More Howlingly Bad Liturgy

It's garbage like this that keeps me posting.

Courtesy of this thread at StandFirm, we have a series of Advent liturgies for Year C. You may read them here, if you wish:

• Advent 1


• Advent 2


• Advent 3

Advent 4 isn't up yet, but frankly, I'm not all that interested; it's probably just about as bad as the others.

Here's some points I observe:

• What is at the point where we should have a eucharistic prayer isn't a prayer at all. It barely manages to brush against orthodox liturgics by including the institution narrative, but God isn't addressed directly, and there's no epyclesis.


• There's no confession and hardly any prayer. The Lord's Prayer is made to substitute for the normal prayers, and it is repeated (in Maori) as the post-communion prayer. The only other prayer is the collect of the day, and even it isn't always a prayer. It's hardly worth remarking on the significance of omitting the confession during a penitential season.


• The Epistle reading is omitted. In pre-Protestant days it was the OT reading that was omitted; here it is kept, but there is no reading from the epistles. Why is this significant? Well, it ties into the omission of the confession: the epistles are the section which particularly contains readings concerning the life of the community, so it has all that nasty stuff about personal (and sexual) purity. The OT readings, however, especially at this time of the year, tend to be taken from the prophets; their warnings can be heard as directed outside the church walls, without threat to the assembled parishioners.


• There are lots of readings from non-Christians. Anne Frank, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lin Yutang... At least Helen Keller was baptized.


• The hymns are bowdlerized. Let's go to the opening hymn of Advent 1, whose last line should read: "Thou shalt reign, and Thou alone." And I hardly know where to begin with the horrible mess they've made of the sanctus. At least, to their credit, they have resisted the push to expunge the Father.


• They've dropped the creed. And thereby they've all but proclaimed their heterodoxy.

All of this is against a background of language which is vacuous, wordy, limp, and nice:

From the beginning, life has been shaped by despair, struggle, and triumph. Oppressive forces have time and again tried to destroy the hope of the marginalized and vulnerable. The forces of wealth and privilege, armies and theology, have beaten down upon the poor. Yet hope is never extinguished. When all seems lost the embers stir back into life, and the light of justice ignites again. For this we give deep and heartfelt thanks.

Well, that inspires me. It inspires me to find a church which, if it is filled with the wealthy and privileged--and what America east coast parish isn't?--at least pays lip service to some other hope besides the social justice which would put these mighty from their seats, and send these rich empty away. The notion that the people in the pews who say and hear these words might have something to repent of is kept at a vast distance. As one Joshua says, it's the perfect realization of H. Richard Niebuhr's summary of bad modernist theology:

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross."

This parish has a page explaining why they are doing this. And here's the first sentence: "St Matthew-in-the-City is attempting to step out of the box of the Book of Common Prayer into Liturgical Renewal." Well, yeah, and that's the end of common prayer. There's no "renewal" here, because it's all new-- well, it's the same old "new", but you get the idea. They can't pray with the rest of us, so in essence, they are schismatics, or revolutionaries. The obvious reason why they find the BCP a "box" is because, for all its latitude (and if I recollect correctly, the NZ version allows a lot more of that than 1979, which is saying something) it requires them to actually believe in stuff which they apparently reject, because otherwise, they would say it.

Such, apparently, is the doom of Anglicanism. No creed, no sin, no redemption; no order but hierarchy, and no faith, but in other enlightened people. We don't need renewal to bring us this; we need renewal to rid the church of this international apostasy.

Crunching the Red Book: 2007

Now that the 2007 Red Book numbers are out, it's time to apply the analysis I performed for the 2006 data. This year I've decided to make a longitudinal comparison for 2004-2007, the years for which data is available on-line.

What is most striking to me is the utter consistency of the numbers. The rates of activities per member (baptisms, marriages, etc.) vary but slightly from year to year, showing a slight decline overall in every category of about 10% over the period. The average rates are as follows:

Baptisms per member: 1.92%
Child: 1.69%
Adult: 0.22%
Receptions: 0.31%
Confirmations: 1.21%
Child: 0.55%
Adult: 0.65%
Marriages: 0.70%
Burials: 1.50%

As before, the rates are in proportion to each other. Burials are a bit more than twice marriages, and the latter is slightly less than child baptisms. The disturbing number, as before, is the departure rate. Baptisms plus receptions together are 50% greater than burials, and adding adult confirmations just makes it worse. Somewhere in excess of six thousand people appear to leave the Episcopal Church every year, or about 2.6% of the total membership; this contrasts with average net losses each year of about 1.9% of the membership.

So who is leaving? The conventional wisdom is that it happens soon after teens leave home. puzzling this out of the data is difficult. It's reasonable to assume that child baptisms roughly represent births to Episcopalian parents, and these happen at over the replacement rate at about 2.4 baptisms per marriage. (Note that there is an error possibility here, because of course not all Episcopalians marry within the church. I'm assuming for the moment that marriages that take people out of the church are balanced by marriages that bring people into the church; I'll account for that assumption in a moment.) Now, according to the CDC, about 10% of the population who survives to age 15 never marries. This is surprisingly consistent with the marriage to burial rate, although accounting for successive marriages would lead to a lower expected rate of burials to marriages. Another factor here is that people who are dying now were generally married a long time ago, mostly when the church was quite a bit larger. There actually should be a substantial excess of burials to marriages. Therefore there does seem to be a large outflow of people who have had children and then left. Probably the larger outflow is those that leave before marrying, but at the moment I haven't figured a way to puzzle this out of the data. One of the contributors to this rate is people who marry out of the church (e.g., to Catholics-- we generally would lose these marriages and the subsequent child baptisms to the Catholic church).

At any rate, the evidence is clear: poor retention is what is causing the church to decline.

2008: The Numbers

After a not particularly illuminating PR dance between KJS and Frank Lockwood, the 2008 stats have been released. See churchwide totals for 2004-2008 and breakdown by diocese for 2007 and 2008 if you like your numbers numeric; you can get graphs on individual parishes here, but they don't show specific numbers and the scale for ASA is too small.

Looking through the last shows a number of cases where the graph shows unchanged numbers for some years. A bit further investigation shows that, at least in some cases, the reason of these reports is that the parish no longer exists, generally because they've split off; the diocese apparently has simply repeated the parochial numbers from the last year before the split. These phantom parishes, if recorded accurately, would surely noticeably increase the reported rate of decline.

And that decline continues as before: membership is down 3% and ASA is down 3%, values which have obtained ever since Robinson's election and consecration. More noteworthy is that, after years of increases, P&P is also down. Moving on to the diocesan figures, the big story is the departure of over 75% of the Diocese of San Joaquin. The other three departing dioceses hadn't left in 2008, but next year's number will no doubt show substantial losses for those as well, not to mention the possibility the South Carolina and perhaps others may call it quits on ECUSA. ASA numbers are as usual quite depressing, with the only large increases being either foreign (see Haiti, the largest ECUSA diocese BTW) or tiny (Navaholand's 5.3% increase sounds good until you realize that the diocese's total ASA is about the same as the ASA of three median parishes), excepting a few southeastern cases.

Thus, the seemingly relentless decline continues: three percent a year, every year, since 2003, after a decade of stable numbers.

Spiked by the elves

So-- Sarah1 (who I believe to be Sarah Hey of StandFirm fame, though I of course could be wrong), dumps a load on me, and the T19 elves spike my response. Well, it's 2009, and I won't be censored so easily.

Here's her comment.

My response:

Which takes me to Sarah's first false assertion. I'll start by saying that she's changed the subject, or rather, that she has cast a bunch of people into the mix who are objectionable for reasons whose variety essentially belies her own thesis. Bennison, after all, is objectionable as much for the way he hid his brother as he is for his episcopal tyranny. Having seen several flaps about things our presiding bishop has said, I personally cannot penetrate her inarticulate pronouncements so far as to establish exactly how heretical her theology is. Chane-- well, on the one hand there was his "I will chastize you with scorpions" inaugural sermon; on the other hand I have heard that he has actually backed down from the confrontational stance with his conservative parishes that characterized Dixon's interregnum. So, I ask, where is the endorsement of Spong's systematic apostasy in any of this? If you want to claim that Jane Dixon endorsed it, give me a citation! In my hearing she has never said any such thing.

And if you you aren't interested in anyone listening, then you jolly well ought to stop jamming the airwaves by talking. What the hell-- who are you trying to save, anyway? It seems to me that you are only preaching to your own little faction and don't even care to increase its numbers. Yeah, there are a lot of dogged partisans out there, and you regularly volunteer (as in this response) to be numbered among them. Let's hit the wayback machine: WRT the possibility of Forrester getting his consents, you wrote: "This is TEC, remember. I think there will be a fine crew of Standing Committees and bishops who do not vote to confirm. But the vast majority of bishops and Standing Committees will do so . . . thus further demonstrating the thing we’ve all been talking about. You then predicted that he would get consents from 3/4s of the bishops, 2/3s at the least. Acto Frank Lockwood, he didn't even get a majority. So what does that mean? I take it at face value: bishops do not think or act as if the various issues are one integral piece.

