SUNDAY ASSEMBLY: It’s “CHURCH” for nonbelievers!

This article was from the Sunday Oregonian on Sunday, November 17, 2013 by Gillian Flaccus, AP, Los Angeles.

“It looked like a typical Sunday morning at any mega church. Hundreds packed in for more than an hour of rousing music, an inspirational sermon, a reading and some quiet reflection – the only thing missing was GOD!”

Dozens of gatherings dubbed, “atheist mega-churches” by supporters and detractors around the U.S. and the world are finding success. In Britain, fueled by social media and spear-headed by two prominent British comedians who are sponsoring a tongue-in-cheek, “40 Dates, 40 Nights” tour in the U.S. and Australia are hoping to drum up donations of more than $800,000 to launch their pop-up congregations around the world.

They don’t bash believers, but want to find a new way to meet like minded people engaged in community and make their presence more visible in a landscape that has been dominated by faith and institutional churches over the years. It dovetails with new studies that show an increasing number of Americans drifting from any religious affiliation.

The “Pew Forum” on Religion and Public Life released a study last year that found 20% of Americans say they have no religious affiliation. That is an increase from 15% in the past five years. This included people who said they believed in God but had no ties with organized religion and people who consider themselves “spiritual”, but not “religious”.

Sunday Assembly (whose motto is “Live Better, Help Others, Wonder More”) taps into that Universe of people who left their Faith, but missed the community that Church provided, according to Phil Zuckerman, a professor of Secular Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.

Please go back to Wed. Oct. 23, 2013 blog posted by OCW Steering Committee titled “Insiders and Outsiders” by Bishop Mike Rinehart! That’s all I’ve got to say—AMEN.


Chuck

Sunday Church

Since the recent Diocesan convention, OCW’s has received wonderful, thought provoking feedback from the community. One response took issue with the idea that we must shed the centrality of Sunday morning in favor of a new approach to inclusion and incorporation. The point the writer made was that St. Paul’s, Queen Anne, the Cathedral, and maybe even my own parish, Epiphany of Seattle, are growing rapidly precisely because of their focus on Sunday morning. My response was thus:

I suspect your comments were based on the OCW's statement:

"We must shed our Sunday morning, location-centered notion of encountering God, worshipping God, and serving God." 

To my way of thinking, the point OCW's was trying to make in no way diminishes Sunday morning and its efficacy in bringing people to Jesus; rather, the hope is to challenge us to broaden our thinking around where we encounter, worship and serve God.

And while I believe in my answer (of course), I also wonder, are we coming to a point in time where what the urban/ suburban churches do to grow may no longer work for rural churches or churches in communities on the decline? Might it be enough for big city churches to focus on worship infused with decent preaching and traditional music, as a means of drawing people to Jesus? The Episcopal worship service, in my opinion, scales beautifully. The music at Epiphany sounds significantly better with a twenty-five person choir than it did with the eight person choir that was in the stalls when I arrived five years ago. At Epiphany we have around fifty people who participate in the mechanics of a Sunday morning service each week, and for each of those participants there is an average of two in the pew who come with them.

The demographic possibility that presents itself to churches in Seattle helps tremendously for growing churches. Once the growth starts for urban/suburban churches it is sustained through good adult formation and relevant, engaging youth formation. But in my experience, formation follows careful (though not idiosyncratic), joyful worship. As a church begins to scale, more employees are hired and more programming and projects are started, then sustained by the additional people who are now involved at the church. Parishioners inspired by their church take that inspiration out into the world, beyond their Sunday morning, and invite friends back to witness what they are experiencing. You see the ascending cycle. And here is the paradox: the bigger the church, the less likely the clergy will suffer burnout.

Now having said all of that, I am not sure how this works for rural churches and churches in declining communities. Is Sunday morning there the same portal that it is for urban/suburban churches? What are scalable models? What counts as success for a church? How is success measured? Can and should it be measured, and who does the measuring? Could it be that over time the Episcopal Church becomes only an urban/suburban church?

I believe, as does the entire team at OCW, that God is the point and the purpose. Encountering God, worshipping God, and serving God happen everywhere. This must be true and because this is true, we also know that God is more than just an Episcopalian. God’s joy, known through the person of Jesus, is not the exclusive purview of the Episcopal Church. God’s presence and relevance does not hinge on our existence anywhere, let alone in every community in America. So talk to me. What is working for you? How is Jesus being known and shared and loved in your church? Do you need a church to do this? What does it look like? Your voice and wisdom around success for the Episcopal Church in all communities of this Diocese matters. Lend your voice to the conversation.


