Sources of Stress

"Fear seems to be the dominant mood of the moment. Hurricanes, tidal waves, floods, earthquakes and terrorism this year have all brought with them not only appalling scenes of devastation, death and suffering, but also outrage at the lack of preparations to avoid or cope with these disasters," begins one of the editorials in last week's Economist magazine. It then goes on to talk about avian flu. It was the first thing I had read in a while that really resonnated with me because it is how I have been feeling. The world around causes me great concern, and this triggers concern deep down inside.

It seems that there is a thicker than usual pall of anxiety and stress hanging over us. Disasters, coupled with fears about the economy, tied in with anxieties about the management of the nation and its business, and then the possibility of an influenza pandemic have people on edge. We have watched fuel prices skyrocket stretching family budgets, and folks like us lose everything because of gigantic storms. This is beside the fact that September and October can be brutally hard months in the schedules of those living in the northern hemisphere.

I sometimes wonder if we in the West aren't playing a constant game to test ourselves just to see how much stress we can take. Certainly, this is the way that it has been for me over the last few weeks, and now I am psychologically and emotionally paying the price. Over the years I have become attentive to making sure that I get my sabbath each week, but because of circumstances beyond my control for the best part of five weeks I have gone without days off.

An impossible schedule, plus unexpectedly painful stresses related to my parochial ministry, have created a situation so stressful that I have found myself a companion of anxiety and depression, conditions that Winston Churchill described as "Black Dog." This, Archibald Hart, in his groundbreaking work on depression among pastors and those in the helping professions, written twenty years ago, is the motif emotion of our age. Since Hart wrote, too, life has speeded up and become more complex, further adding to our sense of fragmentation and inability to cope.

During the last couple of weeks I have been having trouble sleeping, but I would hazard 6-10 people with whom I have had pastoral dealings have made the same complaint. I have spent time with a supermom who isn't feeling so super any more, an insurance agent who keeps having panic attacks, as well as speaking to several clergy who are at the end of their rope.

For these latter sufferers is the added pall hanging over so many of us in ECUSA who have been perilously wounded by the events that are shredding our denomination. