A Different World: Part 3

 

            This begins the third installment of a reflection about change in the Church under the title, “A Different World.” In the first two essays, I have attempted to describe the immediate post WWII  church as I experienced it and  the dramatic changes which occurred in the turbulent 1960’s to offset that settled 1950’s church. For the purpose of discussion, I have asked a question about why the Episcopal Church in particular and the Mainline Protestant Churches in general seemed to be so poorly prepared for the onslaught of secularism which hit them in full force in the 1960’s. The question was asked because there seemed to be advance warning from several highly respected sources.

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             In the aftermath of two unbelievably destructive World Wars in the first half of the 20^th century, some individuals began to take a critical look at the theology and beliefs of Christianity. This in itself was not earthshaking. Throughout the long history of the Church, there have been individuals who have sensed the needs of the age in which they were living and have questioned the ability of the church to meet those needs without making some changes (adjustments) in the theology which it was teaching to its people. For example:

In the first Christian century, the theological contributions of Paul and the Hellenistic author of John’s Gospel, enabling the Church to move out into the wider world, would need to be mentioned.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354-430), lived his life between the collapsing classical world and the beginning of the Middle Ages. He established orthodox Christian doctrines (sin, grace, the Trinity) which would dominate the Western Church for 500 years. He was deeply influenced by Neo-Platonism (Plotinus).  His work was a stabilizing influence in the gathering chaos of the medieval period.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) achieves the great medieval Scholastic synthesis between Aristotelian philosophy and the faith of the Church. He in effect struck a much needed balance the demands of faith and reason.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) raised his voice in the battle between the needs of the individual conscience and the established authority of the Church and in the process lit the spark which set off the Protestant Reformation, thereby dramatically altering the history of Western culture.

 In the second installment of this essay, I briefly outlined the contributions of  several theologians whose “prophetic voices” heralded the coming advances of secularism and offered suggestions for change which would put the Church in a better position to preach its message in language which would better appeal to modern individuals.

Briefly, I will restate those contributions. The theological fervent in the first half of the 20^th century was led by German theologians: Karl Barth in 1919 attacking Protestant liberal theology with his publication of The Epistle to the Romans, Rudolf Bultmann and his proposal to demythologize the New Testament, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his call from a Nazi prison for a form of Christianity that does not depend on the practice of religion; and Paul Tillich who, using the methodology of depth psychology, reformulated God as the ground of being. Obviously these individuals were all European theologians and their work seems to have had limited initial impact in the United States because of translation issues and the post-war stability and optimism of the 1950’s. The next decade, however, was to be a different story.   

The Spirit of the Times

            The 1960’s began a period in American social history of open rebellion against authority. Campus violence was common. The civil rights movement was gathering momentum. These were the years of the beginning of the sexual revolution. The decade of the 1960’s also began the escalating process of the extreme secularization of American society. A difficult road lay ahead for American Christianity and especially for mainline Protestant churches. The days of a kinder, simpler faith had passed! It would have been surprising if the authority of the church had gone unchallenged! “Modern American culture in the 1960’s,” according to Langdon Gilkey, writing in Naming The Whirlwind, “can only be described as a secular age for which categories and symbols of transcendence, especially those pertaining to God were empty, irrelevant, and unheeded – and thus it was announced that God was dead for our time.”

Those of us who have lived through the past fifty years in American society and in the Episcopal Church know from experience the many changes that this transition has brought. Some of the change has been positive while others such as declining church attendance and membership have been painful. As has been stated several times already in this essay, it would have been helpful if there could have been some advance warning of the approaching difficulty for the church, some strategy for the church to counter the blow of the advancing secularity. Actually there was an abundance of such prophecy! In the nineteen-fifties and sixties there was a great deal written about the challenges that a dominant secularity would pose for the church.  

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"Honest To God" Revisited

            Systematic criticism from an English speaking insider appeared in the Anglican Communion in 1962 with the publication of Honest To God by the Bishop of Woolwich, England, John A.T. Robinson. In his book, Bishop Robinson began by asking a simple question: what is the true defense of Christian truth? Is it a “firm reiteration in fresh and intelligent contemporary language of the faith once delivered to the saints?” Or is it instead a much more radical recasting of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself? He would opt for the latter.

In 1962 there was a growing gulf between, on the one hand, the traditional orthodox supernaturalism in which traditional faith was framed and, on the other hand, the categories which the world found meaningful. Bishop Robinson wrote Honest To God as an argument for the need of a radical reinterpretation of the Christian message in modern times. It was also a personal confession of his feelings about Christian beliefs and doctrine, feelings which he had suppressed for some time. His concerns would span the whole spectrum of Christian theological loci: the authority of scripture, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and, perhaps most importantly, the question of the reality of God.

Robinson felt that the use of the word “God” had become so impregnated with a outmoded way of thinking that it needed to be discarded if, in his words, “the gospel was going to signify anything.” In Bishop Robinson’s mind, the idea of a God who is a separate, distinct supernatural being and who is personal had become a stumbling block for moderns. What John Robinson was really getting at in his argument to discard primitive constructs and mythologies was an attempt to replace them with contemporary language and concepts. He believed that people who live in a post-supernatural world were not going to be drawn to a religion based upon supernatural stories, doctrine and revelation. If Christianity was going to survive and have any chance of recapturing the imagination of secular human beings, Robinson felt that there was no time to lose in detaching it [Christianity] from this “theistic mode of thought.”  The urgent task in his mind was to somehow frame a conception of God and the Christian gospel which does not depend on the projection of God as a person who dwells in a specific place, i.e. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” . . .

            These were startling words to be addressed to the church in 1962 by one of its Bishops. Robinson was certainly not alone in the direction of his thinking. He had been deeply influenced by the work of the popular German systematic theologian Paul Tillich, particularly several of his sermons published in a collection titled The Shaking of the Foundations. It was published in English in 1948. The choice of this title conveyed Tillich’s conviction that the foundations of traditional Christian theology had been shaken and they must now be reconstructed. Paul Tillich instructed his listeners: “Forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself.” This is precisely the message which Bishop Robinson was attempting to convey in Honest To God. 

            John Robinson went on to say that the story of the Incarnation is mythical. He saw the encounter with Jesus as purely transformative, a complete reorientation of human being, mirroring the example of Jesus, “whose only concern is for others, who maintains the freedom from self to the end.”

