Staying Episcopal

1. When I went to college I was introduced to the Episcopal Church by Susan (later my wife). I had never thought seriously about the difference between the churches—my upbringing was Christianly serious, but more “mere Christianity” than “why-we’re-Presbyterian-and-not-Methodist.” After a period of study and prayer, I decided I should become a “catholic,” and I saw three options. There were the Orthodox, but they seemed inextricably tied to particular ethnicities (Greek, Russian, and so on). There were the Roman Catholics, but this was 1975 and they were in a banal wasteland of liturgical and doctrinal confusion. And there were the Episcopalians, who seemed to have a plausible claim to be the catholic church for English-speaking people. So I was confirmed, and in a few years married in the Episcopal Church, which also sent me to seminary and in which our children were baptized.

We move forward a generation. When our children were in college, they similarly faced the differences between the churches. For them, it did not seem plausible to consider the Episcopal Church at large as a catholic church; after their own study and prayer, they were confirmed as Roman Catholics.

This was painful: the division of the churches sliced right through the middle of our family. I joked (half-joked?) to a friend that it would have been easier if they had become atheists—at least, in that case, it would be right for us to be divided on Sunday morning. Yet I understood their decisions. If I were, today, to be looking for a catholic church, the manifest confusion and decline in what we now call TEC would not commend it to me.

Why then do I stay in the declining, once-mainline, Episcopal Church?

2. Here’s a first principle. Church unity, which we are commanded to long for, is not advanced by individuals moving from one ecclesial body to another.

Now, any individual person may become convinced in her conscience that she must leave one church for another. If so, then she should. But such a move will not advance church unity. It is, perhaps, partially analogous to a marital separation. It is possible that, in an extremity of need, one should leave one’s spouse. And if one should, then one should.

But along with this principle is the corollary: such a move should be made only rarely. I have felt that my college-age decision to become an Episcopalian was fundamentally determinative of who I am. Susan and I decided to marry each other, and so we remained till death us did part. I pray God that I remain his priest until I die, and his servant and friend for ever; to do that (on this side of death) calls for my stability in an ecclesial location, which, for me, is given by the Episcopal Church.

There is a subtle temptation (and a great danger) that whenever we move from one church to another we will have an unconscious motivation, namely, to find a church “that’s just like me.” The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion was once described to me as thousands of people getting together to ask a single question: “What would a church look like if a church looked like me?” That’s not quite right—a lot of the AAR isn’t interested in church. But you see the point?

I remember a man who married a parishioner of mine (this was decades ago). He had been in a non-denominational church, very small, perhaps only a dozen or two people on Sundays. And they split! He told me with a wry smile that it was over the use of styrofoam cups in coffee hour.

Here therefore is Austin’s rule. If you feel conscience-bound to join a different denomination, never join anything smaller. The danger of self-deception is too great. 

3. Now for some observations about the positive side of staying in a declining church. First, one may be called to be a missionary. If you think the church you are in is straying from Christian truth in what it teaches and/or what it does, consider whether God might be calling you to understand that church as a missionary field. Not all missionaries have to travel to find “unchurched” people. Our very churches are replete with “unchurched” folk.

This is a point especially relevant to clergy. We have been ordained for the sake of others, not for our own self-fulfillment. Again, consider an analogy to the marriage vow’s language of commitment “in sickness and in health.” We may feel our own church has turned in a grievously wrong direction, that its teaching is confused and its practices more shaped by secular trends than by enduring Christian truth. But nonetheless, one can find part of that truth still proclaimed, and some of those practices still largely intact. However extensive the sickness, there is still some health in there. And there are people, faithful and committed Christians, whom you, if you leave, will leave behind. Clergy especially may be called to stick around as missionaries and pastors.

Second, it is possible that the “illness” of one’s church is God’s punishment upon our past infidelity, and like Israel in exile, our call is to accept it and endure it. Ephraim Radner has made this point in countless ways; one shorter piece I remember was an article in the Anglican Theological Reviewwhose title tells it all: “Bad Bishops.” If we have a bad bishop, God’s call might be for us to recognize and accept that we deserve no better.

4. The deep reason why Christian unity would not be advanced if, say, tomorrow everyone became a Roman Catholic, is this: Church unity must be truly catholic, a big tent with a place for the valid charisms developed in the various divided churches.

This is part of the mystery of sin—it can lead to good things which we would never have known otherwise. Of course we should not sin that grace be multiplied! But nonetheless, in God’s economy of providence, our sins have led to grace.

This is true even more broadly of simple finitude and illness. Sign language is a beautiful and remarkable thing. But if there had never been deafness, it would never have been discovered, and that part of our brain (that way of language, different than all spoken languages) would have lain fallow, uncultivated. We should not wish for deafness, but we can celebrate the good that can come out of it.

We should not wish for Christian disunity, but we can properly celebrate the particular charisms that have arisen therein. One needs discernment: not everything the Episcopal Church has done is a true charism! But there are identifiable, characteristic Anglican/Episcopal strengths and gifts that should be received by a reunited Church. Four such charisms occur to me (hardly a complete list):

            1) Language for prayer that is dignified, exalted, biblically saturated, and resonates.

            2) A trust in the power of the Scriptures, Old and New Testament alike, to form a Christian people as they are read sequentially, day after day, morning and evening.

            3) Epistemic humility, which does not claim greater doctrinal precision than words can give, yet does not deny that truth can be known and some error, at least, can be recognized.

            4) A concern for government, for the social order as politically structured.

With regard to that last one, I remember noticing in ecumenical dialogue that while we Episcopalians tend to speak of “immigration,” Roman Catholics tend to speak of “migration.” Neither is wrong; both are necessary. But with our national and, in England, establishment tradition, we tend to have a special care to pray: “Lord, keep this nation under thy care.”

So a final reason for staying in the declining Episcopal Church is to preserve the particular gifts of the Anglican tradition so that, when all the churches come together, we may bring them as our gifts to the one altar of the Lord.

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Out & About. I am to preach at All Souls’ Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City on Sunday, November 3, and to teach classes on Ruth (at noon) and “What’s the good of being human” (at 6 p.m.) over the ensuing three days.

The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar (and the final seminar of 2019) will be on The Warden by Anthony Trollope. If you read the book it will make you happy and pensive, and in addition we’ll welcome to to speak in the seminar if you want to! Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, 6 to 7:30 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 17. (I promised to write about forgiveness this week. It will be next week, I hope. Please forgive me!)

These reflections were first published in the Covenant weblog of the Living Church.

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

As We Forgive Those

Earlier this year I had some posts on the Lord’s Prayer. The hard line is the one about trespasses, and we’re rather stuck there, it seems. It calls on us to acknowledge that we have trespasses, that sinning is something we do. Indeed, since we say the Lord’s Prayer several times a day—or at least every time we go to church (I can’t imagine a worship service that lacked it; Cranmer had it twice in the Eucharist, and it was also in Morning and Evening Prayer, so on a Sunday you’d be saying it four times). And every time, we are to say “our trespasses,” every time there are trespasses that we need God to forgive—which is to say, the prayer just assumes as a matter of course that we who pray it are going to be going on sinning.
    That’s not exactly a cheerful thought.
    Its severity is mitigated, however, by the thought that this is a prayer that Jesus taught us to say. And Jesus has no trespasses, doesn’t have any now, never had any, never will. Does Jesus pray his own prayer? If he does, what does it mean for him to ask “Our Father” to forgive his trespasses?
    It seems to mean one thing: that Jesus is always in solidarity with us. He prays right alongside us. You never say this prayer alone. When you say “our” Father, you’re not (only) putting yourself alongside all other Christians, you are also right there alongside Jesus.
    Every prayer, in fact, is glued onto Jesus’ being. We can’t pray alone. Even in the proverbial closet, in those secret prayers that no one around us knows about—even there, we are not alone. When we confess our most secret sins, Jesus is right beside us, saying the words with us, taking our selves upon himself.
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    But it doesn’t stop there. We ask for forgiveness, “as we forgive those”—those who? Those other folks. You know. The bad ones. The ones we don’t want. The ones who “have trespassed against us.”
    Here the prayer opens a door upon a healthy realism. There really are people who have sinned against us. A sin, of course, is not a mistake, an act done in ignorance; it is an offense, a harm of some sort, intended and brought upon us. This is the realism that at least some of the things that may have offended us really were offenses.
    So, realism, not denial. And then, the healthy response: forgiveness. We really have been offended and we really need to forgive. In the prayer, Jesus tells us to say that we have, or at least, to ask God to forgive us “as” we have forgiven.
    Should we despair? Who has really forgiven, in the way we want to be forgiven, in a godly way? And if we haven’t forgiven, does that mean that, in the prayer, we are not asking God to forgive us?
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    I will write next week about what forgiveness is. But here is a hopeful thought. If we fail to forgive, that itself is a trespass. And so when we say the prayer, we are asking forgiveness for it also! It’s something like this: “Forgive us our trespasses, including our failure to forgive those who have trespassed against us!” And the second half is then something like, “as we forgive those who have failed to forgive us for our trespasses against them!”
    It is precisely to save us from such unavoidable circularity that God has decisively cut through the mess of the world in Christ Jesus.
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    Out & About. My lecture on Ruth—with focus on what it says about the need to be married (and what that means for kinship, loyalty, and human flourishing today)—is, at least for now, available here. 
    I am to preach at All Souls’ in Oklahoma City on Sunday, November 3, and to teach classes on Ruth and “Christian anthropology” over the ensuing three days.
    The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on The Warden by Anthony Trollope, an absolute gem of a small novel, set in the 19th century fictional diocese of Barchester in the Church of England. If you have never read Trollope, you’ll find his prose to be delicious like Viennese whipped cream, but capable of heart-stabbing insight. In Dallas, at Church of the Incarnation, 6 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 17.

 

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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