Title: A New Middle Way? Surviving and Thriving in the Coming Religious Realignment
Abstract: May You Live in Interesting This ancient Chinese aphorism - said to be both blessing and curse - has clearly come true for the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Our long-simmering conservative-liberal conflict has come to a boil. Dozens of conservative congregations and several dioceses have severed ties with the Episcopal Church to align with conservative provinces on other continents. A reverse exodus of moderate-toliberal (and some conservative) individuals and congregations have cut ties with the departees to return to the Episcopal Church. And what about all the rest: the vast majority of Episcopalians who haven't gone anywhere . . . yet? Since a potential liberal-conservative rift exists in every Episcopal congregation, might it not, left unaddressed, eventually unravel the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion? That we are living in interesting times may be the only thing everybody in the Communion can agree on. Okay. Got the curse. When do we get the blessing? My own congregation - actually, two successive iterations thereof - has experienced both the curse and the blessing. The first, planted in the early nineties, experienced the curse. A relatively conservative congregation, it grew quickly at first but within two years had disintegrated in conflict over human sexuality issues. Two years later, blessing followed curse. A new congregation, with a relatively recendy ordained leader (me) and composed largely of survivors of the first plant, rose from the ashes of the old. Determined to learn from painful experience, we dedicated ourselves to discerning and living into a new way of being church, in which conservative and liberal Christians could five together in love, and which conservative-liberal theological differences could not kill. We have been engaged in this journey of exploration for more than a decade. The purpose of this article is to give you a small taste of what we have learned on this journey, and how that learning continues to help us survive and thrive in the midst of the current conflict. Living in an Age of Collapsing Paradigms To begin with, we realized that to be effective leaders we could not be blind guides, but had to be good interpreters of the spiritual signs of the times (Matt. 16:1-3). We needed to open our eyes and, with God's help, look critically at ourselves and the church. We quickly discovered that neither we, nor the Episcopal Church, were transiting these turbulent times alone. The whole is wracked by this conflict. It's just that we Anglicans have always been more public in our disagreements than others. (A healthy sign, we think.) In time, it dawned on us that this conflict was not your average, everyday schism, but a paradigm shift of seismic proportions. The blossoming church movement is one example. Originally an Evangelical phenomenon, emergent movements have sprung up in almost every denomination (ours is Anglimergent), critically reexamining their denomination's assumptions of what it means to be church. Some suggest that this Great Emergence is part of a cyclical pattern of upheavals in the church, on a par with the Great Schism or the Great Reformation.1 Knowing that we five in-and what to expect in-an age of collapsing paradigms has helped our congregation respond to the changes around us with less anxiety and more compassion. Realizing that what we had thought was a field of battle between unalterably opposed sides was really an emerging and still mist-covered landscape helped us understand that we needed each others' eyes to find our way safely through. Helping Our Congregations Interpret the Signs of the Times What did we learn to expect in an age of collapsing paradigms? We learned that major paradigm shifts are almost always accompanied by turmoil and disorder. Take science, for example. The primar)' mission of science is the discovery and integration of new knowledge. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot