One Diocese’s Grassroots Journey of Discernment

‘Crisis’ is a term that describes well one particular diocese of the Episcopal Church, which I had the opportunity of accompanying on a large-scale mission strategy process.Footnote 3 Like many American dioceses, it had peaked in membership, baptisms, confirmations, and self-confidence in the mid-1960s. Those trends began an inexorable slide later that decade, with membership falling to pre-World War II levels by 2000, while the population of the area covered by the diocese more than tripled. By 2004, baptisms had dropped by roughly 65% and confirmations by 87% from their peaks in the middle of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the region’s demographics had shifted dramatically, from predominantly rural to predominantly urban and suburban, from a predominantly white racial composition to a vastly more diverse mix of races and cultures.

The diocese had attempted a series of strategic planning efforts to reverse the trends over the past four decades, with largely disappointing results. Most of these focused on church growth methodologies, with bold (and unmet) goals for starting and renewing congregations. Each failed process bred further discontentment, frustration, and anxiety. Leaders within the diocese who studied these efforts at the start of this new intervention diagnosed a culture plagued with systemic problems. These included internal competition among congregations, leaders, and diocesan bodies; a pervasive lack of coherence and focus in the operative view of mission; weak follow-through, accountability, and evaluation for mission efforts; and a failure to engage grassroots members directly in mission planning.

The leaders who conducted this diagnosis agreed that one more attempt at strategy would likely not resolve these patterns. Instead, they called for a deeper, wider process of rethinking the very identity of the diocese as the first and necessary step toward reframing its mission and operational life. Unlike many previous processes, which failed to tap deeply enough into the grassroots to bring lasting culture change, this one would be highly participatory—directly involving nearly three quarters of the congregations and over 2,000 local church members.Footnote 4

Extensive listening through a variety of forms took place throughout the diocese during a 6-month period to help discern identity. These included a survey taken by nearly 800 leaders (with almost 1,000 write-in comments), visits to congregations, and feedback from diocesan convention delegates and the clergy. Among the questions asked were, ‘What does it mean to be Episcopalian in this diocese?’ and ‘If the Episcopal Church in (this diocese) were to disappear, what would be lost?’

The answers reflect values that are commonly espoused across the Episcopal Church today. A predominant one was democracy—understood largely as pride in the representational polity of the church and as the freedom to hold one’s own autonomous beliefs and interpretations of Christianity. The second most frequently cited image for the church was that of an intimate family—perhaps no surprise, given the small size of most Episcopal congregations. While many held the view that the Episcopal Church was ‘inclusive’—indeed, inclusion was named as a major missiological ideal—others wondered about an elitist class identity that might run against the grain of a fully ‘democratic’ and ‘inclusive’ church. How the image of the church as an intimate family could be reconciled with an open, inclusive democracy remained a puzzle. As theologian Patrick Keifert likes to remind us, families are the most closed human social systems—you have to marry, be born, or be adopted into them.Footnote 5

Alongside these identity markers of democracy, family, and class elitism, the members of this diocese placed a very strong emphasis on aesthetics and liturgy. Indeed, when asked what would be lost if the Episcopal Church disappeared, the greatest number of respondents cited liturgy and the arts. The Episcopal Church was seen to offer an expression of Christianity that was aesthetically and intellectually rich and nuanced. These very characteristics were recognized by some, however, to narrow the church’s missionary appeal. One member likened the audience for the Episcopal Church to the audience for National Public Radio: ‘small, but discerning’.

Other mission values often identified were advocacy and social justice. These were viewed to play out on multiple levels. On the one hand, Episcopalians were seen to be positioned within society such that they could speak on behalf of the voiceless and marginalized. This particular diocese has a heritage of leaders taking (what were at the time) unpopular, progressive stances on social issues from their positions of privilege and access to power. Another way in which the church’s mission of advocacy and social justice was understood to take place was through giving to those less fortunate—the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) being the most recent example of a long history of benevolence (often expressed indirectly from congregations, through community and social service institutions). Finally, the church was seen to witness to justice through its own ‘inclusion’ of various groups in positions of leadership—primarily women and homosexual persons.