Your hyperbole about dialogue between a communist and a libertarian exemplifies exactly how your rhetoric pollutes. Communists are ideologues, and libertarians (at least all the ones I have met) are ideologues; but not every Episcopalian is an ideologue, nor every cleric in this church. And even the ideologues are not always ideologues about everything in the same way.

The thing is, I knew Jane Dixon's sermons quite well, because I heard them every Sunday morning the last year or so that I was a parishioner at St. Philips, Laurel. I didn't really like her then, though I came to dislike the direction of the parish to the point where I bailed out. When she became bishop, and especially in her days of acting bishop after Haines's retirement, I might have commented that she was one of those bishops who put the "despot" in despota (EO joke there). But in all my Sundays of hearing her preach, I heard neither the Unitarianism of some clerics nor the Tillichian apostasy that is Spong's theology. She preached middle-of-the-road broad stuff.

This is one of the reasons why the reasserter schismatics are going to lose most of the church: they won't admit that both they and Spong-ite crazies are both small factions. Probably few Episcopalians have so rock-solid a theology as to make the schismatics happy, but I suspect that a majority can say the Nicene Creed without having to cross their fingers. Misrepresenting this just makes the critics of the current regime into a bunch of, well, right-wing, loudmouth, intolerant jerks.

And you don't get points in heaven for this, either, if that's what you're looking for.

Crone-ies Are Our Future

I don't recommend the StandFirm thread which called my attention to this. There is too much snark about the "simple country bishop", and the comments degenerate into argument about homosexuality which is not as snarky as the typical SF commentary, but which is not especially germane to the subject of the post.

That subject is the September newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. It's not surprising that it has a lot of material about General Convention, or that this material goes off about how inclusive the church is. One despairs of seeing a convention eucharist anywhere outside of, say, Ft. Worth where traditional vestments are worn and a solemn rite is used; apparently that's not celebratory enough, judging from the pictures. Pep rally liturgy doesn't include me, but we all know that a white college-educated married man who wants Rite II straight up and sky-high is not the guy they want to include. Some of the other features get plenty more snark from the SF folks than they deserve, particularly an article about children's bibles which begins with some snark of its own, but then goes on to suggest, well, editions from surprisingly orthodox sources-- did anyone expect someone from Mt. St. Alban to recommend a book published by Zondervan, never mind Adoremus?

But then we get to the "monthly meditation", and we find ourselves reading about "crones". Now, as Ms. Lanyi doesn't quite get around to admitting, "crone" as she uses it comes straight from the whole Wiccan-Gravesian "triple goddess" fantasy. One gets some sense of how things have fallen from the days when Florence King's south (of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen Fame) was terrorized by Dear Old Things, Rocks, and Dowagers (in her taxonomy), so that it can be suggested in this day that an older woman needs some sort of masonic ritual or some such thing to justify her exercise of whatever womanly power she has. And it's ironic that Ms. Lanyi, having just said that crones need a ritual that doesn't look like something pagan, then proceeds to set forth exactly that sort of ritual. For an Episcopalian, it isn't as though we don't have ample material of our own for such a thing. One can mine the Book of Occasional Services for rites for just about anything, and besides that, one can see between that and the BCP the basic Anglican skeleton for constructing such a rite. A versicle and response, a reading from apposite scripture (and it isn't as though there aren't scriptural models for older women), a psalm, invocation of the Holy Spirit...

Instead, what we get is a neo-pagan ritual addressed, more or less, to a different god. Inside of that is exactly what they world recommends in this age: a ritual of mutual self-affirmation. It seems to me that a genuinely powerful woman would dispense with this and do it the old-fashioned way: through sheer force of personality. On another level, I don't want to ridicule the Red Hat Society for what it really is, but it really ought to be admitted that "When I am old, I shall go out to lunch with a club of other women, all wearing red hats" really cuts the heart out of the poem. The sentiment is much the same, and it is once again the antithesis of taking up one's cross.

I would be more likely to dismiss this as an aberration if I had never seen the trial liturgies of the ongoing round of liturgical revision. They are dominated by the same borrowing from pagan sources, except that the borrowing is concealed by using scriptural texts which, in their liturgical context, are assigned the same readings that the neo-pagans and their new age fellow travellers assign to our scriptures. It's at this point that I turn into a 1979 traditionalist. I see no reason to accept liturgy which is constructed at the dictate of non- and often anti-Christian authorities. But there seems to be no stopping it. Once we get gay marriages dogmatized, it seems as though it will be impossible to subject this stuff to any kind of reasonable theological test.

She Who Must Be Ignored

Putting a title to this one was tough; at StandFirm they called it the Stupidest Anglican Idea Ever, but the competition for that is so intense that I'd hate to choose a winner.

Anyway, this is Katie Sherrod's idea:

Before giving up totally on the Anglican Communion, let's have all the men -- Rowan Williams, all the male Primates, all the male bishops, all the male priests, all the male laymen -- take a vow of silence on this issue for a year and let the women of the Anglican Communion work on reconciling us to one another.

Let's let the people -- women -- who really DO make up the largest numbers of Anglicans in the world work on finding a way we can all live together in love despite our differences.

Let's make IAWN the instrument of Communion.

Well, let's NOT.

First, not to put to fine a point on it, but as Greg Griffith at SF says, the folks at the International Anglican Women's Network seem to be the same kind of nutcases-- when they aren't the same nutcases-- who infest the Episcopal Church Office of Women's Ministries. That is, they are stuck pushing the same 1970s woo-woo womanist claptrap that suggested adding pagan/wiccan material to the liturgy. They are wildly unrepresentative of women in the communion as a whole; they don't even represent well the women in liberal churches like ECUSA.

Second, the notion that women can, by nature, run things better than men is an amusing conceit that is easily belied by middle school. Yes, perhaps the girls are better organized, but the back-biting and viciousness is if anything worse than that among the boys. The notion that a woman can do a man's job, but not vice versa, is old enough to appear in fairy tales, but it is, after all, sexist through and through. And when I look at the presiding bishop, her female role model seems to be Elizabeth I on a good day, or her sister Mary on a bad one. Meanwhile IAWN and OWM represent the gender-neutral conceit of liberal academics that the world would be perfect if ordered according to their flights of fancy.

If we're going to have women run things, though, I have some suggestions. Let Geralyn Wolf run ECUSA, and let's seat Fleming Rutledge in Cantuar's throne. And let's have the remaining All Saints sisters run the Office of Women's Ministries. That way we could have some real change.

ECUSA: The Not Thinking Church

One of the things that General Convention actually did (as opposed to the controversial resolutions, which didn't so much do anything as permit people to talk about whether they did or didn't do anything) was to pass the wretched kalendar changes put forth in "Holy Women, Holy Men". And if you want to understand ECUSA these days, you need to know that though this is taken from a hymn lyric, the source is in fact the emasculations of The Hymnal 1982. I imagine that one of the reasons it was picked was that "women" appears before "men".

I say this because reading the list of people they added to the kalendar reveals some profoundly questionable choices, and in particular leads to questions about the theology of even having commemorations. A fair number of those listed aren't Anglicans; several weren't even Christian. Three of them are Anglicans who crossed the Tiber. And then there's the collects, whose peculiarities wash over into the other set of supplemental liturgies brought before GC. As Dan Martins points out, the collects are highly adverse to the word "Lord". And a number of them ascribe lordship not to the Son, but to the Father. (They are also terribly written, but that's par for the course.)

Objection to this can be found all over the place. A friend of mine, John Robison, offers much the same critique. Yet this thing seems to have sailed through GC almost without consideration. Robison says at one point, "This [commemorating the atheist John Muir] is just one example of the "cool kids" making a decision and rolling with it." His next post discusses the "cool kids" further, in light of GC starting up eucharistic relations with the United Methodist Church and the failure of Forrester to gain consents. The latter is, I think, one of the most notable developments of late, because it indicates that, however weak, there is a core of orthodox belief about baptism and trinitarian theology. It is especially germane to the present point that objection to Forrester focused particularly on his tampering with the baptismal rite, as nearly every bishop and standing committee who gave a reason for withholding consent made that objection. Yet you would hardly know that from watching the output of GC; about the only orthodoxy-endorsing act was the bishops' reaffirmation of the virginity of the Theotokos. The UMC communion-sharing action simply ignores the differences in eucharistic theology between the two bodies, and while there are probably Episcopal priests out there who hold Zwinglian views (because there isn't any heresy you can't find in the church somewhere), by and large it seems to me that Episcopalians in this day and age hold to the high theory of substantial change embodied in the 1979 rites. Methodists, I gather, mostly do not. But it's what the "cool kids" want, so now we have it.

