Black Priest Matter... be as Christ to me.

A White Prince Lays a Church Foundation

Absalom Jones was ordained to the Priesthood in the Episcopal Church in 1804. It was 211 years later, in 2015, that Michael Curry was elevated to the role of Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. My suggestion is that this process, spanning two centuries, has not been one of building up but digging down. We have, at the very best, dug out the rough space to begin to lay a foundation.

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13) Is an oft repeated bible passage. The goal, too often, has been one of keeping those out of power complacent in their enfeeblement. The conceit being that for a servant to stop laying down their life is to take up the sin of pride. 

Won't you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you? The Servant Song by R. Gillard has become a mainstay over the past forty years. The idea, which is a sound one, is that everyone who sings it seeks to enter into the kenosis of Christ, they seek to empty themselves out for the aide and support of others. The problem I have always had with the song is that it does not have the correlating, and requisite, response, to this line. I will let you be my servant, let you be as Christ to me.

To enter into the bonds of friendship as Jesus compels us, we have to name the other individual not only our servant but also our Christ. The perpetuating issue of race in America is that there is a refusal to recognize that which is Black as that which is Christ... that which is Black as that which is Messiah, Lord, Logos, and God. If the questions is won't you let me be your servant then the answer is yes but when the question is won't you let me be as Christ to you then the answer has repeatedly been no. The repeated failure of church and society to say yes in answer to both questions is a marked point as how we fail to inhabit the realm of Christian friendship.

When Absalom Jones was ordained to the Priesthood he was ordained to serve a black congregation that had already formed around him and he and his congregation were denied voice and vote in the councils of the church. It would be 150 years before black clergy and laity were given voice and vote in the councils and conventions throughout the Episcopal Church. It would be 166 years before a black man served as bishop over a diocese. It would be 211 years before a black man served as presiding bishop. Each of these moments, that came about only through the perseverance of many in the face of extreme opposition, was a moment when the Episcopal Church began to say yes. Moments when our Church said yes, that which is Black is that which is Messiah, Lord, Logos, and God.

This is our Church digging the foundation lines, placing the first foundation stones, for building an actual community seeking to inhabit the realm of Christian friendship. We have gotten to the point where every parish would be honored to have a Black Priest, at least specifically in respect to Michael Curry their presiding bishop, be present to preach and celebrate in their community. This is, however, a very different reality to a space where every parish can readily respond to the call of black aspirants to the diaconate and priesthood or where every parish can readily call a black priest as their rector. This is, however, a very different reality to a space where every parish is readily seeking to enter into the transformative but difficult process of actually processing what has been uncovered for them personally in the midst of excavating this foundation. This is, however, a very different reality then a church that has processed its issues and history with race both within and outside itself.

Our church and our society continues to fail in its ability to name that which is Black as that which is Messiah, Lord, Logos, and God. We continue to find ways to construe that which is Black as that which bears the Mark of Cain, that which is less than human, and thus that which can be enslaved, segregated, and imprisoned. That we have so easily moved from outright slavery, to Jim Crow, to imprisonment in corporate prison labor camps speaks to how incapable we are of truly entering into Christian Friendship as a society. Thus it is that Black Lives Matter exists as a movement because as a society we have failed to enter fully into the obligation of Christian Friendship... we are more than happy to say yes, be my servant to that which is Back but have utterly failed again and again to say yes, be my Messiah, Lord, Logos, and God to that which is Black. Until we do so as a church and a society we will fail the basic paradigm of Christian relationship requisite for following Jesus.

        

When a cathedral promotes discrimination...

Earlier this week I discovered that Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock, Arkansas was giving a platform to Erik Metaxas. I found this discouraging on many levels and not simply because Metaxas is a theologian with whom I generally disagree but that in the midst of this he is also a Conservative Christian Media personality with a long history of anti-women and anti-LGBTQ+ bias. Now I realize that we need to host individuals who disagree with us to come to our communities and tell us their thoughts and stories... this is a good thing. When we do this, however, we must do so in a way that names what we are doing. Otherwise what quickly comes into question is the character of our community and how it relates to the speaker. Trinity Episcopal Cathedral has failed to make any such distinction.

