Ministry “Meaning & Purpose” Poll

As a young person in ministry, and as a person fairly newly ordained, I often find myself reflecting on the fundamental question, “What in the world am I doing here?”

Reckoning that I’m not alone in this — though am perhaps given more permission to wonder about these things, as a young clergy person — I’d be interested to hear a bit of your own musings on this question, and for us to hear a bit from each other.  As this isn’t exclusively for ordained folks, but for all of us who try to find a meaningful connection between our faith and our action, I invite you to direct others to this post, as well. 

If you’re willing, would you please take a few moments to reflect on and answer the following questions.  Simply post your reply in the comment box.

Thank you, and God bless.

Questions to Consider:

I believe_______.

I believe God created me to________.

I thank God for________.

I serve God by________.

I serve others by________.

Do you serve the Church? Where? How?

What do you enjoy most? Least?

On what do you spend most of your time? Least?

Why did you decide to serve the Church?

Is your work with the Church satisfying?

If ‘yes,’ how so?  If ‘no,’ why not?

What keeps you coming back?

What do you most want others to know about service with the Church?

Here endeth the questionairre. 

Thank you for your time and energy!

 

This Just In: “You reap what you sow!”

Ya know, I’m all for folks asking tough questions and coming up with even tougher answers, assuming this process of questioning and answering comes with enough humility to consider that other faithful Christians just might be doing the same kind of tough questioning and answering themselves — all the while claiming Jesus as Lord.

As some of you may know, this epistemological humility — not to mention Christian charity — has been missing from much recent conversation in The Episcopal Church, and from both sides of the aisle. The difference, however, is that some folks have decided that TEC no longer holds a valid claim to communion with Canterbury — that is, TEC has “walked away from the Anglican Communion.” Those who believe this to be true — predominantly from the more socially and theologically conservative side of the aisle — have decided that, in order for them to remain in communion with Canterbury, they must jump ship from TEC and hope to be picked up by the passing ships of other boundary-jumping bishops from around the globe. Most have been successful in this effort — being rescued by the likes of Uganda, Nigeria, and Recife (Brazil). Strangely enough, though, this emergence of trans-geographic dioceses has created its own tangled mess. Seems the schismatics are beginning to recognize the fruits of division — confusion, indirection, and fear.

One wonders how Archbishop Kolini of Rwanda can, with any integrity, suggest that there’s a unity which transcends ecclesial structure — the unity of ‘mission’ — our common concern for the world in which we live. If I understand our Christian unity correctly — and I’m open to being corrected here — it is rooted in the “gift” of unity we receive as baptized members of the Body of Christ — the unity of being “One in the Spirit” — what Anglicanism refers to as “communion.” They both work together — you can’t really choose one and not the other. Believe it or not, though, that’s just what the likes of CANA, ACN, AAC, and AMiA have done. They’ve chosen to abort the fundamental reality of our unity in Christ, and are attempting, now, to take the high road of Mission in Christ’s Name. Eventually — and you can count on this — some group among the schismatics will decide that a historically excluded group is worthy of affirmation and care, and some other group among the schismatics will disagree. Because they don’t agree on the trajectory of God’s love for the world — and because they’ve demonstrated a lack of belief and commitment to our spiritual unity in the Body of Christ — they will choose to further sever ties with each other, and further divide the Body they so strongly profess to care for.

How do you feel about worshiping in a church with people whose beliefs and/or behaviors you disagree with? Have you experienced this? How have you dealt with it before? Are there limits to your willingness to “stick together”? How do your understandings of God and Church play into it?

Read on, and see what you think. Peace, Paul

Jacksonville (Fla.) Times-Union
Jan. 20, 2007

Anglicans raise questions of unity

By JEFF BRUMLEY
The Times-Union
The Anglican conference concluding today in Jacksonville was described as Christian unity in action.
About 1,300 to 1,600 participants of the Anglican Mission in America conference shared a zeal for spreading the gospel and a repulsion from the Episcopal Church’s growing acceptance of openly gay clergy
and same-sex blessings.

But between workshops on topics like church planting and creating effective children’s ministries, the buzz among vendors’ tables and coffee kiosks often centered on where the whole Anglican experiment
in America is headed. With about a dozen national organizations representing Anglicans who have quit the Episcopal Church, plus nearly as many foreign bishops overseeing parishes in the U.S., many worry the movement is becoming irreparably fragmented. “It’s all part of the balkanization of the Episcopal Church,” said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site that boasts 4 million readers.

Theologically conservative Episcopalians left the denomination after 2003 when an openly gay priest was elected the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. In doing so, they sought oversight from like-minded Anglican bishops in places like Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. On the First Coast [sic], former Episcopalians from more than a dozen congregations have accepted oversight from bishops in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Brazil.

Meanwhile, at least 10 national Anglican organizations have been formed, including the Anglican Communion Network, the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Province of America and the Anglican Mission in America. Some fear the longer congregations are led by different foreign dioceses, the harder it will eventually become to draw them together under a common banner.

