Ecclesia Episcopaliana: The Smallest Parish in West Texas

From ENS:

It’s Sunday afternoon at the farthest reach of the Diocese of West Texas. Under cotton puff clouds floating lazily in a sparkling blue sky, a handful of parishioners arrive for services at St. James Episcopal Church.

You wonder where they’re coming from. Except for the stone footprint of an old frontier fort, the horizon is unencumbered by any signs of human habitation. The scene is virtually unchanged from what the first ranchers, settlers and soldiers saw 150 years ago.

But arrive they do at their small rock church with a white cross on top, from isolated pockets across the empty landscape, in vans, SUVs and pickup trucks, some caked in caliche dust. There are no sedans or small imports.

The vicar, the Rev. Christopher Roque, arrives with wife Tish and their two children, Matthew and Ethan. They chat briefly with church members congregating at the front door before heading inside for the 3 p.m. Communion service.

He’s wearing a white straw Stetson, leather vest, Levis cinched up with a big silver belt buckle with a Texas star in the middle, tall leather boots, a beautiful silver crucifix and a clerical collar. From a tooled leather briefcase he dispenses today’s scripture readings.

There is no procession or music. Roque walks to the front of the church and starts Rite II.  With his sermon, the entire service is over in 45 minutes.

…

St. James sits in the crossroads town of Fort McKavett, population 4, some 170 miles west of San Antonio. Besides St. James, the tiny hamlet consists of a post office, fire station and the Fort McKavett State Historical Site.  It’s so remote that you have to drive to Sonora, 41 miles south, for a loaf of bread or tank of gasoline.

On Sundays, “Father Chris” as he’s affectionately known to his parishioners, conducts services at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Sonora in the morning, and then treks up to Fort McKavett twice a month for the 3 p.m. Communion at St. James.

“If called to Sonora as rector, it’s conditional that you are vicar at St. James,” Roque said.  “The diocese kind of yokes the two churches together.”

St. James probably would never have existed if it hadn’t been for the presence of Fort McKavett, a prominent cavalry and infantry base active in the mid-19th century.

…

When the fort closed in 1883, the chaplains left, the services at the base ended and the area was left without a church or Episcopal minister. So “the local residents demanded that the bishop give them their own priest,” Roque said. They founded St. James as a mission in 1884 and formally organized the church in 1889.

A decade later they built their first church, a wooden structure that was so damaged by a twister that the bishop eventually condemned it and ordered all the furnishings removed for safekeeping. The present rock building was constructed in 1941.

“Many prayers have bounced off these walls,” said Bishop’s Warden Jimmy Martin.

…

St. James was served by supply priests until the minister at St. John’s in Sonora began going up to St. James, leading to the tradition of yoking the two parishes together under the same minister. Roque has served at St. James and St. John’s since 2008.

…

Smallness does have its virtue, Martin believes. When he’s visited larger churches, he wonders “how many of those people does that priest know personally?”

“We love each other, we share with each other, we know each other very well,” Martin said. “Father Chris knows us very well.  We know everything about each other.”

Martin paused. “For better or for worse.”

…

“Now we also have a priest,” he said.  “If we need him, we can call him.”

Roque has taken to the area’s rich ranching culture and probably has the distinction of being the only priest in the diocese who helps his parishioners round up cattle.  “It also gives him a chance to meditate and pray…”

…

“St. James is a staunchly independent and self-reliant church,” Roque said.  If the diocese asks “if there is anything we can do for you, our members will say we’ve been around for over a hundred years.  Just give us a priest and we’ll be all right.”

Archbishop of Canterbury’s New Year’s Message

I’m a few weeks late on this, but I just discovered it myself:

Non-negotiable: The Book of Common Prayer

Dr. Derek Olsen, who runs the blog Haligweorc, has written a tremendously thoughtful and helpful article on The Book of Common Prayer over at the Episcopal Cafe:

If we want to renew and strengthen the Episcopal Church in light of these very real challenges that are facing us, then the one thing that we dare not mess with is our commitment to the contents and spirit of our 1979 Book of Common Prayer…

—-

I’m not saying the book is perfect. There are certainly some things that I’d change if I had the chance. But recognize this: 1) it is an authentic expression of the historic Western liturgy that has nourished literally millions who have come before us. 2) It is an authentic expression of the English devotional experience. (The importance of this is not that it’s English, of course, but that it is a rooted, embodied, inherited tradition that has been embraced and passed on by a diverse group over a period of centuries—not just dreamed up by a few people last week.) 3) It is an authentic expression of historic Anglican liturgy that balances reform of Western norms with Scripture and the theological and spiritual practices of the Early Church. That’s actually quite a lot of things going for it—and it’s more things than would be going for most services either you or I would dream up.

