Why stay?
“The issue, “ wrote Robert Bellah in THE GOOD SOCIETY, “both for the local parish and for the national or international Church, is whether membership is accepted as having a formative claim on one’s very sense of self, as involving a loyalty that can persist through difficulties, or whether membership is merely instrumental to individual self-fulfillment and, like some current conceptions of marriage, can be abandoned as soon as it ‘doesn’t meet my needs.’”
In the current polarized condition of the Episcopal Church, that issue has become more crucial than ever before. A lot of people have canceled their subscriptions, and more are talking about it every day.
A friend recently told me she had heard a rumor that I was planning to leave the Episcopal Church and set up my own denomination. Stunned, and amused at the same time, I replied, “Yes, and I plan to call it ‘Frey’s Reformed Evangelical Anglican Katholics,’ or ‘FREAKS’ for short.” No, I don’t plan to leave. But my friend’s comment has really made me think a lot about what it means to be a member of the Church.
Is membership organic, as in Paul’s phrase about being “members of the one Body,” or Jesus’ metaphor of the Vine and the branches? Or may I treat it as purely organizational, sort of like membership in a club? You don’t have to be a great scholar or theologian to recognize that the organic model is the Biblical one. But having said that, I realize that it doesn’t really answer all the questions.
When teaching about Baptism, I frequently ask audiences how many of them were baptized Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist, or Catholic. People automatically raise their hands when their original denomination is mentioned. Then I tell them that they’re all wrong. There is no baptismal liturgy that makes someone an Episcopalian, or a Lutheran, or any other denomination. Baptism makes you a Christian and incorporates you into the Body of Christ. But, if that’s true, may I then treat my membership in that Body as organic, and my membership in the Episcopal Church as simply organizational?
I don’t think so. For the paradox is that, in order to be a member of the Body, you have to be a member of some specific part of that Body. The universal derives from the particular. Free-floating membership is a contradiction in terms. To use a flawed analogy, I may try to live as a citizen of the world, but when I travel, I need my blue passport.
No, I don’t think I’ll leave. God found me in the Episcopal Church, and God continues to bless, sustain, and guide me here. The “means of grace,” Scripture and Sacrament, continue to nourish me, and the “hope of glory” has not been taken away. In the meantime, if we are a community under God’s judgment because of our sins and unfaithfulness - and I truly believe we are - I’ll stick around to take my share of whatever that judgment means, for surely my own sins and unfaithfulness have contributed to the overall situation. And, after all, God’s motivation in judgment is love and his aim, reform.
Besides, I don’t know where I’d go. In the current configuration of the Christian Church, I don’t know where else I would fit. I may not be English - as a matter of fact, very few of today’s Anglicans are - but at heart I’m an Anglican. I treasure those things which make Anglican Christianity, at its best, such a remarkable part of the Body of Christ. I am not so naive as to think that we always live up to our best, but when we do, we manage to produce our fair share of saints and martyrs, which is probably the true test of any Church’s authenticity.
At its best, Anglicanism has the power to be both local and global at the same time. It has an ability to express the fullness of the Christian faith in a variety of socio-economic and ethnic structures without doing damage either to the truth of the Gospel or the cultural milieu in which it finds itself. It has the advantage of being historically rooted without being backward-looking, perceiving that the best is yet to come. At its best, it has that hope “which is the ability to hear the melody of the future,” and that faith which is “the courage to dance to it today.” And it has the ability to be missionary without being triumphalistic, knowing that all triumph rightly belongs only to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
The Catholic, Evangelical, and yes, Liberal, ethos of Anglicanism fits me like an old glove. I thank God for its true comprehensiveness. I will admit that it’s easy to caricature our beloved Anglican “via media” - I’ve done it myself on occasion - and to dismiss it as a sort of fuzzy tolerance so vague as to become oppressive, so nebulous that no one, not even Saddam Hussein is safe from inadvertently becoming an Anglican. But at its best, this via media it is not a shallow compromise for sake of harmony, but a deliberate choice for the sake of unity. We have, historically been able to embrace a broad spectrum of the legitimate human response to God’s self-revelation so as to avoid “breaking the bruised reed or quenching the smoldering wick.”
