Your first Sunday at the episcotheque

Visiting any church for the first time is intimidating. I’ve been doing it all my life, and I still get nervous (and visiting alone is even harder). Sometimes I think Episcopal churches can be especially hard to try for the first time—it seems like everyone else knows what to do when and how to find all the right places in all the books. The first time is the worst, though—it only gets easier. (Shoutout to Sarah Moon, who plans on first-time-attending a whole variety of churches, and who recently wrote up her experience visiting an episcotheque.)

There are plenty of results that pop up in an Internet search for “Attending Episcopal church first time.” Some of the books I mentioned here have sections about services. Christopher Webber’s Welcome to Sunday is entirely about the worship service from start to finish. The book resources are great, because they explain why things are done.

I can’t give you all that—I mean, I just have a blog post and my limited knowledge. I was a first-timer not too long ago, though, so I’m going to include a few pointers (in roughly chronological order) that I think are important, in hopes of making your first visit a little easier. Fellow Episco-readers, add your own hints and tips in the comments section!

Do your research. Figure out when the services are and which you’ll attend. Figure out where the church is and how you’re going to get there. If you’re driving, make sure you’ll be able to find parking. If you require an accessible entrance, note where it’s located. Also check out the church’s website (if it has one). You can often learn a lot about a church by what it chooses to publish online, and you can see if there are any programs that might interest you (children’s programs, young adult groups, adult education, etc.).

Dress comfortably. You’re going to feel a little nervous anyway, at least if you’re like me, so wear something you know you like. The dress code varies from church to church. No one’s going to chastise you for wearing the wrong thing. If you want to dress up—go for it. If you want to wear jeans—go for it. If you want something more prescriptive than that, the safest option is probably a skirt or slacks and nice shirt for women and dress pants and collared shirt for men. Casual dress.

Arrive on time. Most Episcopal services begin with a procession, and it’s awkward getting tangled up in that. The time before the service is actually a really lovely time to sit or kneel silently (save socialization for coffee hour) and center/settle yourself before worship.

Take a bulletin. There might be ushers handing these out, or they might be set out somewhere. Some churches print the whole liturgy inside so that you don’t even need to use the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), but either way, this is your key to what you’re doing when.

Sit in the back. This can change as you grow more comfortable with the service and congregation, but for newcomers, this is an ideal spot. Not because it allows you to hide from the priest and congregants, but because it gives you the perfect opportunity to observe and follow what everyone else is doing—when they stand, sit, kneel, shake hands, go forward for Communion, etc. You by no means have to copy everything—do what you feel comfortable doing—but having experienced people to follow makes everything easier.

Follow along. The bulletin will list page numbers in the Book of Common Prayer (black) and hymn numbers in the hymnal (blue or red)—note that numbers beginning with “S” mean “service music,” which is the first section, so the S-numbers come first, and then the plain numbers start over. It can be helpful to look ahead; some parts of the service go really quickly and can leave you fumbling with the books in your pew.

Receive Communion (if you’re baptized). This is the center of the Sunday Eucharist service; what everything is leading toward. Official policy in TEC is to extend Communion to all baptized Christians, though some parishes are a bit less… stringent about this invitation. Anyone can come forward to receive a blessing (cross your arms over your chest to show that this is your intention). Follow the other people in your row to the altar (or remain seated if you wish), and kneel or stand. Hold out your hands to receive the bread/wafer (which you may eat immediately); help the minister guide the chalice to your mouth. If you’re sick or don’t want to partake of the wine, you can cross your arms over your chest after receiving the bread. Some people prefer to intinct (dip) their bread/wafer in the wine rather than drinking—if this is you, hold on to the bread/wafer until the chalice comes around. If you have accessibility questions, ask an usher before the service and s/he will be happy to help.

Relax. Nobody’s watching and judging. If you lose your place in the BCP, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to say every word every time. If you can’t find the service music, don’t fret. The choir has you covered. Never chanted a Psalm? Sit and listen. You’ll catch on. As intimidating as it can sometimes feel, this service isn’t about blending in and making all the right motions. It’s about worshiping God; about gathering the people, telling the stories, and breaking the bread.

