PEOPLE of the WAY
Renewing Episcopal Identity By DWIGHT J. ZSCHEILE Morehouse Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Dwight J. Zscheile
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8192-2090-5Contents
Chapter One
THE LEGACY of Establishment
In the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles lies a beautiful canyon, where a scenic highway was built in the 1930s. A striking concrete arched bridge was constructed over the narrows in the canyon to join the two sides of the highway at the culmination of the project. However, a storm of unprecedented proportions arrived the winter after the bridge was completed, and a flood washed away the highway on both sides. The bridge was untouched. After a subsequent attempt to rebuild the highway higher up, the canyon walls were abandoned. Some years later, this "Bridge to Nowhere" stands aloof today, accessible only by hiking or horseback. It is used by bungee jumpers, but otherwise it remains a picturesque oddity in a changed landscape.
Many churches in the U.S. and other Western countries today resemble this bridge—beautiful structures that once connected people to God and one another, but now stand disconnected from their communities due to floods of social and cultural change. Episcopalians have a particularly deep establishment legacy that shapes our churches. In order to move forward in discerning a renewed identity, we must attend closely both to where we have been and the changing world in which we find ourselves today.
The Establishment Legacy: State Church Roots
The Anglican Church began in the early Middle Ages as the church among the English people (ecclesia Anglicana—the church in England). It was simply that part of the Catholic Church located within the particular cultural and social setting of England. Because there is no one specific theologian or reformer that Anglicans point to as the touchstone of their identity, Anglicanism has always had a national character. Its identity depends in part upon the unique culture of the nation in which it finds itself. From around the year 800, the ideal of Christendom increasingly characterized medieval Europe, including England. Christianity became a territorial and tribal religion, supported and sanctioned by the state. Kings, queens, and other rulers were legitimized in their authority by the church, and the church was protected and encouraged by the government. This tight, symbiotic relationship between church and state prevailed for centuries, up into the modern era. During the period of Christendom, the church's mission was largely to cultivate and preserve Western culture, as well as to spread it by expanding the territory of Christendom. The era of European colonial expansion reflected the integration of church and state, as missionaries accompanied the military, political, and economic forces of colonialism in order to "Christianize" and "civilize" indigenous peoples—the two being understood interchangeably.
The English Reformation unfolded in the sixteenth century within the framework of Christendom. The Act of Supremacy, by which King Henry VIII claimed headship of the Church of England, is a powerful expression of the marriage of church and state. In this period, to be an English citizen was to be a Christian, and specifically an Anglican Christian, as more radical Protestant dissenters such as Puritans and Baptists, as well as Roman Catholics, were banned from the country (leading some, of course, to settle in America). A strong sense of national unity and identity pervaded the church and society. The Book of Common Prayer was created by Thomas Cranmer to allow the liturgy to speak in the vernacular language of the people. The church's calling was to sanctify the nation.
Establishment brought with it particular ways of organizing the church that continue to shape Anglican life, including in America. In Christendom Europe, all of the territory was divided up into parishes and dioceses, each under the authority of a monarchical rector or bishop, just as the same geography was controlled by monarchical political rulers—the king or queen, then princes, dukes, etc., down to village squires. The division of territory into dioceses and parishes reflects the reshaping of Christianity in the context of the Roman Empire (a diocese is a unit of Roman imperial governance). The church was positioned at the center, in a place of power and control.
Christianity began with different structures, however, as a movement organized along social networks in synagogues and homes in the first- and second-century Mediterranean world. The early Christians used existing gathering places and relational networks to spread the gospel. When Christianity came to be officially tolerated in the Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, the church was spared the bitter persecutions which had characterized its life and witness during previous emperors. It also began to adopt more directly the cultural forms and governing structures of its host society—the Roman Empire. This should be no surprise, for at the heart of Christianity is the incarnation—God's transformational embrace of a particular culture in order to relativize and redeem all cultures. The church must take on the cultural forms of its surrounding society if it is to be the body of Christ in a given time and place. The difficult question, however, is the critical transformation of those cultural forms, for when the church uncritically absorbs (or is absorbed into) its host culture, its prophetic identity and calling are diminished. This is, in part, the dilemma facing Western Anglicans today.