Without providing this clarity what Trinity Cathedral is promoting is the idea that the rest of the Episcopal Church is enabling Nazism and Genocide. This is, some how, the very logic of Metaxas who feels that progressive christians who promote birth control, allow for abortions, and accept LGBTQ+ individuals (all of which the Episcopal Church does) puts us in the same category as those who feel no need to respond to humanitarian need in the middle east and are equivalent to those who allowed Nazism to rise and the Holocaust to occur. Any church that supports non-discrimination laws for the LGBTQ+ community, a position the Episcopal Church has held for decades, is opposed, in Metaxas mind, to Religious Freedom. The logic being that true Christians need not respect the basic dignity of LGBTQ+ individuals when it comes to issues of housing, employment, and public accommodations.

A lot of this comes from wanting to make the current narrative promoted by certain christians that they are a persecuted minority in America today linked intrinsically to the plight of Bonhoeffer. Promoting this persecution narrative, that Christians are the new Jews and soon will be outwardly attacked, is a major part of his text on Bonhoeffer. What makes Metaxas appealing is that he does everything as a soft sell. By and large he is the dealer of gate way theologies into the darker sides of christian exceptionalism in America. He specifically remains palatable to give problematic narratives credence.

What Metaxas is currently doing around Bonhoeffer he has already done with William Wilberforce. While his book on Bonhoeffer seeks to assimilate the Nazi Persecution narrative with the current narrative of persecution held by conservative christianity in America, his book on William Wilberforce seeks to paint Conservative Christians, in their fight against LGBTQ+ inclusion, women's health, and sexual health, as the modern day abolitionists. His book took an existing trend and solidified it within the conservative christian narrative. Now if one listens to Focus on the Family talks one will find the story of William Wilberforce presented as a narrative of wild sexual play boy who found Jesus and became an abolitionist. The questions they bring up is one of how can Conservative Christian Pastors reclaim their politically active roots as abolitionist and speak politically against the LGBTQ+ community, against women's health, and against contraception... aka against wild sexual play boy antics.

All of this, I hope, sounds absurd and presents why if an Episcopal Cathedral is going to host such a media personality that they do so with some level of conditions and awareness. As it stands it is unclear to what, if any, extent Trinity Episcopal Cathedral agrees with Metaxas around discrimination against women and the LGBTQ+ community, how much they buy into his narratives of Christian persecution in America and of anti-LGBTQ+ advocates as equivalent to modern day abolitionists. This is a lack of distinction which simply cannot be allowed to stand in light of the overall Episcopal Church's decade long stances on sexual health, women's health, and LGBTQ civil protections.

Student Debt for Episcopal Ministers

This project began as a conversation around student debt between fellow clergy at a retreat. What I became aware of was that we had little or no context for our situation and that for many of us breaching the topic was problematic. As I drove home I asked myself if there was a simple mechanism for placing our conversation into some context. The answer that came to me was a roll out survey on Facebook.

A roll out survey would not give us a clear picture of actual statistics around student debt for Episcopal clergy; such would take, at the least, a randomized survey. All it can do is provide us with some dots on a map and some very initial information. My hope would be that it would provide enough information to encourage fuller, and more systematic, study.

In forming the survey I kept several thoughts in mind. I wanted to insure it would provide context for those who took part in the initial conversation, all of whom were clergy between the ages of 20 and 50, a group that overall makes up roughly 30% of our current clergy. I wanted it to be able to differentiate on issues of gender, race, LGBTQ+, and ordination status. I wanted it to take about a minute to fill out.

Outside of demographic questions the survey only sought three points of information. The total amount of student loan debt an individual had upon graduating seminary, regardless of source; the amount of one’s income currently going to pay off student debt; and the number of years post seminary it would take an individual to pay off their student debt at the minimum rate required by the lender.

The survey was exceptionally well received and within four days exceeded the amount of entries I was able to freely view by the survey host, 150. Of these responses 121 provided useable data for the study. Others expressed situations outside the studies expectations such as loans being in deferment on account of PhD studies, inheritance or other means had been used to rapidly pay off loans, or filing for bankruptcy. A handful of responses were incomplete.

