What Really Matters: Being Christ's Church to a Community

By Robin G. Jordan

Two things influenced my choice of the title of Monday’s article, “Men in Skirts: Vestments in the Anglican Church.” The first was an older member of the small Continuing Anglican church in which I am presently involved. He often makes fun of the senior warden, the junior warden, and I for wearing cassocks and surplices, referring to them as “skirts.” The two wardens and I conduct services of Morning Prayer on the Sundays when there is no communion.

The rector of the Jackson Purchase’s only other Continuing Anglican church officiates at a service of Holy Communion on the second and last Sunday of the month. The two congregations are affiliated with different jurisdictions but by agreement between the diocesan bishops of the two jurisdictions he serves as supply priest for the church. Both congregations are located in the same county and are roughly fifteen miles apart. The priest is a former church member who struck out on his own to start a church on his farm. Needless to say that the older church member in question does not poke fun at the priest for wearing eucharistic vestments.

The second was Mel Brook’s 1993 musical comedy Robin Hood and Men in Tights. I am a fan of Mel Brook’s movies. When I was a teenager, I watched a number of the older Robin Hood movies on late night and Saturday morning TV. I also went and saw Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which Brooks parodied in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

In retrospect, a better title might have been “Vestments: Help or Hindrance?”

In Monday’s article I touched upon a topic that I believe merits further discussion. I have done a great deal of reading on the various aspects of gospel ministry over the years. While I do not remember all of the titles of the articles and books that I have read, I do remember most of the helpful ideas that they contained. The way the human brain works, we must focus our attention on something in order to remember it. I focused my attention on content and not titles. I was not doing much writing at the time and did not keep a record of what I was reading. I also had access to my entire library, which I do not now.

One of the works that I read identified several different ways that churches create barriers to hearing the gospel. Rather than eliminating or reducing these barriers, they expect those who have not heard the gospel to cross them. They may not realize that they have created such barriers or how difficult to negotiate these barriers are for those they are ostensibly seeking to reach with the gospel. They may also mistakenly believe that a barrier is an obstacle or hindrance for their ministry target group but is actually something that will attract the people in that group.

The churches creating these barriers may also be stuck in the mindset that what they are doing is the only way to do church. They cannot imagine doing church any other way. While they aspire to reach others with the gospel, they in practice put their preferences first. Their aspirations and their preferences conflict with each other.

Among the barriers to hearing the gospel that churches erect are the location of the building; the accessibility of the building; the attitudes of church members to outsiders; the age, race, and ethnic mix of the congregation; the style of music, the style of worship; the translation of the Bible used in church services; the days and times of church services; the lack of a nursery for infants and toddlers; and in the case of Anglican and Episcopal churches, the particular ambiance of the church, including vestments; the language of the service book used in church services—Jacobean English; the unhelpfulness of the church bulletin; the length and complexity of the rites and services contained in the service book; the role of the congregation in these rites and services; the manner in which they are conducted; and the individual proclivities of the rector, vicar, or priest-in-charge.

What is a barrier may differ with each guest, or visitor. Churches will be tempted to assume that because some guests are able to negotiate most barriers, all guests are available to negotiate them. Churches will be also tempted to blame guests for the barriers that they have created. They take the attitude that is not fault of the church but the guest’s own fault if a guest is unable to cross these barriers.

Churches that are wed to a particular ecclesial praxis often have the most barriers to hearing the gospel. They typically lack flexibility and adaptability—essential characteristics for a church on the North American mission field. Rather than seeking to reach a broad segment of the unchurched population, they settle for reaching “people like us”—people who are little different in demographic characteristics as well as preferences and tastes from the members of the existing congregation.

The foregoing is one of the reasons that the proposed service book of the Anglican Church in North America is problematic. It embodies such an ecclesial praxis and caters to the preferences and tastes of one segment of the ACNA. It limits the outreach of ACNA congregations to a narrow segment of the unchurched population. In adopting it and the worship style with which it was designed in mind, ACNA congregations will be multiply barriers to hearing the gospel as well as putting a brake on their ability to reach a wide swath of North America’s unchurched population with the gospel. They will be repeating the mistakes that the Episcopal Church made in the nineteenth century. With the exception of its missions to former slaves and to Native Americans, it would remain largely a church of the affluent, the educated, and the upper middle class.

When Jesus gave the Great Commission to the disciples, he charged them to make disciples of all people groups. He did not tell them to focus on their kind of people. A recurrent theme in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is the various ways that God show the disciples over and over again that their mission is to all people, not just the Jews but also the hated Samaritans and the Gentiles—Ethiopians, Romans, and Greeks.

If we are to be faithful to the Great Commission in the community and region in which God has placed us, we need to focus on more than one small segment of the local population.

On January 17-21, 2002 I attended the second Annual Winter Conference of the Anglican Mission in America at the Peabody Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. As I recall Quigg Lawrence who is now bishop of the Diocese of Christ Our Hope in the Anglican Church in North America was a speaker at that conference.