However, we’ve been able to do this only because Anglicanism has historically had a very solid center of faith rooted in worship, and worship rooted in faith. I’m grateful for a Church which does its theology on its knees, a community whose book of doctrine is its book of worship. That is undoubtedly one of the most attractive traits of our particular brand of Christianity.
So long as that center of Biblical faith and Catholic worship holds, our community can afford to tolerate, even encourage, a great deal of exploration and speculation. In fact, the universality of original sin and the consequent fallen state of humankind makes it imperative for a community, even one with a strong center, to make room for both liberals and conservatives. We simply have to have checks and balances. We need conservatives to ensure that the community preserves that truth which gave birth to the community in the first place, and we need liberals to keep the conservatives honest, to guarantee that they are preserving only the true essentials and not their personal preferences, and to help stretch the community to find fresh ways to express and live out its true teaching.
In the real world, “loyal opposition” is perhaps the only deterrent to fossilization. However, this only works so long as both liberal and conservative continue to worship at the same altar, and acknowledge the unifying bond of Word, Sacrament, and Creed.
Logically, if any were to think about leaving the Episcopal Church, it should be those who, in one way or another, thumb their noses at the received teaching and faith of the Church. The Prayer Book, and the Hymnal, and, up to this point at least, the official formularies of the Church send a very clear theological message. Back in the 1960’s, when Bishop Pike realized that his own theological inquiry has led him to redefine the creeds in such a way as to deny their plain content, he had the courage and integrity to resign.
We have been blessed by having a strong center. But when the center begins to weaken and crumble, the result is not, as some seem compelled to declare, “diversity,” but anarchy and chaos. Our current confusion and malaise stem from the fact that many people feel that the strong theological center which has held our Church together for so long is about to disintegrate, or indeed, has already collapsed.
A number of years ago somebody asked me if I was afraid the Episcopal Church was going to disappear. I said, “No. My concern is that the church would keep on going, but cease to be what God wants it to be.”
I confess that I still have that concern, and that there are days when I have great sympathy for those people who have left, or are talking about leaving, this part of the Body of Christ.
The reasons these people give are usually the same - a Presiding Bishop and other national leaders determined to push a revisionist sexuality agenda while pretending to ask only for “dialogue;” a House of Bishops which cannot, or will not, hold its own members accountable to their common covenants; the Bishop of Newark’s continuing efforts to rewrite the whole Christian faith, and the breathtaking arrogance which enables him to label anyone who disagrees with him a “fundamentalist;” sexual and economic scandals at the highest levels of the hierarchy; a number of leaders who openly disassociate themselves from the traditional Anglican understanding of the authority of Scripture; and a fear that the 1997 General Convention will take some action that would separate us from the rest of the Anglican Communion.
In some cases, I find people leaving or talking about leaving from sheer exhaustion. They don’t mind doing battle with the “world, the flesh, and the Devil,” but they are weary of fighting with fellow Episcopalians, and of apologizing to outsiders for what they consider the heresy or even apostasy of many Church leaders.
Well, I’m weary, too. Twenty years of wrangling about sex is a long time, and one of my personal concerns is whether my Church will be a safe place to bring up my grandchildren. But I keep reminding myself that Jesus was undoubtedly weary on many occasions when “he came to his own and his own received him not,” And surely Paul and the other apostles suffered exhaustion as they were “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” Yes, I get tired, but I don’t think I’ll leave. The Church’s mission and witness are already seriously compromised division in the Body. I don’t want to be an agent of weakening that witness any further.
A wise Archbishop of Canterbury once reminded a church gathering that “while we deliberate, God reigns. When we decide wisely, God reigns. When we decide foolishly, God reigns. God reigns! God reigns!”
I’ll take that conviction with me to Philadelphia this summer, and in the meantime try to remember that the proper response to God’s love and faithfulness is not anger and despair, but joy and praise.
William C. Frey
Jan. 4, 1997