Recognizing the limited number of responses I would be able to view, the hope to give context to what is a minority population of our clergy, and the nature of roll out surveys, I requested that only clergy under the age of fifty respond. The reality of student loan debt on clergy over the age of fifty soon overwhelmed that request and it became apparent that individuals over the age of fifty were filling out the survey and responding as individuals between the age of forty-five and fifty. This makes the data I report on minsters over the age of forty-five less contextual than that of the other age brackets

Before presenting the information I want to again note that this data is not representative. It provides us some context to what is going on in regards to student loan debt for ministers in the Episcopal Church. Actual objective and representative data will take more research than one individual using a free survey service and promoting it solely through Facebook. My hope is that presenting this information will be a catalyst for that needed further research.

The first column shows the various demographics. The second column the percent of that demographic with student debt. The other columns deal just with those individuals with debt, marking average debt, the range of debt in that demographic, the average percent of income going towards paying off that debt, and the average number of years post seminary it would take to pay off that debt at the minimum rates.

	Participants	% with debt	Average Debt	Debt Range	Average Percent Income	Average Years
All	121	72.00%	$61,101.21	$5-296K	13.45%	24
Under 45	96	72.00%	$66,465.58	$8-296K	13.48%	24
Over 45	25	76.00%	$55,736.84	$5-125K	13.42%	24
Male	56	70.00%	$64,505.71	$6-296K	13.71%	25
Female	65	82.00%	$63,913.68	$5-157K	13.30%	23
LGBTQ+	23	83.00%	$59,421.05	$6-120K	12.63%	24
P of C	7	88.00%	$51,616.67	$30-95K	17.50%	22
Lay	13	77.00%	$96,800.00	$35-157K	15.00%	30
Ordained	108	72.00%	$59,963.14	$5-296K	13.27%	23
20-25	1	0.00%	$0.00	0K	0.00%	0
26-30	14	57.00%	$63,125.00	$20-125K	15.00%	19
31-35	35	69.00%	$70,986.96	$18-100K	13.26%	25
36-40	31	77.00%	$69,978.26	$8-296K	14.35%	24
41-45	15	93.00%	$52,780.36	$24-120k	11.79%	23

I must stress, again, how these numbers are not representative of the church. The demographic numbers themselves show this to be true. All they provide is some context for various demographics. Taking into account the nature of a roll out study, and the varying sizes of the various demographics, no demographic has an exceptionally different context.

The context of ministers under thirty appears to be better overall than those over thirty. How much of this is on account of better funding possibilities, versus a hesitancy of younger individuals with student debt to enter into or get through discernment is unknown. It also appears that the contexts of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community are slightly more problematic than the overall average context discovered. Again what is causing this reality, and how the church is or is not contributing to it, is unknown.

Overall these numbers present more questions than they do answers. The goal of the project was not to gain answers but to get a better context from which to answer questions. To that end I hope it brings about better and more robust research so that we can understand what is obviously an issue for the majority of Episcopal Clergy.   

Confirmation Proclamation...

Confirmation... that liturgical, historical, and theological quandary. My request is that we simply recognize it for what it is, the Multipass of the sacraments. With all the inherent usefulness, and annoyance, that such a comparison inhabits. There is no need to tie it down to a singular purpose nor to think it is requisite for much of anything, with ordination being the one exception. That it be known for simply what it is, this sometimes annoying anachronism that many of us need to make our way about a life of faith. 

There are points in the life of some where they need to gather before the authority of the church and confirm their life of faith. There are a lot of reasons that a person might come to that point. When that point is discerned in the life of a person of faith, then we take up the work of the sacrament of confirmation as a community to recognize it. It is supposed to be a significant enough work by the church that it has a life long impact in the life of the individual. This is why proper discernment and instruction for those seeking such a moment, and the full effort of the community, is so important. Creating a singular event in the life of a person is no easy task.

So far all those points in a persons life, and all the routes they may take afterwards by plane, train, automobile, or intergalactic vortex... we need a multipass. A moment for individuals to come before the church and proclaim Christ Crucified from whatever context they are in and have that proclamation recognized by the full community and authority of the church. It is a point of mutual confirmation of life together, a life that is transforming the church and the individual.