            Bishop Robinson considered it to be a “religious perversion” when worship becomes a realm into which to withdraw from the world to be with God. Traditionally, “holy” has meant that which is not common. The purpose of worship, according to Bishop Robinson, was not to retire from the secular into the department of religion (the sacred), let alone to escape from this world into the other world, but to open oneself to a meeting with Christ “in the common, to open oneself to that which has the power to penetrate superficiality and to redeem one from alienation.”

            What John Robinson was attempting to do – relying heavily on the theological insights of Paul Tillich and also, surprisingly, the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer – was to ground Christian faith and belief in reality (the ground of all being) instead of supernaturalism. Robinson saw clearly that in the post-scientific world, the natural world is all that there is (reality) and God, faith, and belief must be grounded there to be believable. This was a movement towards liberal humanism, an attraction which he acknowledges in the book. It is a humanism firmly grounded in a confidence in humanity’s ability to work in community to make positive progress towards the good, i.e. “judging, forgiving, supporting in time of need, providing ethical ideals, etc.”  

Unless the church could accomplish the necessary reconstruction of its theology and worship using his model, Bishop Robinson believed that it was set for decline and fall. He wrote in 1962 that we, Christians, need to prepare for a revolution, a change of the pattern of Christianity, and unless that preparation is made, it – Christianity – will be abandoned. The church must identify itself fully with the things and people of the world just as the incarnate Lord did. There should be no “otherworldliness” about the church.

So, in summation, because of Bishop Robinson’s major overriding concern about how the church would fare in the face of the inevitable dominance of the secular spirit in Western culture, his solution was to offer the outline of what we could call “a radical theology” to counter secularity. In some sense, it became a matter of, if you can’t beat them (secularists), join them.

The principles of this “radical theology” according to Landon Gilkey, a theologian teaching at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the 1970’s,  were that there was to be an acknowledgment that humanity had come of age (Bonhoeffer’s words) and was now autonomous (the secular spirit) and not theonomous (dependent of the guidance & authority of God.) The idea of a sacred deposit of faith or “religious mode of knowing” was to be discarded. Theological statements needed be restricted to what one actually believes and accepts and, importantly, what makes sense in one’s cultural context. The “new” Christianity should focus only on the historical Jesus as a source of ethical guidance. Categories such as divine, suprahistorical, eschatological, and supernatural should be regarded as meaningless. And finally, the new Christianity should be an action centered view of human existence, i.e. theology should follow and not precede experience. The autonomy of humanity would change all the categories!

Postscript

            The final comment needs to be a question. To what extent has the Protestant mainline church in general and the Episcopal Church in particular moved deliberately [emphasis mine] to incorporate the several aspects of Bishop Robinson’s model for a new Christianity in order to be equipped to exist and compete for loyalty in the post-modern culture of the early 21st century?

 

 

A Different World: Part Two

 

            The first installment of this essay about change in the Church was a collection of post-WWII personal memories & observations.  The picture painted was taken from my experience growing up in a parish church in Bismarck, North Dakota. I talked about the 1950’s as being an expansive time for the Episcopal Church. There was a drive across the country to found new churches in the suburbs and to replace old buildings with new, more modern facilities. It was a time of growth and prosperity in the country and in the church! The defining forces of the 1950’s, according to the essayist John Lahr, were velocity, mobility, and confidence. The increasing number of automobiles on the road was a visible witness to the mobility. I can still remember the day in 1956 when our family got a second car. It was the Eisenhower years; we liked Ike! American society had put the war securely in the past and was focused on building the economy, i.e. living the good life. The age of the transformation of American citizens to consumers was in full swing. Credit cards were in the not too distant future. Television had made its appearance. Elvis Presley had started a music revolution. Times were good but ominous signs (of change) were on the horizon and the church would not escape. The turbulent 1960’s and its challenges to authority of all kinds were just around the corner.

Turmoil in the Church:

Modernity rears its ugly Head

 The accelerating changes in American society mentioned in the first installment directly impacted all institutions. The church was not immune! One very important example quickly spring to mind. It is a parable of sorts, about the many problems involving belief or the lack of it which would soon confront the Episcopal Church. Those issues were embodied in the tragic career of Bishop James Pike. The church was bitten by one of its own. His statements and books, critical of the church and its theology, commanded a great deal of popular interest & media coverage in those days. Bishop Pike was front page news in the 60’s.  I have in my files a copy of the November 11, 1966 issue of Time with his picture on the cover. On a slash across one corner is the statement: The Relevance of Faith & Myth in Twentieth Century Life. That for Jim Pike was the issue, the relevance of the church and its teachings to modern man! (It’s still the issue today, fifty years later.)

            Pike was an individual whose life and career was “meteoric,” as a 1999 article in The Living Church described him. He was first of all intelligent and well educated. One has to wonder how much he could have accomplished in a less volatile, more disciplined life. A brief summary of his career(s) provides a clue to that volatility. A 1934 graduate of the University of California, he received his law degree (JD) from Yale in 1938. After employment with the Securities and Exchange Commission and service in the Navy during WWII, he was attracted to the liturgy of the Episcopal Church and decided to pursue ordained ministry. He had been born a Roman Catholic. He studied at both Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary. He was ordained to the Diaconate in 1944 and to the Priesthood in 1946. In rather quick succession, he was the Rector of a parish in Poughkeepsie, New York and Chaplain at Vassar College (1947-49); Chaplain at Columbia University and chair of the Religion Department (1949-52); Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City (1952-58); and the 5^th Bishop of California (1958- 66). He resigned in 1966 and became the theologian in residence at the Institute for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. He left the Episcopal Church in April of 1969 and announced his intention to do so in an article in Look magazine titled, “Why I Am Leaving the Church.” By then he was dabbling in the occult and Spiritualism. He was found dead on September 7, 1969 in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea. He and his third wife Dianne were in the Holy Land on their honeymoon and researching a book they were writing. In his twenty-five years in the Episcopal Church, James Pike did it all and burned himself out in the process. James Pike never seemed to stay with one thing very long. He seemed always ready to embrace something new as long as it was controversial.

            I would be the first to admit that this short biography in no way gives a complete picture of Pike’s life and accomplishments. What it does show is the degree to which his career unsettled the Episcopal Church. As his obituary in Time magazine noted, “For seventeen years, Pike dominated the Episcopal Church in word and deed.”  Much of it was not positive! The church seemed totally unprepared to discuss the issues he was raising.