And that leads to Robison's central point: "Most matters of theological distinction are really rather unimportant to many in power in our Church. [....] Trivialities and feel good affirmations as well as sociology and political aphorisms have replaced the hard work of theology." I'd put it another way: the church does theology like a mob of Harvard undergraduates-- Harvard sophomores. Superficially well-informed, convinced of their own superiority to the point of considering criticism to be something akin to lèse majesté, insular, lazy, fond of a certain radicalism, and given to excusing all manner of coarse behavior among their own kind. So the Office of Women's Ministries puts forth a liturgy containing Old-Testament-condemned pagan practices, and their response upon being challenged about this is to go off on a completely (and ironically) irrelevant tangent about copyrights, when everyone else is wondering how a priest can defend being a druid on the side. And then the next liturgy they put out, once again, has verbiage that is conspicuously from pagan sources. Meanwhile the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music continues their decades-long campaign against God the Father, while dropping all sorts of theological novelties into the texts they want us to adopt. All of this is stuff to gladden the heart of an Ivy League academic (or even more so, one from the Seven Sisters), but it bespeaks a milieu that was passing from the University of Maryland College Park even in the days of my attendance there, thirty years ago. Yeah, we had our supply of radical feminists, but already they had a dated quality to them.

So this stuff comes onto the floor of GC, and rather than being picked over and sent back with a scathing rebuke, the, well, Harvard freshmen among the deputies and Harvard faculty among the bishops wave it on through. I mean, celebrating (and God, I am beginning to hate that word) Kepler and Copernicus in church is so cool! Well, perhaps the fight over homosexuality had them distracted. The next time around, when the homophobes have been more thoroughly routed, will they have that excuse? The next battle is plainly going to be over liturgical revision, and at present I don't think they're going to able to stand up to the "cool kids" who still think that clown masses are groovy and that the bible is so sexist and patriarchal and that having standards of faith is so oppressive. And thus, unless someone else rebels, we'll end up with a liturgy that is so "relevant" that the only thing it in't relevant to is religion.

VGR and the Numbers

Courtesy of GetReligion we have a NYT interview with V. Gene Robinson (breathlessly described as "Episcopalians’ First Openly Gay Bishop", as if he has never before given an interview) in which Robinson, well, not to put to fine a point on it, essentially lies through his teeth about the statistics of his diocese. Now, mostly he doesn't say anything that can't be absolutely pinned down as a lie, but when you look at the official statistics, they paint a completely different picture from the one he presents.

Let's start with the statement that "Our diocese grew by 3 percent last year." I don't know where he got that number, but it didn't come from Kirk Hadaway. Official church numbers for 2008 aren't out yet; 2007, according to the church, showed a 1.3% decline. Lest you think that is an abberation, let's review the numbers:

• 2002: 16,698 members
• 2003: 15,621 members
• 2004: 15,531 members
• 2005: 14,725 members
• 2006: 14,347 members
• 2007: 14,160 members

or if you prefer it in percentages:

• 2003: 6.4% decline
• 2004: 0.6% decline
• 2005: 5.2% decline
• 2006: 2.6% decline
• 2007: 1.3% decline

Even if you believe VGR's 2008 numbers, there is a cumulative loss of 2100 members since 2002, or about 12.7% of membership; using the 2007 numbers gives a loss of 2500 members, or about 15% decline. Oh and when VGR said, "There are 15,000 people in the diocese of New Hampshire," he was not telling the truth either. Membership in the diocese hasn't been that high since 2004.

But on to the spin:

Q: Who are you pulling in?

A: We have received so many Roman Catholics and young families, particularly families who are saying, “We don’t want to raise our daughters in a church that doesn’t value young people in our church.”

Again, not to put to fine a point on it, but this isn't what the numbers say. Robinson's earlier statement in the interview that there was only one parish he had to close down may be true, but it's also misleading: 49 parishes and missions amounts to a loss of 280 members per parish from 2002 to 2007, or about nine whole parishes. He may not have rebellious priests and vestries, but he has plenty of departing laymen, far more than enough to offset the supposed RC influx. The fantasy that disaffected Catholics are going to pour into our more inclusive church is simple wishful thinking; four decades past Humanae Vitae, and it still hasn't materialized. Looking at that, and John Kerry, and Catholic Europe, I'm inclined to postulate that at this late date, Catholics have become adept at combining papal allegiance with routine disobedience. Perhaps having to sing all four verses of a hymn is a big turnoff. But the fact is that nobody really knows, that I can tell. Statistics on these conversions simply do not seem to exist.

What is real, by contrast, is the steady decline, year after year; the last year in which the church grew was in 2000, and since then the domestic dioceses have lost 213,000 members, or 9.2% of the 2000 total. And the 2007 membership of the four seceding dioceses amounts to about 2% of the domestic total, so it seems likely that 2008's numbers, when they are released, will show continuing losses.

Addendum: I don't mean to imply here that Robinson, with malice aforethought, stated what he knew to be false. There is nothing here that could not be attributed sloppy math on the one hand or unreasonably rosy thinking on the other. The important point in the end is that the bishop's demographic statements cannot be trusted, whether he is lying to us, lying to himself, or he just can't do math.

POSTSCRIPT

Well, the real numbers are out, and diocesan numbers can be found here. There is some fudge/smudge between Robinson's numbers and the official tallies. Membership grew by 2.4%, not 3%; there's a little lily-gilding in that, though at least the basic fact of growth panned out. The five year loss is 7.2%. A bit more disquieting is that ASA continued to decline, with a loss of 1.1% from 2007. Calling 14,501 members "15 thousand" is really pushing the limits of rounding up, but not technically inaccurate.

So my doubt on Robinson's expression of vigor must be tempered. He does have more members, though not quite so many (either by percentage or in toto) as his round numbers would lead one to believe. On the other hand, the drop in attendance is as discouraging as ever.

I'll have reactions to the 2008 numbers in a later post.

Forrester Disappointment

If Frank Lockwood's tallies are to be believed, Thew Forrester is going to fail to get the necessary consents, and will not be the next bishop of Upper Michigan. Anyone who has followed this is probably aware of how he was first presented as a Buddhist, and how his "election" consisted of him being presented as the sole candidate. These oddities bothered some people, but what really brought him down was his liturgical innovations, which were found out by the blogosphere and broadcast widely as a result. Standing committees and bishops alike referred to his alterations to the baptismal liturgy in refusing to consent. Even dioceses generally considered to be pretty liberal and theologically adventurous (e.g., California) went against him.

It's not over until the clock runs out, apparently, but at this point it appears that without some considerable vote-switching, he will be turned down. And thus the complaining has gotten underway in earnest, as represented by a letter Lockwood received from a pro-Forrester standing committee member. Consider the following excerpt:

As you might imagine, the episode concerning Northern Michigan has sent a chill up the spines of a few folks in the Episcopal Church. What if, at the conclusion of our grueling, intensive & expensive process, a majority of bishops and standing committees decide they don’t like our bishop-elect? How do you think that realistic fear will affect search committees around the nation?? As someone recently said… “Only the bland need apply.”

Well, I don't think it's going to work out quite that way. What's going to happen, more likely, is that nominees are going to take care not to leave a paper/webpage trail, so as to avoid being borked. Forrester's big problem wasn't so much that he was vetted for theology, but that he could be so vetted on the basis of what people could find on the net. In the future, I expect that more nominees are going to look, at least electronically, like David Souter than Bork; but they won't have to be "bland". They just can't leave anything lying around that testifies to their heresies.

And that's the other point. We've finally reached a point where we can identify some of what is in Tennis's "core theology". Yes, it may put a chill up a few spines, but for most of those so affected, it's an overreaction. It does not necessarily signal rejection of the largely Lord-free language of the proposed additions to the Kalendar, for example. It certainly doesn't signal a change of direction on homosexuality, for the ACNA schismatics have surely put paid to that. Really, all that is being demanded is that a bishop-elect believes what he or she says in church on Sunday. That may be beyond the high church Unitarians, but really, it shouldn't be that tough to find candidates who can meet that standard. And it's only reasonable to expect that representatives of an organization actually hold to its tenets.

Atheists Considered Tedious

In the Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Allen writes of atheists:

I can't stand atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores.

How very, very true.

Second Search Committee

In acomment to this post from Mad Priest, Terry Martin says:

The idea that the entire Church...or for that matter the entire Communion...will function as a second search committee is absurd, imo. If the diocese elected him, and the process was canonically correct, then consents should be given.

Well, nonsense. Why even have a consent process anyway? And if the process to elect Mark Lawrence the first was correct, why object to his consecration? Ah, but the difference in the reasoning is entirely revealing, and never mind on which side of That Issue the two candidates were thought to stand. The stated reason for objecting Lawrence, one may recall, was that he was not sufficiently convincing in stating that he would not try to take his diocese out of the denomination. The objections to Forrester are mostly theological, though the process under which he was elected (and I am not the first to observer that it looks more like a self-appointment than anything else) has also come under criticism. A lot of bishops apparently don't believe that Forrester believes what the BCP rites teach about baptism, among other issues.

The canons do not in fact give any grounds at all for consenting or not. Historically, the last time someone really failed (skipping over Lawrence, whose first pass was denied on a procedural pretext) was DeKoven, and the objections to him were decidedly theological. So as far as precedent is concerned, there is ample, and never mind whether DeKoven should have been elevated.