What happens in the midst of confirmation is that the Episcopal Church, in the midst of our own norms and tribalism, recognize that what is the core of following the way of Christ is the proclamation of Christ Crucified from a variety of norms and tribes. Yes it is a point where an individual confirms that being part of the norms of the Episcopal church, joining the Episcoposse Tribe, is part of their life... but of equal, if not greater, importance, it is a point where the Church affirms the Proclamation of Christ Crucified from an individual as a force to change the nature of those norms and tribe. In that way it is the church's multipass into the byways and highways of cultures and norms outside ourselves. The way by which we move beyond our well beaten paths.

So confirmation is our multipass, the multipass of the church to norms and realities outside of ourselves, the multipass of individuals to go about those norms and realities affirmed by the church, the means by which we engage in a full and robust proclamation of christ crucified by the church.    

Youth and Campus Ministry... living together... mass hysteria...

Maybe this is an absurd idea... I think, however, that it would be really nifty if Youth Ministry and Campus Ministry had a healthy vibrant relationship. Youth Ministries, in my mind, should be seeking to be in healthy relationship with relevant Campus Ministries and vice versa. To be really honest for me this is a no brainer. 

Sometimes, though, when I mention this idea it feels like I have suggested we take up human sacrifice and want to plunge the church into mass hysteria. That this would be some epic crossing of the streams and we all know that crossing the streams is bad. Everyone looks at me as if I am the person who failed to keep his head clear and now a giant marshmallow man will destroy New York.

To be clear what I am not talking about is going back to a time when Episcopal Campus Ministry was an inward focused institution dependent upon the church to supply numbers for a special Sunday student program. I do not think we could bring that back if we tried and I would not want to even if we could. Episcopal Campus Ministries were forced to become nimble, crazy, and missional long before it was cool and we are not going to be forced back into that parish style box at this point. 

At this point our most effective campus ministries are running full tilt in missional/mission shaped/relationship based/emergent styles. It is the basic ethos by which the campus ministry I serve runs and one of the reasons we found a mutual call was a general commitment to this style of ministry. This means we spend a lot of time striving to create a worshiping community that relates to and impacts the campus environment and less time focused on fostering the institution of the Episcopal Church. As things stand we are a growing vibrant community with a solid grounding. If things remain as they are then things will be good. I am not writing this because if something does not change then my ministry will fail. I am writing this because if I can build better relationships then my ministry and the ministry of the Episcopal Church will get even better.

The deal is that Mission Shaped ministry and Parish ministry are not polar opposites. They are symbiotic creatures that create a robust church when brought into full partnership. They are like a jam filled pastry. A person can just eat jam or just eat pastry dough but the magic happens when one takes a deep generous bite of a jam filled pastry. If we are going to have robust mission shaped ministry and robust parish ministry creating an overall robust church then we have to put the two into interworked layers of relationship and let them bake. 

 

So the plan, the absurd plan, is that we create an overall ethos of Episcopal Youth Ministry that empowers Episcopal Campus Ministry that then empowers Episcopal Ministry at large.... we can even throw some powdered sugar on it for good measure. 

My ministry, as it stands, is doing pretty good at empowering Episcopal Ministry at large. We are baptizing, confirming, and receiving members into the church. My students are working and volunteering at Episcopal Parishes, Schools, and Camps. My students are actively discerning calls to ordained ministry. That layer is working.

It is the first layer, the Episcopal Youth Ministry to Episcopal Campus Ministry layer that seems to be having problems. The relationship dynamic here simply is not vibrant and healthy, in many places it does not exist at all. What I want to present is a place in my ministry where this relationship is working.

I have a great relationship with one of the local youth leaders. The parish is in a suburban area about thirty minutes from the university with an amazing youth and family ministry program. If a relationship exists between the parish and a student at the university I get an email of mutual introduction. About half of those emails result in a student becoming a regular participant in the campus ministry, which is fine. The point is not to force the students to involve themselves in campus ministry but to introduce them to the concept of campus ministry and the chaplain. It is great that this parish is thirty minutes away but any parish can take up this email exchange and create this level of relationship. The problem is that this does not happen.

