Not long ago the Rev. Elizabeth Molitors, for nearly six years the innovative, upbeat, “West Wing”-loving rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, offered meeting space to a group of LGBTQ+ undergraduates attending a nearby college with an evangelical bent. They accepted and have become part of the life of this lively, growing parish.
As Elizabeth and I discussed her invitation, I described her impulse as an evangelical one. In a secularizing time, we are all evangelists for our little denomination’s trinity of charisms — word, sacrament, and everybody belonging no matter what. She granted the point, though she said she hadn’t thought of it as evangelism as much as hospitality, another Trinity charism, of which Kathy and I felt the full effect as we spent a busy “Welcome Home Sunday” on campus.
The Rev. John G. Draper served throughout as my gracious chaplain. Together with Elizabeth and the Rev. Sarah Thomas Smith, the associate rector, I first met with our nine candidates for baptism, confirmation, and reception. We talked about our nation’s uncertain future and the vital role people of faith will play in the public square in a secularizing time.
Over 230 people were in church at 9:30 a.m., where I presided and preached. Since Trinity is not air conditioned, and its seaside people are unused to 95-degree mornings, the splendid Trinity choir (for their first Sunday back after the summer, under Thomas Joyce’s leadership) and we altar ministers left most of our vestments in the closet. The congregation included the Rev. Canon Mark Asman, the former Trinity rector, as well as the Rev. Randall Day and the Rev. Christine Purcell, recently retired from their ministries in Los Olivos and Pacific Palisades. In the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Georgia, I put in a plug for Bishops/Episcopalians United Against Gun Violence, whose trademark orange stole was my sole vestment.
Following a reception the garden, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Theo Patterson, director of children, youth, and young adult ministry, invited us to spend an hour over a delicious lunch (which Elizabeth had prepared) talking about the word and sacraments, the evangelical and Episcopal churches, and the war in Gaza with 18 undergraduates and young adults, including members of the queer community made welcome at Trinity.
I loved this time, because I find I never grow tired of talking about our church. I’m by no means the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to the Reformation and Anglicanism. But I know what being welcome and unwelcome feel like. We all do. And I’m proud to be part of a church that by and large, two long millennia after the Christ event, has figured out how to say and usually show that, however you have come off the potter’s wheel, however your body and soul have been fashioned by love according to the grace and mystery of our diverse creation, you are going to be welcomed as a beloved sibling in our parishes and missions.
The day before, I had the privilege of presiding at the celebration of new ministry of the Rev. Channing Smith, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Montecito. (Facebook has made a jumble of my photos from the two visits. Suffice it to say that it was a glorious unity of a weekend out west in Santa Barbara.) This friendly congregation has quickly taken to Channing, his spouse, Mary, a marriage and family therapist, and their fifth grade daughter Olivia, who served as crucifer, not to mention to the four chickens Olivia keeps in the rectory garden.
Channing designed a liturgy that beautifully conveyed the mutuality of gifting and support among rector, congregation, and bishop. His longtime friend the Rev. Robert W. Fisher, rector of St. John’s Lafayette Square and son of Kathy’s and my fellow Holy Land pilgrims Art and Louise Fisher, veteran All Saints members, was our stirring preacher. Rob not only grew up at All Saints but served as its curate for a time.
