Since I'm about the spam the newsfeeds of all the friends the Facebook algorithm sees fit with my comments from General Convention, it only seems fair that I say something about why this matters so much to me. To that end, four things are relevant: 1) why I'm a Christian; 2) why I belong to a church; 3) why I belong to an Episcopal church, 4) why the General Convention matters.
Why I'm a Christian
I was not raised in a particularly religious household. We were culturally Christian to the extent that we celebrated Christmas. At times we were faintly Quaker. But I was mostly atheist, sometimes emphatically so. My mother recalls me starting a conversation with my grandfather, a Lutheran minister, with the phrase, "If God exists...". I have no specific memory of that, but it's in character.
My atheism was pretty much intact until my junior year in college. My boyfriend, John, and I had driven from Indiana to Washington, DC for the final display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Among the events that weekend was a candlelight march from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Fred Phelps and his crew were stationed along the route. As we passed their contingent with the "God hates fags", etc. signs, I suddenly, intensely felt the love of God. It's hard to explain that experience, other than to say something broke into me, and I knew who it was.
I had never been able to make sense of Easter. As far as I was concerned, Jesus rising from the tomb held no more meaning than legions of monsters' surprise returns at the end of a horror movie. But I saw in his death and resurrection a reflection of my experience of coming out, still quite a fresh thing at that time in my life. For me coming out was not so much revealing myself as being made new. And I saw that in the resurrection, too.
In other words, I'm not a Christian despite being gay. I'm a Christian because I am gay.
Why I belong to a Church
In the beginning my motivations were simple. I needed someone to talk to about this. John was a sympathetic ear. He was a Catholic, with a somewhat specific obsession with the Latin mass. But we were both 20 or so. I was looking for a little more authority. I ended up finding that in two churches. I'll get to that later.
Over time my understanding has changed. As a new Christian, church was a resource to be able to put some words around what was going on. But why keep going? After you get the basics of the faith down, aren't you done?
It is hard to be a Christian alone. I was baptized in 1997, but from 2002-2005, I left the church. My career had gotten increasingly busy, I was doing night school to get my masters degree, and church was the thing to go. I didn't lose my faith, precisely, but it atrophied through inattention. I learned through this experience that with the rare exceptions of desert hermits and anchorites historically, and maybe the Carthusians today, we need each other to feed a spiritual life.
And finally we Christians need to do things together. We are told that the kingdom of God is near. The Revelation to John, despite its reputation as an account of the destruction of the earth, makes explicit near its conclusion that it is a renewal of the earth. The account in Revelation shows the descent of heaven to earth more or less as a deus ex machina event. But in the letter to the Hebrews we're told that we, the church, are the body of Christ. So if we're waiting around for God in heaven to fix things up, we're wasting our time. We might get the odd assist from on high, but God is here on earth in us.
And we have to do it together. Jesus is with us when two or three (or by extrapolation, more) are gathered in his name. Less so when we're alone. To put it another way, random acts of kindness ain't gonna cut it. Collective action is required.
That's why I belong to a church.
Why I Belong to the Episcopal Church
The Catholic church was a non-starter. The Quaker meeting in Bloomington was friendly, but I found it difficult to fit in there. I ended up really liking an ecumenical campus ministry. The ecumenical ministry was everything I could want. It had good music, a friendly congregation, and a freedom of inquiry that appealed to me. It was a model of a church accessible to newcomers.
By contrast the Episcopal Church in town was dark, had lurid blue carpet, multiple texts to juggle, people crossing themselves (which I'd never seen outside the Catholic church), and incomprehensible rules about when to stand, sit and kneel. I didn't like it very much my first time. But for some reason I went back. And then I went back again. And again. And again. Something about the ritual appealed to me
For some time I went to the 8am service at Trinity Episcopal Church and the 10am service at the Center for University Ministry. I don't really remember how it came up, but at some point one of my linguistics professors pointed out to me that the Episcopal church is one of only two churches named after its form of governance. Presbyterians are named after their governance by presbyteries (I'll confess to not being entirely certain what those are); Episcopalians are named after our governance by bishops.
I am generally quite cavelier about bishops. They are exactly like you and me. But in the Episcopal church as in the Catholic church and some other traditions, we have this concept called Apostolic Succession. Fancy words, but what it means is that Jesus laid his hands on his disciples in conferring their work in ministry, and then those disciples laid their hands on a next generation, and so continued passing the touch of Jesus down to our bishops today. There is something reassuring in that touch passed through time, ineffable but invaluable.
