Palm Sunday Blizzard

This post is ridiculously past due, but I'm posting it anyway.  Here in Kansas City we've had a crazy winter.  November and December were mostly like the previous year - warm and dry.  It got colder in January but it looked like we might be in for another mild year.  Then the last week of February, only a week or two after the ground hog had assured us that spring was just around the corner, we had two installments of snow adding up to a foot or more.  It took forever for it to melt.

Just about the time we were seeing grass again, the clergy or our diocese gathered for our annual overnight meeting.  Diana Butler Bass was our guest speaker.  She spoke about cultural and population trends that are and will continue to impact the church over the next few years.  It gave us a lot to think about.  One of her comments is that she doesn't think in terms of church growth, but of church depth.

I liked that.  Much of the way we talk about success and struggle in the church during the years I've been ordained involves numbers:  how many new members?  how many dollars pledged? what percentage larger or smaller are we this year than last year? We're in the habit of measuring our success by numbers. But the numbers may steal our attention away from considering how people's lives are changed by the work of the church and by their involvement in it.  These last two things are more about depth than growth. It completely changes your perspective when you think about it that way.

The big religious holidays can be a real ego booster.  Looking at a congregation that fills the church feels good and I looked forward to it the week before Palm Sunday.  We prepared for the day as usual.  Our palm leaves were ordered, the choir was rehearsed and our route for an outdoor procession was planned.  As the day approached, that outdoor route gave way to an indoor alternative.  The weather was predicted to be chill and rainy on that morning.  Our choirmaster who is not fond of processing and singing outdoors had jokingly suggested to the choir that they pray for rain on Palm Sunday.  Next time you need prayer, give me a call and I will put them to work.  As the weekend approached, the forecast changed.  We were now expecting another several inches of snow to fall through the night before Palm Sunday.

And it fell.  I spent the night in my office at the church in order to assure having a priest on hand in the morning.  As the sun rose, our snow removal crew tackled the parking lot with plows and a bobcat, just in case the usual crowds might be able to get there.  But they didn't.  We had already sent text messages to choir members and servers advising them to be cautious about travel in the morning.  Phone calls and text messages began to come through letting us know that streets were impassable.

A group of 15 of us gathered for worship that day.  Several walked - among them an out of town visitor from Port Townsend, Washington.  A few drove and a couple more rode the bus.  A day or two later the weather began to warm and it all melted.

 It's really about more than how many people are there.

Driving to work earlier this week my thoughts were bouncing around between comments in the blog of Landon Whitsitt about Lillian Daniel, a Chicago clergywoman lately engaged in wrestling the concept of "spiritual but not religious" to the ground.  I read Landon's comments in the context of NPR's recent series on "the nones," the growing number of Americans who do not identify with a particular religious tradition.  Also in the mix were the Conversion of St. Paul last observed last Friday and the sad death of Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey.  Heat, stir, add caffeine and you have a blog post.

Somewhere in my travels since last Sunday I saw a tongue in cheek comment that Lady Sybil's tragic end is what happens when men make decisions about women's health care.  Lillian Daniel's comments come down hard on anyone who claims a spiritual life but practices it outside a religious tradition with a long pedigree.  Is that judgment analagous with Lord Grantham's decision to put his daughter's life in the hands of the posh London obstetrician rather than the local doctor who argued for treating her on the basis of what her mind and body were doing?  Lord Grantham asserted his authority as lord of the manor over the objections of the local doctor and Lady Grantham, one two women present who had actually experienced labor and delivery of a child, again, another triumph of tradition over the evidence before their eyes.  The two stood by horrified as their youngest daughter died an agonizing death.

Who gets to decide or define what legitimate religious belief and practice are?  What are the criteria?   Among Lillian Daniel's many comments on the "spiritual but not religious" is the following:  "It's not all about you and no, you can't make it up.  The beauty of long tradition is that it is bigger than anything we can do by ourselves."  I don't particularly disagree with her about the beauty and value of a long-established religious tradition.  But I wonder if denigrating those who dare to say they pray but have not yet put down roots within a particular tradition does more harm than good.

St. Paul, whose conversion we commemorated last week took the gospel to the gentiles a couple of decades after Jesus' death.  When these new believers wanted to identify with what was at the time the "established" community of Jesus' followers, its elders responded with a challenge to their legitimacy: they hadn't fully undertaken the "long tradition" of the Jews.   How could they be legitimate followers of Jesus without doing so?  Is Lillian Daniel's scorn for the "spiritual but not religious" at least somewhat similar to the response of the Jerusalem church to Paul's fractious and far-flung gentile churches?  