Go to the coffee hour. Seriously. You might not feel like hanging out with so many strangers, especially if you’re an introvert like me, but if you don’t meet people in the church, you’re never going to feel at home there. The clergy and members of the congregation should be eager to meet and welcome you, and ideally some of them will do this before you even leave the nave (where you’ve been sitting). Sometimes they forget that they’re supposed to do this, though, or rush off to complete important tasks, take care of children, catch up with friends they only see once a week, and imbibe copious amounts of coffee. So go to where the coffee is. If no one strikes up a conversation (shame on them!), walk up to someone friendly-looking (those with clerical collars or nametags are great options) and say hello. You’ll be glad you did. (Sometimes you even get presents. Not that this should be a motivation.)

Technical difficulties

So. This was going to be my first go at a “perplexionary” video. I picked my passage (1 Corinthians 8), I set up my camera, I arranged my shot. I spent about half an hour filming, then plugged the camera into my laptop and downloaded the footage.

A symptom of being something like a digital native (and a Mac user) is that when I put things into my computer, I expect to have a pretty clear and obvious idea of what to do with them to make them work. Alas, not so this time.

I downloaded the footage, but couldn’t play it. “Ah,” I thought, “I must need to install some software.” Sure enough, a CD-ROM came with the camera. I slipped it into my laptop, but nothing started automatically, so I opened the file. Nothing I clicked on would work. Never mind that I have yet to look at the manual.

I’m sure I’ll decipher this technology after I spend some quality time playing with it, but that’s not quality time I had this week (I was too busy reading Derrida). So: no video.

In fact, no perplexionary, because as I was filming myself, I realized something: I’m really bad at filming myself.

Some of it’s my fault. I decided I could speak extemporaneously, since I’ve seen other vloggers/vidcasters do it. The thing is, extemporaneous isn’t really my style. I teach extemporaneously, sure, but pretty much every speech I’ve made over the past decade has been completely written out.

As it turns out, looking at a video camera feels more like making a speech. I had images of Ian Morgan Cron-esque vid-nuggets of wisdom, but I ended up with dozens of “ums” and a whole lotta time staring silently at the little digital image of myself.

Editing takes care of much of that, but I never got a chance to edit: technical difficulties.

This got me thinking, though. One of the criticisms I often hear about young Christians (e.g. me) is that we have difficulty articulating out faith/beliefs. This may have been said in connection with the Barna Group research, which is heavily interview-based.

There may be some truth to this typification. Or I could be a somewhat awkward introvert made nervous by the pressure and presence of a camera. Or, you know, maybe both.

I wonder what could be done to make young Christians more articulate about belief?

Education is key—if I’m uncertain about something, if I don’t feel I have a solid grounding to articulate and defend it, then I’ll probably avoid talking about it. If I don’t know the details and scaffolding of my faith tradition, how can I ever expect to explain it to someone else?

Practice is also vitally important—Practice makes perfect, but where do we practice? I attended Christian schools. I went to youth group. I was fed information—information that I didn’t have to critically engage until years later. I passed quizzes. I played the right role and was a great listener. I never needed to articulate anything. Even talking to the consistory (and, later the bishop) in preparation for profession of faith/confirmation didn’t require a great deal of thoughtful articulation.

One January in undergrad, when I was on an off-campus Interim trip in New England, my group attended a Unitarian Universalist church. We ended up attending on “Credo Sunday,” when a group of (14- and 15-year-old) teens planned the service and shared their credo statements, their personal statements of belief.

Now, there’s plenty about the UUA that I disagree with, and I admit it also felt a bit odd to sing Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” in a worship environment (or to pass the offering plate to BNL’s “If I Had $1,000,000” ), but I don’t think I’ve ever heard from such an articulate group of young teenagers. And they didn’t recite received information—one of the young women announced that after careful consideration, she would be leaving the UUA church for a UCC church in town. By encouraging and facilitating the care and preparation that went into those credo statements (and all the others; this is a denomination-wide practice), I think the UUA is doing something really, really, (really) great.

I hope I’ll get better at and more comfortable with articulating my beliefs. I also hope I’ll get better at and more comfortable with using a camera. And I hope I’ll be able to help others with this along the way.

