Practical A/Theism

A piece for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington's blog, in which I contemplate the power of the alpha privative. (Just kidding. No one would read that.) Really, I'm asking the question,  "If someone cannot discern your beliefs out of your actions, do you really believe your beliefs?"

New Creation!

October 1, 2014 -- Episcopal Church of the Annunciation, Memphis
Photo by the Rev. John Burruss, who takes good pictures even if he's in a bee keeping suit.

Usually I try to avoid posts that are about church itself, but I'm going to break my own rule for just one post. But with all of the noise about "the end of theological education as we know it" because of the crisis at General Theological Seminary (if you haven't heard about this, good for you!) and the fact that I've been in contact with dozens of my classmates over the last two weeks, I feel like I need to say something a little more pointedly church-oriented. So, if you're brave, keep reading. If you're smart, tune in next week.

There's a narrative about mainstream Protestant churches which claims that the churches are slowly dying. Churches are merging, or being closed down, and selling their buildings. Millennials are suspicious of institutions, the median age of church goers is older than ever, and more people than ever before don't affiliate with any religion at all. I understand that.  But that's not what I'm actually hearing from my friends who are one or two years out of seminary.

A friend who graduated with me is starting an ecology initiative with the church's land that will eventually support ministry to sex-traffiked women in Memphis. This year, they had their first crop of honey, and are working on preparing the soil for planting a huge garden that will grow herbs for tea and herb rubs. The community took what had been a burden to them -- acres of land to keep -- and made it into an asset for good. Now they stand for something. The church had been shrinking, but it's growing now.

Another priest friend is starting a print shop with his church community in Kentucky that will teach printmaking skills to those in hallway houses and prison, and will be a place where those people can be employed until they can find other employment. This project is in its very beginning stages, but it's exciting to see it get put into motion.

Another friend moved to Texas, and is teaching American Civics classes in Spanish at his church, to help immigrants pass the citizenship test. That church is growing, too.

I heard story after story from friend after friend -- and even if people weren't working on entrepreneurial and self-sustaining projects, they told stories about neighborhoods coming back to life in Baltimore, of growing youth groups in South Carolina, of creating safe havens for the LGBT community in Arkansas, of dinner churches for young adults being established in Southern Maryland, of public and liturgical witness all over the country, of laundromat ministry in DC, and some really amazing outreach in bars and coffee shops.

We choose the stories we tell, and I choose these stories over the narrative of the decline and death of the church. When we allow these sort of creative ministries to happen, even if it means having priests who don't look or act like the parish priests of the past, or priests who are one foot in the secular world and one foot in the church world, we tell the story of our faith in a way that speaks to others. In the news the past few weeks, and from the older seminary alums I was working with in meetings this week, I heard the death and dying narrative repeatedly. But what others see as death and dying, I see as an opportunity to prune back the branches, and to allow new growth to flourish.  Besides, it's already happening.

Forty Years

The Rev. Allison Cheek after the first public celebration of the Eucharist by a woman
Nov. 10, 1974 at St. Stephen's and the Incarnation, NW DC
Photo by the Washington Post

Today is a big deal, at least for me, anyway. Today is a big deal, because forty years ago, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church, the Philadelphia Eleven, were ordained at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, PA. They were irregularly ordained, which means they were ordained outside of church law, which only caught up with them two years later. These women, and the male bishops who ordained them, risked their vocations (and, I'm assuming for the bishops, their pensions) in order to live out what they believed to be true -- that God does not discriminate by gender when God calls someone into the sacramental priesthood, and that God was calling each of these women to serve God as a priest in God's church. It's beautiful, and it's true.

I love these stories, these stories about the first women priests in the church. I love hearing about them, I love to read about them. (If you are interested, Grace in Motion by the Rev. Dr. Judith Maxwell McDaniel is a great place to start.) I love these stories because I feel like they are my stories, and because even though I was born eleven years after the Philadelphia Eleven, and even though I began to seek ordination thirty-one years after the Philadelphia Eleven, I was told, when I began my process, that my priest would not be supporting me for ordination because I was a woman, and he did not believe that woman should be priests. This set off a series of chain reactions in my process.

It took me nine years to be ordained to the priesthood.

There are many things I could say about that experience, but what I'm thinking about today is the enormity of the courage, effort, prayer, persistence, tenacity and sheer grit it takes to make a change toward justice in an unjust system. Women and their male allies had been fighting for decades before 1974 to see this change happen, and when women finally were ordained, they had to find jobs that would hire them, deal with belittling, sexual assault, physical violence, death threats, the never-ending balance between family expectations and work, and not to mention the nearly inevitable sacking after becoming pregnant, at least in the early days. I've heard these stories from some of the women who have experienced them.