Doyt+

What About Gender Sexual & Romantic Minorities

In the weeks following Diocesan Convention, we have been thinking about and responding to comments and questions we received there. One that I have been thinking about is this: “Please consider LGBTQ+ (or GSRM) issues in what is proposed. (GSRM stands for Gender Sexual & Romantic Minorities – it’s a new term that shortens LGBTQ+)”

My first response was “Of course, we are considering everyone, including our LGBTQ/GRSM brothers and sisters as we do our work.” But as a straight woman, I realized that my understanding and perspective is limited. I need to know more. Because our group’s focus is studying, learning, and discerning, I want to hear more. What should we know? How can we work towards being fully and truly welcoming and inclusive?


Kelly

Waiting for our children to return

Thanks to everyone who was so supportive of our group at Diocesan Convention! It was marvelous to see so many of you engaged with these questions we've been asking for the last year, and I for one am eagerly looking forward to the results of our Community Conversations in the coming months.

A number of the participants at Diocesan Convention asked questions of our team through our question forms, and we'll be responding to those for the next few weeks. One of the comments we received noted the fact that we (the whole church, not just our diocese) keep waiting for our children to come back to church, hoping that once they have children of their own, they'll come back to church to give their children the grounding they themselves got. This has been part of what we've observed for decades in the church, that people come back when they have families.

This worked for a long time for us, and for all of the mainline churches. We find ourselves today, however, in a world where increasingly second and third generations are being raised outside the church; and folks who weren't in the church to begin can't come back to a place they never were to begin with. We've known as a denomination that we were not going to be able to grow as a church without reaching beyond our historic constituency for almost a decade (a study report from the Episcopal Church Center in 2004 confirmed as much), so we need to start looking beyond the usual suspects if we're going to turn our decline around. 

None of this is to say that we were doing it wrong before; in fact, what we were doing before was the exact right thing, and it worked brilliantly. The tricky thing is seeing when the circumstances change, and both realizing and acknowledging when the thing we've been doing no longer works. We seem to have come to that point now, or at least it looks like it to me. 

What do you think? 

-R.C.

A Sabbatical Outside Church Walls

As Greg Rhodes, our last blogger discussed, we just finished a definite “inside church walls” event in the annual diocesan convention. I agree completely with his assessment of the good of it, of what one sees in it. I chair said convention which is always a daunting task, but one supported by many good people in organizing and in participating. It is an example of discourse that can be wrapped in prayer, and a focus on something other than the strident poles we seem to find in much public discourse today. I came back to the “chair” from four months on sabbatical, truly “Outside Church Walls”, attending Spanish Language School, surfing, traveling to Canterbury, the true heart of Anglicanism of which we are part, but viewing all of this from outside the church. Another activity I had not planned on while on sabbatical was moving, literally, my household from a house, to a condo, downsizing in the process tremendously, and having such a liberating experience for my family and me in the process. One of the interesting things about this however, was the lead up to moving in. For the month or so while we waited for closing and all of that, we found out later that many of the other residents of our new building got wind that “the Bishop” was moving in. There seemed to be a lot of concern, “what would these “religious” people be like?” “Will I have to change my behavior somehow?” “Will they expect us to change.”

What seemed to put all of that to rest was a planned party by the building shortly after we moved in, which I insisted our entire family had to attend. It was two hours of light banter, good food and drink, and most of all, for all of us, the eradication of the abstract, replaced by the real. If the “walls” part of our title divides anything, or represents a divide in anything I am coming to this as the main divide, the difference between the abstract and the real. Way too often, our conversations across the walls are done in the abstract, with lots of assumptions, and far less experience. We need diplomacy both ways, we need to work to have no walls. We are real people, living real lives, placing our hope and future in all kinds of things. We should share those things, face to face. Let’s be real. Lets do what we can to eradicate the abstract, and replace it with the real.

One very “real” thing that binds us today is the crisis and need in the Philippines, a place I have been most blessed to visit and where we have friends. I offer this video as we all search for ways to respond.

Bishop Greg

Our Annual Family Reunion

I’ve been musing about our diocesan convention that occurred this past weekend. I have many thoughts about our annual family reunion, but I’ll keep it to one for now: The power of being centered first on what we hold in common is a gift we can take to our broader culture.

Convention was structured around worship and prayer, reminding us regularly that we were there because of our common faith, and our desire to express that through the Episcopal Church. In our fractured and continually fracturing society, we are segmenting ourselves into ever-smaller groups who agree precisely with our positions. We’re organizing around the least common denominators. In the church at its most faithful, however, we organize around the greatest common denominator, God.