And since there is a consent process, it seems self-evident that the other dioceses are expected to review what the electing diocese has done. Such checks-and-balances structures are all over Episcopal Church polity; else the House of Bishops would have led us into the Unitarian wasteland long ago. And the nasty issue at the moment, of course, is that there is in fact a great deal of well-deserved distrust about the work of search committees. The liberal institutionalists are afraid of more attempts to take dioceses out of the church; the theological conservatives, well, don't want any more heretics. The not-entirely-a-surprise here is that, on some important core issues, there are a lot more "conservatives" than anyone banked on, and that a lot of the social liberals aren't going to go along with someone whose baptismal theology goes against the prayer book, not to mention 1700 years of doctrine on the matter.

This awakening of resistance is troubling all around. It's bad for the GAFCONites, because it puts paid to the lie that the choice is between them and the Spong-ite Unitarians. It's bad for the radicals because they've counted on being allowed to have their way as a sort of theological courtesy. But maybe, just maybe, it's good for the church.

(Hat tip to Lisa Fox for calling attention to this.)

Bad Theology Breeds Bad Verse

From Peter Ould we have this timeless new hymn sung at the ACC opener:

Lord of our diversity,
unite us all, we pray;
welcome us to fellowship
in your inclusive way.

It goes on like that for four more verses, but in the interests of fair use and reader sanity, I think we can stop at one.

What's particularly awful is that they decided to sing this to the tune of the Ode to Joy. As numerous people have pointed out, the meters aren't the same: this thing is 7.6.7.6, and the Ode is 8.7.8.7D. A check through the online metrical indices shows that 7.6.7.6 tunes are almost entirely iambic, whereas this one starts off trochaic; but then it's iambic on the second line. The only tune I found that fit it at all was the first part of Royal Oak (used for the refrain of "All Things Bright and Beautiful"), and even that is a little forced. Also, dancing around in a circle, holding hands, perhaps does not set the proper tone.

But then again, perhaps it does. Now, even Horatius Bonar didn't hit one out of the park every time; still, this is doggerel at best. And when you think about it, the sentiment is pathetic. Honestly, it sounds like something one would sing of and for kindergarten. Meanwhile both sides are praying, "Lord, let's get this fight over with." Lucky for them, they're C of E.

It's Miraculously Delicious!

BigIdea's daft hagiography of St. Patrick:

Bishop Epting on "'Open' Communion"

From here:

The point being, we have ecumenical covenants and commitments that we have made over the last forty or fifty years which are predicated on our commitment to certain basic sacramental practices. When these practices involve the most basic sacrament which unites all Christians together, regardless of our other differences, surely we run the risk of being considered unreliable ecumenical partners when we make these changes with virtually no theological conversation among ourselves and certainly none with our ecumenical partners.

And, of course, any priest who formally and publicly invites the un-baptized to Holy Communion is in direct violation of canon law and subject to discipline for that.

But, hey, who cares about that, right?

Well, yeah-- who cares? I mean, canons are only for the bad guys, like the renegade dioceses and parishes. The "radical" in Radical Inclusion means not having to bother with rules, right?

I share Bishop Eppings's skepticism over how genuinely radical this inclusion is. This isn't about hospitality to the genuinely religiously hungry, for they as a rule can understand that there are some things which are reserved to the initiated. What it does instead is open the door to those who profane the sacrament by not caring about it at all, or those who profane it by reworking it in their own minds into whatever fits their private spirituality. On the other side, those who can read scripture or who are aware of the ancient tradition of the church may well be put off by being told to communion with unbelievers.

What particularly bothers me about the latter is that the tinge of being deliberately offensive has increasingly colored the liberal side, to the point of an increasingly conspicuous hypocrisy. How can you tell that you're being radical? Because someone complains. Therefore, you aren't truly radical unless you're offending someone. On that level, "radical inclusion" is an impossibility, because offending people isn't inclusion. Well, okay, I suppose one can try to wash over this this by saying one can't include people who don't want to be included. But still, there's that nagging need to have people to offend. In practice, the radicals of ECUSA will always have those nasty "fundamentalists", which increasingly means no more than "anyone with a real theology", to set themselves against. But the problem then becomes that doing any real theology becomes impossible, because having theological commitments leads to exclusions. And it's very obvious that the "inclusionists" have such commitments, and that they extend beyond a general inclusion into some very specific inclusions. And it's also very obvious that they are basically having not only to stop reading scripture before they get to the Letter of Paul to the Romans, but also to skip over some things that Jesus is quoted as saying in the gospels. So now the exclusions extend very much into making sure the power structures of the church don't express these contrary-but-scriptural expressions of exclusivity. And that leads us back into the old paradox of rigid latitude that has been a marker of the powerful liberals for a very long time.

And pretty soon, in the interest of not offending, the creed has to be put on the shelf, and indeed, practically anything except that specific set of inclusion causes has to be jettisoned. And then, why bother calling us Christian?

Two Tales of a City

Dan Martins writes about the division of Stockton, California between the two competing Anglican dioceses in Two Tales of a City.

I would particularly call attention to his response to Sarah. One of the conceits of the puritan faction is that ECUSA is (except for a few faithful parishes and dioceses) composed of licentious Unitarians. There are parishes like that, of course, and dioceses where the bishop and his staff are like that. But most of the sexually-obsessed liberals aren't Unitarians, and in amongst the liberal command posts and conservative outposts in those dioceses, there are a lots of parishes where the rector doesn't constantly make coded sermons on inclusiveness, and where those who have any notion about the Unitarians make jokes about how the UUs pray "to who it may concern."

One of the not-too-well-concealed issues in the current program of departures is how it's being a bit of an evangelical triumph. While I'm still wondering how the Anglo-Catholics fit into this, it seems increasingly the case that the GAFCONites etc. don't particularly care that they keep approaching the issue of separation in a manner which is repugnant to the middle-of-the-road, if not bordering on slander. The result of the hyperbole about the character of the church is that the people in the middle don't believe the GFACONite/ACMA/etc. crowd, and they do believe the liberal hierarchy's accusations about the schismatic intent of their opponents because the accusations, well, appear to be true. The one group that the "evangelicals" don't really want to evangelize effectively are their own fellow churchmen.

Today's Featured Article

From Wikipedia:

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) was a leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI.

Slogan Busing

Our friends at GetReligion have alerted us to the contest the Guardian ran in response to the atheist bus slogan campaign. So here I have a few:


One for my daughter:


And finally, with apologies to Eddie Izzard:

And Another Thing Which Never Changes

William Reed Huntington writing in 1891 on Popular Misconceptions of the Episcopal Church

Another Reason not to Take Libertarians Seriously

Lew Rockwell on Anglicans:

There have been many arguments made against [Rowan Williams], but now his critics in Africa especially are making a libertarian one: that while the Pope is chosen by his private peers, the Anglican leader is chosen by the State.

Yes-- and what a disappointment that has turned out to be. Williams was plainly picked to be the man to safely lead the church into the pleasantly liberal future. Instead, he has forsworn liberal advocacy entirely, angering everyone who wants Canterbury to be a bully pulpit. Politicians do not always get the people they want in these appointments, as one saw in the Warren and Burger courts, to take American examples.

And as far as Anglican origins are concerned, it comes back to the same issue: the papacy of the time did not see itself as in any way distinct from politics. I shied from saying "state", as the development of such an entity was a feature of the era. But in any case the separation of the English church was not simply an act of Henrican willfulness, nor of theological innovation, but also a reaction to the manifest political and secular corruption of the papacy. Its current relative purity is a direct result of the forced powerlessness which its excesses brought upon itself.

Augustine's throne confers even less power than Peter's; but the African notion that Parliament stands in power above it is an argument of convenience. The GAFCONites are angry at Williams because he refuses to simply hand over governance of the church to their junta; but not only is the communion at stake, but his own church as well. The recent developments at General Synod had an ugly, American color to them. The Church of England has to be saved from the same forces that are destroying ECUSA. Williams is plainly not Parliament's agent; he represents a genuinely Anglican position that the GAFCONites assail in their rush to purity.

And Rockwell's remarks are a classic example of the failure of libertarians to understand how pervasive power is. It is anyone's guess who would have been chosen had the question been given to the English bishops rather than to Tony Blair; but Cantuar's meager authority in the communion was given to him by the communion, not by Parliament. Rockwell is apparently willing to take the GAFCONite complaints at face value, because they fit into his political theories; that is all.

The Buddha Which Can Be Eaten Is Not the True Buddha

If you meet the Buddha on your plate,


EAT HIM!

(yes, these are cupcakes)

A Trinity Sermon

Yesterday, I gave my first "sermon" at church, more or less as follows:

How many of you have heard a Trinity Sunday sermon that began, “This is a Sunday about a doctrine”? Well, you can relax a little, for I'm not going to attempt to explain the doctrine of the trinity to you. That's rather the point, after all: the trinity is a mystery, and in the end, beyond our understanding. So I will leave aside the visual aids and analogies: no shamrocks, no diagrams, no icons. This Sunday, the mystery will remain a mystery.

The other Sundays of the year, we largely look at Jesus. In Advent, we look to his coming; at Christmas, his birth; during Epiphany, his manifestation of God in his life, and so on up to Ascension Day. The Holy Spirit gets a Sunday at Pentecost, and then starting the Sunday after this, we spend the rest of the church year considering Jesus' teachings. But today, we look at God Himself, and not in time, but for all time.

Now of late, denunciads against religion have been running off the presses again. I personally was cured of reading these things back when I had to read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for a philosophy of religion course. I found it unbearably sophomoric, and the latest examples seem more of the same. A lot of them seem to get really no further than the observation that people do evil in the name of religion, and I think that for a Christian, this is not a remarkable observation. But to stay on the subject, the picture of God that appears in these books is hardly better than a caricature of the image of an angry old tyrant on a throne. Their “god” is too small.

In today's lesson from Genesis, by contrast, we see God as he is very, very large: the creator of the universe. This morning I read that there are thought to be 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That's big-- unimaginably big. And yet the old medieval image of God holding the universe in one hand and measuring it with the other is closer to the truth. “The heavens declare the glory of God”, it says in Psalm 19, and considering how big we believe the heavens to be, that's a lot of glory. We do not fully appreciate the scope of the divine architecture. And yet, the image of the great tyrant architect troubles some. The theologian Paul Tillich preferred the image of God as the “ground of being”, an image I have never found adequate, being too close to the pantheistic belief that God is simply the sum of all existence. For all that, it is better than the deistic image of the divine watchmaker, who simply starts things going and then steps away from creation; but it neglects the divine transcendence, reducing God to the foundation of the building, not the builder himself.

And it solves a problem which I think we no longer find very pressing. Yes, we believe that God is immanent in this place. He made himself manifest in the person of Jesus, and he manifests himself in the church and in the sacraments Her ministers perform. After two thousand years, we are comfortable with talking to God wherever we are and believing that he is there, and we accept that He may take up a seat in our hearts and minds and souls. The notion that God underlies all existence is comfortable to modern minds, but a transcendent God who is not only down here, but out there-- that has become difficult. The Anglican theologian Robert Farrar Capon, whom I first came upon talking about the revelation of God in cooking, also wrote that the Old Testament images of God reacting in wrath and raining down special effects on the world at least have the advantage of showing God as something active and involved in the universe. But often, it seems, men prefer their special effects in the movies. God parts the Red Sea, but it is only trick photography. God sends down fire upon the Nazis who have defiled his ark, but it is only model work. God raises Jesus from the dead, but of course the actor never died. The world looks at the screen, and knows that such things only happen in the movies.

And is it not so? These days, we do not see the special effects God, the God who, it is said in the Revelation, will pour out the seven bowls of wrath upon the earth. If God is acting in our lives, for the most part it is subtle, secret, and often in silence. Often we can only tell after the fact that He has touched us. Remember some weeks back how the disciples in Emmaus did not recognize Jesus until after he had broken bread with them? That is how, most of the time, it is with us. Vague spirituality and frank unbelief come easily to modern people; but belief in a God of power and divine will do not. Saying that a hurricane or earthquake is like the wrath of God has become an archaicism. The god of the world has become small to the point of vanishing in mist; there are very many who believe that god is present, but that he doesn't doing anything more than make people feel good.

And who should worship such a triviality? It would be like worshipping the comforter on one's bed, or a teddy bear. We are moved to worship the awesome, the God whose full presence is terrifyingly unbearable. In Isaiah, the angels hide their faces from His presence; in Exodus, God will show only his back to Moses, but not His face. When the temple in Jerusalem is consecrated, the glory of the Lord settles on it, and the priests cannot enter it to minister; and on the mountain, when Jesus is transfigured, the three disciples are confounded. We, gathered here, have not seen these things; but if we remember them, if we listen to scripture and commit these things to our hearts, we can keep the taste of the God in our mouths and the fear of God in our hearts.

So I'm almost to the end, and I've hardly mentioned the Trinity. And yet it too is a scandal, because the complexity it hints at in God is also offensive to many. The picture of the perfect, all-sufficient God affords to many no room for three persons unified in one God. Judaism could not accept it; Islam rejects it. In our history the Unitarians turned away from the doctrine. And yet, for today, I point to it as the sign of God's transcendence. It is not something we could work out for ourselves, save that scripture testifies to it. Monotheism: that we can grasp; a pagan pantheon of gods and spirits for this and that principle: that we can see devised in myriad places and manners. But a god who is both unified and divided: that we had to be taught, and that we have to remember-- just as we remember the titanic acts of God, and his creation of this universe whose wonders we never seem to reach the end of. So today we are taught by Jesus himself, that we baptize not just in the name of God, or of Christ, but in the Threefold Name.

The mighty God of history is a God whose story must be retold to each generation. Indeed, remembrance is the central act of our worship. In a short time, the priest will take up the bread and wine, and will recall Jesus' words at the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.” The church is assembled in recollection not only of the divine promises, but of the divine's mighty acts. So let us remember our faith, and remember to worship the immanent and transcendent, triune God— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— forever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

The Privileged Oppressed Are Heard From Again

Back in December, it was the gay black Harvard theologian. This time (courtesy of TitusOneNine) it's the female Maori dean of a college in New Zealand. Back when KJS was elevated to presiding bishop, I wrote that "[a]t least one of those symbols is positive by anyone's standards: no longer need I suffer self-indulgent hand-wringing about the need for further empowerment of women in the church." And here we have a powerful female officially-certified member of the establishment wringing her hands about female empowerment. When are these people going to catch on to the irony (not to say self-parody) of their situations?

Which leads immediately to the other irony: that the communion-level flap and the resistance to covenanting is manifestly about making sure that those third world bishops in Africa, South America, and East Asia do not get any power over the rich, self-satisfied, enlightened first world. In an earlier decade, this would have been called "racist". Whether it is truly thus is for others to debate, but the elitism is unmistakable and blatant.

In saying this, I would not belittle the real suffering of any particular woman-- or man, for that matter. Real oppression, real privation, real suffering are all easy to find, in past or present. But university professors and college deans are not oppressed, and do not suffer desperate want, and do not risk bodily harm simply by showing up for work. It is unseemly that they summon up those grim prospects in defense of their own license and power.

Is the Creed Sectarian?

Over at Sarx Huw has edited together Richard Fabian's rationale for omitting the Nicene Creed from the liturgy used at St. Gregory of Nyssa. My reaction to this explanation is turning out to be not especially positive, I'm afraid.

The central word in Fabian's explanation is "sectarian". It's a word which is pejorative to the point of prompting the obvious question: What exactly are the sects? Well, this rather over the top remark gives a hint:

I advise ordinands that if they must use the “Nicene” Creed in their parishes, they might march about waving American and Episcopal Church flags, while their church wardens tear up photographs of the Mormon Tabernacle: these gestures would express the custom’s fundamental spirit, and employ beloved Episcopalian paraphernalia lately fallen into disuse.

When I was in high school, we used to process the flags in and out, but I think that was mostly to soak up three more acolytes, not necessarily to make some sort of statement. It's the Mormon Tabernacle, though, that's the phrase to note. The Mormons are certainly among the excluded when put to the test of the Creed, and so are the JWs, and the Unitarians. Officially, though, that's about it. Oh, and the Orthodox, because of the filioque. But if we were to take that clause out, one suspects that the Catholics would object, so it's rather a "can't win" situation.

Meanwhile, in the irony department, the Episcopal Church is about to be converted into a sect of Anglicanism. There's more than one way to be sectarian, after all, and one of those ways is to break faith with the whole. And one of the American church's persistent problems is that there are clerics and even bishops who dissent from the Creed. We cannot, of course, reduce the sectarian walls between us and either the Mormons or the JWs, so there's no point really in trying. And there's no real reason to, unless you want to believe that it doesn't make any difference that the dogmas of those sects are in blatant contradiction to the Creed-- and to each other.

I'm not a believer in the theory that one can root around in the history of a practice and apply that history directly to the present. In particular, I do not agree that one can apply the meaning of the remote past as if it were intended in the present; that meaning must be found in the present, independently of the past. And it seems to me that the main power of the Creed in the present is unitive, not sectarian. The vast bulk of Christianity holds that it does matter what one believes about Jesus; repeating the Creed each week can be taken as an act of solidarity.

I'm not going to say that omitting the creed is in some way invalidating, and I'm not going to step up to the question of how well it fits in liturgically. And I'm not going to condemn the Gregorians outright for omitting it. But I wouldn't do it, and I would be uncomfortable at a parish were it was always omitted.

Crunching the Red Book: 2006

So today the 2006 red book numbers are out, and everyone has to do the appropriate posturing.

Looking at 2005, and considering domestic dioceses only, we see immediately a decline of 50,000 in active baptized members, and a decline of 22,000 in Average Sunday Attendance (ASA). That works out to a 2% decline in the former, and a 3% decline in the latter. Not good, but I suppose it could be worse. ASA/parish went from 110 to 108, a 2% decline.

