The Hat Problem: The Episcopal Church, Young Adults, and the Crimson Assurance Agency...

So after a conversation with another Episcopal Young Adult where a certain metaphor about our lives and the church came up I wanted to share it with the wider world. So this is an incomplete metaphor, it does not resonate with all experiences I have had in the church but it resonates with many. I call it the problem of "hats".

So often when Young Adults have to engage, and by that generally the expectation is observe, Old Adults talking about ANYTHING when it comes to the Episcopal Church we basically feel we are caught up in the midst of the meeting playing out in the video to our right.

The number of meetings and conversations that seem, in the end, to dissolve into conversations about what should truly be a foot note, for instance the need for more people to wear hats, and then seem to resolve by everyone assenting to that foot note, or dissenting to that footnote, and derailing everything. I actually mark the point where someone brings up the "hat" and this is when I often shrug and no the chance of the meeting having any meaning outside itself has come and gone.

The reality is that a lot of us feel that the Episcopal Church is literally stuck in this form of meeting. Our most recent bout with TREC, where the "hat" was weather or not the Lazarus reading was a good or bad metaphor, is just another example of this cycle. There is no ability to differentiate from some "hat" and ask what is actually being said. Which is what is leading a lot of Young Adult Episcopalians to have regular feelings along the line of the individuals in this video.

Now I do not think any of the Young Adults really want to enter into the type of hostile takeover engaged in here. Most of us are willing to simply wait it out. I do not think any of us, however, want to. We do not want to see the resource drain waiting entails. We do not want to loose the chances for out of the box evangelism we see around us. We do not want to perpetuate systems that might be comfortable for many but we know, often from personal experience, cause harm and damage when it comes to the retention of youth, the inclusion of our peers, and making overall worthwhile endeavors. We want to, we try to, but in the end we are pretty sure that any such conversation will, in the end, turn to revolve around "hats".