On The Death of a Parish Priest

 

George Plattenburg Service

July 9, 2014

            We are gathered here this morning to do two things: 1) As we always do when we gather to worship, celebrate the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus; and the more poignant – painful task today of 2) Honoring the memory of a man, a colleague – George Plattenburg - who made the decision fairly early in his life to give his life to Christian ministry and more particularly, to the ministry which takes place in parish churches. I think that I can say without too much fear of disagreement that that is a noble calling! For this service I chose not to read one of the recommended Burial Office Gospels, but instead picked one from the service for the ordination of a priest. In case you didn’t appreciate it the first time, here it is again:

            And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. Teaching and Preaching and Healing! That is the model for ministry which Jesus sets before us. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to the disciples, “The Harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

            George Plattenburg was one of those, I am guessing, back in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s whose imagination was stirred by that imperative from Jesus and he decided to become one of those laborers following the direction of the Lord of the harvest. Again, it was and is a noble calling!

            George was born in Oxford, Ohio. His father was an Episcopal clergyman, the archdeacon of the Diocese of Ohio at one time. George spent his childhood in Ohio and also in upstate New York where he graduated from high school. He went to college at Sewanee – the University of the South - a place well known in the Episcopal Church, graduating in 1955. Having been in ROTC in college, 2^nd  Lt. George Plattenburg spent three years in the Air Force as a navigation officer. It looks like he then made a brief run at a business career but decided instead to heed the call to the ministry and he became a seminary student at Bexley Hall, an Episcopal Seminary in Gambier, Ohio. (This was back in the day when Episcopal postulants actually went to Episcopal seminaries.) He was graduated in 1962 and was ordained to the priesthood the next year.

He began his ordained career as an assistant at a parish in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then he took his growing family to Kemmerer, Wyoming where he served what is called a two point parish. That means that every Sunday he had one service in a small church and then drove forty five miles to a second church where he officiated and preached at another service. And he did that summer and winter, rain and shine. I’m sure he even drove it in blizzard conditions.

I knew a young Lutheran clergyman who went to seminary in St. Paul,

Minnesota. He signed on to become the pastor of a three point  

place in North Dakota. Before he went out there, he got married. His

new wife had not been part of the decision to go there. When they

drove into the small (and I mean small) town where they were going to

 live, he stole a sidelong glance at his wife. She was sitting there

crying! It was not an easy transition!

George was in Kemmerer for seven years and I would guess that it was there that he really learned how to be a parish priest. Years ago we used to say that it was the small rural parishes that did the actual training of parish clergy. They are demanding situations! The clergyman is a one man band. George then spent some time in Moline, Illinois and in 1976 moved to St. Louis where he spent the last 38 years of his life.

I knew George in the 1990’s when he was involved in the Urban Partnership, a ministry of two priests alternately serving four small urban parishes. Prior to that he was an associate at St Peter’s, Ladue where he worked for David Benson. His last place before retirement was St. John’s, Tower Grove Park.

            George’s son George Jr. was good enough to share some memories of his father with me.  I especially liked two images. The first was of George, Jr. accompanying his father numerous times on that forty-five mile trip between those two small towns in southwestern Wyoming so that he could serve as the acolyte. The second description  with which I was really taken was of George’s weekly sermon preparation. Every clergy person who has ever served in a small parish knows about the pressure of that weekly sermon. It was always there over your head, week after week after week. There wasn’t anyone else to spell you of the preaching responsibility. Apparently George used to put it off until late Saturday evening or even early Sunday morning. The process by which he did his sermons was described to me as “creative panic.” I understand that completely! I have been there.

            What is there that is so compelling about parish ministry? I could write a book! It is still striking to me how little people really appreciate the great value of this institution which came into being through the action of the Holy Spirit following the Ascension of Jesus. That action gave us a place, a sacred place, to live our lives in the midst of the chaos & confusion of secularity, most importantly during our transition moments. Each one of us makes a life journey and the parish church offers us a sanctuary along the way where we can be strengthened through the power of the gospel which Sunday after Sunday by a process sometimes of creative panic is preached there. God bless the people who make that happen. God bless the parish clergy! God bless George for his decision to follow that vocation and answer the summons of the Lord of the harvest.