In our civic life we can model affirming what we have in common before wresting with our disagreements. We can intentionally find common ground with our adversaries. We can seek Christ in each person, loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Greg

Community Conversations

We are introducing a new project called Community Conversations.

In this project we are simply trying to reach out and engage with the neighborhoods around our churches. We invite church members to talk with people in their communities about critical challenges and needs. What you hear may help your church join hands with neighbors and respond in tangible ways. What you learn will also help the diocese discern a vital mission for the future.

You can find more information on the page to left titled Community Conversations. To help, we have sent a packet of information and tools to all churches, which you may also find here.

While at the surface, this may sound a little scary, not to fear! Start with low-hanging fruit in your own parish. Ask people in your church or good friends who see the community outside church walls. This could be your mayor, a firefighter, a law enforcement officer, a public servant, a principal of a school, social worker, etc. 

Ask them:

What is the biggest problem in our community, and what can the church do to help?

Also be sure to ask for the names of others who they know that might be able to help answer this question. (As if you were selling Mary Kay). When you get an answer, send it to us here on the blog, by email, or by mail. 

Let's go out, and meet our neighbors where they are, and find the work that God has already started Outside Church Walls.

Decline The Dance of Darkness

The collect for All Saint’s Sunday reads:

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you…

On All Saint’s Sunday the hope for worship is to honor our unity with one another, with those who have gone before us and those who will come after us, with those who come to church and those who don’t, all through the presence of God in Jesus Christ. God is the glue, the beginning, the end, the point, and the purpose.

And so with this belief as our backdrop, I wonder why there is so much fighting and tumult and discord in the world?

John Peterson dropped by Epiphany Parish for a visit the other day. John was the Dean of St. George’s College in Jerusalem for twelve years, and then served as the Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) for ten years. John knows the worldwide Anglican Church as well as anyone.

What John has noticed over the years is that the worldwide Anglican Church and the broader Christian church, as well as Muslims and Jews and even secular governments and political parties are becoming more and more fundamentalist. As I sit here and wonder why, I am reminded of the second question the priest asks people who are being baptized: “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”

Could it be that the world, through the wonderful power and imagination of God, is being knit together in a new way? Might the mystical body of Christ be finding a revolutionary form of expression that has hitherto never breached the minds of humanity? Maybe there is new access to the saints… and if so, maybe it is causing the evil powers of this world to thrash about and seek to consolidate power and to fight back like their very lives depended upon it.

Am I hinting at the idea that in the corners of fundamentalism lives the spark of evil? I suppose I am. But let me be clear, this evil spark of fundamentalism has equal access to all walks of life, all forms of religion, all political parties, and all tribal persuasions. There are two characteristics of fundamentalism that strike at the heart of the mystical union. The first is dogma and the second is broken relationship, and when they dance together they call forth the power of darkness.

Here is the dance of darkness: Dogma says that what I believe is more important than my relationship with you. Dogma has fixed boundaries and those mired in dogma are uninterested in exploring how what you believe and what I believe might have points of intersection. If you want to know where evil breeds, look to a place where people are willing to break relationship over a particular “belief” or a “right way” of doing things.

Our churches sag and thrash about when we forsake one another. Honor unity with one another. Resist dancing in the darkness.


Doyt+

Excellence

Seth Godin is an author, entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker. He’s a student of our shifting culture, and he’s an astute observer of organizations. In his book Linchpin he asks a question that I summarize this way: “Who are we organizing ourselves around – the average or the excellent?”

Just a couple weeks ago on this blog we reposted an article by Bishop Mike Rinehart of the ELCA. He directly addressed the question of who churches are organizing themselves around – the insiders or the outsiders. It’s a great question, and critical to our vitality. I encourage you to read the article if you haven’t already.

I think the second half of Godin’s question deserves a look, too. Are we organizing ourselves around the average or the excellent? This is tricky for the church. Our measuring rods aren’t the same ones used by secular culture, or by business. It’s not all numbers and profit. Unlike in business, church is not about competition, or outdoing someone else for our advantage.

But excellence honors God, honors the gifts God has placed within us, individually and in community. We are called to offer the best of what we have, to serve with our own excellence, because we are grateful to God for it. We’re not competing with each other; my excellence can compliment yours.

Excellence does not equal perfection or grandeur. Excellence can be humble. But it is always care-filled and intentional. We often know it when we see it. We can feel it. We know when people are “phoning it in,” and we know when they’re bringing their best.

Too often in the church we settle for average, for getting by, for good enough, when instead we could care enough to provide excellence – or we could stop doing that thing and doing something different with excellence instead. We ought to call forth excellence from our people, because there is great joy in offering God the best we have, and in seeing how that matters to people who encounter it.

Greg