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Are you comfortable articulating your faith? Why or why not, in your opinion? What do you think we could be doing to help young people become more readily articulate about beliefs?

You lost me…again

If you’ve been with me from the beginning, you’ll recall that I owe a couple of entries to the Barna Group (read them here and here). David Kinnamen’s at it again—on Friday he spoke with Michel Martin on NPR. You can listen to the clip and read the transcript here; thanks to the Episcopal Café for pointing me to it.

It’s a short interview, but Kinnamen said some interesting stuff. A big point he makes is that young adults leave because churches don’t address their complicated life issues. Describing the study findings Kinnamen says, “…in a nutshell, what we learned is that churches aren’t really giving [young adults] an answer to these complicated questions that they’re facing, these lifestyle issues and challenges that they’re facing. And it’s not really a deep or thoughtful or challenging response that most churches are providing to them.”

This is the same across denominations, he says. While there are obviously differences, and the interview-style responses that make up the bulk of the Barna Group’s study are necessarily very individual and subjective, Kinnamen expressed surprise at how similar many of the responses were. “I think the overriding theme,” he said, “was that this generation, in so many ways, is post-institutional, regardless of their traditions.”

I’ve heard this opinion/generalization about my generation before, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it. This is why “house church” models are seeing a resurgence, why “spiritual but not religious” is such a common claim. In many respects, I think this has merit—institutions have problems, and sometimes those problems are too much. (Shout out to the Bohemiam Bowmans who’ve been blogging about leaving the institutional church.)

The thing is, though, I like the institutional church. I like denominations, as I admitted last week. I like the communities of practice we build and the ways we find to run them. I like knowing how the church structure works in a given denomination, how it evolved and is ever evolving. I even like the spreadsheets and official communications and annual meetings. Because even the down-and-dirty, boring, painful stuff is part of the church that houses so many people who have important roles in my life. TEC is very much an institution, with all the baggage and benefits attached to that status; it’s a special institution to me, and I’m not ready to leave it behind.

I think Mariann Budde, the recently installed bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, says this well in The Washington Post. When asked why TEC matters, she replied, “The complete answer…is I don’t know if it matters. Does God really care? But then I realize that I really care. And I think of all the people in my world who also really care. I wouldn’t be a Christian without them.”

So I’m troubled by the idea of being a post-institutional generation. It seems like a throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater situation. Yeah, institutions are broken. Including the Church as an institution. But just because something is broken doesn’t mean there’s no value in it, or that it’s not worth trying to fix (I mean, look at me!).

What I like about Kinnamen, though, as I’ve mentioned before, is that he ultimately emphasizes relationships as the way to build healthy churches. He refers to it as “reverse mentoring”—while Millennials are open to learning from their elders, older generations also have something to learn from Millennials. Kinnamen says, “So this idea of reverse mentoring––we need young people to help enliven and invigorate our congregations and we also need older adults to give good life coaching in the midst of these very different and complicated times that young people are facing.”

In a way, valuing and emphasizing meaningful relationships moves toward the post-institutional, but I think relationships are what give life to institutions. So I’m staying in the institutional church. I’m going in deep—joining groups and committees; giving time, talent, and money; learning how the structure works. And down deep there, I’m building. Building relationships and, I’d like to think, building a future.

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What do you think? Is the institutional church worth saving? Is the Millennial generation a post-institutional one? Are relationships and institutions compatible?

Get ready for… Perplexionary

Hard to believe: I launched this blog over three months ago. It’s outlived my food blog from undergrad. It has more posts than my high school Xanga. In fact, I’ve managed to maintain my Monday/Thursday posting schedule (with some, er, soft posts around the holidays), which I guess just goes to show how far stubbornness determination can go.

Apparently the three-month mark is a big one for bloggers. Why? Because it’s when a lot of people quit their blogs. I have no plans to quit just yet, but I am feeling the need to adjust things a bit. So along with the “two cents” guest posts (think about contributing!) I’m going to delve into something of biblical commentary.

What am I thinking?

Answer: I don’t know. But it sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Be forewarned: I am no esteemed scholar. My formal biblical education consists of four years of Baptist high school, a core course in undergrad, and a few months of EfM. I’m flying loose here, folks.

