Postscript: St. Paul's new presence in cyberspace

New St. Paul's parishioner and fellow book study grouper, Don Anderson, has bravely undertaken the task of revamping our website, and would love to know your thoughts. Well-wishes, comments, and the gently-worded suggestion are all welcome.

You can check out a trial version of the website here.

The Pentecost people

St. Paul's celebrated Pentecost Sunday 2007 with a baptism. Like birthdays, baptisms are occasions not only to celebrate with a new brother or sister in Christ, but to remind ourselves that we too once were at the font, whether held by older, loving arms, or guided there by our own two feet. At every baptism, we renew the vows that we made or that someone who loves us made for us, to strive -- despite our failures, because of our failures -- to live into those promises that make up the Christian life. I sometimes wonder if at every single birth every baby were given some words uttered on her/his behalf that could be read each year on that person's birthday we might put into language the singular specialness that we can only begin to understand and marvel at with candles and cake.

It seems fitting that our book study group ends on Pentecost, with a baptism and our recitation and renewal of our own baptismal vows. Baptism reminds us that Christianity is always beginning, always starting anew, which make this well-worn journey of faith so fresh and enlivening to every person to walks it, each generation who sets out to know the heart of God. Sometimes that path is well-trodden, but sometimes, like now, the trail isn't well-marked and we might feel like we don't quite know which way to go. Maybe we've taken the wrong turn and should go back and take that other road that seemed so much easier to take. Or maybe we can't go back. It's getting dark, and a little cold, and please God help me find my way of out these desert places because this journey is more confusing that I'd thought. Where are you?

Our book study group ended with a baptism, which is a promise. It's not a promise of anything more than what God promises us over and over: I'm with you, don't be afraid. Our group concluded last Thursday with this realization, which is really a reminder, that what to imagine and claim Christianity for the rest of us, in this, the 21st century, it's more important why we believe than what we believe. And why we believe is because God is with us, and we're with each other as we journey through the life of faith with no markers of our certainty.

Over 7 weeks, we have talked about our hopes and dreams for the church not so much by waxing about the sundry programmatic possibilities that St. Paul can offer -- certainly, we can continue to worry about that. But in the midst of our anxieties and imaginations, we listened to where we've come from, why we came here, and what difference God has made in our lives that is enough evidence to know that God's still making a difference in our lives today and tomorrow. We listened to each other's stories and through that listening we heard God whispering to us, each and every time: this is my beloved, listen to her, listen to him! And while we differed over what we believed, we knew that each person had reasons why she or he believes, and it was that why that kept us coming together.

The church of the future, no matter what it looks like, will still be about relationship, with God, with one another. We're not coming to church just because it's what our parents did, but we are coming to church because our ancestors did. We come to church because the story of God search for humanity through the ages is still happening, and our seven-week journey together bears witness to that most ancient and yet most palpable reason for doing church: where two or three are gathered, Christ is with us, two or three IS Christ. The Lord be with you. And also with you.

We ended our group on the eve of Pentecost, the culmination of Easter, and we emerge from that room over in the Gooden Center praying that we can be a Pentecost people to the world. And how do we do this? Do we need more money? Maybe. Do we need better programs? Probably. Most of all, we become a Pentecost people by first sitting down with someone, a stranger, someone who DOESN'T speak the language with which you are familiar and ask him or her: tell me your story, in your own language, and I'll try to share with you mine in your language too. To live the life of Pentecost, which is the culmination of Easter, is to risk the Spirit's taking us to places we didn't even imagine was possible, to people we might rather avoid. To be a Pentecost people is to be relentlessly relational, because God is in the relation. God asks us, "Men of Galilee, People of St. Paul's, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? Go to Jerusalem, go into Ventura, go into the world, because that's where my Spirit is."

We end this group with a baptism on Pentecost, which is really a promise to God and a promise by God. What God is challenging us to do now, and tomorrow, to live into the life of Christ that we were reminded of today through our renewal and in our promise to uphold the journey of our new brother in Christ, is to show the world what it means to be Christian, and why that makes a difference. "See how they love one another," said people of the ancient world of the Roman empire of those who were called Christian. Perhaps our greatest challenge to be a Pentecost people, today and tomorrow, to show why we believe what we believe is to live out a life of faith that makes others exclaim, "See how they love one another and everybody else!"

Thank you for reading. Thank you to those who attended the group so diligently, and thank you for being part of this journey, as it closes in this form and emerges in a new, heretofore unimagined iteration. Happy Easter and happy Pentecost.

On worship

Apologies for my less frequent posting, and apologies again for today's brief post. I'll try to write more this weekend.

But just to get us going, on the question that Bass poses for us with regard to worship:

Can you share a transformative worship experience? What was it like? What did you experience?

Closer to God's heart: diversity and justice

This week's focus on diversity and justice have been very much on the tip of our collective minds in the Episcopal Church, so much so that we might be tempted to forget that diversity and justice are not so much goals to accomplish but rather as journeys that lead us ever closer to the heart of God.

We can begin to name the programmatic things we can do to facilitate diversity and/or justice (and sometimes diversity and justice complement one another, but not always), but before we do, I wonder if we might think through the the path that God would have us walk. If we believe that all persons are made in God's image, then what would God have us do when we encounter the image of God in every person we meet? To what extent then are diversity and justice not "things" to have, but rather capacities through which our journey reflects and models Christ's?

It's in that spirit that I post today's set of discussion questions:

Bass speaks on p. 170 of justice not as a program, political platform, or denominational position, but rather a “pilgrimage of the beloved community” to facilitate the reign of God. What journey of justice are you on? What journey of justice is St. Paul’s on? How do we express this journey of justice to others?