 The opening salvo in his departure from theological orthodoxy was fired on December 21, 1960 in an article in The Christian Century. It was entitled “Three-Pronged Synthesis.” In it, Bishop Pike denied the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and described the Doctrine of the Trinity as “excess baggage. An outcry about his opinions culminated in cries of heresy. It finally came to a head six years later. A number of conservative bishops did bring heresy charges against him and (after some negotiation) he was censured by a majority in the House of Bishops in 1966. One comment made on that occasion was that “a bishop was supposed to symbolize the unity of the church.” The censure was part of a deal to avoid what would have been an embarrassing heresy trial, a spectacle which the Episcopal Church definitely did not want.

            I was at Grace Cathedral in September of 1968 when he came back to preach a farewell sermon. He had resigned in 1966. His remarks were a lengthy, incoherent diatribe by a man who was obviously not well. It was also an example of an intellect which had run amok. Completely undisciplined! What was he searching for? Jim Pike loved and perhaps needed the controversy that was gained by fiercely challenging established positions. He was accomplished at it. After all, he was a skilled attorney. People today still argue about whether or not he was “good” for the church. I wonder whether or not he (and they) ever thought about what he was doing to all those faithful people whose faith he was aggressively challenging by his statements about their beloved beliefs. I doubt it!

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            James Pike was not an original thinker, particularly in the field of Christian theology. Here I reach an important point in my argument. What Pike did was to present some ideas which he had picked up from his (I am guessing) superficial reading of the works of three well known German theologians. Their names were Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Before I give a sampling of their important ideas, I must talk a bit about a comment which I made earlier, to the effect that there was an ongoing project by modernists in church and society to complete what is called, “the Enlightenment Project.”

            The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which began in the 17^th century. It was directed towards placing human knowledge on the secure footing of the authority of human experience. The thinker who many acknowledge as the initiator of Enlightenment thought was Rene Descartes (1596-1650). A mathematician, he is rightly called the father of modern philosophy. Descartes began his journey by questioning what he could know with certainty – the kind of certainty that did not rely upon anything unobserved (a priori) for the explanation of natural events, but by the submission of everything to reason. His doubting finally led him to the one thing he could not doubt, i.e. the fact that he was thinking. He found his beginning point in his now famous statement: “I think therefore I am.” Descartes intellectual achievement marks the genesis of modern Western culture. Its two most important elements are the ever diminishing authority of the church and the increasing authority of science (scientific method). It was an enormous shift of authority! Descartes through his investigations set down this principle: “Nothing is to be recognized as religiously valid but that which can be found in the reality present to us and produced again out of our direct experience” [emphasis mine]. What we know as “The Modern World” was born out of the Enlightenment viewpoint.

            It has been almost four centuries since Descartes began this intellectual revolution and it has been a long epistemological history of tension between church and society. The church has struggled to maintain its “sacred” foothold in the world. Obviously Descartes’ insights spelled trouble for the church. The authority of the church is based upon a supernatural category of “revealed” knowledge. The church has always revered the Bible as divine revelation not based upon human experience. What we talk about today as secularization is the movement of society away from any dependence upon supernatural agency, any semblance of revealed knowledge. Since World War II, this movement has accelerated. Because of this fact, many liberal theologians in the twentieth century began advocating for change in the Church in order for it to survive in the modern world. Enter among others: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich.

            I have to say that I have for a long time been extremely impressed with the achievements of the German theologians beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the father of liberal theology. One of his teachings was that religion, philosophy, and science do not contradict each other. Theology was on its way to becoming anthropology! The contribution of German theologians in the 19^th & 20^th century - beginning with Schleiermacher - was most impressive! In Protestant theology & biblical studies, their work was head and shoulders above everyone else.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a well known German theologian and churchman who became involved in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was imprisoned and finally executed in April, 1945 just before the end of the war in Europe. While in prison, Bonhoeffer did some writing which after the war was collected and published in 1952 in a book titled: “Letters and Papers from Prison.” In a letter to a close friend, Eberhard Bethke, Bonhoeffer introduced several theological conclusions which have made a deep impression on readers ever since. He asked a question which had been bothering him: “What is Christianity and what is Christ for us today?”  One of his main ideas was that he felt that there was a movement toward a religionless Christianity. He wrote: “We are proceeding toward a time of no religions at all. Men as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.” What did he mean by that? He went on -

“The movement beginning about the 13^th century . . . towards the autonomy of man in our time has reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. . . It is becoming evident that everything gets along without God, and just as well as before. . .what we call God is being more and more edged out of life, losing more and more ground.” Bonhoeffer wrote about a world which in his mind had “come of age.” He described it as “the adulthood of the world.” [It no longer needed a dependence on God.] He described a world which has attained to such a realization of itself and the laws which govern its existence that it is frightening.

            The subject of the autonomy (independence) of the world was a key theme for  Bonhoeffer. He saw reason as the sufficient instrument of religious knowledge and talked about the substitution of moral principles for the Ten Commandments. He quoted Descartes: “The world is a mechanism which runs on its own without the intervention of God.”

            He returned again and again to the theme of the growing tendency of asserting the autonomy of Man and the world: There is no longer any need for God as a working hypothesis, whether in morals, politics, or science. Nor is there any need for such a God in religion and philosophy. In the name of intellectual honesty, these working hypotheses must be dropped. God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along without him.”

            Such were the views of Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose life was cruelly taken from him by the Nazis. Unfortunately, he did not live to see whether his predictions and observations about the world would come about in the years following WWII.  We can say in honesty that his comments about the “coming of age” and the advancing autonomy of human beings were remarkably prescient. This fact alone would certainly greatly impact the church.

            Certainly, Bonhoeffer’s views about the eroding need for the church are disturbing. But we need to remember that this was a man who had watched as his beloved Germany, the most advanced nation in the world, descended into the madness of National Socialism (the Nazis). Where was God?

            Much has been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his theology since the war. I would guess that his most popular book is “The Cost of Discipleship,” which begins with the statement: “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.” What I have quoted in the above few paragraphs are opinions of his which bore directly, in my mind, on the future situation of the church. Read them and then look around at the world and society in which we are living. Weren’t Bonhoeffer’s observations about humanity “coming of age” accurate? I wonder why the church was not more concerned about the possibilities inherent in Bonhoeffer’s writings?  

Paul Tillich 

            Paul Tillich is a German theologian who left Germany in the 1930’s and came to the United States to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York where his thought impressed and influenced a great number of people. Among them was James Pike, who recruited him to teach at Columbia University.  Tillich wrote numerous books on a variety of cultural subjects and among them was a large three volume Systematic Theology which was used in the introductory systematics course when I was a student at CDSP in the late 1960’s. Tillich was very “in” then!

            He wrote at the beginning of the first volume: “Theology as a function of the Christian Church must serve the needs of the Church. A theological system is supposed to serve two needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation. Theology moves back and forth between these two poles: the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.” That is an excellent definition of the persistent, recurrent problem which faces the church in every age, the imperative to preach the unchanging Gospel in contemporary, understandable language and symbolism.

            Tillich is best known for his renaming of God as “the ground of all being.” This concept was presented initially in a famous sermon which he preached titled “The Depth of Existence.” It was later published in a collection of sermons titled “The Shaking of the Foundation.” This was an apt title, for the foundations of the church and faith were being violently shaken by the modern world which according to Bonhoeffer had “come of age.” God - Tillich was saying - was not a personal other who was “out there” or “up there in heaven” of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the ground of our very being. He wrote:

            The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all

            being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that

            word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the

            depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate

            concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.

 

                                                                      John A.T. Robinson,

                                                                      Honest To God (p. 22)

We see what Tillich has done. He has redefined God from a person who exists up there somewhere (a supranatural image), and replaced that with something much nearer to us, something we all share in, the depth of being itself. The power of being! Brilliant!

Tillich wrote: “Forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself.” He said: “Our period of time has decided for the secular world. That was a great and much needed decision.”

I think that those reading this essay can easily understand from where both Bonhoeffer and Tillich were coming. A new secular world had dawned following WWII and if the church was going to remain relevant, it must speak to human beings in a new situation. It must speak a new language! It must find new methodologies to preach the gospel. That is one of the keys to Tillich’s thought. He used the vocabulary of depth psychology and Existentialism to set forth his explanation of who or what God is.

Rudolf Bultmann

            Bultmann’s name is easily recognizable as the German theologian who said that we must demythologize the Bible if modern people are going to engage with it. He really put it quite simply. He said something to the effect that people who are driving automobiles and listening to radios are going to find it very difficult if not impossible  to identify with the biblical world of demons and miracles. He meant that “the conception of a supernatural order which invades and perforates this world must be abandoned.” Rudolf Bultmann outlines his thesis in 1941 in an essay entitled, “The New Testament and Mythology.” A more popular form of his work appeared in English under the title, “Jesus Christ and Mythology.”

            Obviously all three of the theologians whose work I have cited were German and it is understandable that their books would have limited influence in the English speaking world. I have been pushing the idea in this essay (with the assistance of hindsight) that it would have been nice if the church had received some advance warning of the secular onslaught to come.

            This second installment has become long enough. In the next installment, I will talk about the contribution of an Anglican Bishop named John A. T. Robinson who wrote a controversial book entitled Honest To God. It was published in 1963.

 

 

           

 

A Different World!

            How did it come about that a major part of the educated classes

   in Europe and America has lost faith in the theology that for fifteen             centuries gave supernatural sanctions and supports to  

   the precarious and uncongenial moral code upon which Western 

    civilization has been based?

                                                                  Will & Ariel Durant

                                                                  The Story of Civilization, Vol. IX

          

        During the winter months I have coffee every Monday morning with three or four of my former parishioners with whom I also play golf in the summer. We do a lot more talking over coffee than we do while we are trying to strike golf balls. As one might guess - because of our ages - much of the content of these winter conversations has to do with the many changes in American society which we have observed during our lifetimes. It usually involves heads shaken in disbelief. One of my friends has the habit of looking skyward and saying, “Oh, well.”

One thing that never fails to puzzle me is how resigned people have become to change, even change that they really don’t like (and perhaps even know is wrong). I must be naïve. I find myself thinking that we should fight to keep beliefs, practices, and institutions we treasure. Stand up and be counted! Sadly, resistance doesn’t happen often. It’s as if – when you reach a certain age – one is relegated to some kind of a spectator role. You can watch, but don’t protest too loudly. Your opinion now doesn’t matter! I always remember the comment of Mr. Jorkins of the new, vested interests to old traditional (stick in the mud) Mr. Fezziwig in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol: “Time and change wait for no man!”

The Brave New World

Those of us who grew up in the years following WWII do remember a much different world than the one in which we currently find ourselves. It certainly was a different world for the Church. Many are asking the same question as the Durants about losing faith in the theology (doctrinal statements) of Christianity. How did this dramatic loss of trust come about?  My purpose in making some observations about this is not just to catalogue the shifts and changes which have occurred in the past sixty years and then complain about them. That has been and is being adequately done. Instead, my purpose is to ask a simple question from the Reformation side of the house. Why were the mainline Protestant Churches in general and the Episcopal Church in particular so poorly prepared to anticipate and strategize for the great changes & challenges of secularization which they should have known [Emphasis mine] were on the horizon in the post-WWII world?

I suppose that there will be people who will object to the fairness of this question, citing as a defense that it is impossible to know the specifics of coming change. Sorry! That defense will not wash! There was, I believe, adequate warning about the future waiting for Protestant Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the old biblical adage about “stoning the prophets” or at least ignoring them remains a constant.

Prologomena (outline)

The first installment of this essay will be a series of snapshots of the post-WWII period. It will begin with some of my personal memories of growing up in the Episcopal Church in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I will also share some research I did about the early history of St. Barnabas’ Episcopal Church on the occasion of the celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the founding of that parish in 1957. That information will add to the picture of that era. It should be obvious from the examples which I will use that I am writing from a very Midwestern perspective.  In the second installment of this reflection, I will describe the moment when the modern world - proverbial two by four - smacked the Episcopal Church right between the eyes in the person of Bishop James A, Pike. The church seemed to be caught by surprise and did not handle it particularly well.