At the same time, the Episcopal church allows me to believe that the Apostolic Succession is valuable, there is a power-sharing arrangement between clergy and laity. In other words, bishops can confer the sacred touch of Jesus, and I can also still think they're wrong sometimes. Incidentally, bishops can think I'm wrong, too (and often, they're right).
I could go into lots of other details, but this is the basic character of the Episcopal church that I love: we can simultaneously hold both the mysterious blessings by which we're connected to Jesus without conflating the person who confers those blessings with Jesus himself.
Why General Convention Matters
Sometimes obviously important stuff happens at General Convention (or Episcopalooza, as my friend Amy lovingly calls it). This stuff about women in the clergy, or the role of gay people in the church, or name your hot-button issue, that all really matters. Some of these have been key issues in either drawing people to or pushing them from the Episcopal church.
We're not really dealing with any of those topics in a big way this year. There's a vote that will come up on same-sex unions that will probably get some attention, but that's not the big issue this time.
No, this year we're dealing with the wonky stuff of budgets and structure. And this is really important, because this goes back to my point about why I need to be in a church. There are some things we can only do together. Parishes and dioceses can take on projects of a certain size, but when it comes to really big stuff, well maybe it takes your whole damn denomination to do it.
Except that if you look at our budget today (as a national church, or to some extent the Diocese of Indianapolis), it looks more like we're trying to support a bureaucracy rather than the mission Jesus lays before us. And it's a big issue this year because the economy and the markets and demographics have not been kind. These realities are forcing us to change priorities. At the moment the instinct is to preserve the status quo, only a little less of it by making cuts to the budget.
But there's another way to look at this. "See, I am doing a new thing," says God to the prophet Isaiah. We can look at the numbers and be scared or look at the numbers and see a nudge from God.
That's why I'm excited about General Convention. Our resources are no longer sufficient to support the structure we have. So the old is being made new. Our church may not be on its best behavior over the next few days, because we're going to be arguing over money.
But we'll also be praying together every single day, celebrating communion in that weird ceremony where we say that bread and wine are actually as good as Jesus himself. So I have faith that as difficult as things might get, Jesus is with us as we work through this stuff. In my own small way, working in the convention print shop, I get to be part of that.
Why I'm a Christian
I was not raised in a particularly religious household. We were culturally Christian to the extent that we celebrated Christmas. At times we were faintly Quaker. But I was mostly atheist, sometimes emphatically so. My mother recalls me starting a conversation with my grandfather, a Lutheran minister, with the phrase, "If God exists...". I have no specific memory of that, but it's in character.
My atheism was pretty much intact until my junior year in college. My boyfriend, John, and I had driven from Indiana to Washington, DC for the final display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Among the events that weekend was a candlelight march from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Fred Phelps and his crew were stationed along the route. As we passed their contingent with the "God hates fags", etc. signs, I suddenly, intensely felt the love of God. It's hard to explain that experience, other than to say something broke into me, and I knew who it was.
I had never been able to make sense of Easter. As far as I was concerned, Jesus rising from the tomb held no more meaning than legions of monsters' surprise returns at the end of a horror movie. But I saw in his death and resurrection a reflection of my experience of coming out, still quite a fresh thing at that time in my life. For me coming out was not so much revealing myself as being made new. And I saw that in the resurrection, too.
In other words, I'm not a Christian despite being gay. I'm a Christian because I am gay.
Why I belong to a Church
In the beginning my motivations were simple. I needed someone to talk to about this. John was a sympathetic ear. He was a Catholic, with a somewhat specific obsession with the Latin mass. But we were both 20 or so. I was looking for a little more authority. I ended up finding that in two churches. I'll get to that later.
Over time my understanding has changed. As a new Christian, church was a resource to be able to put some words around what was going on. But why keep going? After you get the basics of the faith down, aren't you done?
It is hard to be a Christian alone. I was baptized in 1997, but from 2002-2005, I left the church. My career had gotten increasingly busy, I was doing night school to get my masters degree, and church was the thing to go. I didn't lose my faith, precisely, but it atrophied through inattention. I learned through this experience that with the rare exceptions of desert hermits and anchorites historically, and maybe the Carthusians today, we need each other to feed a spiritual life.