Within the paradigm of Christendom, spiritual authority and care (the "cure of souls") over the people in a geographical parish or diocese was focused in the clergy. They were the "ministers" responsible for preaching the Word, celebrating the sacraments, and nurturing the faith of those under their charge. This pattern of leadership represents a significant evolution from what we see in the early church, where teams of leaders (male and female) with a variety of gifts played different roles to equip the whole of the church for ministry in engagement with a non-Christian environment. Once Europe was "Christianized," ministry became the province of the few and consisted primarily in taking care of an already established flock. Church membership grew by birth, no longer primarily by conversion.
The American Colonial Period
When the first English colonists arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, they brought the Church of England with them. Anglicanism was the officially established church in the southern and some of the mid-Atlantic colonies up to the Revolution, and the state church logic of geographical parishes was transported across the Atlantic. Yet some crucial differences pertained. There were no bishops in America during the colonial period. Given the small number of ordained clergy, parishes tended to be very large. Moreover, vestries, which in England were bodies responsible primarily for helping the poor, looking after church buildings, and maintaining public roads, took on much greater power. Particularly in the southern and mid-Atlantic colonies, these vestries hired and fired clergy, for instance, planting the seeds of a more democratic form of church governance.
In the eighteenth century, the predominant form of Anglicanism in the American colonies was Latitudinarianism, a rationalistic version of the faith heavily influenced by Deism. God was seen as the creator of a universe governed by natural laws that operated on their own, with little need for divine interference. Churches were spare in their decoration, with box pews, clear glass, and small communion tables. Communion was celebrated infrequently. The focus was on right living through appropriating the moral precepts taught and exemplified by Jesus. Given that the church was led by the wealthy colonial elite (who controlled the vestries), this served the purpose of encouraging good order and decorum in the colonies. There was less emphasis on God's active presence and movement in the world than on human reason and agency.
The evangelical revival or Great Awakening, a renewal movement led in part by Anglicans such as John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, did impact the American colonies with a call to repentance and conversion and a more emotional appeal for a personal relationship with a living God. Yet the Wesleys and Whitefield often found themselves at odds with the established church and were forced to operate outside ordinary parish life, preaching in the fields or organizing small groups in homes. They were resisted by many parish clergy, whom they criticized for spiritual lethargy.
From the Established Church to the Church of the Establishment
The American Revolution posed a major crisis for Anglicanism in the American colonies. The Church of England, with its monarchical bishops, represented the very thing that many Americans sought independence from. Clergy had sworn solemn oaths in loyalty to the king at their ordinations in England, and many left America at the outbreak of the war or openly sided with the English. When the fighting subsided, the Anglican Church was in disarray.
Yet many of the most prominent leaders of the Revolution and the new United States were Anglicans. An innovative reorganization of the church was carried out in the 1780s in Philadelphia, led by the priest William White, who went on to become the first bishop of Pennsylvania. The new Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States maintained much of the DNA of its mother church, the Church of England, yet introduced a new governance structure modeled on the federalism of the U.S. government. These changes reflect the Anglican commitment that the church should embody the cultural forms of its particular national setting. The monarchical governance of the Church of England, already modified in practice by the strong role of vestries in some of the colonies, would be qualified and complemented by democratic rule, including important participation from the laity.
The Anglican Church in America went from being the officially established church to the church of the establishment as it remained favored by many of the socioeconomic elite. The resurgent Baptists and Methodists succeeded in luring away many of the lower classes through their revivalistic preaching and more open, egalitarian approaches to church leadership. As long as the Episcopal Church tended to uphold the status quo of a stratified economic system and a rationalistic faith, it failed to attract and retain wider swaths of the American populace.
There were nonetheless signs of significant renewal across the church amidst the difficulties of the post-Revolutionary period. For instance, William Meade led an effort to rebuild churches across Virginia in the first half of the nineteenth century. His passion for the gospel and evangelistic spirit helped a dry and disorganized church catch fire. Also in the nineteenth century, the new interest in ritual, early church theology, and sacramental piety of the Oxford Movement brought a different, richer texture to Episcopal worship in many parishes.