I will then talk about some of the aforementioned ‘ignored prophets’ who tried to warn the Church about what was coming down the pike (no pun intended) in the aftermath of WWII under the guise of modernism.  If they had, they would have been prepared to deal with Bishop Pike. As a conclusion to this reflection on societal change & the church’s response, I will talk about the importance of the parish church and suggest a possible model that the church could have learned from as it tried to cope with the different world in which it found itself living from the decade of the 1960’s onward. This (with a few diversions) will be the basic outline of my essay. Simply, what I am attempting to do in this the first installment is to give people a sense of what the church & society was like fifty or sixty years ago (as I experienced it). People can judge for themselves about the changes that quickly took place then and whether or not the church should have been better prepared.

A Time of Coherence?

I would make one more important (I think) comment about the post-WWII world which is where my earliest memories of life begin. The period immediately following the war was perhaps the last time in our history that things – the ways of the world - had been so clear and understandable. A writer named Terence Malley (Long Island University) put it this way: “[It] stands as a time of coherence, when things were easier to understand than they could ever be again.” My observations! It was a black & white world then. Evil had appeared under the guise of German National Socialism (the Nazis), Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy, and a fanatic militaristic nationalism in Japan. These forces of evil literally attempted to subjugate the rest of the world. The free world opposed them in Europe and the Pacific and decisively defeated them. Good had defeated evil; the world made sense! I always think of a comment made by the fighter Joe Louis during the war. He said, “We can’t lose because God is on our side!” That is exactly how most people thought in those days.  

Sadly, that world of certainty dissolved very quickly. A catastrophic war which had claimed 100 million human beings as victims had really not settled very much. It had simply rearranged boundaries & set the table for a new and potentially more dangerous conflict. The Cold War had begun, and the stakes were raised. Nuclear war was a real possibility. Bomb shelters were a hot topic in the early 1950’s. A sense of the meaninglessness of human existence began to permeate much of Western culture thanks to the literary skills of existentialist writers/philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Cracks very soon began to appear in the victorious, contented façade of American culture.

Some Background Information

            At the beginning of WWII, the United States had a population of c.130 million people. During the war there were over 14 million American men and women in uniform. After peace had been declared in both the European and Pacific theatres of war in 1945, those individuals came home with one goal in mind, i.e. to get their lives back to normal. They wanted to have a good job, get married, buy a home, and raise a family. Very quickly people decided that they were tired of city living. They wanted a house with a yard in which their children could play. The American move to the suburbs was on. The Episcopal Church would quickly follow. The twenty year period following WWII was a heady time of new church development and building projects. Between 1946 and 1965, 18% of current Episcopal parishes were developed. By comparison, only 6% were founded between 1966 and 1989 and 3% after 1989. Why the dramatic slowdown? Obviously something had changed.

            To introduce a discussion of those changes, I will talk about the personal experience of my own family. Both of my parents were Episcopalians before marrying. On the Tudor side of the family, we can trace our family involvement in the Episcopal Church back to Samuel Tudor IV who served on the Building Committee of Christ Church, Hartford, Connecticut in the early 19^th century. The family in which my father grew up were members of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. One of my favorite pictures of my father was taken on the occasion of his medical school graduation in 1937. It shows him in a double breasted suit standing outside looking confidently at the world. In the background of the picture is St. Clements’s. That fact was more than symbolic! The church was an important part of his life. It was foundational, a part of his identity!

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            In 1948 after the war, my father moved his own family to Bismarck, North Dakota and we joined our lives to St. George’s Episcopal Church. Very soon after we moved there, the congregation, led by its Rector A.E. “Ted” Smith, constructed a new church building on the NE corner of Fourth & Ave B. St. George’s was ready for a prosperous future. The great majority of people living in Bismarck in the early 1950’s were either Roman Catholic or Lutheran. A small percentage was Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopalian. The funny thing about that was that our size didn’t detract from the strong sense of identity we felt as Episcopalians. My father was a life long reader of history and we knew clearly the role that the church had played in the settling and creation of our nation. We were aware of the fact that more Presidents have been members of the Episcopal Church than any other denomination. Our Rector was a Canadian by origin and our connection to the Church of England was always evident. That new church building whose construction he had overseen in the early 1950’s looked very much like an English village church. It even had stained glass windows containing pieces of glass salvaged from bombed English churches during WWII. Finally, the stately English in the Book of Common Prayer Sunday after Sunday testified to our genesis in the Church of England. We knew who we were!

            In those years, the Episcopal Church held a preeminent position among Protestant Churches in this country. I can remember reading stories in Time and Newsweek in the 1950’s about American church life, and the Episcopal Church was always named first in a list of Protestant denominations. This goes to the identity issue which I mentioned earlier. As members, we had a strong sense of the “bridge church” role between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism played by the Episcopal Church for much of the history of our country. One doesn’t hear that mentioned anymore.

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            During my “growing up” years, St. George’s on Sunday mornings always seemed to be full of people. Congregational worship in those days was very formal compared to today’s casual standards. Men and boys wore suits and ties; women and girls wore dresses and hats. Women had to wear hats! It was part of the unwritten tradition of the church.

Our rector had a very strong sense of the drama of the Processional at the beginning of the service.  Often we would have as many as eight acolytes involved. There was a crucifer, two torches, the St. George’s banner and four flags: The American, Canadian, North Dakota, and the Church flags. It was quite a show!

The church was a busy place. The women of St. George’s, most of who were house wives, were divided into four guilds which met monthly. The composite of those guilds, the Episcopal Church Women (ECW), also gathered once a month. There was always some kind of event – a bazaar, church dinner, bake sale, etc. – being planned.

The Sunday school filled the Undercroft. What I especially remember are the yearly Christmas pageants. When the narrator read the verse from Luke’s Gospel which said: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host,” a multitude of little children always did appear, dressed in white with silver garlands around their heads to simulate halos.

There was a large active Youth Group which did things on the weekends. During the year, there was always a diocesan youth convention somewhere in the state to which St. George’s sent a large delegation. In the summer, we went to the diocesan camp named Holiday House on Pelican Lake near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. The church provided a lot of activities for us and we responded. Again I have to point out that as young people we felt a strong identity as Episcopalians.

            Ted Smith, our Rector, was at St. George’s for twenty years, from the early 1940’s to the early 1960’s. It is interesting now to remember that he maintained no office at the church. There was no space even set aside for a church office when the new building was constructed. Ted was out every day visiting and seeing people, many of whom were not members of St. George’s. He was the Parson. Everybody knew and respected Rector Smith. He was a walking definition of Christian character.