These espoused values of Episcopal identity and mission articulated by grassroot Episcopalians are worth probing more deeply against a larger historical and theological background. They contain a number of implicit assumptions that bear fresh examination, as well as some provocative contradictions.

Christendom’s Lingering Legacy

As one of the earliest churches to come to America, the Church of England brought a deeply establishmentarian ethos across the Atlantic. The established state church in the southern and portions of the mid-Atlantic colonies up until the time of the American Revolution, the Church of England assumed many basic tenets of Christendom—the division of territory into domains (parishes), with monarchical clergy focused on cultivating the moral and spiritual life of the flock in their charge, the overlapping of civil and religious jurisdiction, and governance by those who also hold the greatest economic and social power.

Yet, American Anglicanism was tempered by the fact that there were no bishops in place until after the Revolution, clergy were often sparse, and parishes were very large geographically, and the laity played a much greater role in ecclesiastical governance (chiefly expressed in the expanded role of vestries).Footnote 6 By most accounts, colonial Anglicanism in America was uneven at best in its religious vitality or moral impact upon society.Footnote 7 This contributed to the crisis that occurred when the colonies sought to overthrow English rule, of which the Church of England, with its monarchical bishops, was a prominent expression. The process of reorganization after the American Revolution brought an innovative transformation of Anglican polity to embrace the emerging democratic ideals of the young nation. William White, chaplain to the Continental Congress, was the chief architect of a revised system of governance for the new Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States that adopted principles of federalism, balance of powers, and representative democracy.Footnote 8 The Episcopal Church came to mirror the US government in its structures and polity.

Mission was primarily construed by Episcopalians through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth as an establishmentarian enterprise. In this, they followed deep assumptions and commitments of English Anglicanism. Richard Hooker, for instance, had argued that the church’s mission ‘was to place a Christian stamp on the character and activities of a nation and its people’.Footnote 9 F.D. Maurice asserted that the national church existed to ‘purify and elevate the mind of a nation’.Footnote 10 The mission of the Episcopal Church was concentrated in education, health care, and church expansion, or ‘good hospitals, good schools, and right-ordered worship’.Footnote 11

In the 1820s, when the Episcopal Church formally organized a denominational mission society, it made the unusual move of equating the mission society with the church itself, so that every baptized member would be a missionary of the ‘Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society’.Footnote 12 This identification of the whole church with a missionary enterprise in which all its members would participate was a remarkable anticipation of later mission theology—specifically, missional ecclesiology. It holds promising seeds for renewing Episcopal mission today. However, such a missional identity depends on its effectiveness upon the faith, commitment, and discipleship vitality of the membership.

Ian Douglas charts the rise of the ‘national church’ ideal as the peak of Episcopal missionary identity in the early to mid-twentieth century. As early as 1853, William A. Muhlenberg offered in his ‘Memorial’ a rationale for the Episcopal Church overcoming Christian divisions in America.Footnote 13 William Reed Huntington proposed what was eventually adopted as the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886, 1888) as a means for establishing Christian unity.Footnote 14 As inheritors of a tradition that integrated Protestant and Catholic streams, Episcopalians saw themselves as capable of offering a de facto national church for Christians of all stripes in America while serving as the social conscience of the United States.Footnote 15 The construction of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC (1907–90) is an embodiment of this idea, symbolizing from its lofty perch the Christian values that were seen to underpin American democracy.

The ‘national church’ ideal coincided with the rise of American imperialism abroad and nationalism at home, culminating in the victory in World War II. The Episcopal Church celebrated its democratic polity, its reformed heritage, and the catholicity and apostolicity of its faith and order. The Episcopal Church embraced the social gospel movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as resonant with its preferred form of mission—institution building rather than evangelism, reform rather than saving souls for the next life. Even though the Anglican Congress in 1963 had asserted a new paradigm of missionary partnership, interdependence, and mutuality among churches around the world, the Episcopal Church tended to retain a colonial approach of patronage and control.Footnote 16

Embedded throughout this history is the assumption that the Episcopal Church stands at the center of society, with resources to dispense for the betterment of the social order and with access to the levers of power. As early as 1853, Muhlenberg had called attention to the class elitism of the Episcopal Church and wondered whether Episcopalians truly could make space for all.Footnote 17 However, it took the tumult of the 1960s for the national church ideal to come under unsustainable pressure. This grassroots transformation and erosion of support for denominational-level priorities has continued up to the present.Footnote 18

The Episcopal Church lost roughly one million members, or 31% of its active membership, during the period of 1965–2005.Footnote 19 With only slightly more than 700,000 people in the pews on an average Sunday in 2008 (or 0.2% of the US population),Footnote 20 ‘national church’ hardly describes the Episcopal Church today. Yet, the assumptions of social centrality, noblesse oblige, liberal social reform, and democratic innovation continue to shape its life and mission deeply. The current embrace of the MDGs as the church’s primary mission commitment is yet another expression of the church’s long-standing mission strategy of benevolence to foster educational, social, and human development—in this case, through largely secular means. This is not unlike the ‘good hospitals, good schools’ approach of centuries ago, though with ‘right-ordered worship’ omitted from the equation.Footnote 21

The Introversion of the ‘National Church’ Ideal?

The public life of the Episcopal Church in the past several decades has been dominated by struggles over attempts to achieve full equality within the church’s own life and leadership for women and homosexuals. One way to understand this is that it represents an introversion of the democratic impulse that was previously directed outward on society. That is, since the Episcopal Church no longer has the capacity to remake society according to its conceptions of democracy and justice (i.e. the ‘national church’ ideal), the focus has shifted inward, toward the church’s own life, where these efforts may be more fruitfully pursued. A ‘national church’ without a nation to sanctify leaves a denomination concerned primarily with its own internal life.Footnote 22

Democracy, Benefactors, and Aristocrats

In order to understand the rhetoric about ‘democracy’ in the Episcopal Church more deeply, it is helpful to distinguish three historical models of democracy.Footnote 23 The first is republican or aristocratic democracy. Rooted in Aristotelian tradition, aristocratic democracy involves an elite of leaders recognized to be virtuous, who are granted authority to rule by the citizenship. In aristocratic or republican democracy, there is a sense of shared communal values—a consensus on the common good. Those values—and the community’s integrity—are upheld by the virtue and integrity of the rulers, though often with little public assessment or accountability. This form of democracy deeply informs the polity of the Episcopal Church, with its elected vestries and bishops for life.

Aristocratic democracy is also highly compatible with another important stream of classical thought that deeply informs Episcopal identity and mission, the benefactor tradition. In the Greco-Roman world, a benefactor was one who virtuously gave to the less fortunate out of excess, while retaining a position of privilege and power.Footnote 24 Today, we might call such a person a philanthropist or patron. Jesus explicitly critiques the benefactor stance in his injunction to the disciples, ‘But he said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather, the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves’ (Lk. 22.25-26).

Philippians 2 provides another powerful scriptural counterpoint to the benefactor tradition. In the kenosis hymn, Jesus debases himself, forsaking privilege, honor, and authority, and ‘taking the form of a slave’. Against the Greco-Roman cultural background, this represents a radical reversal of roles—a pouring of authority, privilege, and status into the other to the point of becoming dependent (a slave). This is done for the sake of the other’s flourishing. It is a far more profound identification with the other than the aristocratic/benefactor tradition would countenance.Footnote 25

A second model of democracy is liberal democracy, classically defined by John Locke, in which private citizens enter freely and contractually into social relations in order to pursue their private economic and lifestyle choices. Citizenship consists of negative rights—freedom from restrictions to pursue one’s own interests. The political process is a strategic struggle to control administrative and legislative power through election of like-minded representatives who will assert the voters’ own private interests. Liberal democracy tends to assume a highly individualistic anthropology. It is often associated with bureaucratic practices, and it typically lacks ongoing means of assessment, beyond simply replacing leaders in the next election.

A third model of democracy is deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy combines elements of both the liberal and republican models in seeking to foster public, communal norms, and values through processes of communicative reasoning, argumentation, and action.Footnote 26 It stresses widespread, mutual participation. Leaders are responsible for opening spaces of dialogue and deliberation for public conversation about the good. The process intervention in the diocese in question relied heavily on deliberative democratic principles.

So, what do Episcopalians mean then when they affirm ‘democracy’? The aristocratic and liberal forms of democracy are evident within the Episcopal Church today in the monarchical functioning of bishops and rectors, in the contested nature of church politics and conventions, and in the polity itself. On the one hand, Episcopalians cherish their autonomy as a province, as dioceses and parishes, and as individual believers. On the other hand, they entrust a great deal of authority and spiritual significance to their leaders (who are sometimes surprised when that authority is not affirmed and respected). Within the Episcopal Church, the aristocratic and liberal streams of democracy at times clash. A greater embrace of deliberative democracy would likely affirm this key value while reframing it away from the conflicted, atomistic tendencies of liberal democracy and the authoritarian, monarchical tendencies of aristocratic democracy.

The benefactor posture presents deeper challenges for Episcopalians in mission. If much Episcopal missiology has in fact proceeded from an essentially aristocratic, benefactor approach, whether through benevolence activities or advocacy in which the one giving or advocating never has to relinquish higher status to identify deeply with the other in need, Jesus’ call to kenotic mission remains elusive. One of the dangers of the contemporary stress on the MDGs (for all the genuine good that they are inspiring) is that it allows Episcopalians to feel righteous in mission while giving only a small fraction (0.7%) of their budget—not enough to require significant sacrifice. In Luke 21, Jesus celebrates the widow who gives everything (as Jesus himself was about to give everything on the cross) over those who contribute ‘out of their abundance’.Footnote 27 The gospel challenges us to move beyond indirect mission—helping those in need largely from a distance—by drawing close in personal relationship, dialogue, and companionship, the kind of companionship that challenges and redefines our identities and status. This better reflects the Trinity in whose image we are created—a community of reciprocity, mutuality, and shared life.

The Limitations of a Missiology of ‘Inclusion’

In the diocese referenced above, ‘inclusion’ was repeatedly named as an operative missiology. It is a word that seems to appear often in Episcopal discourse today, particularly around mission.Footnote 28 As it is commonly voiced, ‘inclusion’ is assumed to proceed from the center out—that is, the Episcopal Church invites others to participate or join it (thus, the recent popularity of the phrase ‘radical hospitality’). What is unspoken here is the fact that such ‘inclusion’ largely takes place on Episcopalians’ own terms. Mission in this frame does not involve a decentering of those holding power, but rather an absorption of others into the present community on its terms.

During the diocesan intervention, the bishop made a striking comment to this effect. He said, ‘The only ones who should be excluded are those who would exclude’. I wondered, who has the power to include or exclude? Looking around the room when he made these remarks, I noticed a few leaders from ethnic immigrant congregations, many of whom profess more conservative theological views than the majority in this particular diocese, including on matters of human sexuality. Would the bishop then exclude their voices and views in favor of another marginalized group, homosexual persons, or vice versa? At the end of the day, he assumed that it was his choice to make, standing at the center and holding the power. The rhetoric of ‘inclusion’ can mask coercive power dynamics, fostering homogeneity rather than genuine mutuality, plurality, and difference.

Moreover, underlying the ‘inclusion’ missiology is an institutional ecclesiology that assumes the church is a place to which people come, rather than a people sent into the world in the power of the Spirit in witness. One of the legacies of establishment and the functional-Christendom era is an identity centered on buildings (consecrated space) and clergy (consecrated people). This has led to a conception of evangelism primarily as inviting and welcoming people to church. The theme of the 2006 General Convention and the resource packets, distributed a few years ago by the national congregational development office, sum it up: ‘Come and Grow’. While Christian mission always involves a gathering movement (a treasured Benedictine legacy in particular for Anglicans), the church is also a people sent. The church is apostolic when it is sent across barriers of difference bearing the peace of the reign of God, as in Luke 10, where the seventy are not offering but relying upon the hospitality of strangers (in this case, probably Samaritans), dwelling together, building relationships, preaching the good news, and healing the sick.