The main reason this does not happen, that I encounter, is that youth and parish leadership just do not think to create this basic type of relationship with campus ministries and incorporate their graduating youth into those relationships. Sometimes I hear arguments about how they want the graduate to be able to freely discern, to not be forced to go to the campus ministry, to be able to be part of a parish, or the like. The deal is that every campus minister I know wants every student they encounter to be able to do just that... they just want to be sure that the student knows they have a resource as they go about that if they need it. 

So this is the core of what I would like to see with parishes. Initiative on the part of parishes to build a relationship with the campus ministries where their former youth become students, ensuring that youth know that campus ministry exists if they need it, and whenever possible a mutual introduction of an incoming student to a chaplain. I try to build these relationships in reverse whenever I can but it simply is not the same.

The other part has to do with diocesan and national youth ministries and events. Our forms should have space for high school seniors to mark where they are going to school and to provide the local chaplain or parish their contact information. Our events should have time for seniors and college students to interact with a college chaplain and build relationships and awareness. Our diocesan camp brought the chaplains in for a day this summer, just to hang around and make one announcement at lunch. The connections with graduating seniors and staff who were in college was electric. 

So that is my absurd idea. Youth Ministry having a basic and healthy relationship with Campus Ministry. I do not know why these ideas are so controversial. I do not know why these relationships are not natural for our ministries... but for some reason they are not natural. I hope someday they can be... I want my Jam Pastry... I want to cross the streams and save New York.    

A new strategy: where the Episcopal Church fears to go in LGBTQ+ inclusion.

I was a closeted gay teen in the nineties and initially I was presented two possibilities about what would happen if I came out as a gay man. My Anglo-Catholic mentors, with whom I was out inside the confessional booth, opened up the possibility of monastic celibacy and discernment towards the priesthood. The broad and low church clergy and leaders with whom I had contact spoke of reparation therapy. Eventually I discovered Integrity. They offered me a third option. I could be an out gay man, I could have a partner, I could be a priest… as long as everything about my life mirrored that of the heterosexual norms of the church.   

Where does our welcome end?

If these three modes were characters on a improve stage, the comedy would be flat. Decades before I was born they stopped being able to be receptive to one another. Where once there might have been space for dialogue, growth, and understanding there is now only space for stimuli-response. Every group exists with its own cultured positivism, the surety that they have the authority on the subject at hand and the right actions to perform. They have created immutable concepts of orthodoxy and orthopraxy from which they shan’t be moved. It a stalwart example of the decadent heresy of partisanship in which the church so regularly bathes.

Now, to be clear, I realize that I am painting with a broad brush and at points doing a disservice to members and subsets of the various groups. This account is based on my personal experience with groups over decades, striving to process these experiences with peers, and quite often finding my experiences echoed back to me. It comes out of a continued longing for a safe place in the church for myself and also those around me, queer or otherwise, and the frustration I feel about not finding such a space.  The consistent reality that I have had to face is a need to choose a side and know that alignment with one means ostracization, if not worse, from the other.

I want to start then by going back to before these three groups had devolved to less than improv characters on a stage.  I want to, in fact, go back to 1963, a decade before homosexuality would stop being treated as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. A time when we were legitimately still asking whether homosexuality was as natural as heterosexuality or if it was a problematic acquisition from the natural heterosexual state. It was at this point which a rather wonderful dense text was published by Martin Thornton: English Spirituality.

Now this text is, at its heart, an attempt to create an Anglo-Catholic reading of English History. It is not a text attempting to engage pressing social issues of its era. There comes a point, however, where Thornton is attempting to clarify the theological methods of Tomas Aquinas and chooses to bring up a question of his time. He chose to address the issue of homosexuality, and wrote:

“It is difficult to distinguish between innate characteristics, or “nature”, and acquired habits formed by circumstances. This difficulty must be accepted and its subtlety recognized, but the doctrine remains. Homosexuality is an example, for this can be almost subconsciously acquired, as a developing tendency, or it can be an innate characteristic. In the former case, the tendency should be fought, for it is but an excrescence upon nature; in the latter case it is part of nature, which can be accepted and ultimately sanctified. What must be avoided is the abominable heresy that the “Christian Character” implies a rigid uniformity; that rather than sanctifying our own God-made selves we should ape some other real or imaginary character”
(English Spirituality, Wipf and Stock, 1963, page 133.)