            Certainly, I am aware as I paint this picture of St. George’s congregational life in the 1950 and 1960’s, that it was a much simpler, less complicated time. There was little else to do in Bismarck on Sundays other than attending church. No stores were open. It was Sunday. Things were closed. Other organizations in town also knew that Wednesday evenings were sacrosanct. That was a church night when choirs met to practice or mid-week services were held. It was a time when church membership was acknowledged as a important part of responsible adult behavior.

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            I need to make one more observation about my early experience in the Episcopal Church. In 1960 I went off to the University of North Dakota and after two years transferred to the University of Kansas. Both places had a Canterbury House with a resident Episcopal campus chaplain. Their names were Eldred Murdoch (UND) and Tom Woodward (Kansas). Both of these men had active ministries on campus with a wide range of students. Canterbury House was a place to go on Sunday evenings and mid-week for some much needed church fellowship. It kept us in touch with the church. Many people of my generation have testified to me about the importance of this Episcopal presence on their college campus and what it meant to them personally. It bolstered their Episcopal identity! In 1969 when upheaval in the church – which will be discussed later - began to affect church giving, the unfortunate decision was made to discontinue funding for staff for these campus ministries.

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            I will now leave this admittedly rather idealistic picture of the Episcopal parish church in which I was nurtured in the 1950’s and relate a statistical story of the founding of another parish church with which I was also intimately connected. That congregation was St. Barnabas’ Episcopal Church in Florissant, Missouri where I was rector for twenty years (1989-2008). This is the parish from which I retired. Its early statistical history provides concrete witness to the great enthusiasm for the church which was a part of American society in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

 After several planning meetings which began in 1956 to discuss the need for a new parish church in North St. Louis County, 83 people gathered in the basement of a rented house for the new congregation’s inaugural worship service on April 28, 1957. The fledgling congregation quickly outgrew its space and moved to the auditorium of a nearby grade school. By 1959, its average Sunday attendance (ASA) was 111. A parish directory published in that year lists 135 families. There were 236 persons present when the mission congregation moved into its new building in 1960. The growth continued! By the end of its fifth year, it claimed 653 baptized members and 301 communicants. St. Barnabas’ peaked in its tenth year (1967) with 898 baptized members and 543 communicants. It published a pictorial directory in that year showing page after page of young families, many with three or four children. More than 250 children were enrolled in the church’s Sunday school program in the mid-1960’s. St. Barnabas’ was admitted to parish status in the Diocese of Missouri in 1972. By then, however, things had begun to change. This story was probably played out in countless parish churches all across the country but especially in the Midwest. 

Fifteen years does not seem like a long time, but between 1957 and 1972, American society changed a great deal. The 1960s began a period in American social history of open rebellion against authority. Violence on college campuses was common. The Civil Rights Movement was gathering momentum. The 1960’s were the years of the beginning of the sexual revolution. (Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963.) The 60’s were the years of America’s deepening involvement in Viet Naim, an entanglement which seriously shook America’s confidence in itself and its destiny. President John F. Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King were all assassinated in the 1960’s. The Watts’ riots in Los Angeles took place in 1967. As we shall see, there was also turmoil in the church mirroring that in society. The decade of the 60’s began the escalating process of the extreme secularization of American society. A difficult road lay ahead for American mainline Protestant churches and it was only the beginning. The peak membership year for the Episcopal Church was 1965. From that point a steady membership and attendance decline began which has been well documented. It continues to this day. What happened in the late 1960’s was that the days of a kinder, simpler faith had passed away. Americans were more affluent and were living much more complicated lives. For many there was no longer time for active church involvement. Priorities had changed. Why did this development seemingly take us by surprise? It shouldn’t have!

Now is the time to return to a statement made in one of the opening paragraphs of this essay, to the effect that, “there was adequate prophecy about the future waiting for American Protestantism in the twentieth century.” What was meant by that? Let’s be very clear about the changes in American society affecting church membership which have taken place in the past fifty years. Whether it has been done consciously or unconsciously, what we have been seeing is what is described by philosophers and theologians as the completion of the Enlightenment project. What that means will be discussed in the next installment of this essay.

 

Ash Wednesday

From that time, Jesus began to proclaim,

“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.”

 

The Struggle

            Today begins the most holy time of the year for Christians.  Since the 6^th century, the faithful in the church have gathered on Ash Wednesday to receive the imposition of ashes on their foreheads and to hear those solemn words spoken: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Continuing that ancient tradition, we gather today.

            The real significance of Ash Wednesday is the fact that it signals the beginning of the Season of Lent, a forty day long period of self-examination and preparation for the celebration of Easter. Lent provides a much needed opportunity for serious reflection about the meaning and direction of our lives. It is a time when, symbolically, we are encouraged to trace the footsteps of Jesus who now sets his face toward Jerusalem and the fate that awaits him there.  Ash Wednesday begins your Lenten journey.

  Countless books have been written about the person of Jesus and in particular, about the Passion of Jesus. One of my favorites is the novel The Greek Passion (1954) by Nikos Kazanzakis, one of the giants of modern European literature (Zorba the Greek).  The story told takes place in the 1920’s in a small Greek village named Lycovrissi.  Following Easter one year, the “notables” of the village decide to have a live passion play during Holy Week of the next year.  And so they select villagers for the key roles of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate, and the twelve apostles including Judas.  The selected villagers are told that they are to prepare for this honor by living lives during the coming year which will bring them close to their characters.  No one has the vision to foresee just how graphically this is going to happen.  The selected villagers do more than just prepare for their roles; they fully become their characters and the passion of Jesus is played out in painful, bloody detail in the life of the village.

            For example, the central figure in the play, Manolios a shy young shepherd who is cast as Jesus, makes some startling changes in his life.  He abruptly breaks off his engagement to the young woman he has been planning to marry and he becomes instead a reflective loner given to going off by himself for long periods of time.  He starts to espouse, much to the disgust of the village priest, a literal Christian moral code: embrace all people, share your wealth, treat all people equally, and so on. 

            The young woman chosen to play the part of Mary Magdalene, formerly the village “loose woman”, radically alters her lifestyle and reveals a previously unknown strength and depth of personality and sensitivity. And on it goes.

