While churches in England have, for the most part, modernised their services in an attempt to attract bigger crowds ”” some of them becoming painfully evangelical and happy clappy ”” the Episcopal church in the US still uses the older, traditional liturgies, the ones that I remember nostalgically. It was these superficial trappings that appealed to us originally. My husband, who writes music for a living, is a sucker for a choir ”” but it is the values that we found there that has really kept us coming back.
At our church, it is not unusual to see children with two mums or two dads, sitting next to Koreans, African-Americans, Hispanics, as well as many white middle-class families. There are monied people from Beverly Hills, rubbing shoulders with artists from downtown. Gay people next to straight. It’s jolly, social and somehow has a relevance to everyone’s life. It reflects an acceptance of all, the kind of value I’d like my children to have. And it is a community. Spirituality, I believe, comes from acknowledging that we are part of something greater than just ourselves.
Talk about seeing through (compass) rose tinted glasses…
CofE ASA: off 5% since 2001.
TEC domestic ASA: off 18% since 2001.
But don’t stop her. She’s on a roll.
You can checkout St James LA http://12.0.101.92/reports/PR_ChartsDemo/exports/ParishRPT_125201065759PM.pdf
Good mid-size parish, smallish for LA intown. Nothing to write home about IMHO.
I’m amused by the previous comment’s disdain. It’s doesn’t fit one’s model to assume liberal churches can grow.
The truth is that churches with strong leadership and active lay membership grow. Churches that don’t have either won’t. I have no doubt that many liberal churches have weak leadership; and conservative churches may have strong leadership. But it has little to do with theology.
Churches that are in conflict do not grow. Which may explain our current situation.
St. James’ liturgy is very orthodox and fairly high up the candle, with great music drawing from mostly catholic and catholic Anglican sources. The parish has a large number of Korean and African American people, and quite a few Nigerians. It’s a good parish. The dismissive comments are pretty petty.
Excuse me Mr Wilkins. There is absolutely no distain in my comment. If you bothered to look at the stats, they show that what you call a “growing” church has merely come back to the ASA of 2001. That may be something for someone from the CoE to write home about, but not for me (pleae note the IMHO).
I have been a reader of this forum almost from the beginning and I appreciate less and less the trollish behaviour of some of the revisionist commentators. Could it be that this behaviour stems from an ever increasing realization that the revisionists are on the wrong side of history and the argument?
Well, John,
If a liberal church can’t grow in the deepest most exclusive pocket of liberals in the country then what CAN they do? It’s still to be asked: “Why aren’t they any bigger?” Why isn’t Bishop Otis Charles’ Trinity Church any bigger? Why did the 75 or so people of that once great parish have to move out of the sanctuary and downsize in the midst of so great a field of rainbow grain? Answer: the niche that is gaydom really isn’t as responsive to revealed religion as Gene, Louie, Susan, etc. would have us to believe. Not enough mirrors in those places of worship to emphasize the inflated egos that quite often trail behind groups of drama-creating/seeking gay folks. So, basically our Church has been hijacked by a very tiny loud group that can’t even convince each other about being with each other and to pay attention to something greater than themselves…GOD.
And we destroyed a whole Church for THIS agenda?
RE: “TEC domestic ASA: off 18% since 2001.”
Not to mention the ASA of the Diocese of Los Angeles has declined by about 1/7 in the past decade! I was kind of surprised. If there’s any place that ought to be taking full advantage of All-Things-Gay, for Pete’s sake, it’s the Diocese of Los Angeles.
But John Wilkins assures us all that the Raving Revisionist Theology of TEC as a whole is Entirely And Completely Irrelevant.
Heh.
Thank you Choir Stall for your comments and insights.
I also noted that #5, rob k above, informs us that the church in question is, “very orthodox and fairly high up the candle, with great music drawing from mostly catholic and catholic Anglican sources”. That sounds wonderful, an oasis in a desert of revisionism. but does it certainly not seem to describe a liberal parish. Rather it sounds like some brave souls living out their faith despite their diocesan leadership.
I imagine they will continue to grow and prosper as long as +Bruno needs their tribute or until they have a clergy vacancy (which ever comes first I would guess). Apparently, also, no one has informed the Nigerians attending there about CANA.
#4. Disdainful? I guess “painfully evangelical and happy clappy” are supposed to be terms of endearment.
