Does the Episcopal Church welcome everyone?

He is in his 50’s and is a maintenance man.  Started coming to the Episcopal Church because he had grown up Roman Catholic and was just tired of Rome’s stance on so many things.   He’s a good guy—high school educated, loves to travel and his favorite travel trips were to a neighboring state to visit family. He decided to go to a social function at his new church.  He was talking with a group of folks over potluck dinner.

The conversation turned to traveling.  Everyone at the table began talking of travels.  The man of course talked of his own trips and how much hunting and fishing trips with family meant to him. 

“Oh, I didn’t mean those kind of… trips,” one person told him.   “I meant REAL traveling on an airplane to a different country.  My friend sat quiet for almost an hour as everyone at the table joined together in conversation about traveling abroad. No one seemed to notice that he wanted to join, but had nothing to say.

We spend a great deal of time talking about race and racism in the Episcopal Church- and that’s good.  We need to be aware of the ways we fall into the sin of racism. However we spend next to no time talking or thinking about class and classism, sexism and heterosexism as a church and the ways that these “isms” might show up and they do show up.

 I think we need to be talking about oppression in all its forms. Race of course is a natural place to start because there is so much damage and reconciliation that needs to take place.  Class flies a bit under the radar as it does not announce itself quite the way race or even gender does.   And because it is not as obvious, we need to have the conversation about how classism shows up in our communities and in our church and the ways we may discount blue collar folk.

  There was a barrier placed in front of my friend that night—a barrier that discounted his experience.  Even though he fit when he walked in the room, he left the room knowing he did not fit.   That’s how classism works so often.  Instead of a good ol’ boy network, there’s a white collar network: where do you summer?   What countries have you visited? I am not saying that any of that conversation is wrong or bad.  What I am saying is that it can become problematic when its an obstacle for others to find their place in that conversation or the experience they have is discounted or perceived as less than. 

I recently attended oppression training where I learned oppression is created when a dominant group chooses to withhold resources -- thus oppression and scarcity go hand in hand.   My mind began to race— about the many sermons I’ve heard and given about abundance, scarcity and God’s Economy.   The implications about abundance and stewardship grew that day for me exponentially.  God of abundance is much larger than I first imagined as I reckoned that oppression and degradation comes out of our smallness, our scarcity thinking rather than the largess of our best true self that is in Christ.   

But maybe you are wondering what does this have to do with my friend the maintenance guy?  The scarcity for my friend was that his offering that night to the conversation was not enough.  He left that dinner feeling pretty small that night.    We might not call this oppression, but it was a barrier. 

The Outside Church Walls Group has been struggling with the barriers we create that keep people as outside or unwelcomed. Why aren’t people here in our church and how do we go about having quality conversations with those not here?   Especially if they think of Christianity in oppressive terms as Christianity and Church are often represented scarcely.    This is yet, another barrier. 

Maybe part of our problem is that the conversations we are having inside the church are hard for outside people to join—for one reason or another.  I think of my friend the maintenance guy who stopped going to church soon after that experience.  I’m sure that the group he sat with was a good- natured bunch that didn’t mean to exclude him but couldn’t find ways to include him and help him feel like he belonged there. 

It is a slog for me going outside church walls. I imagine it is just as much of a slog for those that might be trying to come in.

As this team talks about the many barriers that separate us, including the walls of our church, my hope is that in our learning, we will able to break down a few walls,  and become more mindful of the barriers we can create with our assumptions about people’s common experiences.  I hope we will be come more nimble in receiving the offerings of others like that of my friend’s with a heart for greater and greater abundance.  

George

Are We Tribal?

I have just returned from the Holy Land, a place rife with tribalism.  My heart broke as I witnessed this play out in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the place that stands as edifice over the rock of Calvary and the tomb of Jesus.  The tribal bodies that dance there have been doing so under tense détente for the last 150 years.  They are the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Egyptian Copts and Roman Catholics.

As I watched with judgment their displays of power and posturing, I began to wonder, and continue to wonder, how do we in the Episcopal Church do the same thing?  Are we tribal in ways we don’t see?  What do we do that isolates us from others or others from us?  What language do we speak that we take for granted in a way that causes us to be tone deaf to the world around us?

To start this reflection I’d like to look at tribe as a concept. Merriam Webster defines tribe as “the social group comprising numerous families, clans or generations together, who share common characteristics, interests, occupations and customs.”  This definition kicks our church community pretty far down the road toward being tribal. Our liturgy is a good place to start.  To us and to our children it is the most familiar thing in the world; to others it is the most foreign thing they have ever dropped into.  Many of us organize our liturgy in a way that allows anyone who can read to have a good shot at being able to follow along.  But still there is confusion, sometimes unease, during the Peace, the Eucharist, Baptism, incense, asperges, bells and holy fire.

Is our liturgy enough to keep people away from our church?  For some, the answer is yes; for others no.  Must we change it as a result?  The conclusion, at least for me, is no.  I believe our challenge is not breaking down our way of worship, nor is it trying to be something different than we are as a particular contextual community.  It is, rather, to put the other, whoever that is, ahead of our idiosyncratic ways of being.  When new people wander into our midst, we have the opportunity to invite them to be most authentically themselves.  This begins, of course, with finding out something about them, asking them questions, listening to their stories, finding ways to connect, and then offering to be their tour guide in this strange Episcopal Church land they have just wandered into.