One particular moment in this history is worth pausing to reflect on. In the early nineteenth century, when church bodies across America were setting up voluntary mission societies for the purpose of evangelizing the burgeoning frontier and sending missionaries overseas, the Episcopal Church did the same. Yet it didn't leave this society as a structure parallel to the church. Rather, under the influence of the evangelical bishop of Ohio, Charles McIlvaine, and the high-church bishop of New Jersey, George Washington Doane, the General Convention of 1835 integrated the mission society and the church, so that every member of the Episcopal Church would be a member of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. Bishop McIlvaine argued that "the church is a Missionary Society, in its grand design, in the spirit and object of its Divine Founder." In other words, to be sent in mission is integral to the very identity of a Christian—not something extraordinary that specialists ("missionaries") do somewhere far away, or that occupies the church from time to time (as in today's "mission trips," "mission budgets," or "mission projects"). Participating in God's mission of restoring all people to unity in Christ is at the heart of the church's identity. The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society became the official legal name of the Episcopal Church in 1835 and remains so today. This is vital to recall as we renew Episcopal identity. What would it mean for us to live fully into this name, where all church members are missionaries sent into whatever neighborhood or relational network God places them in in order to share in God's work of healing all creation, according to their unique gifts?
Unfortunately, this bit of missionary DNA could not supplant the deep establishment posture that prevailed in the Episcopal Church, and the link between mission and local church membership remained largely undeveloped. As chronicled colorfully in Kit and Frederica Konolige's 1978 book, The Power of Their Glory: America's Ruling Class: The Episcopalians, the Episcopal Church prided itself on drawing from the nation's elite. Privilege and social centrality were deep identity markers for a church with sophisticated liturgical rituals and rarified architecture concentrated in the East Coast corridors of power. Indeed, to this day, Episcopalians remain the best-educated and wealthiest Christian group in America. A 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey ranked Anglicans/Episcopalians behind only Hindus and Jews among religious groups in America in social status, with over half of households making an annual income over $75,000 and more than half of members being college graduates—nearly double the national average in both categories.
Establishment and Mission
The Episcopal Church's sense of self-confidence and social, cultural, and economic centrality led to the articulation of the "national church" ideal in the second half of the nineteenth century. For an America growing in strength and power on the international stage, the Episcopal Church was seen to offer a kind of de facto national church through its Reformed (Protestant) faith, apostolic church order (bishops in historic succession), and democratic governance. It could combine the best of Protestant and Catholic traditions with the democracy of the nation, thereby unifying Christianity in the U.S., even without technically being the state church.
The influential New York priest William A. Muhlenberg offered a "Memorial" (proposal) to the 1853 General Convention to this effect. Muhlenberg's vision was that the Episcopal Church could reach a much larger audience and have a greater positive impact upon society through an ecumenical vision. Yet he recognized that the Episcopal Church's established habits, customs, and posture worked against its being able to reach the lower classes effectively. Another prominent nineteenth-century New York priest, William Reed Huntington, saw in the Episcopal Church a unique capacity to bring together other Protestant traditions to promote Christian unity and thereby uplift the moral character of the nation.
Perhaps the most visible expression of the "national church" sense of Episcopal identity and mission is the construction of Washington National Cathedral (begun in 1907, completed in 1990), representing from its perch high above the capital the Christian values that were assumed to underpin the nation. The Episcopal Church saw its role and purpose in sanctifying society from the center, with access to power and privilege. While other mainline denominations built large churches in the capital during this period, only Episcopalians would presume to call theirs the National Cathedral. In the words of Ian Douglas, the Episcopal Church saw itself as "a chosen people among an elect nation." When the Episcopal Church began to send missionaries overseas, it followed this establishment ethos. The Episcopal Church could be part of spreading the American way of life, with its prosperity, democracy, and "civilizing" influences, particularly through education. The 1899 Annual Report of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society envisioned people in Africa and Asia "lifting up their hands and asking for our religion, our civilization, our schools." Episcopal missionary efforts typically underplayed proselytizing or making converts in favor of attempting to build the kingdom of God on earth through social ministry and education. It is striking to note that the first country to receive Episcopal missionaries in the early nineteenth century was Greece, chosen because it was already a Christian society, though in need of greater educational and material development. Throughout much of this history, the predominant establishmentarian ethos fostered approaches to mission in which confessing the faith was implicit rather than explicit. These linger in the Episcopal Church today.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PEOPLE of the WAY by DWIGHT J. ZSCHEILE Copyright © 2012 by Dwight J. Zscheile . Excerpted by permission of Morehouse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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