I don't know if many of you read the Living Church magazine. It is a rather conservative Episcopal news publication whose masthead's subtitle reads: "an independent weekly supporting Catholic Anglicanism." It's an old publication, beginning in 1878, and often it seems determined to fight battles long lost but it, along with the Anglican Digest, speaks nostalgically to a past which I too once valued.

The March 22nd issue contained a reflection on Episcopal Church growth in the Midwest in the 1950's and it's decline in these days. Typically, the writer draws, I believe, the wrong conclusions. He writes: "In many ways, the 1950's and early 1960's were the heyday of the Episcopal Church in the Midwest…American society (has) changed a great deal. The 1960's began a period in American social history of open rebellion against authority. Following the Civil Rights movement, activism and protest became common on college campuses and the sexual revolution began. Deepening involvement in Vietnam seriously shook American's confidence in itself and its destiny…Life for a parish church in the 1970's proved to be a much more difficult proposition than life in the relatively simpler years of the late 1950's. The stage had been set for the polarization of the church between traditionalists and progressives, and the days of a kinder, simpler faith had passed."

It has been a popular rant of traditionalists to blame church decline, which began in the 1970's, on clergy who were too liberal and a National Church which embraced liberal causes. The remedy suggested, by some, is a return to more "traditional values," which seems to mean disengagement with political life. ("Separation of church and state.")

What's conveniently forgotten is that the embrace of liberalism in the late 1960's and 70's was far from universal in this or any other denomination. Some congregations (like St. A's) were deeply involved in social change and social justice issues, others far less so. Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail documents the reflections of a modern day prophet heartbroken by the active resistance of the churches to speak up for justice and which actively resisted desegregation in schools and sanctuaries.

In the early 1970's, as a seminarian, I did field work at Grace Church in Georgetown (Washington, D.C.). Grace Church had been a dying church, hamstrung by a poor location at the foot of Wisconsin Avenue (you had to get lost to find it), no parking and an inadequate ability to compete programmatically with its wealthier neighbor churches, Episcopal and otherwise, in the district. But they had a visionary in a young associate, Andrew Foster, and his wife Linda. Since Grace was slated to be closed by the Diocese anyway, the parish leadership responded to the Bishop's challenge to "change or die" with a willingness to engage the culture around them: hippies, dopers, street kids and dreamers, and the urban hip. The church opened its doors – wide. The Washington Free University offered classes, the Food-Coop met, the Black Panther Party gathered, the parish ran a drug and suicide hotline and they rented a brownstone to establish a community of young people whose mission was to live together, pray together and witness to other young people about a life without drugs and random sex. (I lived in this house for a year as a sort of "seminarian- abbot".) Some of these things worked, while others failed. But the church was known as a place of welcome and sanctuary. When gay young people mobilized to demonstrate against an illegal and unpopular war, Grace was the place they stayed in overnight, sleeping on pews and making protest signs. Grace Church began to change…

Looking back now a lifetime later, what I so value was Grace's willingness to extend a radical hospitality to those who never would have been welcomed at St. John's, Georgetown or the National Cathedral – or any other church for that matter. Some of those kids surely grew into adults who claim the church today as family while other perhaps do not. But there was a faithfulness in such welcome which spoke to people‘s need to be renewed by a hope for justice and peace – a vision consistent with the life pattern of Jesus.

What we did so less well was to "tell the story."

The inability of many of our preachers and theologians in the 1970's to explain "why" these actions were prophetically consistent with the Gospel is amazing in retrospect. We know this of Jesus – while he engaged in a ministry of healing and exorcism and performed a number of prophetic actions – Cleansing of the Temple for example – his ministry was centered in proclamation ("The Kingdom of God has come near you!")

Oftentimes, the engagement of the church in social justice felt idiosyncratic (reflecting the passion of the local priest at the time) or "politically correct" (reflecting, rather than providing guidance to, the tenor of the times.) And so, many people were not brought along for the journey and disengaged – dropping out altogether or arriving at newly chosen churches as "refugees".

Change is painful and disconcerting for most, if not all, people. Perhaps the great mass migration of people from the old mainline churches to the newly emerging evangelical megachurches which were designed and crafted to avoid such conflicts – a critic would say that such institutions function more as citadels of an American civil religion rather than of historical Christianity – was unavoidable. Even the best exegesis of biblical texts could not move segregated southern churches to accept the offspring of former slaves as co-worshippers. Nor could the gospel mandate of reconciliation prevent white churches from establishing academies and parochial schools to avoid the supposed horrors of school desegregation. But it was the wholesale avoidance of the "challenge of challenging" on the part of many leaders that was the shame of that time or any time.

