Your THRIVE team attended our second event last Saturday; a one day workshop with half of the parish teams meeting in Rockford from 8:30am to 1pm. It was a very early morning drive! Nevertheless, we came away with much to think about. The primary question of the day was: WHY? Why do we, the church, exist? And what are the many implications of even asking that question? All this is quite challenging, to say the least.
As I said in my sermon on Sunday morning (see the link below), the church – and by this, I mean Christianity as a whole – is in the middle of historic change. And it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. All we can see is the decline in membership, decrease in attendance, the absence of young families and children… just to name a few of the “trees.” In response, we (myself included) often find ourselves wringing our hands and wondering what to do to fix it.
All too often, fixing it tends to look like the way things used to be. We spin our wheels trying to recreate the church of an earlier time. When in fact, if we examined that church more closely, we would find some rather disturbing features: among them, segregation (by design), very limited roles for women, and particularly for us Episcopalians, a rather arrogant sense of our superiority (not that this last one has entirely disappeared). In short, nostalgia is short-sighted.
Here’s the bottom line: we can change, or we can die. But what do we mean by change? It does NOT mean losing our heritage and identity. Those gifts still have much to offer, including our sacramental worship and our increasing diversity. What remains is the first question: WHY? Why do we exist and what does it mean to be church?
These are questions I can’t answer, not by myself anyway. We will have to pray, listen, and discern those answers together, and it will take some time. Meanwhile, here’s what I do know: we can trust God. We can trust that God is in the changing. The Holy Spirit of the living God is with us as we faithfully live into these questions and seek to do God’s will.
I close with one of my favorite quotes: THE THING THAT MOST GETS IN THE WAY OF OUR NEXT EXPERIENCE OF GOD… IS OUR LAST EXPERIENCE OF GOD. God is always a surprise!
Faithfully,
