Fear and Hope

Last week I travelled with Fr Jameson and St. John’s lay delegates (Skip Jennings, Stacy Jennings, John Bradshaw, and Rick Wright) to the annual Convention of the Diocese of Georgia, held in Tifton, about four hours drive west of Savannah. As we passed through the small towns of the hinterland we saw the damage wrought by storm Helene – huge trees uprooted, roofs patched in blue tarpaulin, piles of debris, and devastated pecan groves. It was an appropriate setting for the main topic of the Convention, which was the reality of institutional decline in the Episcopal Church, especially in the smaller congregations of a largely rural diocese. If the secularizing headwinds of recent decades have not come as suddenly as hurricane, their long-term impact has been equally damaging. Formal religious affiliation in the USA has been declining right across the spectrum, but especially in mainline denominations like our own. The impact falls hard on small rural congregations, which are increasingly unable to afford to pay full-time clergy, and are often in areas without part-time or retired clergy to call on. Developing strategies for survival in such circumstances is critical, and the Convention’s conversations naturally had their needs in focus.

Though it does not face the challenges that beset smaller congregations, St. John’s is not immune to these big changes in American religious habits, either, and though we have seen a welcome growth in numbers since our return from the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, we have no reason to be complacent or triumphalist. In a consumerist culture like ours, the formation of faith and the building of congregations is a challenge for all.

Fear is helpful when it jolts us out of ignorance or complacency, but its effect is short-lived, and easily collapses into apathy, fatalism or despair. Fear alone leads nowhere good unless there is also a real hope to embrace, and we embrace it. Bishop Logue wisely pointed the Convention to the “living hope” we have in Christ – the “sure and certain hope” set before us in the gospel, the hope for us to embrace in faith. There is no strategic vision or action for the church’s future that does not begin again from the gospel hope. In my own observation, however, though lip service is often paid to the gospel, it gets little sustained attention, and its character and implications are not carefully explored. Bishop Logue’s exhortation needs to be followed up, not treated as a box to be checked. The perennial temptation of Episcopalians (along with other mainline liberals) is to endorse superficial worldly optimism in place of the true gospel – the false gospel skewered so memorably by Richard Niebuhr: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” If this is the version of the gospel we embrace, then we are embracing a delusive hope.

Inevitably, the Convention’s deliberations on a strategic vision took the form of a listening process conducted by consultants. While this supplied a useful baseline for this conversation, the results were inevitably somewhat predictable and superficial, motherhood and apple pie, and only vaguely grounded in the gospel. Instead of self-criticism, there was a good deal of selfvalidation, and that is not what is needed at this time. An openness to self -criticism is a necessary step to renewal, otherwise we are just pursuing the same failing approaches that have got us where we are now. Managing a process of self-criticism that allows all voices to be heard in a climate of civility is no easy trick in our culture. Even the most prestigious academic institutions in our time have failed to establish a climate in which disagreements can be aired with civility. To its credit, the Episcopal Diocese has sought to hold together a range of views and practices in a “big tent”, one that finds space within a liberal denomination for theological conservatives like ourselves; and the tacit commitment we have made to each other is not to bring the big tent down. It’s easy to see how feelings could be hurt and divisions exacerbated as disagreements are brought out into the open, and the temptation will be to shut down such difficult conversations. Learning how to explore our disagreements within the big tent – speaking the truth in love – will require courage and wisdom, humility and charity. Whether or not we are ready for that is a question. We may think it is better to just muddle through the way we have done before.

There is another aspect to hope, and that is the providence of God. Whatever one thinks of the recent election results – and of course opinion is sharply divided about this! – it seems that we are moving from the predictable and placid flow of recent history into a stretch of white water. That means a time of fear, and quite possibly disruption and destruction – but it also may be a time when hope appears in surprising ways. It is not unthinkable, for instance, that the secularizing world and its secularizing churches may be caught up in a religious and spiritual revival. A church that is serious about its mission will be alert to such movements of the Spirit.