It takes courage to be here this morning. I am in awe, being in your company. Devoted leaders of congregations you love. Devoted colleagues undertaking the ministry of walking with you these 18 months toward a still indiscernible horizon.
And here we are on a Saturday, when there are other things you could be doing, redeeming the gospel promise, embedded in the readings we just heard, that the risen Christ is making all things new. When we walk in the wilderness of uncertainty and anxiety, the flames will not consume us, and the waters will not overcome us. Being reborn in the Spirit isn’t just what we say, but what we do.
On behalf of the whole Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles community, I offer thanks to our mentor team and especially program author Whitney and our own Melissa and John for their vision and leadership. According to the workings of the canons and calendar, I can’t promise to walk with you these 18 months as your bishop. But even after I retire, I promise to pray that the Lord will keep your life, the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in, from this time on, for 18 months, and forevermore.
Being a member of one of the congregations invited into a process such as this can make one feel isolated or perhaps singled out. The impulse of shame runs strong in many church people. We are never far from the foot of the cross, focal point of our failure. We’re tempted to think it’s our fault. We’ve done something wrong. Everyone else has it all figured out, but not us.
I hope it’s encouraging to hear that at every level of The Episcopal Church, these conversations are underway. At the meeting of the House of Bishops earlier this month in the Dominican Republic, Craig Loya, bishop of Minnesota, offered us rules of the road for our whole church’s ongoing requiem or renaissance moment. The whole church doesn’t call it that, but it’s precisely what the whole church is doing.
Because our nation is secularizing. Fewer and fewer people are coming to church — and in United States Christianity, our forms and values are not in the ascendant. The forms and values that are in the ascendant were on display last Sunday in Glendale, Arizona, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. That’s the expression of Christianity where any canny Wall Street investor would want to put their money.
From Bishop Loya’s riveting talk, three points in particular made me think of our work together beginning this weekend.
First, he said, let’s work to strengthen the core instead of convincing the edges. According to the growth model, which we inherit from political and economic liberalism, getting more people to come to church is probably the most common aspiration written on Post-It notes at vestry and bishop’s committee annual retreats. And I’m all for it. But first, who is here already? What are we doing brilliantly already? What do we love about our church already? What resources do we have already that can be leveraged for the glory of God and the sake of God’s people? What miracle has our God in Christ got underway among us already?
The mission church I’ll visit tomorrow, St. Martin in-the-Fields, Winnetka, is famous for its beautiful music. For years, anxious leaders worried about the budget. Then a license agreement with a third-party school lifted the immediate financial worry, enabling the Rev. Gabri Ferrer, the vicar, and the bishop’s committee to worry less about money and focus more on what God already had underway.
Their new initiative is a monthly concert series. Sixty people, including many non-members, came to the first one in September. They’re not doing it to get more people to come to church. They’re doing it because St. Martin’s does beautiful music, and circumstances gave them a moment to count their blessings and share them with their neighbors.
Second, Bishop Loya invited us to give thanks for the gift of the small. After his speech, I rushed to tell him the story of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in the Taiwan Episcopal Church. The bishop of Taiwan and I exchanged visits over the last year. Last year around this time, three priest colleagues and I were in Taiwan and visited the parish of St. Thomas’ in a city called Chungli, near the Taipei airport.
It was founded as a mission 15 years ago. When we visited, church leaders complained of dizzying growth. They said they were going to insist that the bishop let them establish a new mission for all these new people they couldn’t accommodate. When I asked how many people were coming to church, they said 70. Seventy people was too many!
They said life in urban Taiwan is hectic, anxious making, isolating, and drenched with digital distraction. Sound familiar? They said their people want to go to a church that feels like family, where everyone knows their name, and where people will notice when they’re not in church Sunday and give them a call to check up.
Our churches may have growth potential, or they may be the size that the Holy Spirit wants them to be. If ministry is lively, welcoming, friendly, and faithful, if it is drenched in teaching and preaching about the living word of our God in Christ, then it’s up to the combined congregational and diocesan collective to come up with the financial infrastructure.
Third, Craig said, settle into being unsettled. While I’m not an expert on the “Requiem or Renaissance” curriculum, I do know it’s not about easy, formulaic answers but careful, holy discernment. A community may have a gospel future other than Sunday morning worship. Repurposing a property or forming a confederation with neighboring congregations are, I’m sure, among the possibilities. For 18 months, our participating congregations on the road with their discernment partners will settle into being unsettled.
I will articulate just one settled certainty. The Episcopal Church in the United States, according to the commission of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, does not have the option of giving up and going away. Our charism is for all intents and purposes unique. Timeless small-c catholic worship. Sacramental faith that the saving power of the risen Christ drenches everything. And at long last, the value that everyone belongs, across all barriers of race and nation, orientation and identification.
In our society and culture, at the end of the secularizing road is a high-tech dystopia where the only truth is survival of the fittest, the only friend we can trust the AI companion on our phones.
Another choice is our emerging state religion of heretical nationalism. Before Thursday, when I talked with James Lee Walker, one of our brilliant retired priests, at a clergy meeting, I would’ve said Christian nationalism. Lee convinced me that this heresy does not deserve the adjective containing the name of our Lord.
In the marketplace of competing values, secularism and heresy are the most popular choices. They’re most of the market share. They’re pulling down the really impressive numbers.
But then there’s the third way. That voice whispering that gentle Christ is alive, and God is love. Put your neighbor first. Love never insists on its own way. “I will respect the dignity of every human being, wherever they are in creation, across all frontiers of prejudice and geography.” And yes: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.”
Requiem or renaissance? Whatever we decide, it’s all Resurrection. It will be a miracle when you figure it out. But my colleagues, the miracle for which I give thanks today is that our God in Christ has brought you here right now, so that you may lead the way for all of us along the third road – to the promised land of God’s mercy, love, and justice, the only road to the healing of our land.
[My sermon Saturday morning at a Holy Eucharist service on the first weekend of “Requiem or Renaissance,” our program for parishes undertaking systematic discernment about the course of their ministry. The photo shows the Revs. Norma Yanira Guerra and John Watson of the R&R team preparing the altar for our rooftop service at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park.]