One of the presentations that I attended was about simplifying the services of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer for use with the congregations comprised largely of unchurched people who had no previous experience of liturgical worship. Among the things that I remember is a conversation about which the presenter told the packed room and which he had with his bishop. The bishop was planning to visit the congregation that he had started. The presenter and the other members of the worship team did not wear vestments. The congregation held its services in a movie theater but that was not the only reason that the worship team did not wear vestments. Like the elements that the presenter recommended should be removed from the Prayer Book services, he had concluded that vestments might prove a barrier to hearing the gospel in the Mid-West where he had planted the new church. The local population was to a large part unaccustomed to them. In some instances they evoked negative associations in the minds of various unchurched people with whom he had talked. In the conversation he tried persuade the bishop not to wear his full regalia. If I remember rightly, he was only partially successful.

I attended the conference due to my longstanding interest in church planting and evangelism. In the mid-1980s I had been a leader on the launch team that planted the church where I served as senior lay reader. The 1988 Lambeth Conference had adopted Resolution 34 – Decade of Evangelism

This Conference, recognising that evangelism is the primary task given to the Church, asks each province and diocese of the Anglican Communion, in co-operation with other Christians, to make the closing years of this millennium a "Decade of Evangelism" with a renewed and united emphasis on making Christ known to the people of his world.

(See further paras 14-23 of the Report on "Mission and Ministry.")

In the North Shore Deanery of which my church was a member, the Lambeth Conference’s call to make the final decade of the twentieth century a “Decade of Evangelism” was greeted with yawns of boredom and shrugs of indifference. My own church had been planted as a part of a diocesan initiative that saw the establishment of two new churches in the diocese in the mid-1980s. The bishop then turned the planning and implementation of further church planting initiatives over to the diocese’s deaneries. The deaneries did nothing.

On the North Shore the population of St. Tammany Parish was exploding—in Abita Springs, Covington, Madisonville, and Mandeville in western St. Tammany and in Slidell in eastern St. Tammany. None of the clergy in the deanery showed any inclination to spearhead a deanery church planting initiative. The demographic studies and the windshield surveys which I had done for the former dean who played a lead role in the planting of my church showed that the parish, Louisiana’s equivalent of the county, could support two or more new Episcopal churches. While the clergy of the North Shore Deanery were letting the grass grow under their feet, several other denominations were taking advantage of the population growth and launching new churches. The largest non-denominational church in western St. Tammany was launched in the same time period.

Later in 2002 I was briefly involved in two church plants, an AMiA plant that did not get beyond the core group gathering stage and a charismatic Episcopal plant that was initially successful but lost most of its congregation due to the events of 2003. When I last visited the church on one of my infrequent visits to Louisiana, it was a ghost of its former self.

When the church was launched, it met in the home of one of the members of its core group on a weeknight. The services were informal and were preceded by a meal. Most of the members of the congregation who worked came directly from their workplace.

None of the deanery clergy would have anything to do with the new church. Two charismatic Episcopal priests from the Baton Rouge Deanery and a charismatic Anglican priest, later bishop, officiated at its weekly celebrations of the Holy Eucharist. The service was “Rite III” from the 1979 Prayer Book or the Communion of the Sick from the 1928 Prayer Book. The only vestments the priests wore were a stole. And yes, some clergy and members of the congregation prayed in tongues. The sick were anointed with oil and had hands laid on them.

The nucleus of the congregation was composed of ex-members of my former church, those who had been involved in my former church’s prayer and healing ministry, its short-lived Daughters of the King chapter, its midweek praise and prayer service, or the Women’s Joy Conference, their friends and other people that they knew. The members of my former church derisively referred to them as “happy-clappy Holy Rollers.” The rector of my mother’s church who is now a bishop of the Episcopal Church refused to acknowledge the existence of the congregation, even though it had been organized with the bishop’s permission and blessing .

As the congregation grew, it would move to a vacant house that the husband of another core group member owned. The house had a swimming pool that was used for baptisms. The congregation would eventually move to a hotel conference room. It used the Alpha Course to reach more people in the area.

However, the consecration of Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire would damage the public image of the Episcopal Church in what is a politically and socially conservative part of the State of Louisiana and exact a heavy toll throughout the diocese. It decimated the membership of the new congregation.

The Episcopal priest of whose parish the new congregation was officially a preaching station would become a member of the staff of the Society of Anglican Missionaries and Senders. The Episcopal priest who succeeded him and who had also served the new congregation would lead his own congregation out of the Episcopal Church into the Anglican Church in North America in 2014. The Episcopal deacon who played a key role in the organization of the new congregation is now a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and serves two congregations in the greater New Orleans area.

I was no longer involved with the church when it fell on hard times. Like myself I had sensed that it had no future in the Episcopal Church. I had become involved with a United Methodist church plant in the same area. It was meeting in the conference room of a local maritime museum.

The services were semi-liturgical, that is, they incorporated elements that are typically associated with liturgical forms of worship—responsive readings, the Apostles Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. The services had two high points—the sermon and communion. After a short children’s talk the younger children went to the Children’s Ministry in the next room and then returned at the offertory for communion.