            All of the major characters in the play make similar transformations in their lives.   The point here is obvious. What Kazankakis has done is to grasp perfectly the significance of ritual in the Church. We are not here merely as spectators, but as participants. The power of the drama of the life of Christ, particularly the drama of his last days - when it hangs meaningfully over our lives - has the power to effect transformation there. This is not just a story but is, as Hollywood once advertised it, “The Greatest Story ever told.” During the forty days of Lent, we need to invest ourselves, in this drama which will be played out in church for us during this deeply emotional and passionate Season of Lent, and we need to tap into its mysterious power in a restorative way for ourselves and our faith. 

So today we begin! The lessons appointed to be read on Ash Wednesday point the way. They set the mood for the penitential Season of Lent. Listen!

Joel 2:13 – “Rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the

                    Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, . . . 

II Cor. 5:10b – “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to

                           God.”

Psalm 103:8 – The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, *

                                        slow to anger and of great kindness.

      The key words in Lent are repentance and reconciliation! ( A definition: Repentance means seeking your happiness in a different direction.) When one leave the church following at the conclusion of an Ash Wednesday service, it should be with these words still faintly echoing in one's ears: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

 

Another Lenten Focus

            Would anyone disagree with this statement?  “The principal anguish and the source of much joy and sorrow in our lives from youth onwards has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.” (Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, p. 1)

            Every person partakes of the divine nature in both spirit and flesh.  We read in the 1^st chapter of Genesis: “And God created humankind in his own image, in his image God created them.” Theologians talk endlessly about what that means.  We can only say that it is a mystery but we can also say that we see this mystery revealed fully in the person of Jesus in the passion of Jesus and that is precisely why we are drawn so strongly to it.  What is so compelling about the last days of Jesus is the struggle between the divine and human – Spirit and flesh – which rages there. That struggle is not confined to the life of Jesus; it breaks out in us all.  It is brought to the surface in Lent with the result hopefully being a longing for reconciliation.

            Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission and finally, the supreme pursuit of the struggle – union with God: this was the path taken by Jesus during the days leading up to his passion and this is the path  that we are invited to follow during these forty days as well.

            If we are able to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish, his sacrifice, his ascent to the summit of martyrdom, the Cross.  There is the goal of a holy Lent, to walk with Jesus the path to the cross.

            As He made His way to Golgotha, the summit of sacrifice, the Christ passed through all the stages which the person who struggles passes through.  That is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we are drawn during Lent to mysterious share it, and why his final victory seems to us so much our victory.  That part of Christ’s nature which was so profoundly human helps us to understand him and to love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own.  Jesus is divine and yet so human, if that were not true He would not be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness, touch us so intimately as He does during Lent and Holy Week.  We struggle. We see him struggle also, and we find strength.  We see that we are not alone in the world.  He is fighting at our side     

What we will see enacted for us during Lent is the meaning of John 3:16: “For God so loves the world that he gave his only begotten son to the end that all that believe in him should not perish but have eternal life.”  Penitence would seem to be the natural response to the suffering and death which Jesus endured in order to show God’s unconditional love for us.  In the arena of human relationships, the love that forgives and the penitence that accepts is what restores relationships.  So this evening as a sign of our penitence, we receive ashes on our foreheads so that we can never forget where we came from and where we would be without the sacrificial love of Jesus.

             

"Morning Obituaries"

     My acquaintance with Leontyne was limited to a few brief conversations when I was a visitor in the home where she had lived prior to her death for eleven years with her daughter Janet and son-in-law Dave who were parishioners of mine. She was ninety-four years old when she died on June 28, 1994. I didn’t have much personal knowledge of her life. However, I did have knowledge of the area where she was born and lived for the first fifty years of her long life. That place is the farm country to the west of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The people and the area are not dissimilar to the place where I was raised. Therefore, I offer this reflection on life and death in upper Midwestern rural America, particularly the Dakotas. Those who have spent any time at all in small town America will know that what I relate is true.  

            I first read the following story in a Louisiana newspaper in the early

           1990’s. I was at Fort Polk with my Army Reserve unit doing Annual

           Training. Somebody had a newspaper which I borrowed. It    

           contained a column by a staff writer talking about the death of her

           father. I liked the story and her writing very much. Over the years, I

          have lost the column and her name. My apologies to her! She

          deserves the credit for these insightful observations. The parable is

          too good not to be shared.

Morning Obituaries

 

            Radios sounded scratchier then, like the voices were being pushed through a screen. His was a Philco, the portable kind that stayed tuned to the same station forever. It sat on a high shelf in the kitchen and breakfast was the only time it played.

            To start his day, the old man listened to the local obituaries, which a faceless woman with a country accent read in a solemn voice. Organ music introduced the program.

            The list of the dead seemed interminable. Nobody talked in his kitchen while the lady read.

            “Burial will be at Hillside Cemetery. . .”

            “Visitation will be from 3 to 9 at the Everson Funeral Home. . .”

            “Mr. Olafson leaves four sons, one daughter, twelve grandchildren.”

            The death lady never got in a hurry, would occasionally mispronounce a name and reread it several times.

            Oral obituaries! We imagine her sitting there shuffling the papers from the funeral home, adjusting her glasses, taking pride in providing a community service. Perhaps she was the undertaker’s wife or simple a church lady doing her perceived duty.

            While he listened to the death roll, the old man would stare out the window and eat his breakfast of cold cereal, hot coffee, sausage and eggs.

            He knew the dead the lady listed, everything about them and their families. He made no comment, accepting their deaths as part of the daily routine. When he would decide to attend a funeral, he would get out his black suit and white shirt, worn only on these occasions and stiffly trudge off to church.

            To an outside observer, it would seem that the deaths of family and friends seemed almost matter-of-fact to the old man. People were born, people died and in between they did the best they could. Perhaps it had to do with living through two world wars or the Depression or a time when a shorter life expectancy was the rule.

            There is a certain fatalistic outlook shared by most older farmers, a perspective in which nature is boss. Perhaps it’s the whole business of seasons which is rendered so poetically by Ecclesiastes:

            “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. . .”

            Death was simply another cold fact of life, like drought or flood or crop disease. It was something to be got through, like a disappointing yield. The old man never talked about death, in the abstract anyway. Rural folk weren’t prone to being philosophical. For him it was always specific, as in “Did you hear that Wilma Hummel died?” One wonders how, in his own mind, he had come to make its acceptance easier? Yes, we do wonder.