God incarnate came to us as a man, Jesus, not to break down the framework of tribe, but to relegate it as secondary to the bigger framework of the kingdom of God.  When we encounter strangers in our midst, the hope is not to swallow them up or take them over or reduce them to rubble, but rather to get to know them for their own authentic selves.

While we will still have our particular tribal ways, relationship is always primary in the kingdom of God.  There is plenty of space in God’s divine economy to make room for other, even within the spaces we cherish and love.   Doyt+

Does the Episcopal Church have Room for my People?

This month, some of our discussion centered on the socioeconomic realities of our wider culture and how these realities relate to the church. The next several weeks, various members of the group will be blogging on this topic.
The table was beautiful. On the snowy white table cloth was a spread of wine and cheese and other finger food I could not immediately identify. Gathered around the table were clusters of priests, professors, and seminary students, fresh from evensong, all dressed smartly in expensive suits and engaged in polite conversation. Walking into this room in a fine house I could only consider a mansion, I felt like I had stepped into another world, a world so foreign to this scholarship student who had grown up in blue collar, rural America. I watched what people were doing carefully, trying to imitate their actions, keenly aware of how underdressed I was for the occasion, choking on what ended up being cheese but looked for all intents and purposes like my mama’s pudding, and scanning the crowd for a familiar face.
Whenever I participate in a conversation about declining numbers in the Episcopal Church, I think of moments like this. There are many ways to define class in the United States, but one way researchers do so is based on college education. Only 30% of Americans get a bachelor’s degree or higher for professional jobs; the rest of the American population is working class and getting poorer all the time (NY Times). In the rural town I lived and worked for some time, the collapse of the logging industry had driven most of us into low paying service jobs and the poverty rate was high. It wasn’t until I saved enough money to be the first in my family to go to university that I considered attending the Episcopal Church. There was an unspoken assumption in the community that the little stained glass brick church was for middle class people with means. Indeed, when I started attending, disillusioned with the evangelical churches of my past and attracted to the liturgy, I found myself primarily in the company of the dwindling number of well-educated and relatively wealthy people in the area, people who did graciously welcomed me.
A recent study in 2011 by the American Sociological Association found that church attendance was rising among middle class, college educated people and declining steeply among working class Americans. Working class people, the people I grew up with, remain relatively religious, but they are going to church less and less. There are many theories as to why this is the case—shame over less stable family lives, the shift among evangelicals to cater to a more upwardly mobile demographic (NY Times), or the increasing disconnection of working class people to traditional social and economic structures in a globalizing economy (Huffington Post).
The Episcopal Church, with some exceptions, does not often cater to this group of people, partly for historical reasons. Dwight Zscheile writes, in his book People of the Way; “The Anglican Church in America went from being the officially established church to the church of the establishment as it remained favored by many of the socioeconomic elite... As long as the Episcopal Church tended to uphold the status quo of a stratified economic system and a rationalistic faith, it failed to attract and retain wider swaths of the American populace.” This trend continues in some ways today. The Episcopal Church, in our diocese and across the country, is thriving and, dare I say, growing in urban areas like Seattle that are attracting an influx of young, well educated professionals. However, in areas that are majority working class, our numbers are declining, perhaps in part because we do not always have the resources to reach this demographic.
Much of my ministry has been on the street, with working class people who have lost everything as their economic situation worsens in this country. My question of the Episcopal Church and the question that I bring to this discussion is this: How much are we willing to reach out to working class and poor people? As I asked in the meeting, does the Episcopal Church have room for my people?

Sarah

'Church' Survey Results Thus Far

As of today, we have just over 1,000 responses to our online survey! At first take, that seems like a lot. However, less than one quarter of those responses are from people who do not regularly attend church. To paint a truly descriptive picture of how church is viewed from both outside and inside we really need more responses from people outside church walls.

Our best hope of doing this is you! Send the link below to your friends via Facebook, email, Twitter, Tweetbook, whatever. A large part of this project is getting regular church goers to talk to those who are not, and have a polite conversation with them.
http://tinyurl.com/cqwttcb
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None the less, the results so far have been very interesting. Most people inside the church are clearly on fire with the Holy Spirit and a few are not quite there yet. The results from people inside the church seem -to my eye at least- to match up well with the survey conducted by Russ Crabtree. For scientific minds, that's good news: we have validated data!

The results from people outside the church are what I see as being the real meat of this project. That is the group we are trying to reach out to and in some cases, to simply discover. For the first month and a half, many external answers were negative. The words 'judgmental' and 'hypocritical' were common and were in the top 25 most common words for a long time. Recently this has shifted a little bit and more positive responses are taking the lead in this group. Words like 'love' and 'god' are now near the top. Still, we do have those descriptive answers like 'stained glass' which is in the top 20.

The results have been very dynamic and still are. The more responses we can get from those outside church walls, the better data we will have. By no means is this project over! Keep telling your friends about this!


Robert