When we look at the other numbers, however, things start to look really bleak. Paradoxically, it's because the other numbers are good. Baptisms outnumbered funerals by about 8,000; adding baptisms to receptions gives a net gain of about 15,000 over burials. And when one includes adult confirmations (many of which are for converts from other denominations), the gain may be as much as 29,000. (I'm ignoring child confirmations, but surely many of these can also be counted as gains in membership.)

So why is this bad? Well, because of that 50,000 member decline. That decline is caused by people leaving the church; so putting it all together, it seems that somewhere between 66,000 and 80,000 members left. That's 3% to 3.5% of the membership. Forget all the mythology about ECUSA dying off; the problem isn't that people are getting old, but that they don't want to be Episcopalians any more. And that suggests that we need to take a stronger look at retention. Classically, the churches saw growth in terms of evangelizing, and took child baptism for granted. As far as the latter is concerned, child baptisms outnumbered burials by a significant margin. But departures outnumbered burials by at least two to one, and outnumbered conversions by at least two to one-- maybe as badly as six to one.

The ratio of child baptisms to deaths isn't wildly out of line with national demographics; either young adults tend to stick around long enough to have their 2.1 kids, or the ones who stay are having big families. What it does suggest, however, is that the crucial source of departures lies in people who have had kids. There are other numbers that suggest this is a problem. Child confirmations are a third of child baptisms, when they should be close to equal; even total confirmations does not come close to equaling child baptisms. Now this suggests that a lot of people simply never get confirmed, but it also suggests that a lot of departures are coming from people who have kids and then leave. If one assumes that everyone who stays gets their kids confirmed, then it's not inconceivable that as many as half of the families who have kids baptized leave before their kids start high school.

I will note in passing that marriages are a little under half of child baptisms, and about half burials. This again implies a certain stability: people do get married and do have children at about the right rate. If there is a big drop in the high school to marriage group, it isn't registering in the statistics yet.

That leaves the big unknown group: the middle-aged. These people don't appear in the statistics in a way that can be directly identified, because they do not personally participate in the rites that get recorded. Thus we are left to deduce how they figure in the numbers. Now, one possible source of discrepancy could come from people who are struck from the rolls because they move to retirement communities; it's conceivable that a lot of these people are nonetheless buried out of their former parishes. We've explored the case of those who have kids but leave before the kids are grown. That leaves the late middle-aged, and the various factors examined so far suggest that they are substantial contributors to the exodus-- perhaps as much as half.

As for why people are leaving: well, it is hard not to look at the trend starting in 2003 and draw at least one conclusion. But the numbers suggest that the problem is not as simple as getting young people to come (back) to church. Keeping older people there is a large part of the problem, and needs further study.

That Didn't Take Long

In a remarkably clumsy move, the (maybe) Bishop of San Joaquin has relieved the vicar of St. Nicholas, Atwater of his position. This has been seized upon as something for the revisionists/legalists to complain about (and there's a LOT more at Fr. Jake's besides that article); conversely, there is decided silence at Stand Firm, apparently because mention of the incident is being censored there.

Well.

If we're talking legalism, then it is hardly remarkable that John David Schofield might exercise a power which, under ordinary circumstances, there is no question about him exercising. Well, besides the usual allegations of firing people for holding the wrong opinions; but if we started handing out tickets for that, we could paper every revisionist diocese in the country with the accusations. To the degree that this is an issue, the conflict is already lost, and we as an institution are damned from decades on.

And if it be an issue, we move on to the next point. The obvious analogue to the Atwater dismissal is the Connecticut Six, but it is a false analogy, because the issue in Connecticut is the unprecedented nature of the acts. What happened in Atwater is therefore no more than fallout from the real issue: whether San Joaquin's unprecedented move leaves its bishop without powers. It is unremarkable that he should consider that he believes that he may exercise them, so on that level the incident is merely cause for "ain't it awful" hand-wringing.

The truly sticky point is that the only precedents we have were set by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and their bishops. It's not a good precedent if you think that canons are our only recourse; it would direct the parishes and dioceses to turn in their keys to the nearest Roman authority.

But the conflict, at this stage, is baldly a war over territory. If charity were given its due, GC would reconvene, concede irreconcilable differences, and set forth a negotiation to carry the division through with as little pain as possible. This is not going to happen because each of the driving factions is intent on getting as much territory for itself and denying the opposition as can be denied. In the middle are a lot of people-- perhaps the majority-- who cannot be claimed as adherents of either extreme, and whose bishops, saying that "schism is worse than heresy", refuse to deal with a situation in which they will have both schism and heresy.

In the battle, Atwater is a rather small prize (ASA of 20 at last count). San Joaquin is a smallish diocese. The real contest is over the dispersion of dioceses like Virginia and Washington and Maryland. The revisionists cannot afford to let moderates have a choice or conservative properties escape. That's where the law comes in.

For as in Adam All Fall

I gave up on Christopher Johnson and the Midwest Conservative Journal a long time ago. As with David Virtue's site, there's just too much cant. So when the following passage appeared there, I missed it (and for some reason, I can't find it now either):

If you are Protestant — if you don’t believe in an infallible/one true church, and as a separate church you were founded by a schism from your lawful ecclesiastical head, you have no right to invoke Nicæa. Ever.

Well, bullshit. My lawful head, the only Head the church has, is Jesus. And I never swore fealty to either Rome or Constantinople; if indeed I owe such an utter debt of loyalty to any earthly church, it would be to 815 2nd Avenue, for it was a Episcopal bishop who confirmed me.

Looking at Nicea as a simply a matter of legal authority is not the only possibility, and it is not the possibility that has any relationship to truth. Nicea's most tenacious authority doesn't come from its political relationship to any bishop, but from its repeated, persistent ratification by generations of theologians coming from a variety of theological approaches.

Come All Ye That Are Somewhat Vexed

Tony Clavier comes at a problem I'd mentioned earlier from a more direct angle:

I only wish the problem with TEC was something to do with liberalism. I caught a bit of a radio talk by the Archbishop of York over Christmas. He said that if the Church of England closed inner city parishes, even if they are sparsely attended, it would cease to be the Church of England and become merely a church for the well-off in suburban areas.

He need only look at the Episcopal Church. More and more as we have retreated from the inner cities and the rural areas we have become a church for wealthy people; people with the money to attend meetings, espouse liberal causes, write checks and love at a distance.

Meanwhile, from TitusOneNine, we have this interview of Peter Gomes, a Harvard theologian:

But I would think that, if Jesus came today, the people he would be most interested in dealing with would be homosexuals, racial minorities, people who would be thought to be less than the most upright and righteous people in the contemporary community. If the New Testament is any model, that's where he would hang out.
[....]
My job is, to coin a phrase used in the 19th century and adopted much by my old friend, Bill Coffin, "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." So, in some sense, if the one thing the sermon does is wake you up so that you discover that you don't agree, it's done a good thing, in that respect.

Frankly, it's hard for me to think of anyone more comfortable than a Harvard theologian, or for that matter, the forces at 815 2nd Avenue. And for all the talk of Jesus traveling with minorities, it seems to me that Rev. Gomes' window into the downtrodden is really quite narrow, and that it looks out upon many who are hardly downtrodden at all. Let us start with Peter Gomes himself, who (if Wikipedia is to be believed) is black and gay. A biography from his church's website reveals that he is firmly placed within the firmament of the establishment.

Let us turn instead to the single mother, with children from several men; or the father who finds himself increasingly in the hole; or the retiree faced with the care of her increasingly senile husband. Or for that matter, the family trying to keep their daughters from becoming teen pregnancy statistics, or the sons from make someone else's daughter a statistic. Or a young man started on the road to alcoholism. Or better still (since that should be our churches' core competency, should it not?) those whose hearts do not hear the message of Jesus; or having heard it, heed it not; or having once heeded it, turn away and depart into the thickets of secularism.

I look at my parish, and I do not see a place where the passing middle or lower class traveler is comfortable. We are the very model of a middle of the road upper middle suburban parish. I look at my old parish, and if anything, it seems worse. Of course, I came into the church at that most patrician of institutions: the private boarding school. We knew there who was quite rich, but we didn't necessarily know who was poor. I was on one score not among the latter, for my parents paid the full cost; but on another, we were terribly strapped by the cost, and it killed the possibility of attending one of those elite colleges such as those boarding schools are wont send their graduates to. Even at the University of Maryland I was reduced one winter to making do with a windbreaker. But I was never really poor.

I remember some of the kids at that school who were very blessed to be there, because we were their family. Sons of diplomats in difficult stations, and children of custodial fathers who didn't know what to do with them. And some of us were simply blessed to peek inside the doors of the establishment. Now and again the true patrician families would appear at the school, and they fairly glowed with privilege. Us pretenders knew we would never join their ranks, at least not by dint of effort. And yet some of them condescended to know us. It would perhaps embarrass him greatly, but I have always been grateful that the father of one of my classmates, a man of some importance, knows me by name and speaks to me as though I were the colleague which I am not.

I wish the doors of our parishes functioned as well. Instead I see the same church that Fr. Clavier sees, a church which is greatly uninterested in the suffering of the great bulk of people. The desperate poor are so very convenient: build them a house (but not on one's street), or offer shelter for the night (but not in one's house) or a meal (but not in one's kitchen). Their needs can be kept at a safe distance, and the venturesome can go among them and make the rest of us comfortable and satisfied that they are so attended to. They will be with us always, that we can never fail to be satisfied in our giving. The rest of the country can go hang; after all, for God's sake, they probably vote Republican.

I would remind Rev. Gomes and his fellows that Jesus' first miracle, as recorded by John, was accomplished not in dire need, but at that monument to middle class vainglory, the wedding. Indeed, from the description it could very well be that the host is trying to live beyond his means. And yet Jesus gives abundantly, as though the host's cheap New York State jug wine and meager champagne gave way to grand cru Bordeaux and Veuve Cliquot. Jesus, in the gospels, is friend not only to fishermen, but to Lazarus; he speaks not only to the Samaritan and Syro-Phoenician, but to members of the Sanhedrin.

Christ came not only to save the Bronx, but also Levittown.

Faith on the Ground

Given the current climate of Anglican crisis (with the latest ramp-up being this accursed Common Cause thing, bidding fair to leave me with no place to go to church) my friend Serge comes through with a timely observation:

Religion on the ground level is often a question of choosing the conscience problems you can live with over the ones you can't.

This came up in the context of a post linking to this discussion of reasons why some people don't become Orthodox. I've gotten that question from some Orthodox, as I continue to engage them in discussion. I mostly haven't gotten that question from Catholics, as they tend to operate from the viewpoint that any reasonable and faithful person would convert on the basis of the arguments they present. They tend to not be really interested in my faith, except to knock it down enough to get me to convert. To be fair there are a lot of Orthodox who take the same tack; they just are not so ubiquitous.

Those who have stuck with me and followed what I've written here over time may have noticed that I'm a bit suspicious of theology. It's not that I think it is worthless, but I think it's exceedingly easy to rationalize. Theology in the large hasn't proven to be a science in which light can be shone with assurance into every corner of every question; if it were, there would be a lot less division. And around Anglicanism, at the moment, there is a lot of division. If there is a single right response to the ECUSA crisis (for a layman), we are presented instead with the unedifying spectacle of people bolting in all directions, or staying put for not especially consistent reasons. A visit to the comments of almost any post on TitusOneNine will show all sorts of "why aren't you gone yet?" slams against the church; but the departing cannot agree on a destination.

And when it comes down to it, all of these destinations have faults, especially when the limitations of geography are admitted. The continuing churches can be roundly chastised for their fissipariousness and the tenuous legitimacy of their episcopacies. ECUSA-- well, yeah; though at least in my diocese (Maryland) for the moment more or less orthodox parishes are being allowed to remain more or less orthodox. A trip to one of the local RC parishes (eliminating the non-English-speaking ones) is impeded by some of my theological objections, but more thoroughly by the ghastly state of the liturgy. Orthodoxy presents the same issues in different forms.

The real problem for me is not I've been increasingly faced with problems in my faith, but rather, that increasingly I'm having trouble finding a place to practice it. In the end, though, I have to have a place to go to church. Surely some will come along and trivialize this problem, saying, "Well, you're putting yourself above Mother Church. You must put aside your distaste/qualms and go any way to [brand name here]." Never mind that I must exercise judgement to decide among the competing claims. Never mind that the speaker may well be a priest who can mold his parish to his tastes. Never mind that I'm being sold a fantasy church. The basic problem, here in this house, in a church that I can actually drive to and worship in, is that I don't see a place where I can be an Anglican refugee-- for that is what I would be, were I to go elsewhere. After thirty years, I am Anglican through and through, from my rising to my going to bed-- and my going to church. I can only attend these other churches as aliens, and at the moment, being a theological alien in ECUSA beats being a theological AND liturgical alien elsewhere.

Also, I am not buying the argument that the crappiness of the church experience is irrelevant. The "magic communion theory" of "you must be in communion with Patriarch X" (where X is in {Rome, Constantinople, Buena Vista}) fails on me anyway, because after thirty years of not having such a connection I'm not amenable to the thesis that absolutely nothing has been happening. But beyond that, it seems to escape most internet arguers that most people aren't theological. Indeed, fundamentally I'm not really theological either. If most people's experience of Christianity as religion is church, then it bloody well does matter how well it is done; indeed, it is important above almost everything else how well it is done. And by that I don't mean that it has high production values, though in my experience where those are belittled, church is done badly. I remember a dozen Friday eucharists at the UMCP West Chapel, an afterthought on the back of the main chapel meanly fitted out for the paltry remnants of protestant chaplaincies (and the Jews twice a year, which accounted for the rather ugly curtained thing behind the communion table). Wofford Smith and I would assemble and wait for the third person to show up so that he could serve a simple said Rite II service, with him standing on one side of the table and the two of us standing on the other. Production values were next to nonexistent, and yet I would place those among the most gracious services I have been privileged to be a part of. No, the problem in most places I've been that have been bad is that they are bad on purpose. It is a sin I can't live with, so I won't go there.

The ArchBarometer of Canterbury

Over in the Covenant discussion of the discouraging news about about the Common Cause meeting, John Thorpe said, "For all his personal theological liberalism, Williams does seem to be a great barometer for what is authentically Anglican in this crisis."

Well, yes. And that's why he is attracting so much ire.

Our Druidic Past

We have another pass at the Melnyk saga, the web-ish details of which I've discussed elsewhere. Here I wish to talk about its relevance to The Current Crisis.

I'm not sure why a book by William Melnyk that came out a couple of years back is suddenly relevant now, but nonetheless one Susanne Evans felt the need to bring it up and connect it to the homosexuality controversy:

Melnyk’s problems within the Episcopal Church began when he was ‘exposed’ by a conservative Christian website seeking more ammunition for attacking the Episcopal Church’s consecration of a gay priest as Bishop. They accused Melnyk of taking part in rituals celebrating the Divine Feminine.

It's an inaccurate depiction, but what is most interesting is the supposed strategy. The problem is that this is precisely how the incident did NOT play out. Melnyk and Melnyk were (and I assume are) husband and wife; the problem wasn't that they "celebrating the Divine Feminine", but that (a) the rite that started it all off aped pagan middle eastern rites as described in scripture; and more importantly (b) it became quickly apparent that Bill Melnyk was living a second life as Druidic priest, on top of his day job as a priest in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Beyond that, the protestations of innocence on the part of the OWM were implausible.

There is a continuing problem within ECUSA of the presence of a core of clerics whose theology goes beyond unitarian and into an adventurism which I for one find irreconcilable with the Creed, much less the ten commandments or anything in the bible. A lot of this is closely connected to feminist theology (though there are other offenders with other agendas), and the Office of Women's Ministry has consistently served as a conduit if not exponent of the problem theology. That's what happened in the Melnyk case, but they got caught.

But as for homosexuality, the connection is loose. One could of course drape both with the banner of sexuality, though one issue is about being a sex and the other is about having sex. But the more truoblesome connection is that the theological adventurers are all on the pro-homosexuality side of that argument; many of their fellow travellers, however, are otherwise quite orthodox (modulo women's ordination, which crosses into the anti-homosexual side). Whether by coincidence or common precept, the orthodox and the heretical are allies on the issue which promises to divide the church.

So we are then back to the question I've raised over and over. Can the Episcopal Church, divested of the "conservatives", remain orthodox? I think it cannot, and the reason is the common thread of rights. Once homosexuality is out of the way, feminist theology is going to come back to the fore. And it is going to be very difficult for the remaining orthodox to effectively criticize it, because any criticism is going to be tagged as bigotry. The prayer book will be revised to enforce womanist positions, and it will be very easy to prosecute (or persecute) the creedally orthodox clerics who remain. Anyone who has seen the first phases of BCP revision has already seen some of this in action.

And Evans's post stands as testimony to the likelihood that the battle is indeed already lost. Such a flagrantly false account cannot be expected to convince the neutral; it is only workable as a self-justification for her faction. The subtext, therefore, is that the opponents of a radicalized theology need not be refuted, much less heeded.

(For some reason, this originally appeared on my other blog. My apologies for the confusion.)

Last Liturgical Dinosaur

The Last Protestant Dinosaur lists 20 Basics of Welcoming Liturgy. Anyone who has heard me talk about liturgy can guess that I disagree with a lot of those twenty points. So let's take it point by point:

1. Stop fighting the BCP. Sure, people in other churches do quite different things in church; but you can't compete with them by borrowing their praxis, so stop trying. BCP worship is the unifying center of Episcopal worship, and insofar as you abandon it, you've abandoned the brand. It is very hard to win converts by alienating the regulars, remembering also that a lot of the "converts" are Anglicans moving in from elsewhere.