Most people I know don’t go to church on Sunday morning to experience the rector’s latest exciting innovation; they go to church because they hope to experience God and to get a concrete sense of what it means to live out love of God and love of neighbor. Using the book doesn’t guarantee any of this, but it is a big step in the right direction…

—

…[T]he Book of Common Prayer isn’t just the book for Sunday services. Instead, the Book of Common Prayer offers a full integrated spiritual system that is intended as much for the laity as the clergy and which is founded in a lay spirituality that arose in the medieval period. If you look at the book as a whole, it offers a program for Christian growth built around liturgical spirituality. The best shorthand I have for this is the liturgical round. It’s made up of three components: the liturgical calendar where we reflect upon our central mysteries through the various lenses of the seasons of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and in his continuing witness in the lives of the saints, the Daily Office where we yearly immerse ourselves in the Scriptures and Psalms, and the Holy Eucharist where we gather on Holy Days to most perfectly embody the Body of Christ and receive the graces that the sacraments afford…

—-

For me, this is where the church lives or dies. Are we forming communities that embody the love of God and neighbor in concrete actions? Not just in what programs the institution is supporting, but are we feeding regular lives with a spirituality that not only sustains them but leads them into God’s work in a thousand different contexts in no way related to a church structure? Are our parishes witnessing to their members and to the wider community in their acts of corporate prayer for the whole even when the whole cannot be physically there? Therefore this is why, when we worry about the fate of the church, my answer will be a call for more liturgy. Not because I like to worship the worship, but because of the well-worn path to discipleship found in the disciplined recollection of God that the liturgy offers.

My firm belief is that if membership is a problem, our best move is to head for spiritual revitalization. People who are being spiritually fed, challenged, and affirmed by their church will be more likely to show it, to talk about it, and to invite their friends and neighbors to come and see it for themselves. This won’t—it can’t—fix all situations, but even if it doesn’t, spiritual revitalization is what the Church is called to be about…

 

Properly Anglican: Catholicity, Reform, and the Via Media

I am currently reading  A History of the Church in England by JRH Moorman, and had I known it would be this enriching and illuminating I would have read it much sooner.  If I had my druthers, it would be mandatory reading for all confirmands and inquirers.  One of the most helpful sections comes in the chapter dealing with the Elizabethan settlement during the English reformation.  Specifically, it deals with the unique way that the English reformers approached the reform of the church in their country.  From page 212:

In the eyes of those who were shaping the destiny of the Church in England there was no sense of separation from the rest of the catholic church.  The Church in England was, as the title-page to the first Prayer Book had implied, a part of the catholic church, even though it had repudiated papal jurisdiction.  It was catholic, but it was also reformed.  Its roots ran back to the primitive church, but certain customs and ideas which had clung to it during the Middle Ages had now been cut away.  The fundamental doctrines and constitution of the Church remained the same, but a number of genuine reforms had been carried out, such as the vernacular liturgy, the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds and permission for the clergy to marry.

The key point for me here is that they were in no way trying to be anything other than catholic Christians, and the inheritors of the Holy Traditions of the church as they had been received in England.  They certainly believed there had been some medieval missteps that needed to be put right, but on the whole English “Protestantism” was less about being good protestants and more about being good catholics.  This is markedly different than the way the reformation proceeded on the continent (of Europe).