Since I like naming things, I wanted to nickname this new venture, too. My first thought was reflection + lectionary (= reflectionary), but that’s already the title of somebody else’s blog, which made it feel cheap. Besides, being perplexed about the lectionary (i.e. perplexionary––because the “x” makes it awesome) is probably a more accurate moniker for yours truly to be using. Because, let’s be honest, there’s some pretty perplexing stuff hanging out in the Bible.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the lectionary (and so can’t tell that my title is punny), it’s a schedule of Scripture reading followed by a number of Christian denominations. Well, that’s a little deceiving—there are variations on the lectionary—but the gist is the same. TEC uses the Revised Common Lectionary, which cycles through Scripture on a three-year track (the CRC I attended during undergrad was also heavily invested in the RCL).

I like the lectionary because it means the special liturgical seasons have seasonally appropriate readings and it means that over three years, a significant portion of Scripture is covered. One facet of this is that preachers don’t get to cherry-pick texts—there’s the lectionary: you’ve got three readings and a Psalm and that’s it. I admire the preachers in my life who work with this, because, as I’ve said, there’s some perplexing stuff that can surface.

For me, here, “Perplexionary” will be a venue for me to pick out the lectionary text(s) I find most perplexing (maybe I’ll do this each week, maybe not), and think aloud about it. Nothing fancy. Nothing definitive. Just my thoughts.

The big twist here: I’m going to try playing around with video. I don’t really like video. I like writing, in sweatpants, my hair mussed, some mood music playing. I’m an introvert and a homebody, and also sort of a luddite for someone my age (i.e. 23) in my position (i.e. comp instructor/grad student at a tech-heavy institution).

In short: I’m bad at video. But it’s cool. And I got a sweet digital video camera for Christmas that I’m determined to make good use of. So, we’ll see how this goes.

Gratefully accepting all your words of advice, encouragement and commentary along the way!

Touchy subjects: more on the broken places

After my “broken places” post last week, the Episcopal Café posted a couple of interesting follow-ups—both re-posted comments, actually. The first one, “The prayer book is the first thing that can and must be negotiated,” a comment from Josh Magda, calls for a change in the prayer book. His reason? He doesn’t like the theology he sees in the language, and he thinks books are no longer an appropriate medium for “[his] generation” (i.e., my generation—I’m not supposed to tend toward wordiness anymore. Shoot. I am a bad Millennial).

As I write this, there are 121 comments on this reposted comment! That is incredible at the Café. I don’t know if I’ve ever slogged through a comment stream quite this long. It was a worthwhile slog—there’s an interesting conversation happening in (many of) the comments. I won’t even attempt to try summarizing it here. If you have a spare hour, you can have at them yourself. What especially interested me is that it seems some of my fellow Millennials felt compelled to respond to a post that implicates them.

Some of the commenters agree with Josh. Many want to push back. One of the comments, Mark Preece’s “Why should there be an Episcopal Church?” was reposted and garnered 19 comments of its own. When I shared the progression of these various broken-or-not high-emotion Café pieces with a friend (you remember Peter?), he commented, “I think it’s interesting how these authors seem to be fish with no concept of the water. As someone who ‘jumped in’ after growing up elsewhere, I feel like I could articulate exactly why TEC, and precisely what is singularly important about the BCP and its attendant rituals… Wild guess you might be able to, as well.”

Now I don’t think there’s much of anything I can “articulate exactly,” but I am pretty fired up about my fondness for TEC and the BCP (aren’t acronyms fun?). My affection doesn’t mean I don’t have problems with both TEC and BCP. Maybe if Josh and I sat down and talked, we’d find we have some solid common ground. I do think there’s a lot more to TEC than our book (in Book of Common Prayer, “book” is undeniably the least important word). I do value and appreciate inclusive language—I sometimes change the words I say (and sing—don’t tell the music director!) in the Eucharistic liturgy. But I think there’s so much worth keeping, and that running wild through the prayer book, the liturgy, the denomination, will cause unnecessary violence. Baby, bathwater.

I guess, when it comes down to it, I like denominations. I like their personalities, their foibles, their grumpy-old-person way of changing at a snail’s pace. I like the great scaffolding that tradition offers.