Anglican parishes are stuck in a “survival mode” as long as that fragmented state exists, said the Rev. Jim McCaslin, a priest who led All Souls in Mandarin out of the Episcopal Church and into a Ugandan diocese in 2006. The church also is one of about 20 in the Anglican Alliance of North Florida, and McCaslin is the leader of Anglican Communion Network congregations in the region. It is crucial that the communion’s world leaders create a new hierarchical structure for Anglicans in the U.S. and Canada – hopefully during their triennial meeting next month in Tanzania, McCaslin said. “If they don’t, that leaves you with a fractured church with unity in the gospel but no structural unity,” he said.

Such a new organization could exist beside the Episcopal Church within the Anglican Communion, Virtue and some priests at the convention said. But some of the overseas archbishops attending the Jacksonville conference hinted that Anglicans in America may have to adjust their expectations.

“To me, structure is the wrong way, the wrong direction,” Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, founder of the Anglican Mission in America, told the Times-Union. Kolini said he believes an important kind of unity already exists – that which unites Christians from different denominations in fighting problems such as AIDS.

The Rev. Sam Pascoe, rector of the Kolini-led Grace Anglican Church in Orange Park, said a new denomination is necessary eventually. Otherwise “it’s just complete disintegration and everyone goes their own way and you end up with hundreds of different jurisdictions,” Pascoe said.

 

Politics and Faith

Now that the gears of the political machine have shifted once again — from election to installation — it’s worth paying close attention to the language of public perception and opinion.  I’m especially cognizant, here, of the PR gymnastics our new Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is training for.  In a recent news article about her celebration party in D.C., one of Pelosi’s PR strategists noted how important it will be to frame her public image as a loving, East Coast grandmother before her political opposition is able to frame her as a  radical, California feminist.  How strange, I thought, that she couldn’t possibly be framed positively as both. 

So, too, with Sen. Barack Obama, who’s quietly waging his own PR battle over his choice to be honest and transparent, in his first book, about his drug use as a young person.  Some criticize his former indiscretion.  Others praise his openness.

So all this got me to wondering, once again, how it is that faithful Christians are to wade through this barrage of PR strategy?  On what bases are we to select our elected leaders, given the manipulation of their public images, both for and against?  

What values do you look for in your elected leadership?

What kind of character do you look for?

What issues are the most important to you as a person of faith? 

 

On God in the Flesh

It’s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart: not to a flower, not to a dolphin, to no innocent form but to this creature vainly sure it and no other is god-like, God (out of compassion for our ugly failure to evolve) entrusts, as guest, as brother, the Word.  — D. Levertov, The Stream & The Sapphire

On God in the Flesh: What’s the point? What difference does it make for God? What difference does it make for us — for the way we live with our bodies and minds and souls? 

I never cease to be amazed by the general unwillingness of the Church — the Body of Christ — to talk about itself as a body and its members as bodies – real flesh and bones and blood.  Perhaps it’s why we’re so scared to talk about sex and why we shouldn’t be so surprised at the recent data suggesting that 90% of all American adults have had pre-marital sex.  It’s no big surprise, nor is it necessarily something to lose sleep over.  What we should be losing sleep over is the incredible disconnect the Church has sown between sex and stewardship — the right care for all that God entrusts to us, including but not limited to our power for pleasure and procreation.  God’s Incarnation into a real body with real parts, endowed for all sorts of wonderment, reminds us that it’s always to the Church’s peril not to say something encouraging and helpful to those on the cusp of sexual activity.  Perhaps the numbers on per-marital sex would drop.  Perhaps the rates of HIV/AIDS and other STDs would drop.  Perhaps the number of unplanned pregnancies would drop.  Perhaps the number of divorces would drop.  Who knows?  Either way, we’d speak a powerful Word into the most intimate place of any person’s life — and they’d hear that God isn’t afraid or embarrassed to be there — and they’d hear that they, in all they do with the precious gift of these incredible bodies, are destined, like Christ, for divinity.  

 

First Week of Advent: Tuesday, December 5th

From Luke 20:9-18 — “The the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ But when the tenants saw him, they discussed it among themselves and said, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours.’”

The allegory is clear — God sends a succession of prophets into the world to call the world back into right relationship with Him. Time and again, the prophets are rejected, beaten, and sent away until, at last, God sends His own Son (that’s J.C.) into the world, sure that the world would respond to the heir’s authority. Instead, the response is even more hostile than before — rejected and beaten, for sure, the heir is also, this time, murdered. And the tenants (that’s the world and you and me) are certain that at last the world will be totally and completely ours — free of the inconvenient demands that come with Christ’s Lordship (e.g. taking care of each other, the world, etc.). The joke is on us, however, as the allegory continues on to reveal God’s Will that the new creation, the Kingdom of God, be built on “the stone that the builders rejected”; that is, the solid form and likeness of Christ, whose clear-cut edges reveal the shape of love that is to support the world forever.