            It is not an easy life to choose, but the Lord of the Harvest remembers those who have been faithful. George Plattenburg, rest in peace!  You fought the good fight! Amen.

 

 

A Differnt World: Part 4

Theology, as a function of the Christian Church, must serve the needs of the church. A theological system is supposed to satisfy two basic 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 two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.

                                                        Paul Tillich

                                                                 Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 3

Paul Tillich begins his three-volume Systematic Theology with the three sentences which I have quoted above.  The content of what he says has to do with the simple idea of message and situation. The Christian message is eternal (the gospel is unchanging); the situation in which it is preached is always in flux, i.e. changing! This is the problem which faces the Church today, i.e. how to go about effectively [emphasis mine] meeting these two needs. In the roughly two thousand year existence of the Christian Church, I would venture to say that in no other time has this problem of hermeneutics (interpretation) been so difficult and yet so crucial as in the time in which we are presently living.

I am currently reading a history of the period prior to what is called The Great War (WWI) which began in 1914. It is entitled The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914. The author, Margaret McMillan, makes this statement about the situation in Russia in the early 1900’s: “Modernity was challenging the old certainties in both the rural and urban areas.” That observation could be made in spades about American society in the 1950’s and 1960’s! That is the point which I have been developing in my series of reflections grouped under the heading of A Different World. The challenge of modernity! Of course the real issue is how institutions like the Church have reacted to this challenge. I have been asking the question of why the Episcopal and other Mainline Protestant churches seemed to be so poorly prepared when great change arrived in the anti-authoritarian 1960’s.

 

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It is natural for a person of my age to be nostalgic about the church remembered from one’s formative years. Marcel Proust, in the first volume of his famous novel Remembrance of Things Past described a village which he used to visit as a boy:

“Those Combray streets – existing in a remote corner of my memory,

are painted in colours very different from those in which the world

is decked for me today.”

                                                            Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way 

Amen! I understand what Proust meant when he wrote those lines! In my own personal experience, memories of an earlier, simpler world are more vivid than the chaotic picture presented by the modernity (secularity) of today. It is the contrast between then and now and an inner yearning to not lose the meaning of that earlier time which makes our personal “remembrance of things past” so compelling.

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In the first three installments of A Different World, I have set the stage for this, the final piece. I have talked about my experiences – the church as I remember it – in the relatively calm and stable years of the 1950’s. I have also related the observations of three very astute German theologians forecasting the impending secular crisis in the Church. I have talked about the meteoric career of Bishop James Pike of the Diocese of California (where else?) who was an abrasive messenger of change in the 1960’s. Finally, I have reported in some detail the content of a 1962 book written by a Church of England Bishop named John A.T. Robinson who also talked about secular change and the demands with which it confronts the Church. Message and Situation! Was the church listening when John Robinson came forward with his message which in effect was: change or perish? I think that there is scant evidence that it was.

I feel compelled to reveal part of my hand at this point. When I ask the question about the church’s response to the challenge of escalating change which began in the 1960’s, I have a particular issue in which I am deeply interested. The church should have based a plan of action on the awareness that whatever was done was going to greatly impact the stability of the individual parish church. One of the major factors to be considered should have been this question: Is this going to contribute to or detract from the strength and success of the parish church. It is one thing to issue statements from New York City; it is quite another to be conscious of the effect of those statements and attendant policies on parish churches in the Midwest and elsewhere.

I remember hearing about a day in the late 60’s or early 70’s which was called Black Friday. That was the fateful day on which half of the employees at 815 Second Ave in New York City (national Episcopal Church headquarters) received pink slips. The people in the pews had spoken (voted); the money had dried up! I am also reminded of that famous March 29, 1976 New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg titled “New Yorker’s View of the World” which depicted the known civilized world as ending at the Hudson River. That picture said it all!