You know the outcome of that argument.  It wasn't long before you could be a Christian without being a Jew first.  In areas where Jesus' followers were part of the synagogue community, the two groups ultimately became distinct from each other with no overlap.  In gentile territory, the churches founded by Paul were, in some sense, "making it up."  We don't see it that way now because their theology and piety are part of that "long tradition" of Christianity, but religious tradition doesn't just happen.  It is brought about through the application of human memory, reason and skill.  Religious conversion and affiliation with a faith community don't just happen.  Surely some inclination to engage in spiritual life has to be present before someone decides to walk through the doors of a church.  

With regard to the "nones" I think it's likely that they're not in the early stages of the process of establishing another world religion.  But think about it a different way.  One of the things I heard from the group of "nones" interviewed in NPR's series on young Americans who are not affiliated with organized religion is that many of them have a lot of respect for religious tradition and practice.  They find attractive the idea of affiliating with a community that is committed to peace and justice and they see the church, in general, as such a community.  Several of them said that they pray, not infrequently.  Many of them said that they had not found a church where they felt at home.  Lillian Daniel seems to question their expectations and to say "get over it" with regard to their desire to feel at home in a church.  She describes the "spiritual but not religious" as being "stuck" and asserts that they "know they are missing something."  She challenges them to "look around" and see the many beautiful options in the religious landscape" and advises them  "you don't have to be out there on your own."  

My experience with "nones" who eventually became church members is that there is great rejoicing over the work of the Holy Spirit for having drawn them into the church.  Is it possible that people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious are in an early stage of the Spirit's work?  Does it make sense to beat them up or say we feel sorry for them because they haven't yet found a faith community?  Would you say the same thing about someone who senses that her vocation is for marriage but who hasn't yet found the right person to marry?  It may not matter who gets to decide at what point a religious tradition becomes long, venerable and legitimate or where lies the dividing line between "making it up" and legitimate spiritual practice anchored in tradition.  But I'm guessing that those of us now inside the churches will appear more welcoming to newcomers if we're willing to accept them where they are rather than ridiculing them for where they have not yet been.

Christianity has a long history of doing just that.  This Saturday, February 2 is the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.  The religious holiday commemorates the events described in Luke 2.22-40.  His parents take him to the temple 40 days after his birth.  They do this in accordance with Jewish tradition to complete his mother's ritual purification after childbirth and to sacrifice animals in redemption of their first born as directed in the book of Leviticus.  While in the temple they encounter an elderly man, Simeon.  He has been told by God that he will not die until he sees the Messiah.  He recognizes Jesus as the one.

February 2 is known more colloquially as ground hog day.  There's a reason why it's the same day as the Presentation.  As Christianity spread throughout Europe, evangelists encountered persons who practiced religions that involved belief in multiple Gods and were based in phenomena of the natural world.  They were open to conversion to Christianity, but such conversions frequently involved incorporation of existing traditions into a Christian framework.  The late winter Celtic feast of imbolc coincides on the Christian calendar with the Feast of the Presentation and St. Brigid's Day on February 1.  Imbolc falls halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox - just about the time we in the northern hemisphere are longing for the warmth and longer days of spring.  Bonfires and candle lighting are among the practices associated with the festival.  A candlelight procession opens the traditional liturgy of the Feast of the Presentation.  The long tradition of the church that Lillian Daniel considers essential to legitimate religious practice has plenty of twists and turns toward earlier groups of "nones."

I have identified myself as a Christian and been associated with the church for most of my life.  I don't expect that to change.   I'm an Episcopalian, a form of Christian belief and practice that considers tradition, in balance with scripture and reason, to be central to the faith.  I enthusiastically encourage anyone who has not found a church where he feels at home to engage with the Episcopal Church.  I've known a fair number of "nones" who have done that and gone on to feel at home and grounded in our four plus centuries of tradition.  One of the reasons why is that we are at ease accepting people where they are and giving them time and space to get where they're going spiritually.  It's a journey for all of us and we all have different starting points.

