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