And finally we Christians need to do things together. We are told that the kingdom of God is near. The Revelation to John, despite its reputation as an account of the destruction of the earth, makes explicit near its conclusion that it is a renewal of the earth. The account in Revelation shows the descent of heaven to earth more or less as a deus ex machina event. But in the letter to the Hebrews we're told that we, the church, are the body of Christ. So if we're waiting around for God in heaven to fix things up, we're wasting our time. We might get the odd assist from on high, but God is here on earth in us.
And we have to do it together. Jesus is with us when two or three (or by extrapolation, more) are gathered in his name. Less so when we're alone. To put it another way, random acts of kindness ain't gonna cut it. Collective action is required.
That's why I belong to a church.
Why I Belong to the Episcopal Church
The Catholic church was a non-starter. The Quaker meeting in Bloomington was friendly, but I found it difficult to fit in there. I ended up really liking an ecumenical campus ministry. The ecumenical ministry was everything I could want. It had good music, a friendly congregation, and a freedom of inquiry that appealed to me. It was a model of a church accessible to newcomers.
By contrast the Episcopal Church in town was dark, had lurid blue carpet, multiple texts to juggle, people crossing themselves (which I'd never seen outside the Catholic church), and incomprehensible rules about when to stand, sit and kneel. I didn't like it very much my first time. But for some reason I went back. And then I went back again. And again. And again. Something about the ritual appealed to me
For some time I went to the 8am service at Trinity Episcopal Church and the 10am service at the Center for University Ministry. I don't really remember how it came up, but at some point one of my linguistics professors pointed out to me that the Episcopal church is one of only two churches named after its form of governance. Presbyterians are named after their governance by presbyteries (I'll confess to not being entirely certain what those are); Episcopalians are named after our governance by bishops.
I am generally quite cavelier about bishops. They are exactly like you and me. But in the Episcopal church as in the Catholic church and some other traditions, we have this concept called Apostolic Succession. Fancy words, but what it means is that Jesus laid his hands on his disciples in conferring their work in ministry, and then those disciples laid their hands on a next generation, and so continued passing the touch of Jesus down to our bishops today. There is something reassuring in that touch passed through time, ineffable but invaluable.
At the same time, the Episcopal church allows me to believe that the Apostolic Succession is valuable, there is a power-sharing arrangement between clergy and laity. In other words, bishops can confer the sacred touch of Jesus, and I can also still think they're wrong sometimes. Incidentally, bishops can think I'm wrong, too (and often, they're right).
I could go into lots of other details, but this is the basic character of the Episcopal church that I love: we can simultaneously hold both the mysterious blessings by which we're connected to Jesus without conflating the person who confers those blessings with Jesus himself.
Why General Convention Matters
Sometimes obviously important stuff happens at General Convention (or Episcopalooza, as my friend Amy lovingly calls it). This stuff about women in the clergy, or the role of gay people in the church, or name your hot-button issue, that all really matters. Some of these have been key issues in either drawing people to or pushing them from the Episcopal church.
We're not really dealing with any of those topics in a big way this year. There's a vote that will come up on same-sex unions that will probably get some attention, but that's not the big issue this time.
No, this year we're dealing with the wonky stuff of budgets and structure. And this is really important, because this goes back to my point about why I need to be in a church. There are some things we can only do together. Parishes and dioceses can take on projects of a certain size, but when it comes to really big stuff, well maybe it takes your whole damn denomination to do it.
Except that if you look at our budget today (as a national church, or to some extent the Diocese of Indianapolis), it looks more like we're trying to support a bureaucracy rather than the mission Jesus lays before us. And it's a big issue this year because the economy and the markets and demographics have not been kind. These realities are forcing us to change priorities. At the moment the instinct is to preserve the status quo, only a little less of it by making cuts to the budget.
But there's another way to look at this. "See, I am doing a new thing," says God to the prophet Isaiah. We can look at the numbers and be scared or look at the numbers and see a nudge from God.
That's why I'm excited about General Convention. Our resources are no longer sufficient to support the structure we have. So the old is being made new. Our church may not be on its best behavior over the next few days, because we're going to be arguing over money.
But we'll also be praying together every single day, celebrating communion in that weird ceremony where we say that bread and wine are actually as good as Jesus himself. So I have faith that as difficult as things might get, Jesus is with us as we work through this stuff. In my own small way, working in the convention print shop, I get to be part of that.
Thank you. I look forward to being at Convention vicariously through your blog.
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