Throughout All Generations, Part 2

After posting last week about the church's challenge of building community among six different generational cohorts, I've seen two other items about this topic.  Yesterday Jim Naughton's post appeared on Episcopal Cafe referencing a post by Pastor Keith Anderson and the book Congregational Connections: Uniting Six Generations in the Church by Carroll Sheppard and Nancy Burton Dilliplane.  Anderson calls the situation a generational logjam. He references Sheppard and Dilliplane's argument that we are trying to squeeze six distinctive generations into the“old three-generation model (Elders, Worker-Bees raising children, and Children)”

During the interval between this post and that I also had the opportunity to listen to the series Losing Our Religion on National Public Radio.  What I heard more than once from the group interviewed for that series is a strong interest in spiritual life and engagement with community.  I heard more than one participant express admiration for the things churches do, like supporting people in their spiritual practices, doing good works and creating a space in which community can be built and engaged.  What I also heard more than once were words like I have never found a church where I felt at home. It's interesting to note that a lot of churches want desperately to create that "at home" feeling for people in their 20s and 3os.   Some of them are trying various things to make it happen, others are just talking about it.  A lot of them want it so badly that it blinds them to urgent mission opportunities that are begging them to take action.

The parish where I serve now, St. Mary's in Kansas City, Missouri has been able to develop a parish community that unites all six, generations that are alive today.   I wish I understood more clearly how it happened, but much of it is a holy mystery.  Seven years ago, I did a "back of an envelope" calculation of the mean age of our parishioners.  It was around 68 years.  It included a member who was, at the time, 98 years old.  But taking her age out of the calculation reduced it only by a couple of years.  I did it again four or five years later and it had dropped to 48 years.  It's younger than that now.

If you asked one of our parishioners where the center of our parish is, most of them would say something about our worship and our outreach ministry.  We have a 150+ year history as Kansas City's anglo-Catholic parish.  We continue in that tradition with bells and incense every week, an ambitious choir composed primarily of parishioner volunteers and led by one as well.  Our parish liturgist, also a volunteer, keeps our worship well-grounded in the Book of Common Prayer and engaged with the cycle of the church year in a way that people are able to connect with their own lives.  The high liturgy gives us regular opportunities to engage sense and memory in worship.  Every Saturday we open our doors to about 200 people from the surrounding community who come to the church to eat lunch and get a bag of groceries.  Our hunger relief ministry has grown over the past 20 years to serve more than 600 meals every month and provide nearly 80 households with a weekly bag of groceries.  The hunger relief ministry has been a point of engagement with many newcomers to the congregation.

Ten years ago our parish was on the brink of closure.  It was in serious financial trouble and suffered from conflict that seemed intractable.  The anger and ill feeling drove parishioners away and did little to motivate one-time visitors to return.  But the parish is located in downtown Kansas City which was, at that time, beginning to redevelop.  The residential population was growing and the decision was made to try to rebuild the congregation.  Ten years later we are growing, organizationally healthy and more or less financially stable.

We didn't set out to attract young people as members, but it happened.  The population of our neighborhood is among the youngest overall of any neighborhood in the city.  What we set out to do is be a community that people want to be a part of.  On Sunday mornings we're friendly without being aggressive.  We allow people to engage to the extent that they want to.  If a visitor stays for coffee hour we make sure that a parishioner introduces them to people.  When they visit again they have someone they know to talk to.  Our service leaflet is easy to follow.

One of the changes that helped St. Mary's retain its younger new members was the relative absence of an "old guard" in control of the workings of the parish.  The loss of membership that the congregation suffered seven to ten years ago left its leadership more open and fluid than is characteristic of more stable parishes.  Before long half of the members the Vestry of St. Mary's, our council of lay leaders, were younger than 45.  Anyone will tell you that is unusual.  A friend of mine, a parishioner at one of the smaller churches in our diocese, was told that no one could be a member of the Vestry in their church until he/she was 50 years old.  That edict came from someone who was well over 60 at the time.  That kind of dues paying might make sense to a member of the silent generation, but for Gen-X it's an invitation to look for a more encouraging environment.

One of our parishioners, the husband of a couple who retired in Kansas City and bought a downtown condominium said "we became members of this church because we knew you needed us."  That's true.  There's something to do or to offer at St. Mary's for anyone who wants to take part.  Creating that environment of welcome and opportunity to serve was intentional.  It has nearly doubled our membership and Sunday attendance in seven years.

I believe that creating a welcoming community intentionally around mission and worship eased the way for us in inter-generational relationships.  We did make some modifications in our liturgy in order to make it more accessible to visitors, but the appeal was not intended to be specific to a particular age group; it was meant to make it easier for new visitors to participate.  In some ways our high liturgy probably made it easier for us to retain an integrity that has cross-generational appeal.  We take it seriously and that shows.  We are true to the roots of our parish, not because we can't break that habit, but because we recognize and honor what that has meant to the parish and the larger community for a century and a half.

Six generations share in setting the priorities for St. Mary's.  To some extent adults make decisions on behalf of our dozen or so members who are eight years old and younger, but all of them gather with us at the Eucharist.  The parish hall of our beautiful but rather inflexible 125-year-old building is their Sunday school room.  When the adults come to coffee hour after the Eucharist, many of them make their way by the corner of the room to see what the children did that day.  What seems important in our parish is that no one individual, family or generation is singled out.   Even a few years ago when we had only one or two young adults attending regularly, members of the parish welcomed them and facilitated their participation without restriction or favoritism.

I want to note again that St. Mary's did not set out to attract new members of any particular generation.  We did work intentionally to make our parish visible within our neighborhood in a variety of ways.  A large and growing proportion of our neighborhood's residential population is in their 20s and 30s.  Our neighbors have found their way here and felt at home.

At diocesan meetings I've observed members of parishes located in towns where people like to retire expressing the concern that their churches don't have a "future" because they don't have large numbers of young families among their members.  They seem to lose sight of the fact that whether or not there will be a steady stream of infants for them to baptize, children nurtured in the faith by other congregations will eventually reach the age of 65 and live happily thereafter. 

A musician friend of mine who used to teach singing told me what he used to tell his students who expressed the desire to sing beautifully.  He said "Find what is beautiful within yourself, nurture and honor those parts of yourself and then sing."  Seven years ago, when the congregation of St. Mary's set out to rebuild its health, we looked at all of the things we had to offer to people who would want to be members of our church. We made ourselves ready and then offered them with an attitude of welcome and generosity.  A remarkable number of new members have accepted those gifts and joined us in offering them to others.

How Far Do You Reach When You Reach Out

There was an interesting item in my inbox this morning - a request from a photographer who is planning a photo shoot of a local semi-pro women's sports team.  I will not name the sport or the team, but will tell you that it involves skating, aggressive interactions between competitors and sexually provocative player attire.  The email message was a request to stage a photo shoot of the team in the nave of the church where I am rector.  It's a beautiful 125-year old neo-gothic building and we have made it available for photography in the past.  We've also refused a couple of requests.

A couple of years ago we were asked to make the space available for a film shoot.  It was, literally, a shoot. The scene envisioned by the director involved a confrontation in which a female character who flees to the church for refuge is pursued by an assailant who unleashes a hail of bullets and kills her in the center aisle of the church. That one was fairly straightforward.

The message I got today made me think twice.  I felt confident I should say no, but I wasn't exactly sure why.  Although the requested date for the photo shoot is the night before our annual meeting and the night of another big event that I need to attend, I might have tried to make it work.  I really want as many people in our community as possible to have a positive perception of our parish, of the Episcopal Church and of the church in general.  For me that involves challenging the perception that the church is an organization whose main purpose is to scold people for acting like human beings.  

The parish I serve is very generous in its outreach to the community, both in the resources it offers and the spirit in which it offers them.  Our congregation has kept calm and carried on in the presence of some extremely eccentric visitors at Sunday worship and various other events.  We do set limits, but they're generously devised and gently, albeit firmly enforced.   Our congregation is relatively young and we are located in a hip urban neighborhood populated by artists and young entrepreneurs.  The parish's ethos fits in with that of the neighborhood.   Part of our commitment to outreach involves opening the building for arts performances and community events and some of those occasionally push a more typical church's envelope of propriety.  Our congregation is at ease with the standards we have set.

 As a woman who became involved in competitive sports well into middle age (Title IX went into effect in the fall after I graduated from high school) I came to realize the value of athletic training and competition for women and girls at an age when I could truly understand it. 
My sport is tennis.  It has specific clothing that are associated with it.  To some extent that clothing is designed for ease of movement, facilitation of play, safety and care of the playing facilities.  It's also about looking attractive and short skirts are the norm for women players.   

The sport referenced in the email message I got this morning most likely has rules about the skates its players wear.  Beyond that, the players seem to create their own costumes.  I interpret their over-the-top provocativeness as an attempt to spoof our culture's hypersexual portrayals of women.  The irony of women playing a physically demanding and very aggressive sport attired as caricatures of "fallen women" is compelling, in a way.  But in a culture that continues to glorify violence against women, to undervalue their work and to constrain their choices, that irony and humor may be a luxury we cannot yet afford.

Here's my response to the email message:

Mr. ____, 

Thank you for your interest in using St. Mary's for a photo shoot on the evening of January 26.  It happens that that date falls the night before a major event at the church and I am reluctant to add to the calendar on that weekend.  Moreover, our staff will be occupied at another event that occurs on the evening of the 26th and it will be difficult to find someone to open the building.

Should you be inclined to choose a different date, I will comment that although I have great respect for the athletic skill and dedication to training of [your sport's] competitors, the sport in its contemporary form presents an outward image that portrays women in a manner distinctly different from the standards of St. Mary's. For that reason, even if the date you had selected were available on our calendar it would be difficult for me to give approval for the photo shoot in the church. 

I hope your team has a successful season this year.  I am a female athlete and I commend your efforts to promote women's sports in Kansas City.
The Rev'd Lauren Lyon
Rector

This is Only a Test

General Ordination Exams for Episcopal Church seminarians began today. The GOE is made up of different types of questions and administered over several days. When I took it in January, 1994 it ranged from a full-day set of take-home essays on a single, practical topic to a series of short answer questions administered in a timed, on-site setting.

 For students in their final year of study, GOEs await upon return from Christmas break. The night before I left for that break, I filled a carry-on bag with books, intent on studying during the time off. I determinedly dragged it downstairs to the door in preparation for my departure the following morning at which time I left it sitting in the entryway in the rush to get into the taxi. It awaited me there upon my return. It would have broken the springs on the taxi driving me to the airport. No one in her right mind would have tried to move it.

I didn't discover that I had left it behind until a day or two after I arrived home. I was a bride of about two weeks the previous August when I departed Kansas City for my final year at Yale Divinity School, leaving my new husband behind. My first two days at home did not allow time for much studying. But on day three of vacation, I went looking for the carry on bag and realized that it was in New Haven. After a couple of hours of intermittent fretting I came to appreciate having the excuse not to study.

Our 1994 GOEs started on Monday morning, the New Year holiday having fallen on the previous Saturday. I was one of four students living in the house where Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is located. It's an Episcopal Church Seminary that operates in conjunction with Yale's interdenominational seminary. The house is a three-story Victorian mansion about two blocks from the main Div School campus.  Four of us lived on the third floor in what had been the servants' rooms - think Downton Abbey but without the locked door between the men and the maids.  Everyone taking the exam was required to show up at the house each morning  to collect that day's questions.  On that first Monday we were sternly admonished to return the finished product by 5:00 p.m. on pain of dreadful but unspecified sanctions.  At that point we were sent forth to our respective homes, dorm rooms and work spaces to complete that day's set of questions.  We happy few who lived in the house had but to wander down a couple of flights of stairs to pick up the questions and climb back up to the third floor to meet our destiny.

That was an advantage during the legendary winter of 1993-94.  In the northeast the snow lay on the ground from the first week of December through the end of March.  A new batch of it fell at least once a week.  On January 4 it was knee high and the temperature was in single digits.  Being able to pick up and deliver test questions with a round trip of four flights of stairs was much better than clearing off the car and driving to and from home or walking down the hill from the residence halls on campus.

The test covered four days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday with Wednesday off.  It was snowing lightly when we woke on Friday and snow continued to fall all day long.  Outside my window I heard rasp of the snowplow every couple of hours and imagined the entryway of our house caked with the red sand that New Haven public works sprinkled over its icy streets.  At one minute 'til 5:00 I printed my answers and walked downstairs feeling glad it was over.  Classmates hung around the foyer after they had turned in their papers, comparing answers and making plans for the weekend.  We noticed that one guy was missing.

In 1994 cell phones were called car phones and few people had them.   A handful of people used email regularly, but they didn't carry it around with them.  We who lived in the house had our own land lines in our rooms and the staff had phones in their offices, but they were still on winter break.  The house itself really didn't have a phone.  There was no way for someone who was late delivering a paper to call in and explain why.  Half an hour past the deadline, our missing classmate came racing into the house, gasping for air, with his test papers in his hand.  He had parked his car on the street in front of his building and the snowplow had tossed up a berm of snow pinning it into the curb.  Snow had fallen all day and after half a dozen passes, there was a three-foot-high wall of snow between him and the test proctor.  He didn't realize what had happened until ten minutes before five when he stepped out the door.  He had run all the way from home.  The dreadful but unspecified sanctions were not invoked.  Someone drove him back to his place.

That evening the four of us who lived in the house happened all to be sitting in the common area between our respective rooms. The test was over; what was done was done.  Our last semester would begin the following Monday.   We started wondering out loud where we would all be a year from that night.  Now, nearly 19 years later, I think we're all somewhere that makes us happy and we're doing work we believe is worth doing.  Good luck and blessings, class of 2013.