After the brief, but violent interlude of the Puritan commonwealth, the Caroline divines carried forward the torch of reforming the catholic church in England.  Their work was, again, not about creating a new church, but about being faithful as the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.  From page 234:

The point of view… may be summed up in the dying words of Thomas Ken…, ‘I die,’ he said, ‘in the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolick Faith, professed by the whole Church before the disunion of East and West.  More particularly I dye in the Communion of the Church of England as it stands distinguished from all Papall and Puritan Innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross’…

Theirs was an atempt to get back to the early Church before the accretions of the middle Ages which the reformers had been so anxious to get rid of.  The Anglicans stood between two great religious systems.  On the one side was Rome, active and aggressive under the impetus of the Counter-Reformation, trying to rebuild a Christendom shattered by the cataclysms of the sixteenth century.  But to the Anglicans there could be no return to Rome since the faith which she taught was, in their eyes, impure — corrupted by the ‘innovations’ which were no part of the Holy Catholic and Apostolick Faith’ as taugh by the Primitive Chuch. As Laud said, they could not return to Rome ‘until she is other than she is.’  On the other side were the Calvinists and Lutherans, who had separated from catholic tradition and had magnified certain doctrines out of all proportion.  The Anglicans were equally clear that they could not fall into line with them since they had abandoned things which the Early Church thought essential.  The Caroline Divines, therefore aimed at a Via Media between two extremes; but the Via Media which they sought was not a compromise, a ‘lowest common denominator’; it was a real attempt to recover the simplicity and purity of primitive Christianity. (Bolding mine)

And here we have that famous phrase: Via Media.  It has been bandied about much in contemporary Anglican debates as a way of encouraging compromise, tolerance, and broad mindedness.  However, what we find in the minds and work of the Anglican reformers is no watered-down compromise.  It is a full-throated declaration and a full bodied working out of the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic faith as understood and passed down by the undivided church.  Now that is what I call, “change we can believe in.”  That is an Anglicanism we can believe in

Celebrating the Saints

From Haligweorc:

One of the real failures in the theological life of the Episcopal Church is the perspective that we can talk about Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, the theology of death, and the theology of the sacraments and that we are therefore discussing five different things. We are not. We are discussing one thing: Christology, and are looking at four of its implications.

We celebrate the saints because at the heart of our theology is the principle of incarnation. Incarnation is the belief that the divine and the spiritual do not eschew physical matter and form, but that God has chosen to reveal himself and his realities in flesh and matter, preeminently in Jesus Christ who, as both fully God and fully human, constitutes the ultimate revelation of God’s self-identity. Furthermore, God’s self-revelation through the mode of incarnation did not cease with the end of the physical, visible, sojourn of Christ among humanity. In Baptism we are bound into Christ, as true mystical members of his Body. We are nurtured deeper into the reality of that life through the Eucharist. We are invited in the sacraments to participate deeply and fully within the divine life of God. Not all who are invited choose to participate. Not all who are invite participate as deeply and earnestly as they could (my hand’s up here…). There are those who are invited who even in (and necessary through) their humanity and limitation nevertheless share with those around them the truth of the reality of the life of God. These are the saints. They inhabit the life of God; they reflect the life of God to those around them.

It’s my blog so I’ll give myself permission to be a bit hyperbolic: We do not celebrate the saints because of their virtues. Rather, we celebrate the saints because ofChrist’s virtues. Yes, that’s hyperbole but it’s necessary to focus on the main thing: saints are incarnational icons. The self-revelation of God happens in many ways–through their participation in the incarnation, the saints are one of them. Looking at the saints helps us to learn about who Christ is. In particular, I see the saints teaching us two very important lessons about who Christ is and they do it because they’re able to clarify generalities by means of particularities.

Read it All

Offices for the Dead

I wish I had seen this in time for All Saints and All Souls, but late is better than never.  From Haligweorc:

Following the discussion here on kinds of votive offices, these are replacement offices—offices intended to be said in place of (rather than supplemental to) the regular morning and evening offices.

So, here they are:

The Office for the Dead: Morning Prayer

The Office for the Dead: Evening Prayer

The Point of Christianity

Using affirmative terms, I would suggest that “the point of Christianity” is to make people fit to live in heaven, to be in the unfiltered presence of God without being vaporized by the sheer weight of divine glory. This is a process called sanctification (in the west; our eastern friends are apt to say theosis–deification). The process is fueled by grace, and grace, while generally ubiquitous, is found surely and certainly in the sacraments.

For my money, this is a lot more exciting than just trying to make the world a better place.”

–  Daniel Martins, Bishop of Springfield

Labor Day: An Anglican Theology of Work

The Collect for Labor Day (BCP1979):

Almighty God, you have so linked our lives one with another
that all we do affects, for good or ill, all other lives: So guide
us in the work we do, that we may do it not for self alone, but
for the common good; and, as we seek a proper return for
our own labor, make us mindful of the rightful aspirations of
other workers, and arouse our concern for those who are out
of work; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

One gift that I believe the Anglican tradition offers to the Western World (and maybe the East as well), is a thoughtful, and meaningful theology of work.  For most of my upbringing (in the American evengelical protestant tradition), daily work was seen, at best, as a sort of necessary evil that one had to do until an opportunity arose to do the “real important work.”  ”Real important work” was going to church on Sunday, reading the Bible, being a missionary, or preaching.  Any other sort of activity or labor was only important in so far as it supported or enabled any of the “real important works.”

Now I realize this is probably an over generalization, but it is one that strikes very near the truth.  It effected me, and I know that it effected others in the tradition.  My grandfather, for instance, worked hard & honestly for 30 years in a refinery to support his family, community, and church.  He did his work well, faithfully, and with some measure of joy.  Yet, if you asked him, he would tell you his work was not “important” or “meaningful.”  In his mind, “preachers” and “missionaries” have the only important work, and I suspect he is not alone in this sort of thinking.

Anglicanism, refreshingly, offers an alternative to this sort of thinking about work and labor as reflected in the Collect for Labor Day above.  Anglicans (or at least properly catechized Anglicans) believe that work, far from being a necessary evil, is one of the primary activities by which we are linked with one another and with the rest of creation.  Because of that, the work that is done, the way it is done, and to what end it is done, is actually of tremendous importance.  It is about far more than just “punching the card.”  It is, in fact, a type or shadow of “communion.”

Together with this comes in the wonderful Anglican concept of “the common good.”  It teaches that life, and work, and worship always exist and are meant for more than the self alone.  It points or life of prayer and work outside of ourselves and toward the wider world.  I first encountered this idea of the common good in NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope, but soon came to discover that it predated the honorable bishop’s work by several hundred years.

The twin ideas of interconnection and common good come together to give great meaning to our daily work and labor, and I believe comes much closer to the New Testament idea of true “ministry” expressed by Paul in Ephesians 4:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers,to equip the saints for the work of ministry

In this context, the ministry isn’t done by the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers, it is done by what we would call “ordinary people”… ordinary people like my grandfather and scores of other laborers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and men and women working 9-5 jobs for the glory of God and for the common good.  Apostles and the rest, at least in these verses, are simply in supporting roles… they are the servants of the servants of God.

I hope such a thinking about work, labor, and ministry will inspire you as it does me to do my work with care, diligence, and hope.  There is much value in the way we spend our time and labor, for if we don’t find meaning, ministry, and Christ in the primary work of our lives, where else will we find it?  Christ is in our midst always, not only in “church” or the “mission field.”

Almighty God, guide us in the work we do.

The Feast of St. Benedict

St. Benedict has influenced the practice of Christianity in Anglicanism as much as any one saint, thinker, or writer that I know of.  In honor of that tremendous contribution, I offer this St. Benedict roundup:

(c. 480 AD – 543 AD) was born at Nursia (Norcia) Italy to a wealthy Roman family, making him liberiori genere, ‘of good birth.’ Tradition gives him a twin sister, Scholastica.

Benedict’s Italy was an unstable province of a collapsing Roman Empire, and throughout the fifth century, waves of invaders weakened the peninsula. First Goth warriors marched along the Via Flaminia and into Rome, sacking it in 410. Others soon followed. Into this fragile, violent world, Benedict (or ‘Bennet’) was born among the Apennine valleys and mountains of central Italy. St. Benedict was married to a young woman, her name is not available, but she had dark brown hair and black eyes with white skin. St. Benedict was not supposed to be married but was any way in 522.

Benedict founded twelve monasteries, the best known of which was his first monastery at Monte Cassino in the mountains of southern Italy. The monastery at Monte Cassino was the first Benedictine monastery (most monasteries of the Middle Ages were of the Benedictine Order). Benedict wrote a set of rules governing his monks, the Rule of Saint Benedict, which was heavily influenced by the writings of John Cassian. The Benedictine Rule, one of the more influential documents in Western Civilization, was adopted by most monasteries founded throughout the Middle Ages. Because of this, Benedict is often called “the founder of western Christian monasticism.” Benedict was canonized a saint in 1220.

