A Fad

That emerging church stuff is just a fad.

the young priest said to me. This was right after I told him I had just come back from a conference. It was 2010 and a group of emergence Episcopalians sponsored a church planting conference called Episcopal Village. It was a clear nod to Emergent Village.

It struck me to be a short-sighted statement, revealing both ignorance and arrogance. But really, what I heard was:

You are wasting your time.

But we weren’t debating emergence theology or praxis. I was just telling him that I was exhausted after my flight, but jazzed about what I came back with.

And he would rather be a dick about it.

We’re doing it already

I’ve heard the fad line and it’s partner

Now that the emergent thing is over…

so many times. But the more pernicious, the more disturbing one for me is just as, if not more popular. It is to pretend that the mainline already is emergent.

We’re doing it already

they say – and

those evangelicals are finally waking up to the sacraments/ritual/liturgical practices

I have heard this refrain dozens of times. Almost always word-for-word. And it burns me. There is nothing emergent about 99% of Mainline churches: we are the epitome of institutional. We may have stuff that many people want, but most of these same people don’t want us. And they don’t want our institutions.

We may have sacraments, but we are hardly acting sacramental.

The emails

Back in my Blogspot days, I had a pretty straightforward blog name: Liberal Episcopalian. I ditched it as I left seminary because I didn’t want to cheese anyone in the congregation. But I would get these emails out of the blue from people looking for honest, authentic church: desperate for a real church with open-minded people. A church that looked and felt like church, both liturgically and emotionally. A church that would let them be themselves and help them be better than they are. A church that wasn’t stuck in the stone ages and didn’t want to condemn anyone back to them.

And they would say that they couldn’t find one. They looked, but didn’t think they really existed. The unicorn.

One email stuck out at me for a long time. It was a young man from the west coast. He grew up in the Anglican Church of Canada, but didn’t feel like he could go back to the Mainline. He argued that we don’t know how to say what we believe or if we even believe anything.

He said

I honestly don’t know what my priest believes. It’s all “some people say it’s this, but others say it’s that.” It doesn’t feel open, it feels indecisive.

He didn’t want to go conservative evangelical, though. They say what they believe, which is essential, but what they believe was repulsive.

Can I really go back to church?

He asked.

Because he wanted to come home, but home didn’t really feel much like church. Other than the atmospherics. It only looked like church.

The Unicorn

It seems that Rachel Held Evans is trying to show us the unicorn. Or that’s how many of our people will feel when they read her piece about Millennials and the cult of cool.

The Episcopal Church isn’t the unicorn. And for those of us in the church, Keith Anderson warns us not to think we are. Ours isn’t a perfect church. Far from it. It is extremely self-protective and it struggles to name its problems. It refuses to meet the people where we are at and stubbornly rejects the idea that we should proclaim the gospel. Our church loves that famous St. Francis quote about proclaiming the gospel, using words if necessary. We just haven’t realized that the words have been necessary for the last 30 years.

Tony Jones’ response to Evans’ piece highlights our biggest weakness, bigger than the hubris.

Before mainliners head out the door, they’d better figure out what the gospel is. Survey after study after poll has shown that American mainliners struggle to articulate what it is that they believe. The content of the faith has been lost among all this civil religion.

This is what that email spoke to a decade ago. The stuff Jack Good wrote about in his book The Dishonest Church. That the mainline stubbornly refuses to be for anything and to passionately teach the stuff we actually learn in seminary, rather than pass off the watered down deism we claim is Christianity. We struggle because we refuse to deal with our actual problems.

The Sacramental

Like Evans, I love the sacraments. I am constantly amazed and humbled by my relationship to them. Nothing snaps me to attention like standing behind the altar and inviting the people to lift their hearts to GOD. This awesome moment, this time in which we remember our salvation history and remember the Christ in us. And we pray as one for the spirit to be with us.

My people love Holy Eucharist like nobody’s business. We love to tell people how

we aren’t right if we don’t get communion each week.

I often feel that way.

But it isn’t that we do the Holy Eucharist or that the individual receives communion, but that the whole deal involves people and our bodies and we have to occupy the same space with one another and we have to look at each other. And we know, if we’ve been paying any attention at all, that if we look at the other person, we might just see Jesus looking back.

For a priest, the eye contact is the most awesome, terrifying moment. The thing that makes us tremble and want to make a run for the sacristy or inspires us to try to actually do the even harder stuff. The sitting with the dying, the teaching the kids with ADHD, the Bible Study that goes off the rails.

What could be

Rachel Held Evans has written a follow-up piece that deals with some of the stuff her critics spoke to. That the Episcopal Church isn’t perfect. That she was speaking of her experience, rather than for her generation. That not all evangelicals will get jazzed about the sacraments.

The second piece is good, but not as good. We need the controversy. We needed many of our people to get their hands smacked for thinking a screen and a projector will attract young people to a church full of old people. There are plenty of mainliners who mistakenly think that.

More than this however, is that we need to know that the problem isn’t just atmospherics. It isn’t just the way we do things or the style with which we do them. It isn’t the rock band or the rock-handed organ. It isn’t “traditional vs. contemporary” or “high vs. low” or “Catholic vs. Protestant” for our youngest generations, for those after the Baby Boomers. It isn’t about style alone.

It is about believing and saying what we believe.

It is about keeping up with scholarship and science and new breakthroughs in thought.

It is about being honest and actually trusting in the Spirit.

It is about having a real purpose for getting out of bed this week.

It is about fulfilling the promise that GOD transforms our lives, that GOD is at work in the world, and that GOD is not done with us – so we shouldn’t pretend like nothing in our lives is allowed to change.

It is about making this stuff essential to our lives.

It is about making the sacraments sacramental.

Living it

I often tell the story of going away to seminary thinking that I was just going to learn how to do things “right”. That there were methods and practices and that my job was to memorize them all so that I could come back, read a little Bible, hang out with people in the hospital, eat at some potlucks, and live the happy life of the Herbert-style pastor.

I was wrong, not just because I had the job all wrong, but I had the wrong idea about what church actually is.

We aren’t about doing the sacraments “right” because who we are and how we live informs the sacramental character of the sacraments themselves. How we approach the table, wash the newcomer, anoint the sick, bless the married, we do with a living-this-out experiential piece that informs how we practice the sacrament. What we believe and how we behave are intertwined. They are so tied up that they inform each other.

In other words, the style shouldn’t merely match the substance. They should be wedded: one flesh. They should change and manipulate the other.

That’s what bothers me most about style conversations in the church, because we nearly always have them without the substance half. We talk about the way we do things, but never speak to the why, other than to speak to attraction or evangelism or effectiveness. Never the theology or the gospel imperative. Never the messiness of how we feel when we participate sacramentally.

This whole conversation is about living and embodying church in community in honest ways which affirm the dignity of every human being and all of creation. It isn’t simply about hipness and cool and trends and wooing missing generations. It isn’t about throwing away traditions or making church unrecognizable to those already there. It isn’t about passing on morality and custom without also passing on spirituality and Christian hope.

Too many of our churches only look like church. What I know to be true is that we’re called to live like this matters. And make sure the church does too.