If you don’t think that it mostly has to do with “theology” I couldn’t disagree with you more. Even using your logic it should still strike you as odd that the vast majority of “strong leadership and active lay membership” evidently left the Episcopal Church for no apparent reason. Weird?
Choir Stall,
Please do not assume that others’ religious motivations are corrupt simply because their theology is in error. It isn’t fair or helpful in whatever is left of a dialogue between us.
I think there may be a sense in which John W is right — when he says that the parish’s theology is not relevant to its growth. I’m basing this on the article itself, a wildly enthusiastic article by what I would guess is one of the parish’s more thoughtful and perceptive members. The thing is, John’s right: she doesn’t mention theology at all. The experience of encountering a transcendent Deity isn’t mentioned at all, or the experience of confessing herself as a sinner and hearing the personal word of forgiveness.
I encourage everyone to read this article very carefully. It might just as well have been written by a person who’s just moved into a wonderful neighborhood: good schools, kind neighbors of a variety of sorts, a great PTA, awesome little league. She’s ecstatic to have found all this, and indeed these sort of things are indeed fine things to be happy about.
Or you can imagine maybe something like this being written by a young man who’s joined the Marines: he’s struck by the brotherhood, the way all these different guys have come together, the way they are committed to each other, the good times they have cuttin up, the way the Corp looks after its own, the way he’s part of something much bigger than himself, the way that he’s serving his fellow man. And again, who would sneer at this young man or suggest he’s wrong for being so happy there?
It’s just that, moving to an awesome new neighborhood, or joining the Marines, or ten other things like that… isn’t Church. And its striking that the closest the writer gets to talking about what Church might actually be about — namely the “older traditional liturgies” of confession and absolution, word and sacrament — a miserable tax collector experiencing mercy from a Gracious God — are the very things she describes as “superficial trappings” and which she emphasizes are not really why she goes.
One should note that the Korean congregation is about 50 -75 folks on Sunday. They have their own Liturgy of the Word in the parish hall before filing in for the Eucharist. That is the law from on high– no non-English liturgies in the main church building and no regular Korean language Eucharist. How’s that for inclusive?
Albany,
If one is known by their fruits, then how long does it take to figure out that this whole catering to fringedom has cost our Church irreparably? What about those churches in new Hampshire, New Jersey, Trinity with Otis Charles, the dead Cathedral of Christ the King, etc., etc.? Play by the same rules. It’s time to show the fruits in order for all of those demands to be taken seriously to really be taken seriously. I’m sorry, but considering the truly FRINGE lifestyle of Otis Charles (with his mind altering spirituality w/substances), I think that we’ve seen quite enough. So, I do question what possible motive one has to rub elbows with Christianity when their choices and priorities do damage to the very standards of it.
#12 The difficulty is that this was written for the (London) Times. It has all the hallmarks of being written to guidelines to suit that paper’s editorial policy – in fact even more heavy-handedly than normal. That is, that the CoE needs to emphasis doctrine and classic Christian morality less, and focus on being a centre for the community that endorses (“accepts”) everyone. In particular, that evangelicalism is Not The Way To Go. Consequently, it is hard to mirror-read out of the article what is the reality of the parish the writer goes to. Everything that doesn’t help the rhetorical purpose has been discarded.
Although it is amusing that, once again, the thing that doesn’t help the Time’s cultural agenda is God and his Son the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we get an effectively atheistic piece on growing church. The British really do do irony well.
The stat page may be found here: http://tinyurl.com/ycatywc
Membership up nicely, but we know how that can be fudged. Attendance down fairly markedly from 2001 to 2005 when they apparently had a new rector then fixed at 405 for the past three years. Giving is down in 2008 (before the Great Recession) in real dollars which doesn’t jibe with a growing church. One is very hard pressed to say that the church is really growing.
Finding exceptions to the devastating rule that liberal-ness is death to a denomination is the kind of “research” done by the likes of the “researcher” Diana Booth Bass. Rather a real researcher would look at liberality of the clergy and church decline and find that to the degree that the clergy is liberal is highly correlated with decline with the UCC and TEClub leading the pack in liberality and decline.
Sarah, the “raving revisionist theology” may be relevant, but not as relevant as you may think. The issue is not causal, but correlative.
By and large TEC adopted a pastoral theology over the last 60 years. It’s not the only one – most mainline churches did so. Preachers were “pastoral directors” rather than leaders. You’ll note that for most liberal pastors, they spend less than 5% of their time actually in the community. They may talk about inclusivity, but they simply don’t do the work.