2. Make worship the central spiritual priority and the sniff test of everything you do. Hospitality is important; worship is all-important. Everyone is there to connect with God; but the 25% or so of the population who are introverts are going to be put off by too much "hospitality".

3. I don't have too much to argue about point 3. Grubbing for money is off-putting for visitors. On the other hand, calling to much attention to your flexibility makes people suspicious, and can be alienating to the regulars.

4. Open communion sends the message that you don't have standards. Most people can deal with the idea that some elements of the service are for full members only. They will be more willing to make a commitment to Christ if they thing that it makes a difference to do so. (And never mind the strong scriptural justification of closed communion.) A better idea for welcoming the unbaptized is to make them aware that they can come up for a blessing.

5. Don't make a fetish out of holding people's hands. No doubt about it: a completely book-based Episcopal service can be baffling to the first-time visitor. OK: well, this is your big chance to be welcoming! Nothing could be more inviting than to slide into the pew, be faced with this daunting book, and have the person next to you come over to help you get through it.

6. Don't assume that people hate church music. Episcopalians have one of the broadest and deepest repertoires of church music out there in the 1982 hymnal. From what I can tell, a lot of clerics are afraid of it. I get the sense that its immense power threatens them because (unlike the words of liturgy) it isn't entirely within their control. So they try to whittle down as much as possible or dilute it by choosing less powerful styles and hymns.

And don't let anyone fool you: style is very important. It is a stronger conveyor of meaning than the words themselves, as evidenced for instance by the fad some years back for plainsong by those who hadn't the slightest idea what was being sung. If the only music you use is trivial, then you are saying that relationship with God is trivial.

The parish can develop an affection and even a desire for some pretty difficult music, if you let them. If they are treated like musical dunces, they will be so, so don't assume that they can't hack Anglican chanting. (There are simplified versions in the hymnal which nearly anyone can sing.)The thing is that the musical competence of any group of people depends on a dedicated core. If you always go for the lowest common denominator, you will alienate these people, and you will not even acheive that low level unless those people have pretty low tastes.

7. Don't obsess about service length. In my experience, Rite II with music and a congregation of any size is going to go over an hour unless some serious cuts are made. If the service is working, most people aren't going to notice the length; but they will notice if they are being rushed through. The clock-watchers? They can never be satisfied; if the service seems to be taking to long, there is no length which is short enough to ameliorate this. So if the service seems too long, the first question should be "what are we doing wrong?" rather than "what can we cut out?" There should of course be room in the Sunday schedule for a low-fuss/speedy service; but remember that this service is not a sellable option for everyone.

8. There's warmth, and then there is too much warmth. Please remember that about a quarter of your congregation does not want to be hugged by strangers or for that matter be subjected to less intrusive forms of familiarity. Making them feel welcome is a delicate balancing act, because they are more sensitive than most to phony cameraderie and other such performances by the priest.

9. The biggest fat isn't in the BCP. Actual liturgy is almost never "fat"; more typically the problem is in the stuff that isn't in the BCP. Item: the interminal parish announcements. Item: the "peace" in which people leave their pews and go searching the nave for the right person to hug. Item: long explanations of why we are doing things. Item: Instructions that don't need to be announcements. Keeping the extraneous out goes a long way towards "streamlining" the service; and doing so helps keep people more engaged, so they don't think about how it's taking a long time.

10. The readings are what they are for a reason. Just do them and live with them.

11. The prayers work for you, if used properly. Except for Form II, which was broken in the name of political correctness, there's nothing really wrong with the Ps of the P that doing them intentionally wouldn't fix. What I see happening to much of the time, however, is that the overemphasis on immanence renders us incapable of praying TO God in a public setting; we are wont to converse with ourselves rather than bring our petitions before the Divine Throne.

One thing I have seen done which if quite effective is to have the leader stand in teh nave or sone convenient such place and face the altar. Leading from the lectern is deadly and should be avoided if at all possible.

12. Routine is not bad in itself; constant change is destructive. The big temptation with having everything in the bulletin is that it allows clerics to indulge themselves in liturgical dilletancy. An occaisional change can wake people up; but frequent change dulls people. They stop paying attention, because it's easier than trying to keep up.

Also, having people stick their noses in the book opens up the possibility that they will stray from the day's liturgy and look at the rest of it. Missalettes send the message that the book's contents are obsolete and can be ignored.

13. Don't make a fetish out of participation. Anglican churches are clerical, and there's only so much one can take the "curse" off it. And besides, a lot of people will want to minimize their speaking role, and will resent being put onstage when they know it isn't properly their part.

14. No disagreement on that: announcements are always a dead weight in liturgy and should be minimized.

15. Don't sell the entrance rite short. There's a rhythm to the liturgy, and when you start cutting, you alter that rhythm. A lot of the entrance rite is about shifting gears; shorten it, the the shift comes too fast for some people.

16. Communion music is tricky. Anything about communion music is going to be hampered both by those people who absolutely do not want to do anything but commune and pray, and by those people whose response to communing is to sing. Communion hymns can work for both groups as long as the first group doesn't feel pushed to participate.

17. Take sermons seriously and play to your strengths. By that I don't mean that they are all deathless monuments of prose; I'm sure even Chrysostom preached a few duds. But you have to look at how you do them, and not fight against your nature.

Of course, hardly anyone can make a long, rambling sermon work. And hardly any cleric can make an exceptionally informal sermon work either, because it's phony. I personally would have a hard time making a really short sermon, because it just isn't the way I talk. If you've made it this far you've probably noticed that I use a lot of subordinate clauses and compound sentences, because my thinking is centered around gluing things together. The question to ask is: What are people getting out of it? The obvious peril is to fall in love with your own voice, so that you can't stop talking; but the more immediate peril these days is to be so afraid of overstaying your welcome that you never say anything substantial. Which leads to

17.1. Preach to everyone, not just the new converts or the old hands. Again, the traditional fault of preachers was to preach to each other, thus producing sermons that laymen didn't understand. Given the frequency of warnings about this, it seems to me that the other fault is now more common: preaching only to the absolute beginners. The thing about beginners is that nobody is one forever; eventually the old hands will decide that there is nothing to learn from your sermons, and they will check out as soon as they sit down after the gospel.

18. Keep the sermon stunts to a minimum. An unusual presentation has a lot more impact when it is rare. If you indulge yourelf in constant performances, that's how people will see you: as a performer (or worse, a clown) rather than as a preacher.

19. Don't pretend you aren't the presiding minister. You can do some liturgies (e.g. compline) without a specific leading minister. You cannot do the eucharist that way; the most you can do is delegate parts to others. If you are really committed to being anti-clerical, then go join an anti-clerical church. But if you are the rector of an Episcopal parish, everyone can see that your anti-clericism is fundamentally fake. When push comes to shove, you will step in to rule things, because that is how your position is constructed.

And the other side of the coin is that probably most people are quite comfortable with taking a "passive" role, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Mainline churches have become uncomfortable with the notion that this kind of participation in the service is also service, even though there is a very, very long tradition respecting that. In a way, the emphasis to the contrary is also a kind of clericalism, because it says that the roles traditionally assigned to clerics are those which are important.

20. Don't mess with the words. And especially not with the creed. If you change the creed, you are saying that you are unwilling to make the same statement of faith as the rest of the church. That is THE most disunifying thing you can do, and it is hugely distracting. The natural reaction is to stop intending the words and try to figure out what the author (that is, the rector) is trying to put over you.

If you can't say the words in the BCP, then it's your job to go find some other church where you can, or to lobby General Convention to change them (knowing full well that you are excluding all the people who cannot bring themselves to say your changed version). But don't inflict your doubts on everyone else.

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What is particularly striking to me about this is not so much that I found 18 of 20 points to disagree with, but that some of the attitudes implicit here are so pervasive. Never mind the lack of faith in the church's ancient words, which is completely beyond the pale. The subtext of this and so many other posts and papers talking about Anglican liturgy very much operate from the seeming position that the traditional Anglican liturgy is unsellable. Given that liturgy is about all we have left, one has to wonder whether we will soon be left with nothing beyond a vague sense of superiority. It's not working for the unitarians, and I don't think it can be made to work for us.

Amazingly Vindictive

The Living Church reported that our presiding bishop is insisting that Episcopal church properties not be sold to any competing Anglican group:

”If a building is sold to a congregation, The Episcopal Church as a whole is not so concerned if it’s going to be a community church,” she said, although there must be assurances that stewardship was addressed and that the building was sold at fair market value. “But if a congregation purports to set up as another part of the Anglican Communion, we are concerned about that.”

Heaven forbid we do anything to help our enemies after all. I'm sure the Most Rev'd sees this as simple prudence. After all, a church converted to a nightclub is not nearly the threat that another Anglican church poses. And I suppose nobody took those retrograde Antiochians seriously in the 1920s or anticipated that they would start absorbing Episcopalians decades later. Or perhaps she is confident that aspiring mega-evangelicals or emerging churches (whatever they are) don't present much competition.

Or maybe it's just spite. But whatever it is, it looks exceptionally petty, if not strikingly sactimonious.

(Hat tip to T19 for the link.)