Coming To An End

As the Outside Church Walls group comes to an end, I am experiencing more than a bit of sadness. I've enjoyed getting to know people I would otherwise never have had the chance to meet, much less work with. My thinking has been informed and sharpened by perspectives I would never have though of myself.

My pet angle has, and remains, communication. As an institution, we need to communicate everything we do to the general public. If we don't get our message out, we are complicit in public misunderstandings of Christianity in general, and the Episcopal Church specifically. Having said that, we should be ever vigilant to resist being influenced, both personally and institutionally, by media. Discernment is listening for the Word of God, not reacting emotionally to the latest "if it bleeds, it leads" news story. Media is a tool of public relations that we can put to work for us. However, it can also be a very dangerous weapon when used maliciously or if consumed uncritically. An example of the former is a press release that leads to an article about something positive the church is doing to help address a problem. An example of the latter is the church leaders making public statements about issues they have simply read about without considering the source. It costs thousands of dollars to produce a very simple 30 second local TV commercial; how many millions must it cost to produce a 30 minute international news broadcast... every half hour? It's worth pondering that you aren't charged a dime for it. But it isn't just TV, now of course it's the Interwebz. How much does it cost to host, say, Wikipedia in 99 different languages on who knows how many servers in various countries around the world. And yet, have you ever seen an ad anywhere on Wikipedia? Who's paying for all this? I don't know the answer, but I suspect that the advertising is in the content. Be skeptical.

We know who we are. Many parishes participated in the Church Assessment Tool survey last year. I urge the powers that be to aggregate these so we as a diocese will have a clearer picture of who we are and what our priorities ought to be. This will inform us about how best to communicate who we are. At lunch this summer, two college students who attend St. Paul's Bellingham, Elysia Gemora and Jon Fedele, urged us not to try to change who we are in order to appeal to others, but to state clearly who we are. "We're here because of who you are," they said.

In other words, don't try to put theory into practice, derive theory from practice.

That reminded me of something Eliacin said at one of our meetings: too often we flip a switch when we enter and leave church. We're slightly different people inside church walls and outside them. Our goal should be to eliminate that internal wall within us so we can best engage with others wherever we may find ourselves.

In closing, I'd like to recommend a little book that Doyt recommended to me. It's called "Hour by Hour," available at the Episcopal Bookstore https://www.episcopalbookstore.com/product.aspx?productid=1485 . It's a book of daily prayer four times a day (morning, noon, evening, and compline), for each day of the week. If I had to pick one personal change I'm taking away from the Outside Church Walls experience, it's that developing a sense of spiritual discipline is vital to discerning God's will. That is the only way we can engage successfully with the culture in which we find ourselves.


Peace,
Brad