It was a J-shaped day at House of Bishops, a good start, a slump, and then a great rebound to a high at the end.
Eucharist had a homecoming
feel this morning. We have been enjoying the musical leadership of the Theodicy
Jazz Collective from Los Angeles. They are young, cool, and very good. So it
was a positive thing to have them with us. But today we had our choir back, and
our choir is pretty talented and cool themselves. This is Chicago music and
Chicago knows a thing or two about music as well. So the Collective was great
but so are our own folks who are led by the incomparable Dent Davidson. It was
like a reunion.
At the end of the service
Bishop Mark Beckwith of Newark offered a meditation on interfaith relations. He
did it by telling his story. Mark did not go in search of interfaith relations
but such diversity has been the sea in which he has sailed his whole life. It
is our time. It is the world we now inhabit. We do not have a choice. He did
not say the all too frequent simplistic stuff about how all religions are
saying the same thing. Thank God. Instead he spoke of how interfaith encounters
had challenged him, taken him to the edge where he discovered his center.
Paradoxical and profound stuff all conveyed as true-life first person
narrative.
We then had table discussions
arising out of Bishop Mark’s offering. We took the topic seriously talking of
how Jesus and the doctrine of the incarnation take us to the edge by shattering
our neat concepts of God and our neat concepts of humanity, and then when the edge
is reached we discover a new and deeper center. All in all quite a good morning.
Along the way I heard good West Virginia and Pittsburgh reminiscences from
Bishop Frank Brookhart of Montana and Bishop Ken Price of Southern Ohio and
Pittsburgh, now retired. They both logged some time in that part of the world.
Then came the afternoon, the
whole afternoon, studying and discussing the TREC report on restructuring the
Church. I like some things in the report. I have hesitations about some of the
report. I have grave concerns about other parts of the report. So my reaction
isn’t about whether I like or don’t like the specific proposals. It is my overarching
feeling response to the project of engineering structural solutions to organic
relational problems. It made me want to go back to the more amiable discussions
of racism, genocide, class prejudice, and divisions over sexuality. It just
sapped the life right out of me. I am truly grateful to the TREC task force
that has worked so hard to create this architectonic dismantling and remantling
of the polity of the Episcopal Church. If I could not handle an afternoon of
it, I cannot imagine how they have persevered through three years of this. So I
mean no criticism. I have only respect for their efforts.
Then after supper 6 of us
gathered for an ad hoc voluntary self-organizing group to brainstorm evangelism.
Thank you Bishop Suffragen Jeff Fisher, Diocese of Texas, for pulling this
together. He had 3 topics for us to consider but the fist one was so rich we
never got to the next two.
The first question was: how
do we bishops promote discipleship in our congregations? I was particularly
excited by Bishop Scott Barker’s promotion of The Restoration Project by Fr.
Christopher Martins. http://www.forwardmovement.org
It is a book and a short adaptable course for discipleship based on a
user-friendly Benedictine model for busy people of today. It is a simple way to
form people as disciples of Jesus. I think this may be the program one of our
rectors presented to his congregation recently and the lay leadership wrestled
seriously over the threshold question of whether the church should be trying to
form people as disciples. On the one hand I am stunned that anyone could doubt
that. On the other hand, it is refreshingly honest to say, “we don’t really
know whether we are interested in following Jesus or not.” If they do become
disciples, they will mean it.
I am convinced that all the
church growth marketing and charismatic clergy we can buy will not enliven the
Church. Our deadness comes from our lack of belief we have anything to offer that the world wants or needs. The problem is we don’t have Jesus in
our hearts. We are not being transformed ourselves so that we can in the power
of the Spirit transform the world. Cosmetics won’t help if our heart is not
beating. For our heart to beat, there is one and only one way: we have to
follow Jesus.
The Restoration
Project is not the only discipleship program. It may not be the best discipleship program.
But it is shaking things up in California and it is getting a start in
Nebraska. I hope Nevada will give it a try. But then we began to wonder about
motivation. It is a proven matter of social psychology that negative motivators
will not work. If I say to a congregation, engage in discipleship or you will
die (which is true), they will choose to die. In order to inspire a congregation to follow
Jesus, I have to show them that he is offering something positive that they
want. What do our people want? What do they hunger for? It is the bedrock of my
faith that the deepest desire of every human heart can be satisfied in Jesus.
But what form does that desire take in the hearts of our people?
Bishop Jeff reminded us that
when Bartimaeus called out “Lord have mercy on me” Jesus said, “What do you
want me to do for you?” Only after Bartimaeus named his blindness as the
problem did Jesus heal him. We have some serious listening to do to figure out
what our people want.
In studying about evangelism, including reading Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s recent
landmark address, “Revolutionary Love,” http://www.anglicanink.com/article/revolutionary-love-archbishop-justin-welby-evangelism
(a must read for all Episcopal clergy and evangelists), I have gotten the
message that before we begin pontificating to the secular world about what we
want to say, we need to listen closely to the secular world to figure out what
they are asking, what they are longing for. We get nowhere offering them what
they don’t need or want. Two short blog posts by our niece Linda Mizwicki make
this point drawing on the insights of Peter Rollins. http://lindaloumiz.blogspot.com/2015/02/can-you-smell-what-church-is-cooking.html
; http://lindaloumiz.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-are-we-serving-evangelism-part-ii.html We have to listen to the world before we
preach to it; but we have to listen to our own people in the pews first if we
are to inspire them to follow Jesus for real, not just attend church out of
habit, or duty, or for mutual support. It’s a whole lot bigger deal than that. It
is a life and death decision.
We plan to keep meeting, to
keep in touch, and to ask the House of Bishops to take these questions on in a
more systematic large group way. I have never been in a group of people where
the love of Christ was more palpable than this House of Bishops, and it seems
to just get more that way with each passing year. We do love Jesus and we love
our people. We see an empty pain in the eyes of so many. It is time for us to
find a way to ask: “What do you want Jesus to do for you?”
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