As you may know, I work with a national church project which focuses on clergy wellness that involves an 8 day "retreat". Following Bishop Robinson's consecration, what I heard so often from colleagues in the South was the lament from their parishioners that this ordination of an opening gay man "came out of nowhere." Where was the time to discuss this and to accept this change? (And this was from the "moderates"). I recalled how we here in Southern California had been discussing this for more than a decade. Our Bishop, Fred Borsch, had written a thoughtful theological reflection which sought to reframe the issue of homosexuality into a larger context of human sexuality. That piece was widely distributed here in our diocese but also to the bishops of the Church at the House of Bishops. Apparently, the Southern Bishops neglected to pack this helpful document in their carryons.

The church culture King lamented in the 1960's for avoiding painful but necessary conversations about race then is the same church culture which avoided conversations about sexual identity in the 1990's and beyond.

The point I'm struggling to make here is that the decline of the mainline churches in the 1970's was not caused by a "polarization" in the church between traditionalists and progressives and the loss of a "simpler faith" but rather that such polarization has always existed in American culture, unacknowledged on one hand and exploited often on the other but rarely dealt with critically using the lens of the gospel. In other words, the gospel of Christ challenges our values and actions in light of the values of the Kingdom of God, which calls us all toward a transformation of this world and how we live in it and as such the gospel is neither liberal nor conservative. Such labels are misleading and far too simplistic. To the extent that the social justice movements of the 1960's and 1970's sought to move us toward the Kingdom of God, they were of God. To the extent in which they frustrated a movement toward greater wholeness, unity and reconciliation; they were not – but to suggest that the Church should either avoid social and economic justice movements as being beneath the gaze of Christ or that the church should avoid such conflict and reflexively support so called "conservative values" as being more patriotic is sinful. The journey is to seek God's face in the struggles of human life, not apart from them. And when we do that with integrity and grace, the Spirit smiles for the Spirit is revealed not in spite of the conflict but rather within it.

And so I would argue that the political analysis is misguided.

But the author made another observation which I believe was powerfully insightful. He writes: (The 1970's) "…was the decade that began the escalating process of extreme secularization of American society, the beginning of ‘rampant boundary-less individualism' that so deeply permeates a fragmented American society today."

Secularization emerged as a byproduct of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. With the development of science and the scientific method, truth was no longer understood as that which is timeless and known through biblical revelation and in the custody of clerics but was increasingly that which is provisional and empirically verifiable and in the custody of scientists. As culture moved from an oral to a written transmission of knowledge mediated not by the family and Church but by the academy and the State; religion's authority and influence was reduced. Authority formerly invested in prelates and priests would be, more and more, invested in the high priests of the new sciences: chemists replaced alchemists, astronomers replaced astrologers, physicians replaced faith healers and so on - in short, rationalists replaced "religionists." The educated elite began to proclaim that society was moving towards its perfection through an embrace of "modernity" – the sense that progress is inevitable when minds are enlightened and freed from the shackles of religious superstition.

This pervasive worldview had resulted in religion being more and more a privatized choice rather than a social obligation as it once was.

This is the larger context church decline needs to be seen in. (The average American congregation has a Sunday attendance of around 100 people; in the Episcopal Church, that average is 85.)

We are, however, moving rapidly into a "post modern" age. In the light of the fires of Auschwitz and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can no long delude ourselves into thinking that science and technology will lead inevitably to progress and perfection. The continued existence of tribal and extremist violence across the globe reinforces our disillusionment with modernity, for science divorced from moral accountability can lead to nihilism and death.

Some would seek to return to a mythic past which predates science. The success of the megachurch phenomena in our land may be due, in part, to its ability to create and sustain an alternative worldview (e.g. the "science" of intelligent design vs. the "theory" of evolution) which serves to insulate people from the pervasive emptiness, provisionality, futility and rampant individualism of modernity. But ultimately what are needed are new definitions. For the purpose of religion is to make sense of the world; to articulate a sense of meaning and purpose for human life. It is to put human existence in context; for science can only answer "how," never "why."

Happily, the article in the Living Church ends up with this observation: "Paul Tillich began the introduction to his Systematic Theology by noting that a theological system should satisfy two basic needs: ‘the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation.' He further observed that ‘theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received'…the fate of the Episcopal Church depends in large measure upon how the theological challenge of message and situation is answered."

The collapse of the "paradigm of modernity" is both a challenge and an opportunity for the universal Church.

As we, in this congregation, struggle with the questions, some have been drawn to affiliate with our fellowship and to engage the spiritual quest for meaning and purpose with us. They have their own answer to why "suit up and show up "and their stories are found in this issue of "Ebb and Flow".