Perhaps these observations are too cynical. I don’t think so! The statistics tell a depressing story. In 1958, the United States had a population of 180 million people and the Episcopal Church reported a membership of over 3 million members. Today our country has in excess of 315 million people and some estimates of Episcopal Church membership place it at less than 2 million. At any rate, it would seem that since the turmoil of the 1960’s our church has lost about 1/3 of its membership. I have heard all the talk about these losses being “systemic” and always wondered whether those putting forth that explanation of church membership decline had completely thought through the implications. I still maintain that different policies could have made a great difference in stemming these losses.

Let’s talk about the word “systemic.” It is an important concept in the life of the Church. The dictionary defines its root word “system” as being “an organized set of doctrines, ideas, or principles usually intended to explain the arrangement or working of a systematic whole.” Therefore, if we say that something is “systematic,” it means that that ‘something’ (the church) is presented as a coherent body of ideas or principles. What I see in the church today is far from a clear picture of “a coherent body of ideas or principles.” Ambiguity is more often the case.  Perhaps coherence is an impossibility today in what could easily be described as fragmented times. Yet, possessing or, more importantly, being a system that is able to function effectively would seem to be a absolute necessity for all institutions and especially the church.

As an example, I would point to the current uproar about the disorder and ineffectiveness of the hospitals being operated by the Veterans Administration. Everyone has agreed that this inability to function properly is a systemic problem and there is a hue and cry demanding that the broken system be fixed. I would say the same thing about the church. If we have a systemic problem which appeared in the 1960’s and led to membership decline - as so many have claimed – what was proposed to fix it?  

I have thought a great deal about this. In thirty-six years of parish ministry in three dioceses, I cannot remember a clergy gathering at which systemic failure was seriously discussed or even admitted. I also have to say that, much to my surprise, no bishop making a yearly parish visitation during my parish years ever broached this subject and suggested that changes needed to be made in the way the church did business if the church was going to be effective in its mission, preaching the gospel. (Remember Bishop Robinson’s thesis in Honest to God!) I wish a bishop would have sat down with me in one of my parishes and said, “Rich, here’s the plan. This is what I want the face of the Episcopal Church to be in your community. We will periodically review your progress in developing this program.” (This statement will probably surprise people but Episcopal Seminaries, in my time, had no courses in parish administration or program development.)

I attended three General Conventions as a deputy. Were there serious discussions about addressing the message & situation issue? I don’t remember any. A measure of triumphalism is always a part of general convention. The revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1979 and the Hymnal 1982 were attempts to modernize the liturgy. These changes had little or no positive effect on membership numbers. There were people who left the church over the revision of the prayer book.

 In the late 1980’s, the church, recognizing that it had a declining membership problem, instituted the Decade of Evangelism to run throughout the 1990’s and an Evangelism office was set up to assist the effort.  Some wag at the time observed that for the church to have a department of evangelism was like the Penn Central having a department of railroads. Nothing happened with the Decade of Evangelism. For some inexplicable reason, the church has had little modern experience or even familiarity with  one of the central concepts of Christianity, evangelism. Another unrealistic attempt to address the problem was made at the turn of the millennium with the 20/20 program which had the goal of doubling church membership by 2020. I haven’t heard anything about that for many years?

I have always preached and advanced the proposition that the church, by design, presents the face of a different culture to the world. There is secularity and there is sacredness, to put it another way. That difference needs to be maintained. The church (to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer) cannot just be an easy extension of secularity! The church needs to offer an alternative life style to people. This is an important mission and it happens for the most part in the parish church. This is the crucial part of the system which in my mind needs to be redesigned.  

The Parish Church 

                        Since the individual parish (or mission) is the basic unit of

                        the Church’s life, it is clear that the health of the Church

                       depends upon the health of this unit. It is at the parish level

                       that the great battle of the Church’s life is fought. If we

                       succeed here, developing strong and thriving parishes, we

                       succeed everywhere; if we fail here we fail everywhere.

                                                               The Rt. Rev. Richard S.M. Emrich

                                                                Diocese of Michigan

            The paragraph quoted above is the beginning of an address delivered in the mid-1950’s by Bishop Richard Emrich to wardens and Bishop’s Committee chairmen of the Diocese of Michigan. The entire address was so popular that it was published in booklet form in 1956 with the title the five marks of a healthy parish. I consider the opening sentences to be prophetic words which should have been taken more to heart by the church.