Diversity “is the active construction of a boundary-crossing community, a family bound not by blood but by love, that witnesses to the power of God’s healing the world” (148). What kinds of boundaries has St. Paul’s crossed in the name of love? What kinds of boundaries do you hope we can cross?

What does inclusion mean to you? Are there limits to inclusivity?

How might St. Paul’s embody Desmond Tutu’s ubuntu theology (151-3)? What might happen if we embraced ubuntu theology as a guiding principle? What hopes emerge? What fears emerge?

We aren't discerning alone

As we continue to ponder and pray whither church, we might take heart by reminding ourselves that churches all over the country, big and small, are engaging in similar conversations. The following article from the New York Times talks of one of the biggest, whose concerns are no more or no less than ours.

May 5, 2007
On Religion
Riverside Takes On the Task of Rebuilding a Church
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Around the grand Gothic edifice of Riverside Church in Manhattan, a structure designed to evoke authority and permanence, there rises a scaffolding of tube pipes and raw boards. Its purpose is to allow workers to repoint the building’s stone facade, but it serves also as a handy metaphor for the paradox of Riverside, the capital of a theological movement that has been slowly deteriorating.

Since being founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1930, Riverside has often and justifiably been likened to the Vatican for America’s mainstream Protestants, the theologically and politically liberal segment of the faith. The church’s first minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and successors like William Sloane Coffin, used Riverside as a national pulpit from which to preach social justice, civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, among other causes.

Yet now, as Riverside prepares to search for a new senior minister for only the sixth time in its history, mainstream Protestants are struggling to reverse a decades-long pattern of losing numbers, vitality and influence to their evangelical Protestant competitors. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, mainstream denominations like the Episcopal, Presbyterian and United Methodist Churches and the United Church of Christ lost 5 percent to 15 percent of their members, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. Riverside is interdenominational but is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Baptist Church

The confluence of challenge, opportunity and visibility, then, makes Riverside’s selection of a new leader important not only for the 26 million adherents of mainline Protestantism but also for the shape of American religion as a whole.

“Any minister who occupies the pulpit at Riverside will have a built-in audience of hearers, both in this large and significant church and far beyond,” said the Rev. James Hudnut-Beumler, a Presbyterian minister who is dean of the divinity school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “There’s already the kind of interest that one has when network news anchors change.”

Riverside’s most recent senior minister, the Rev. James A. Forbes, smashed the church’s color barrier by becoming its first African-American pastor. In his 18 years at the helm, which will end with his official retirement on June 1, he also succeeded in making Riverside an all-too-rare example of an integrated congregation, moreover one in which whites in the flock followed a black shepherd rather than the other way around.

Like several of his renowned forebears, however, Mr. Forbes ran into opposition on administrative issues from factions of the highly educated, highly involved congregation. One group of members sued in New York State Supreme Court, ultimately unsuccessfully, to have the church’s finances put in the hands of a receiver, alleging mismanagement of millions of dollars.

What is undeniably true is that Riverside, beyond its religious impact, is a large, complex operation, with 2,700 members, a $14 million annual budget and a paid staff of 130. As much as Riverside has traditionally sought a public intellectual and world-class preacher in its pastor, it arguably needs someone who also has experience at overseeing a large organization, like a megachurch. Mr. Forbes’s background was as a professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary.

The selection process has just begun, with a 21-member search committee being put forward on May 20 for approval by the congregation. The full process is likely to take 12 to 18 months, said Dr. Billy Jones, the chairman of Riverside’s governing council and a proposed member of the search committee.

At this early stage, the most notable aspect of the search is the dearth of names being bandied about. If Riverside wanted to break the sex line, it could look to the Rev. Vashti McKenzie, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, or the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, former president of the Hampton Ministers Conference. Both of these women are African-American, as are two prospective male candidates — the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the Rev. Michael Livingston, outgoing president of the National Council of Churches.

“Compared to Bill Coffin or Harry Emerson Fosdick, neither Jim Forbes nor anyone else in mainline Protestantism cuts that kind of profile,” said Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford. “Who are the big dogs today? It’s true in Catholicism, too, for that matter. Where’s the Spellman or the Cushing? The religious leaders worth listening to have to make the case for themselves — running their own organization, writing books, being in the media.”

By Mr. Silk’s definition, the ideal candidate for Riverside’s pulpit might be the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of the religious social-action group Sojourners and author of such books as “God’s Politics.” Unfortunately for Riverside, and revealingly for mainline Protestantism’s dilemma, this leading liberal minister happens to be an evangelical Christian.

Dr. Jones said that Mr. Forbes’s successor must be “someone who fits with the congregation’s religious and spiritual philosophy, serving God through social justice.” Geoffrey Martin, also nominated to the search committee, said the congregation itself must “face up to the fact that Riverside has had a fairly public reputation of irritating our last two senior ministers to the point they got exasperated.”

In the wider world, events having nothing overtly to do with mainline Protestantism present Riverside’s next leader with a propitious opportunity. The increasing unpopularity of the Iraq war, combined with the Democrats’ recapture of Congress, has restored energy to American liberal groups that had been on the defensive for much of the last quarter-century. In more specifically Christian terms, evangelical conservatives last fall found themselves uncharacteristically on the losing side of a major election.

“Riverside’s next minister needs to make a coherent case for liberal Protestantism, and that’s been missing for a long time,” said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College and an ordained Episcopal minister. “You need someone who has solid theological understanding and can articulate it speaking to a popular audience.

“The standard conservative criticism,” Professor Ballmer said, “is that the mainline Protestants lost their theological moorings, that they got too far out ahead of the people in the pews. But I think the larger issue is that they were not communicating to the masses.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company