Given the demographic makeup of the Episcopal Church, which reflects some of the highest levels of education and social status in American society,Footnote 29 how valid is the ideal of ‘inclusion’? At best, I would argue that the Episcopal Church is selectively inclusive—genuinely opening life-giving space for some groups who are marginalized elsewhere. The value of such inclusion should not be underestimated. However, sociologically, many Pentecostal and Roman Catholic churches are far more racially and economically diverse (to pick two churches judged by many Episcopalians to be ‘exclusive’). A missiology of democratic ‘inclusion’ in which those at the center retain the power to decide the terms on which people are included or excluded, and which often fails to build deep relationships of identification, trust, and unity across lines of theological and sociological difference, is not adequate either to the gospel or to the church’s diverse context today.

The challenge is to go deeper, beyond the primarily atheological categories referenced above, in reframing Episcopal missiology for a post-Christendom context. The leaders in the diocese with whom I worked came to a similar conclusion. They began to articulate together new categories for their ecclesiological and missional identity, beginning with God’s own life as Trinity, and centered in the ecclesial practice affirmed most widely across all the diocese’s various constituencies: the Eucharist. What follows is based in part upon their grassroots process of discernment and discovery, as well as further development by the leaders of a local Episcopal congregation where I serve.

From Inclusion to Communion

The theological category of communion is a widely discussed one in Anglicanism today, largely due to the conflicts within global Anglicanism. The extent to which it can provide a unifying theological and ecclesiological framework for holding postcolonial Anglicanism together in the twenty-first century is not the primary focus of this essay. Rather, I am interested in the missiological and ecclesiological potential of communion as a theological category for shaping local congregational life and mission.

The communion ecclesiology that informs much recent ecumenical thinking on the church is rooted in the rediscovery of the social doctrine of the Trinity by western theology and the participation of Orthodox theologians in ecumenical dialogue with the West.Footnote 30 Orthodox missiology has emphasized Trinitarian koinonia, or communion, as constitutive of salvation and the life of the church, and experienced most powerfully in the Eucharist.Footnote 31 There are rich theological resources within these streams from which to draw in developing a renewed missiology for the Episcopal Church.

Recent thinking on communion and otherness in light of Trinitarian personhood provides a framework in which the classical Anglican ideals of comprehension and reconciled diversity might be understood anew. John Zizioulas says, ‘If the church wants to be faithful to her true self, she must try to mirror the communion and otherness that exists in the Triune God’.Footnote 32 Zizioulas builds from the Cappadocians a conception of relational personhood in which diversity and unity coexist. ‘Communion does not threaten otherness’, he says, ‘it generates it’.Footnote 33 He understands otherness and diversity as ontological—built into creation design, not as a cause for division, but rather to flourish within a larger pattern of communion. Otherness actually constitutes communion—and, by that measure, true community. The church’s imaging of the unity and diversity of the Trinity involves a deeply reciprocal engagement with others in all their difference.

The Episcopal Church values diversity of various sorts, both theological and sociological. However, one of the great challenges has been a theological framework robust enough to contain and unite such diversity, particularly when conflicts erupt. Mere democratic inclusion does not suffice, for there is no basis within that framework for the deeper movement of reconciliation. Such reconciliation is the work of the Holy Spirit, with the cross of Christ at its center. However, in the Episcopal Church, the typical response to conflicts fostered by the church’s diversity and liberal democratic culture has been a turn toward aristocratic democracy—a new emphasis on the authority and autonomy of bishops and their dioceses. Polity (and the power embedded in it) is asserted as the basis of unity. Reconciliation often remains elusive.