In a completely different conversation, Landon Whitsitt offers his thoughts. The titles are pretty self-explanatory: “Dear Young(ish) Mainline Pastor Type People: Please Plant a Church,” and “Further thoughts on my ‘plant a church’ post.” As I understand it, his gist is that young radicals are entering mainline churches expecting a stable job and wanting to do radical things, and that this doesn’t match up because “the system does not pay you to buck it.”

These posts, too have gained some interesting comments, including a really thoughtful post by Emily Morgan, a Princeton seminarian, on her own blog. She conveniently puts really awesome quotables in bold, so even if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, you should check it out.

What I like, and why I agree with Emily, is her emphasis on the importance of working within community. The “progressive,” system-bucking parishioners (and they’re not all young folk) don’t usually want to leave—and they aren’t sticking around for the awesome paycheck. Rather, they’re Spirit-led to challenge their communities in faith and love.

Like languages, I think most things that depend on human involvement only cease changing when they’re dead. Since I believe the Church is anything but, I don’t think we should be surprised by calls for change, and I think we ought to be willing to explore and graciously live into the acceptance of change. This needn’t be done carelessly; in fact I think it must be done with great care an intention. More importantly, though, I think it must be done in community, all the parts of the body working together.

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What do you think about these “touchy subjects”? Has TEC closed its fists too tightly on tradition, or is “traditioned innovation” a really viable option? Is there still value in denominational affiliation?

Strong at the broken places

I’m going to do more pointing to other pieces than original thought today. The first week of the semester always makes me a little crazy, adjusting to a new schedule and all, so I’m scrambling to get to all my other stuff.

A post that caught my eye last week was Scott Gunn’s “Of broken things in the church” on his blog, Seven Whole Days. An alternate title could have been “Things more flawed than the GOE in TEC.” The post highlights Gunn’s responses to a list a colleague sent him of 10 broken things in TEC. The Episcopal Café picked it up, focusing on issues with the deployment process. The comments sections on both are also well worth exploring.

Something that’s NOT broken, Derek Olsen argues, is our prayer book. Responding to the Episcopal Café’s “what exactly is up for grabs” article I mentioned last week, Olsen gives a lengthy-but-interesting appraisal of the BCP’s importance. And then at his own blog, he points to the Café piece and mentions why it’s an important article.

These posts got me thinking, because to be honest, as a relative newcomer to TEC, I think I’m still more conscious of what’s broken in the CRC (or the conservative evangelicism of my high school experience) than in the denomination I now claim. The knowledge I do have is more intellectual than experiential.

The thing is, the Church—at least, the Church today—in any denomination, is an institution, and institutions have a lot of broken places. As far as I can see, that’s just the way things are. I accept that reality. That doesn’t mean I won’t respond to the broken places, but I acknowledge that broken places will always exist, and sometimes can’t be fixed.

My title sounds hopeful, but I should include the context. I snagged it from a famous Hemingway quote in A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

Institutions—like corporations, despite what corporate personhood may imply—are not people, so this sentiment may not be applicable. But what if it is? Could an institution be strong at its broken places? Could resisting inevitable brokenness be deadly? Where do you see the broken places in the Church (TEC, or more broadly)? Are those broken places fixable? How might you go about fixing them?

The kids will be fine—let them

One of the most recent and best additions to my List of Good Blogs is The Twelve, a team of twelve Reformed bloggers + guests writing from a Reformed perspective—it’s connected to Perspectives, “A Journal of Reformed Thought” that, happy day, published an essay of mine last month (woot). I was introduced to the blog by a favorite former professor and this hysterical Facebook/church-humor post. (So. Funny.)

Anyway, a couple of posts caught my attention this week. In “The Kids Are Not All Right: A Research Opportunity” (complete with soundtrack), James K.A. Smith comments on Christian Smith’s National Study of Youth and Religion and the corresponding publications—including Kenda Creasy Dean and “moralistic therapeutic deism”—and notes that the onus is not on the twenty-somethings but on the folks Smith’s age who “produced” this generation.

