceses, clusters or networks (whether regional or affinity-based) and those dioceses banded together as jurisdictions shall each maintain all authority they do not yield to the Province by their own consent. The powers not delegated to the Province by this constitution nor prohibited by this Constitution to these dioceses or jurisdictions, are reserved to these dioceses or jurisdictions respectively
2. The Province shall make no canon abridging the authority of any member dioceses, clusters or networks (whether regional or affinity-based) and those dioceses banded together as jurisdictions with respect to its practice regarding the ordination of women to the diaconate or presbyterate." (Common Cause Partnership, Provisional Constitution Article VIII)."

I don't know about y'all but this sounds like Episcopal Congregationalism to me. In the context of the catholic ecclesiology of the global Anglican communion, this is clearly Congregationalist thinking and hardly meets the classical Episcopal governance of members of the Anglican Communion. I'm surprised that they didn't try to put all properties in trust. Tsk tsk! I thought we were supposed to be one Church here.

"All church property, both real and personal, owned by each member congregation now and in the future is and shall be solely and exclusively owned by each member congregation and shall not be subject to any trust interest or any other claim of ownership arising out of the canon law of this Province. Where property is held in a different manner by any diocese or grouping, such ownership shall be preserved." (Common Cause Partnership Provisional Constitution, Art. XIII)

Are we planning for some doctrinal or ecclesiological dispute? Or was this a compromise to satisfy the more protestant quasi-jurisdictions (more specifically the REC)?

Their Canons are equally scant. Both Constitutions and Canons make up no more than five written MS Word pages I think. Scant when compared to the Books of Order of the Presbyterian Churches or the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church.

As misguided as I think these efforts are, I do wish the people who are participating in this peace and success in their journey and that God will lead them into all truth and knowledge of Him. I hope that this was done not out of reactionism, factionalism, or a spirit of divisiveness but out of a genuine and conscientious objection to the actions of the Episcopal Church and some of its global partners.

Cantuar's Video on World Aids Day

First, the following message from Rowan Cantuar:






Now, Lord Archbishop, although I appreciate the sentiment and the powerful message of your video, and it was a good one at that, there are some glaring omissions that you need to pay attention to. AIDS in Africa is especially important, but what about the growing AIDS rate in your own country (UK) and the western world, especially in the GLBTQ community? What about pastoring AIDS victims in your own community? What about listening to people from your own part of the world?

Rowan ... wake up!