Yet, the communion created by the Spirit within the church’s life is not primarily a gift for the church to hoard, but rather to give away. As long as the conversation about communion in Anglicanism is focused inward on the church and its problems, the missional potential is lost. The Windsor Report recognizes this in its opening pages:

It is not clear that the missional communion ecclesiology hinted at (but not fully developed) in the Windsor Report has taken root very deeply in the imagination of the Episcopal Church.

A missional communion ecclesiology offers significant promise for reframing the life of the Episcopal Church from the establishmentarian institutionalism toward a more apostolic, Trinitarian community in which otherness flourishes within God’s outward-reaching (ekstasis) movement toward all creation. Such an ecclesiology redefines the church’s life in the very life of God. It provides for a wide range of cultural and social diversity within a unifying framework that does not impose uniformity. It comprehends heterogeneous elements within a common life lived not for its own sake, but for the sake of the other—first and foremost God, then others in the church, and the world in all its otherness, including the poor, sick and suffering, and those estranged from God.

One of the challenges of Episcopal mission in the past century, as identified by Ian Douglas, is the American church’s difficulty with accepting the partnership paradigm proposed in the Anglican Communion document ‘Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence’ (1963).Footnote 35 That document echoes work done in ecumenical missiology circles that sought to reverse the long history of western colonialism with a fresh emphasis on mutuality. Yet, it proposed a deep dilemma for a church caught up in its sense of national mission, for it called for an end to exporting the American way of life (including American democracy or ‘development’) without real openness, vulnerability to, and reciprocity with the other.

A more thoroughgoing Trinitarian imagination for the Episcopal Church’s mission affirms this stress on mutuality, interdependence, and reciprocity, and takes it to the next level. It describes not only inter-Anglican relations, but also a missionary posture toward the world and all its diversity in which mission proceeds on the level ground of the cross. If mission is an embodiment of God’s own communal life of reciprocity, sharing, and exchange (perichoresis) through the power of the Spirit, the missionary encounter involves mutual companionship and conversation. Such reciprocal companionship and conversation is not dedicated toward fulfilling an ideal of ‘inclusive’ tolerance, but rather at discerning what God is actually up to in the world. In the biblical pattern of discipleship and mission, it is the one outside the community’s boundaries who often illuminates what the reign of God is all about.Footnote 36

From Benevolence to Companionship

Our participation in the communion of God’s own Trinitarian life sends us out not only to invite others to the feast, but also to accompany and break bread with them where and how they are in today’s world. This is where Lk. 10.1-12 offers a striking reversal of the usual missiological language about hospitality heard in the Episcopal Church today. The 70 disciples sent in pairs into Samaritan towns and villages bearing the peace are told by Jesus to stay in local homes, breaking bread with these strangers whose cultural and religious customs were offensive to observant Jews. In the midst of that encounter, there is reciprocity—the disciples witness boldly to the gospel of the reign of God, heal the sick, and reach out, while at the same time depending for their own survival on the strangers to whom they are sent. Missional hospitality is about sharing bread (companionship means, of course, ‘with bread’) on the other’s terms as much as it is about welcoming the other to our feast, with our culture and customs. If we cannot receive from those to whom we are sent, we remain benefactors, not disciples.

It is the risen Jesus who encounters and transforms disciples on their path of dejection, hopelessness, and fear on the road to Emmaus by breaking bread (Lk. 24). This journey offers a powerful image of accompaniment in mission. The two journeying discover that the story that they knew in part, a story of failure and despair, is incomplete. Jesus expands and deepens their narrative of reality in his teaching. The critical point of transformation comes in the breaking of bread, when they recognize his identity and connect the story he has told with the stranger in front of them who shares the meal.

Mission as companionship and conversation means listening to others’ stories and helping them place their story in God’s story, as companions on the way. The exchange of hospitality in breaking bread together gives us a taste of God’s own presence and accompaniment in Jesus. It is in companionship that we express our compassion (‘suffering with’) for the marginalized, poor, oppressed, and forsaken. Work for advocacy and justice are integral to this companionship, but when unmoored from it, lose their incarnational character.