            I believe that people need the experience of living their lives in a healthy parish church which draws them deeper and deeper into the life of Christ. As a part of that experience, the people have the right to expect stimulating liturgy and good preaching. These two elements are essential. They also have the right to expect that their parish will have a well rounded program of activity designed to draw them deeper into the common life of the parish. We used to use the SWEEPS acronym to describe these activities: Service, Worship, Education, Evangelism, Pastoral Care,  & Stewardship.

            At this point I propose to develop an analogy. Everywhere we go in the United States we see the same stores and the same restaurants. They are franchises. During the 20^th century, the idea to duplicate successful marketing outlets really captured the public imagination, particularly in the fast food business. One can drive down streets in cities all over our country and they all look the same. There’s a Burger King, there’s McDonalds, there’s an Olive Garden, there’s Wendy’s, there’s a Dairy Queen, there’s a Pizza Hut and on and on ad infinitum. All of these companies sell a food product which has proven to be successful in the market place. When you enter one of these stores, one knows what to expect.

I would suggest that one way to look at the organization of the Episcopal Church is to consider the individual parish churches as local franchises operating because they are licensed by their regional authority (the diocese) to do so. They are given the opportunity to market a product (the gospel). Part of their obligation as a franchisee is to pay an annual licensing fee called an assessment. When you visit a local Episcopal franchise, can you expect that there is a uniformity of product offered similar to what one would expect when you walked into a McDonalds? I think that here we are on shaky ground. There isn’t much uniformity and that is something of a problem.

 During my thirty-six year career in parish ministry, I was associated with four parishes of varying sizes. One was a corporate sized church, two were pastoral size, and one was a family church. I am using the sizing criteria developed by Arlin J. Rothauge. It is described in a pamphlet titled Sizing Up A Congregation for New Member Ministry. He also wrote a follow up piece titled Reshaping a Congregation for a New Future.  A smart guy! 

During all my time in parish ministry, no bishop making an annual visitation ever asked me for a realistic assessment about how things were going and about our progress in important common church life areas like the children’s Sunday school, adult education, pastoral care, home visitation, liturgy, and annual fund raising campaigns to name a few. No bishop ever heard me preach a sermon. How did they know that any of this was going on and how did they know the quality of the product being offered to the people. Each parish by canonical requirement fills out an annual parochial statistical report and submits it to the diocesan office which then forwards it to the national church offices. No one ever called me to talk about those statistics which included both financial and attendance & participation numbers. My point is this.  Where were the standards to hold me and the parish accountable for the mission of the church? There should have been a clearer defined system to regulate and direct how we were doing business. I am certainly sensitive to the idea that it is always convenient & easy to be critical of the bishops. However, they as a group are stuck with one problem. The Greek word “episcopas” means oversight. It’s defines their responsability! Can you imagine a regional supervisor for McDonald’s visiting one of their stores and not looking at the books, inspecting the premises, evaluating the quality of management, and then giving the place a grade?

Having mentioned McDonald’s, I will expand the franchise analogy a bit. The story of the history of this corporation is well worth reading. It is contained in a book titled McDonald’s: Behind the Golden Arches by John F. Love. Most people should have some familiarity with the story. Most of us have been in countless McDonald’s store over the years.

McDonald’s

In the early 1950’s a pair of brothers opened a restaurant in Southern California offering inexpensive “fast” food. The place was called McDonald’s. It did a land office business day and night and it eventually came to the attention of a milk shake mixer salesman named Ray Kroc who very quickly saw in the McDonald brothers’ success the business opportunity which he had been looking for all his life. To make a long story short, he bought the franchising rights from the McDonald brothers and set out to change the eating habits of the American public who, he was convinced, would just love the idea of going to a McDonald’s. He was right! Today there are over 35,000 McDonald’s franchises worldwide. When Ray Kroc died in January of 1984 at the age of 81, his personal estate was worth over 600 million dollars. However, the road to that kind of success was not easy.