Is Otis Charles a good leader? I don’t know. He may be loud, but hat doesn’t indicate good leadership to me. Why not, for example, use examples such as Bill Tully or Nicholas Lang?
There may be some connection between orthodoxy and growth, but it is not absolute. If orthodoxy were the sole indicator, why wasn’t San Joaquin booming?
“Liberality” is, after all, a fairly vague concept. What is true is that leaders with a vision, a strong sense of mission and boundaries, are more effective than those who believe anything goes. But proving strict causality will be difficult. One would have to distinguish liberality from laziness, ambivalence and all sorts of other characteristics of clergy that inhibit growth.
RE: “There may be some connection between orthodoxy and growth, but it is not absolute.”
Very much agree. There are all sorts of variables after the Christian faith is acquired and proclaimed.
The main issue for TEC is that in an organization that purports to offer Christianity, it instead offers MoveOn.org.
That’s a major cause of decline [and of course, there’s only correlative evidence for my assertion]. When a tennis club lures in erstwhile tennis players and then suddenly only offers skeet shooting, the club does not grow — it declines.
It’s not so much that “liberalism” doesn’t work. It’s that products need to be sold in the correct organizations without lying.
It’d be just fine — and I suspect it’d grow too — if all the MoveOn.org leaders in TEC would, say, move to MoveOn.org. I’m sure that MoveOn.org would grow from the influx too.
But lying about who and what you are, and sneaking into another organization under false pretenses, and then trying to lever your beliefs in to that organization causes . . . a decline in customers, since the customers originally showed up to actually attend a Christian church.
Of course, there are valid reasons why the lying leaders of our organization chose to enter this organization. They needed a Trojan horse to be the carrier. To mix a metaphor, they needed a good host for their parasitic ideas.
But at the end of the day, the host dies, deprived of the animating force of . . . people and money.
Sarah seems to assume that religion is fundamentally about a set of beliefs or a set of activities that can easily be defined as “religious.” Empirically, I’m not so sure. I’m a bit more conservative in my definitions. Interestingly, it’s also the tack that many atheists take. The Christian, or the religious, life is hard to reduce even though it is tempting to do so, and useful. Fortunately, there’s grace.
I bet in most Episcopal churches there are people who have joined MoveON, and others who are moderate Republicans, and many who love tennis and even play tennis with friends from church. But Sarah insinuates that a liberals, by nature, must inflict their politics or athletic choices upon others the church. Many do. But there are plenty of liberals who don’t want the church to become a political organization. Liberals also pray, say confession, light candles, and participate in worship, saying the same prayers as others.
What is right about the assertion is that any church should be clear about who it is. If it has a theology that is Augustinian in its understanding of truth, admitting that some scientific claims have bearing on the religious life, then it will be different than a church that is conservative and Manichean. It is entirely correct that a church that is deceptive and full of conflict will have a lot of trouble.
What Sarah does not admit is that there may be pious, faithful people who think differently and may know God, and be known by Him.
RE: “Sarah seems to assume that religion is fundamentally about a set of beliefs or a set of activities that can easily be defined as “religious.â€
Actually, I assume that Christianity makes truth claims.
RE: “Empirically, I’m not so sure.”
Of course you’re not — you don’t believe the Christian gospel’s truth claims as you’ve asserted notably and vociferously over the last five years.
RE: “I’m a bit more conservative in my definitions.”
Heh — nice sophism there. ; > )
Transparent though, so that takes points away. Need to be less blatantly sophistic if you’re to be a good one.
RE: “Interestingly, it’s also the tack that many atheists take.”
I should hope the ones with integrity would recognize that Christianity makes certain truth claims. That’s — hopefully — why they don’t claim to be Christians. They have integrity.
A pity that so many Episcopal leaders don’t have the same integrity.
RE: “The Christian, or the religious, life is hard to reduce even though it is tempting to do so, and useful.”
Nobody reduced anything. But yes, Christianity makes a series of truth claims.
RE: “What is right about the assertion is that any church should be clear about who it is.”
Well — any *organization* should be clear. And if an organization which claims to be a Christian church doesn’t believe or proclaim the truth claims of the Christian gospel, then they should cease pretending to be something they’re not.
It almost inevitably leads to departures and decline among its “customers.”