A morning obituary: Leontine M. Jones. Born October 4, 1900, in Freeman, South Dakota; died June 28, 1994, in Florissant, Missouri. She was preceded in death by her husband Richard E. Jones. She leaves two children, four grandchildren, three great grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on Friday, July 1, at 10:30 am at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. The Rev. Richard B. Tudor will officiate.

            And he will comment on the fact that she was baptized and confirmed in a German Lutheran Church in her home town of Freeman. It was a church steadfast in the Reformed tradition where certainly she was taught about the centrality of scripture in the religious life and a church where she learned just what it is that makes up a Christian life. It is to confess Jesus Christ, that in Him God has been active to restore and reconcile the human race and through that restoration, the whole creation.

            I was told by her daughter Janet that in her later life Leontine did not place much stock in dwelling on the past. I hope that she will forgive me these few moments of nostalgia, a remembering of a time and a sometimes harsh place settled and populated by a tough, resolute group of northern European people who left behind them a solid heritage of hard work, simple values, and steadfast faith.

 

 

 

           

Requiem for Grace Episcopal Church, Clarksville

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          Did you happen to see the article in the Sunday, January 26^th, edition of the Post Dispatch about the couple who bought a closed Episcopal Church in Clarksville and converted it into their residence?  I was looking through the paper that day for the sports section when my eyes fell upon a headline which grabbed my attention. It said: Episcopal Church. As a lifelong Episcopalian and Episcopal clergyman, I was very interested. At first glance, the headline was a bit misleading. In full, it actually read: COUPLE CREATE A NEW HOUSE OUT OF AN   EPISCOPAL CHURCH. Very clever visually! Why the extra large print for Episcopal Church? What was the message?

            The article went on to relate how a couple from Ladue, Kirk and Mary Ostertag, had in 2011 purchased a shuttered Episcopal Church in Clarksville, Missouri. I was somewhat bemused by the fact that the couple’s last name “Ostertag” is a conjunction (joining) of two German words which together mean “Easter Day.” Isn’t there some irony here? People named “Easter Day” living in a former church building!

            One was able to glean from the article that Grace Episcopal Church in Clarksville, Missouri had had quite a history. It had been founded in 1869 a few years after the end of the Civil War. The building which was sold to the Ostertags was constructed in 1940. That is also an interesting story. The church building was designed, constructed, and paid for through the efforts of one individual, a St. Louis surgeon named Dr. Malvern Clopton who must have had some connection with Clarksville. Perhaps he grew up there? The article doesn’t tell us. Whatever the reason, it was quite an act of individual generosity! The article went on to say that the church had been closed for three years when the Ostertags purchased it in 2011. Grace Episcopal Church had a congregation of only four people in 2008 when they decided to close their doors. The Canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, Dan Smith, is quoted in the article as saying, “Some of these smaller churches just can’t keep going like years ago.” That is something of an understatement. Maintenance costs on a building that seated 100 people must have been eating them alive. A congregation of four people! Unfortunately small towns and churches have life cycles and the church in Clarksville fits the classic pattern.

            In the late 18^th century when the United States was founded, ninety-nine percent of the people lived on farms and one percent in cities. Today the situation is completely reversed. Less than one percent lives on farms and ninety-nine percent live in cities. Throughout history, there has been a continuing, accelerating movement from rural areas to the larger cities. This demographic has been disastrous for rural and small town churches.  I would guess that the average age of those four remaining communicants when they closed was probably around eighty. Young people are rarely found in small town congregations. They have either moved to the larger cities where there is employment opportunity or they are no longer interested in church involvement. Secular culture today exerts a powerful pull against active church membership for the young.   

            I have to say that I found this article a bit irritating. The message in the setup of the headline is plain (at least to me) and speaks volumes. There is more than a little secular triumphalism in this story about a closed church being converted to a residence. In my mind, we live in a world in which things or institutions of substantial value are passing away to be replaced by superficial substitutes. Let me say that another way. In a world hungry for lasting meaning, we should be creating more sacred space, not deconsecrating the little that we have.

            My reasoning would follow this line. Grace Episcopal Church in Clarksville was a parish church that could look back on almost one hundred and forty years of congregational life when it closed its doors in 2008. Just think of all the faithful people who gathered there Sunday after Sunday for all those years to hear the Word of God read and preached and to worship according to the “stately, measured cadences” of the Book of Common Prayer. How many adult lives were strengthened there and uplifted there? How many children over those years attended Sunday School and learned all the familiar bible stories about Jesus in the Undercroft (basement) of the church?  Just think of all the people who were baptized, confirmed, and married in Grace Church and who, at the end of their lives, were buried  from there! I can stand in a church building when it is empty and hear the faint echoes of all the Christmas Eve and Easter services that have been celebrated there. A parish church building is a monument not only to Jesus Christ but also to the commitment of all the people who invested significant portions of their lives there.

            Parish churches like Grace were once the ethical foundations of small towns like Clarksville. They provided a spiritual leaven in communities which called out the best qualities in people.  They also provided opportunities for much needed fellowship. How many hours did the church women spend working in the church kitchen serving – God only knows – how many potluck dinners? The unasked and unanswered question in the article is this: just what has replaced the Christian presence of Grace Church in Clarksville? Sadly, the answer to that one is all too obvious. It seems to be a reversal of the beloved prayer from the Good Friday service, “. . .; let the whole world see and know that things that were cast down are being raised up and things that had grown old are being made new. . .”

            I am certainly more than aware that we are living in a world and society which is rapidly changing; the new is replacing the old so fast that it makes one’s head spin! I am also aware that the closing of a small church is nothing out of the ordinary. I have been resident in the Diocese of Missouri since 1989 and, in that span of about twenty-five years, the census of congregations in the diocese has declined from fifty-nine to about forty-six. Many of those remaining churches are quite small. Attrition is a reality. What I am saying is that it is a sad reality and we should mourn it. We should also be willing to confess that, over the years, churches like Grace were neglected in many ways. The saddest part of the article about the conversion of the church building to a private residence is the revelation of “deferred maintenance,” i.e. a rotting steeple, clogged gutters leading to water problems, etc. Grace Episcopal Church, Clarksville, we mourn your passing and we give thanks for your life and witness. Requiem Eternam!