Ray Kroc had his own ideas about the correct way to run a restaurant and he always insisted that things be done a certain way, i.e. his way. The McDonald’s franchise philosophy was different than their competitors in the field. Other franchisers were mainly interested in the franchise fees paid by the local owners. They were committed to making money off of those selling their products. Kroc had a different idea of success. He felt that his corporation had a personal stake in the success of each and every store. He went out of his way to help the local franchises reach the level of success that he knew was possible for them and he would often waive franchise fees until that success level was reached. Ray Kroc insisted that every store be run the same way and present an identical face to the public. There was no local option. It was the McDonald’s way or the highway. There were always individuals who thought that they knew better than Ray Kroc and wanted to change the menu by adding additional items. They wanted to buck the system. He got rid of the mavericks by not renewing their leases or buying them out. If Ray Kroc visited a McDonald’s and found it dirty, the wrath of God descended upon the franchisee.

Kroc was not a restaurant person and really knew nothing about hamburgers. He was a marketing genius. He knew how to sell a product and he did it with an established system. Ray Kroc instituted severe operating standards and he was intense about enforcing them. He had a formula which was used to evaluate McDonald’s stores. It was called QSC and it has become the universal symbol of performance in the fast food business. It stands for Quality – Service – Cleanliness. Every franchise was evaluated once a year by being subjected to a performance audit in which they were given a grade of A, B, C, D or F in these categories. I wonder what would happen in Episcopal parishes if such an audit were made. I would make the observation half in jest/half in seriousness that parishes in the Episcopal Church would be a lot better off if Ray Kroc (or someone like him) would have been the presiding bishop in the 1970’s. Why do I say this? Because he understood the changes in American society which began to emerge in the 1950’s and he could sense what the American public wanted. They wanted inexpensive good tasting food served quickly in a clean, family oriented restaurant. He gave the American public exactly that. Ray Kroc had a formula for success and he did not and would not compromise his operating principles! What does the American public want in a parish church. Do we know?

Perhaps using an analogy of McDonald’s and the Episcopal Church offends some people, but the church is also in the business of selling ideas, beliefs & values and a way of life. We could have used a marketing expert. The reason the church could have used that expert is the fact that during the second half of the twentieth century, American society changed dramatically around the issue of personal choice. Old loyalties (like generational church membership) went out the window. For me this change is epitomized in the Burger King commercial which promises: “Have it your way!” Today Americans do want it their way. It is a difficult proposition to convince them otherwise. Indeed! The hardest sell in the church today is getting people to accept an authority other than their own needs and wants.

Conclusion 

           

I began this reflection by quoting Paul Tillich. I will close with a quote from Wolfhart Pannenberg, another eminent 20^th century German theologian. In a small book titled An Introduction to Systematic Theology he states:

                        The fundamental question in the history of Christianity is

                        why a person should commit themselves to be a member of

                        the Christian Church?    

This is an especially difficult question to answer today because of the strong and aggressive modern challenges to Christian doctrine. Those “challenges” are: 1) the rise of modern science as a secular interpretation of reality, human life, and history; 2) the modern criticism of all forms of arguing by recourse to authority (authority & reason in opposition). The Church is still left with the responsibility of developing a systematic theology presenting a coherent model of the world as God’s creation. I have in these reflections attempted to take a long look at the world of my experience and make some observations about how the church has handled the modern challenges during my lifetime.

            I will readily admit that it is easy with the benefit of hindsight to look back at the past fifty years in the church and be critical of action or inaction. The question of what should have been done, what decisions should have been made is still difficult. I think that a starting point could have been to break the problem into a dichotomy: 1) the church should have stood fast on its beliefs and defended its doctrine (Here I stand, I can do no other) or, 2) the church should have completely modernized and secularized itself (If you can’t beat them, join them). The answer to this either/or probably lies somewhere in the middle which has been, since the Protestant Reformation, a comfortable and convenient position for Anglicans (the Middle Way). But is that way effective today? That is the important question! What is effective today? What will people buy? What will being them back to the Church and compel them to make meaningful commitments to Jesus?

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.