What astounds me now is how easy it was for all of those decades to be flippantly dismissed with a few offhanded words from one person in authority.  But do you know what? That didn't stop the Eleven. It didn't stop women from becoming professors and deans of schools or cathedrals, from raising families while running churches, from serving the poor or the sick, or from becoming authors and world-renowned preachers and not least, bishops. And with their help, it didn't stop me.

So, today is a big deal. I'm so grateful for those women, and all that they've done, and continue to do. I can't wait to see what the next forty years has in store.

Greetings from Bushwick!

The Vicar went to visit the very awesome St. Lydia's Dinner Church in Brooklyn, and is spending the day wandering around Bushwick until she gets back on her Megabus to DC. She feels a little out of place because she doesn't have high-waisted acid-washed skinny jeans or an overly graphic t-shirt, but she's going to be okay.

Anyway, St. Lydia's was found to be a beautiful expression of what the church outside of church walls can become: a group of people, some churched, and some not, who come together over a meal to bless the meal, each other, and their time. There was beautiful singing, prayer, storytelling, good food, conversation and laughter. Who could ask for anything more? 

Yoga Time

I've recently started doing yoga down the street at Yoga District, and I was surprised at how easy it was to get back into classes. I'm looking forward to making time for not only the body work, but the inner work that happens when one practices yoga. We'll see if I can manage to make it a habit, but here's hoping.

Anyway, I wrote a reflection about my experience getting back into yoga classes, how the institutional church can learn from yoga studios, and the Millennial obsession with awkwardness for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington's blog. You can find it here.

Ash Wednesday

Dupont Circle South Metro Entrance, March 5, 2014

Today is Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and a day that Christians have traditionally observed by going into church and having ashes smudged on their forehead to remind them of their own mortality. Today, though, I donned my cassock and joined many of my clergy friends in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington in getting out of the church and going to where the people actually are: metro stops, busy sidewalks, coffee shops. I was graced with questions, conversations, tears, prayers, and real contact with real people, making their way in the world. 

Brushing the hair away from their forehead, and looking into their eyes, this is what we said: "You are a beloved child of God. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Simple. True. Lovely.

The "Death" of a Church

A church very close to where I live was just sold for $2.2M to developers. I'm not sure what the deal is, or why the church decided to sell. Perhaps they are taking the money and starting a new ministry somewhere else; perhaps they are moving somewhere else in the neighborhood; perhaps the community slowly died, and the building was only a shell of what the community used to be. I work elsewhere in the city on Sunday mornings, so I haven't been around to see whether or not there are active church services there or not. A reasonable amount of internet snooping led to no new information, and so I'm left with my conjectures.

A few neighborhood blogs have covered the announcement, most notably Frozen Tropics and HStreetGreatStreet. This is the former church of St. John Church of God, if you're wondering which one:

St. John Church of God, Jan. 21, 2014, H&13

Near the front steps:

The former St. John Church of God, Jan. 21, 2014

The chain and lock seem just a little heartbreaking to this Vicar, and when I peered in the front doors, the door to the sanctuary was open, revealing the pews and "Do this in remembrance" lettered on the altar and all the little things that make a regular building a church, hymnals in the pews and signs to the bathroom and bulletin boards with outdated announcements no one has bothered to take down. I found myself a little sad for this little church.

But. Church buildings shouldn't be museums of places where people used to gather in faith but now sit empty. Church buildings shouldn't burden their congregants to the point where all they do is maintain the building and neglect their mission. Church buildings shouldn't exist just for the sake of existing. The building of the church isn't the church, the building is just a place for the people who make up the church to use as a tool for mission. And if that building is getting in the way of the church doing what the church should actually be doing, it needs to go. Period.

I'm not saying that the church building can't be the center of gravity for a community, or a place of sacred reflection that feeds the souls of those who come to worship there. But if the building itself becomes the object of worship, it needs to go. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of faith communities could be set free if only they could get rid of the idol that is their church building. I wonder what these communities would discover about themselves, about their priorities, about their faith, if they were willing to set out on an adventure, to see their building as a tool for doing ministry in the world around them.

So, on further reflection, I'm not sad for the community, or that little church building, of St. John Church of God. Good for them for going out on faith and moving on, in whatever direction they are taking.