Finding this paragraph in my late teens was a God send for me. It provided me an approach to theological and spiritual dissonance around my faith and sexuality that gave me a balm of peace I had not known in my entire life. Unfortunately my finding of it was not well received by any of the three groups. The Anglo-Catholics, who had introduced me to Martin Thornton, did not want to engage the possibility his approach would allow for a change in their approach towards homosexual individuals. The broad and low churchmen were not exceptionally interested in any argument based in Thomism. Those in and about Integrity were strongly advocating I stop caring about Thornton, Aquinas, or any of the tradition that challenged the concept of including conforming members of the LGBTQ+ community.   

The resistance is understandable as what Thornton puts forward strongly critiques all three. Its first critique is towards those who consider homosexuality to be an acquired deviation. Thornton was still using a theory of Freud that some individuals took up homosexuality as an acquired trait. Even though Freud himself noted it was inherently impossible to “cure” homosexuality many have attempted this impossibility. As our scientific understanding of sexuality has grown since 1963 it is now recognized that sexuality and sex are naturally formed by a complex series of factors we do not fully understand and are not acquired traits. At this point what science has revealed to us is that individual’s who acquire LGBTQ+ identities as a developed trait, if they exist at all, are an exceptionally small minority subset of the LGBTQ+ community. That across the board individuals who identify in the midst of the LGBTQ+ community are expressing their natural characteristics.

To state this in another way, for a long time we considered members of the LGBTQ+ community to be guilty of acquiring their LGBTQ+ identity unless proven otherwise. At this point medical science has shown, repeatedly, that an LGBTQ+ identity can be taken as an inherit naturally occurring characteristic of an individual with the rare exception being a case of acquired psychosis. Our theological and pastoral response to the LGBTQ+ community must be based on the idea that their characteristics are inherently part of their nature.

The next twist we have to deal with is recognizing that the Anglo-Catholic response I encountered and the response from Integrity are, in fact, the same response. Both groups take LGBTQ+ identity to be an inherent trait in need of sanctification. Their difference is simply in the allowable mechanisms for that sanctification. Both expect “that the ’Christian Character’ implies a rigid uniformity” and that conforming to this uniformity will bring about sanctification. The Anglo-Catholic expectation being those not called to biologically procreative sex must conform to a call to monasticism, or at least celibacy. What Integrity has sought is that LGBTQ+ individuals and families be able to conform to the rigid uniformity of individuals and families already existing in the Episcopal Church. Members of the LGBTQ+ community who can readily conform to expected gender expressions, norms, and family systems we already have in our church should be free to do so. What happens if someone does not pass well in their gender expression, of if that expression is not a clear choice of either male or female... what happens if there is a twenty or thirty year age difference between spouses... what happens if someone's black slacks are neoprene not wool... 

Creating a space in which people are allowed to sanctify their own selves and not ape some other real or imaginary character is a difficult process. LGBTQ+ individuals cannot be expected to ape real or imagined characters of the non-LGBTQ+ community. Our theological and pastoral approach to them has to recognize their capacity to sanctify their own selves within our communities. Yes, this means that some LGBTQ+ individuals will be called to celibacy and monastic life. Yes, this means that some LGBTQ+ couples will be called to monogamy and married life. Yes, this means that some LGBTQ+ individuals are naturally going to assimilate into expectations of Episcopal norms. These are real characters of being across the spectrum. The issue is that the Episcopal Church is not called to be a safe space just for those people, LGBTQ+ and elsewise, for whom our norms is the real character of their being… The Episcopal Church is called to create the community that allows individuals to sanctify their God-made selves, to become Christian Characters, not ape our preexisting notions of “Christian character”.

The reality, at least from what I hear from my peers who are the younger leaders of the Episcopal Church, is that we want a church that takes both the historic voices of the church and the current voices of the LGBTQ+ community seriously. That there is a recognition that the “Christian character” espoused by any one group, Thomists, Integrity, or other… is going to have some major problems to it. That the goal of Christian Community is to bring individuals to a point where they can be open to sanctifying their God-made selves and place aside a set of expectations to which we must conform and ape. Until we can move beyond the expectations of positivism, that one group or individual has it right, we will continue to cut individuals off from a space where they can experience sanctification.