The communion table was a plastic-topped folding table elevated to standard altar height—3 foot, 3 inches, using sections of ABS pipe. These sections were slipped over the feet of the table. The table was covered with solid colored Jacobean fall which fell to the floor and concealed the ABS pipe sections.

After the consecration of the bread and wine, the pastor stood in front of the table and distributed the bread. He was flanked by two assistant ministers who distributed the wine. A round loaf of leaven bread was used for the bread and red grape juice for the wine.

The music was what is sometimes called the “New Traditional”—a blend of traditional hymns and older praise choruses and worship songs. A number of new hymns and songs were included in the mix. The lyrics were projected on a portable screen, using a multimedia projector and a laptop.

On occasion the pastor wore a pulpit gown. Most of the time he wore a shirt and a tie or he wore a blazer, a shirt, and a tie. The services were well-attended.

When the United Methodist church occupied its new building, I moved on to a Southern Baptist church plant which was in a much earlier stage of development and which had a small group ministry. The church was meeting in a fire station garage. The pastor was also a fire department chaplain. The pastor had been called by the local Baptist association to plant a new church in a rural area of western St. Tammany, which was beginning to experience suburban development. With that development the area’s population was growing.

A number of students from New Orleans Baptist Seminary were involved the new work. The worship pastor was a part-time student at the seminary. Later he would have to give up his position as worship pastor to complete his Master of Divinity.

The leadership team of the new work incorporated a number of liturgical elements into the church’s worship. The area had a sizable unchurched Roman Catholic population. They had also been influenced by the writings of Dan Kimball, which “focus on ways that methods of worship, preaching, church structure, evangelism and leadership need to change in order to be missional in a post-Christian or postmodern culture.” They were therefore open to experimenting with some liturgical elements, for example, the observance of a simplified liturgical calendar and the use of the cross in worship. Because I came from a liturgical background and was knowledgeable in the areas of Christian worship and liturgics, they picked my brain for ideas. I in turn learned from them, particularly in the areas of church planting, evangelism, and small group ministry. I was also recruited as a vocalist on the worship team and engaged in community outreach at a local coffee house with the worship pastor.

The basic pattern of the services was fairly simple—a worship set, a prayer, a Scripture reading, a sermon, an invitation, a solo, a prayer, a final song, and a dismissal.  This pattern is similar to that of Morning Prayer--praise, proclamation, and prayer--but is far less complicated.

The music was for the most part contemporary Christian music and praise and worship songs. The worship pastor also used some material that he himself had written. A number of older hymns and gospel songs were included in the mix. The lyrics were projected on a wall screen and later shown on flat screen TV monitors suspended from the ceiling. All of the songs used in worship were accessible to the average singer in the congregation.

The pastor dressed in an open collar shirt and jeans or slacks. What he wore fit the setting.

The church would eventually move out of the fire station garage into a café that it bought and converted into a church office, worship center, and nursery. The church made good use of the commercial kitchen as a part of its community outreach. During services a part of the congregation sat around tables on either side of the platform.

I learned a number of valuable lessons from my involvement in the unsuccessful AMiA church plant as well as these three church plants. These lessons added to what I had learned when I helped to launch and pioneer my former church. They included the importance of planning for the long haul, of recruiting the members of the core group or nucleus of a new congregation from the population of the target community, of not being discouraged by a lack of immediate results, and of not postponing group meetings of core group members for community-building, prayer, team development, and vision-sharing out of fear that these members might push for the premature launching of public services of worship.

The latter can be a very real possibility. In the case of the Southern Baptist church plant it was not the members of the core group that pushed for the premature launching of public worship services but the local Baptist association that called the church planter. The church planter had not wanted to go public until the network of small groups forming the nucleus of the new congregation was much larger. The local Baptist association, however, did not fully grasp his strategy.

His experience points to the importance of agreement on strategy between the church planting team and the sponsoring church or judicatory. He had wanted to launch large which would have increased the likelihood of a successful launch and of post-launch growth. The launch, while premature, was successful and produced a growing, thriving church. After I relocated to western Kentucky, the church planter moved on to successfully launch a second new church in western St. Tammany Parish.

Among the things that I have learned is the importance of shedding our preconceived notions of doing church and of focusing upon being the church—a community of faithful Christians on mission for Christ. It is critical to know the community in which God has placed us and to which he has called us to be missionaries—Christ’s representatives and witnesses. We are not called to be Christ’s church to a community of our own imagining. We are called to be his church to the real community—to people who are not like ourselves and may not even like us. This means that we must be prepared to be flexible and adaptable. The one thing that we cannot change is the essentials of the Christian faith, in particular the gospel.

When we put things like a particular ecclesial praxis first, we are not serving God. We are serving ourselves. To be Christ’s church to a community, we do not need vestments, candles, communion rails,  kneelers, or any of the paraphernalia that many Anglicans and Episcopalians associate with “church.” We do, however, need to be faithful to the “rule and teaching of Christ.”