The allegory works strongly enough upon us if we’re able to read ourselves into the story. It’s the form and intent of the allegory that it not require too much elaboration to make its point. So I’ll leave it alone and let it work on us today with little more than a simple thanksgiving: How grateful we are to live with a God whose love for us says ‘no’ to every careless and callous rejection of His desire to be near us — even to the point of sacrificing Himself. A sure sign, once again, that God is faithful — that God is loving — and that God takes risks to make that love known to us.

Keep an eye out today for God coming near you. Look for the subtle invitations to say ‘yes’ to others and to the Christ in them. And give thanks to God who loves us far too much to simply leave us alone as we are!

 

First Week of Advent: Monday, December 4th

From Luke 20:1-8 — “‘Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?”

In standard form, the Gospel here sets up a (true or false) dichotomy between the leaders (“chief priests, scribes, and elders”) and the led (“the people”). We know from other stories (Nicodemus in John ch.3, Gamaliel in Acts ch.5) that the division wasn’t nearly as clear and clean as the Gospel would suggest. So why set up the division in the first place?

It’s true that an essential subtext to the entire Gospel corpus is the story on non-recognition — especially strong in John’s Gospel, but present in all four — and this isn’t just a problem for “the bad guys,” but is foretold as a problem for us all. Further, emotional content of this non-recognition appears to come in many forms, anywhere from inattention to indifference to excitement to open hostility. And we’re invited into this story as those whose belief is still seeking understanding — maturing in faith and recognition of Christ as Lord and Messiah.

Much on the theme of yesterday’s Gospel in which we heard about the individual’s responsibility to engage God directly, not vicariously, so too today do we hear about the individual’s responsibility to respond in faith to that engagement with God directly, not vicariously. The chief priests, scribes, and elders represent all those caught in the difficult middle between personal doubt and public faith — unable to give their own ‘yes’ to the ‘yes’ of so many others. And here in Luke, of course, they’re to represent the absurdity of non-recognition. But it might be more fair to affirm their cautious discernment — leaning now toward doubt but, perhaps, given time to steep in the faith and love of community, might one day lean toward a faith of their own.

Better not to vilify these folks too much, lest we vilify that part of ourselves that still wonders on occasion — by what authority does Jesus do these things? who gave him this authority? Good questions in the days ahead.

 

First Week of Advent: Sunday, December 3rd

From Matthew 25:1-13 — “The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’”

We’re rightly shocked by this pericope (snippet of Scripture) in this day and age in which the values of sharing and cooperation are so highly treasured over the values of selfishness and competition. So clearly, it seems, our present sensibilities would suggest that the fate of “the wise,” who are prepared with ample oil which they are unwilling to share, would be a far worse fate than the fate of “the foolish” who were never prepared to begin with. And, for sure, we’re always to be mindful that our slow journey with God is rightly a partnership with other pilgrims along the way — sometimes strong, sometimes struggling, but always doing so together. This is a good and right view of our life together in the Body of Christ, which is the Church.

However, today’s Gospel from the daily office reminds us that we’re never saved by the faith of others alone but, rather, are expected to “go [directly] to the dealer and buy some for ourselves.” We can be supported by the grace of God through the lives of others, but we can never receive new life itself without going directly to its source and trading in the empty bottle of our own will for the full bottle of God’s Will, which overflows with an abundance of oil — a sign of blessing and source of light. Love others — depend on others — support others — and do so always first with a recognition and appreciation of the source of Light that keeps your own lamp aflame.

 

Young Adult Internship Planning Retreat this Weekend

We ask that you keep our planning group in your prayers this weekend as we meet for an initial retreat to discuss preliminary plans for building a year-long internship program here in Spokane. The proposed internship would be one of only a few internship programs in the country — coordinated by the office for Ministries with Young People (MYP) of The Episcopal Church. The Rev. Douglas Fenton will be joining us for the weekend from NYC — guiding our prayers and deliberations and sending us forth with several homework assignment to complete before his follow-up visit in the spring.

Planning group members: Bryan Krislock (Spokane Valley), Evita Krislock (Spokane Valley), Lisa Stagaman (Spokane), the Rev. Margaret Fisher (Ellensburg), Michelle Klippert (Spokane), the Rev. Paul Lebens-Englund (Spokane), and Phil Mixter (Pullman).

What would you want to do with a year-long internship program? What guidance and suggestions would you want to give us?

 

Elections

I read an interesting article in the newspaper today suggesting that the Democrats had a resurgence of electoral success among voters of faith — even among white evangelical men. Of course, none of the numbers were staggering — a few percentage points shift from one party to the other — and nothing indicating that the shift is necessarily related to issues of faith and conscience and not simply the all-too-popular and apparent dissatisfaction with the Republican party as a whole and this president in particular. What do you make of these numbers? How did your faith impact your vote? What are you hearing from other people of faith around you?