November 5, 2015

Following Jesus, Lord of the Church

This past Sunday was a wonderful day for The Episcopal Church. Not only was Michael Curry installed as our new Presiding Bishop, he also preached an awesome sermon in which he laid out a dynamic, exciting charge for The Episcopal Church in years ahead. 

It certainly wasn’t the first time a major church service was televised or live-streamed. However, on this occaison, as I gathered with folks in my own community along with friends from many other places at a potluck viewing party in our parish hall, really did feel like All Saints’ Day this year was a great awakening across our Church!

The message Michael Curry delivered was one we’ve long needed to hear, and it has been high time for us to get on and get going as living members of the “Jesus movement." Combining a wonderfully straightforward, even traditional Christology, and a call to renew the common good, he offered a vision as well as a theology that will motivate many Episcopalians to participate and celebrate.

As I sat and watched the celebration, feeling myself moved to joy at times and tears and laughter at other points, I was also aware that I had one foot in two worlds. Earlier that morning, you see, St. George’s, Valley Lee – the congregation I have the pleasure of serving – just wrapped up a three-part series in which we talked about and discerned togheter the future of our congregation. We’ve been talking about collaboration and shared ministry and, perhaps, even striking out to find an entirely new model, a new way to ‘be church’ in our community for a long while now. Meanwhile, we’ve also been participating in and leading these conversations in our region of our diocese. Our neighbor congregation, Church of the Ascension in Lexington Park, Maryland, also had these same conversations on these same past Sundays, and we plotted the same talking points at the same places on the same three Sundays, culminating on All Saints’ Day. At St. George’s, we talked about by-laws and canons and who has the right to change the shape of the parish. We talked about money and committees and pro’s and con’s of different models of being church – from Do Nothingon one end of the spectrum, to Merge Everything (and Sell Real Estate) on the other. It wasn’t necessarily the most prayer-filled series of gatherings, and we weren’t always focusing on Jesus and the mission of the church, but you have to let people find their voice, I say, no matter where that initial voice comes from.

Like I said, one foot in two worlds, sometimes two very different worlds.

But I’ve realized, through my own prayers (following those conversations!), that our conversations at St. George’s, together with the perspective of our friends from Ascension, Lexington Park, are just the beginning of what God will make of us, not the end. What Presiding Bishop Michael Curry offered in his sermon was, in fact, the vision and the reason and the purpose of doing this work. It’s not supposed to be shocking, I suppose, but I’ve found, to my amazement, that the work of parish ministry has brought me thoroughly to the truth that Presiding Bishop Curry speaks: God still does love this world, as he said on Sunday so profoundly, and God still loves this church, and God isn’t done with The Episcopal Church just yet.

Our hope, born of the Holy Spirit and rooted in Christ, is going to bring resurrection out of the current shape of this Church, and I really do believe it’s going to happen. But it’s also going to happen when congregations and communities of faith have these hard, sometimes exhausting conversations, no less than what St. George’s and Ascension have been doing. Our leading language has to be the Word of God, no less than the Word which is life: Jesus Christ. But our other foot needs to stay planted, and planted well, in the organizational and structural stuff of our established, once-staid institution.

In other words, I believe so much in the vision our Presiding Bishop is laying down that I’m ready, once again, to give another go to by-laws and money and structure and committees and models of the Church. I’m ready, once again, because I know those things won’t be roadblocks, nor will they be central to our focus for too much longer, not when we go about following Jesus as Lord of the Church! 

Picture above: Episcopal News Service photo / Mary Frances Schjonberg 

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