(The “research opportunity” is for a summer seminar on hymnology, as “maybe it’s at least partly the case that young people have been sung into the moralistic therapeutic deistic faith”—I admit I like this focus on the formational aspects of worship, and I’m a sucker for music.)

A couple of days later, Jason Lief followed up with “…I won’t do What you Tell me,” in which he basically says to quit freaking out and leave the kids alone. “The real problem,” he writes, “is the over institutionalization and management of young people.” This isn’t a church-exclusive phenomenon—a friend (shout-out to Shannon) shared this interesting article on over-parenting.

Jamie Smith shows up in the comments to (somewhat) agree with Lief: “I think we would both say that the church could do much more by actually doing less, as long as that ‘less’ is also more intentional and recognizes that it needs to intentionally counter the powerful ‘secular’ liturgies of formation that can so easily trump Christian formation.”

To which Lief responds by wondering, “How can the Christian narrative – the formative ‘liturgy’ of the Christian story – speak to and supplement these cultural expressions rather than replace or co-opt them? I think it begins by taking their cultural world seriously.”

What I think I appreciate most about Lief’s response and comment is his willingness to assign agency to young people. “Taking their cultural world seriously.” This doesn’t mean taking Lady Gaga to church, or praise leaders in skinny jeans and dark-rimmed glasses, or chic U2charists. It means taking people for what they are. Breaking the Good Church People mold. Because, let’s face it, that mold has got to go.

I teach composition, and we talk a lot about agency as it relates to pedagogy. As a teacher, it’s my job to provide for my students the tools and guidance they need to become better college writers—but much as I’d sometimes like to, I can’t write their papers for them. I might think I could phrase something more beautifully or argue for something more meaningful and interesting, but it’s not my paper, and acting as if it were would hobble my students’ learning and revoke their agency. It would be bad teaching. And it would be the opposite of caring for my students—even though I still assign grades.

I’m not a parent, like Lief or Smith. I can’t talk about “what we should do about young people,” because I’m in that group. What I can talk about and appreciate is the need for agency at any age, an agency that stems from love, from charity and respect, an agency that requires active listening and an attempt at understanding, as well as distance and a great measure of trust. Parenting and pastoral care, done well, don’t strip agency—my ministers and mentors over the years have been great sources of tools and guidance—but in the end, I have to write my own paper.

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So, will the kids be all right? What does intentionally leaving someone alone look like? What does it look like in the context of Church young people?

Maybe this year

It seems that a new Gregorian calendar year has everyone feeling an urgent draw to make predictions about the new year. It’s not all that surprising; I usually journal about “Things I’m Looking Forward to in YYYY,” things that sometimes happen and sometimes don’t. I make this easier on myself by hedging: “I’m interested to see what happens with X,” I wonder if I will Y.” Nothing too absolute. And no resolutions. Sometimes I forget that I don’t make resolutions, like last year. I made four. And broke them all. Including the really easy one about putting lotion on my feet.

So some of the predictions I’ve been coming across are about what’s going to happen with the future of TEC/Christianity/religion. There were a couple of comment-provoking posts over at the Episcopal Café—Jim Naughton projects about everything from the Anglican Covenant to the Occupy movement. He also states that “We will understand with deeper urgency that if we don’t attract more people to the Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church will wither and die,” and wonders how we might “make our churches more visible and appealing to our friends, neighbors and the strangers in our midst” (including special appeals to young adults and immigrants). “Or maybe,” he pokes, “We will just occupy ourselves in arguments. Because we are, at the moment, a church of more hat than cattle, and we didn’t get that way by accident.”

I’m uneasy about Jim’s positions here—I agree in part, but not in full. While it’s true that we shouldn’t pretend church attendance isn’t declining, pretend all’s well until we look around one day and no one’s left, I think Lindsay made a good point that we need to be focusing on values before programming.

I also recently reread this bit from Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season: “The church is not immune from the bigger-is-better heresy. One woman told of going to a meeting where only a handful of people turned out, and these faithful few were scolded by the visiting preacher for the sparseness of the congregation. And she said indignantly, ‘Our Lord said feed my sheep, not count them!’ I often feel that I’m being counted, rather than fed, and so I am hungry.”