The Collect:

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, we give thee thanks for the purity and strength with which thou didst endow thy servant Benedict; and we pray that by thy grace we may have a like power to hallow and conform our souls and bodies to the purpose of thy most holy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

From Catholicity and Covenant, St. Benedict and the renewal of European Civilazation:

On the feast of St Benedict, +Rowan on Benedict of Nursia, patron of Europe, echoing the conclusion to MacIntyre’s After Virtue:

The Benedictine Rule did not set out to ‘save civilisation’; what it did was to define in itself the components of a certain kind of civilisation. You may recall Thomas Merton’s exclamation on his first visit to the abbey of Gethsemani, that he had discovered the only real city in America. The way in which the Benedictine contribution to Europe has sometimes been discussed is in terms of a kind of withdrawal into enclaves where the memory of civilisation was preserved, not always fully understood – a sort of archive of cultural treasures. But, while this is not completely wrong, it misses out the positive contribution of Benedictinism as a model of active Christian life in itself; Benedict’s monks were creators of community before they were librarians, and the vision of human possibility and dignity contained in Benedictine witness was at least as important as the conservation of classical letters – or rather, it gave to the heritage of classical letters a clear and practical application, animated by faith. If the Rule is to be one of the sources for the conservation and renewal of European civilisation in the centuries to come – granted that these centuries may be every bit as brutally anti-humanist as the so-called Dark Ages – it will be because of this sketch of political virtue, not because of any merely conservatory role.

From a previous post on this blog, Benedict’s influence on the BCP:

…like the Regula [The Rule of St. Benedict], the Book of Common Prayer is not a list of Church services but an ascetical system for Christian living in all of is minutiae…the Prayer Book [is] not a shiny volume to be borrowed from a church shelf on entering and carefully replaced on leaving.  It [is] a beloved and battered personal possession, a life-long companion and guide, to be carried from church to kitchen, to parlor, to bedside table; equally adaptable for liturgy, personal devotion, and family prayer: the symbol of a domestic spirituality — fully homely divinity

— Martin Thornton in The Anglican Tradition, 1984, pp 87

The Priesthood

A great article entitled  Given as Icon from Catholicity and Covenant:

Despite the grave difficulties faced in recent years by Anglican-Orthodox dialogue, the 2006 Cyprus Agreed Statement - The Church of the Triune God - notably enriches the Anglican understanding of the ministerial priesthood and answers contemporary Anglican confusions.

In the various debates afflicting Anglicanism in recent decades – ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate, 1.10 and New Hampshire, Sydney/Fresh Expressions and lay presidency – a common theme has been an inability to articulate what the ministerial priesthood actually is.  Instead, a “baptism ecclesiology” has inspired both the progressive and the puritan, Philadelphia, New Hampshire and Sydney.  In such an ecclesiology, the ministerial priesthood does no more than represent the eucharistic community.  It is the projection of the community.

The Church of the Triune God - which, as ACC14 noted received a “favourable response” at Lambeth 2008 – reminds us that the presbyter is more than the representative of the community.  Quoting both the Moscow (1976) and Dublin (1984) Agreed Statements, it says:

In the Eucharist the eternal priesthood of Christ is constantly manifested in time. The celebrant, in his liturgical action, has a twofold ministry: as an icon of Christ, acting in the name of Christ, towards the community and also as a representative of the community expressing the priesthood of the faithful (VI, 19).

Commenting on the presbyter’s role as an icon of Christ, Cyprus stresses this particular ministry of the presbyter: 

The priestly president of the eucharistic assembly exercises an iconic ministry … In the context of the Eucharist, the bishop or presbyter stands for Christ in a particular way. In taking bread and wine, giving thanks, breaking, and giving, the priest is configured to Christ at the Last Supper (VI, 19).

This calling to be an icon of Christ, given particular expression in the celebration of the eucharist, ensures that “Christ’s own priesthood … remains alive and effectual within the ecclesial body” (VI, 21).

That the presbyter is given to the Church to be an icon of Christ’s priesthood means that the ministerial priesthood is not our projection.  The presbyter as icon recalls the community to the truth and reality of revelation and grace. Standing within and as part of the community of the baptised, the presbyter’s ministry and vocation as icon proclaims to the community that we are dependent on the prior action of the Triune God in the Incarnate Word.