Yeah, there are practical issues. I want TEC to continue and thrive as much as the next person, I’m just not sure I want to be part of a church that grows because it prioritized awesome marketing instead of the awesome Gospel message. It’s a tough balance.

The other Episcopal Café post ponders “what’s up for grabs” in TEC renewal—Should celebration of the Eucharist be normative for Sunday worship? Do we need a paid clergy class? Do they really need a seminary degree? There are a variety of opinions on this. Bill Stringfellow gets quoted in the comments section.

One argument I can totally get behind is IT’s on Friends of Jake. IT suggests we should talk more about why we go to church—IT does it, and IT’s an atheist—so why don’t we? Most people don’t come to church if they aren’t invited.

CNN’s Belief Blog offers “15 faith-based predictions for 2012.” #6, #7, and #15 deal particularly with young Christians/Millennials, predicting continued departure from socially conservative religious traditions, an increasing generational divide, and new viewpoints on the Israeli Palestinian conflict—“ Is there a way for the Church to be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine and pro-peace?”

And rather than predictions, the Rev. Jeanne Finan offers “Ten things we can do if we really want to change the church” at Remember Your Baptism. They’re funny, smart, and thought-provoking—suggestions like “Wear the hat and heart of a visitor,” “Do the right thing, not the ‘cheap’ thing,” and “Don’t attend conferences that have only male speakers (or a single token female) or only white people on their agenda. Look at most homiletics conferences. Wow! Is Barbara Brown Taylor the only woman who has found her preaching voice?” If you only have time to explore one of the posts I’ve linked to, I recommend this one.

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How about you? Anybody out there want to add their voice to these predictions? Agree or disagree with those offered? Contribute some of your own?

Two cents: Peter

Welcome to Peter Hulen for my first “two cents” guest post! Thorough readers may have already encountered Peter’s thoughts by reading blog comments, but even if that’s the case, I heartily recommend a re-read. See what Peter has to say, and feel free to respond via comments!

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Peter Hulen is a composer of computer-generated music, a college professor, and a sometime church musician who converted to the Episcopal Church in his late 30s because it fuses ancient rituals and narratives of his home culture with permission to continue an open-ended life of spiritual pilgrimage and development.

I guess I’m more of a lumper than a splitter. As someone who has worked directly with the 18-22 cohort for the past 20-odd years, I perceive the Millennial generation as developmentally on par with any group that age from any generation. New technology, new connectedness, new social/global consciousness, yes. New kinds of human beings, no.

For example, social media amount to a virtual container for social entities the size, scope and function of those that have been around as long as our species. What is different after having left our foraging/agricultural villages and then returned to them in digital form, is about the experience in between. Regardless of individuals’ relative cognitive development and social identification (whether there are ‘thems’ and ‘usses’ of various sizes and configurations, or a planet full of ‘usses’), everyone still has to deal with the effects of mutual global encounter on one or more levels as never before.

What does this mean for the Church? I do not have a single ‘what I think the church will look like’ vision, because I think we are headed in a couple of different directions. The Church in the global South looks to be adopting forms of Christianity and related attitudes that characterized the North over the past couple of centuries. This is in keeping, for better or worse, with the emerging material and mental macro-culture.

In the wealthy, industrialized part of the world, Christianity will either evolve or be more completely replaced with sundry non-/approaches. The vision I do have is what I hope the Church will become. That would include theologies of greater universalism, and of unity between the natural universe and the noosphere wherein dwells what is experienced as ‘the spiritual’ (no dualisms, Cartesian or otherwise—incarnation anyone?), less literal and more metaphorical understandings of scriptural narratives, and rituals stressing contemplative practices over propitiation, dominion, membership—dynamic processes over states and products. These issues cut to the very quick as regards authenticity in context of the rising watermark (however glacial its movement) of human consciousness.

Maybe my view is colored by present realities, but I see Millennials becoming this, opposing it tooth-and-nail, and checking out, in roughly equal numbers. But if the past year has illustrated anything, it is that critical masses and tipping points have a way of emerging, seemingly out of thin air. What is to come will hardly happen to or through a single generation, but I think Millennials are sure to move the marker just a bit farther along that long, long arc of the universe.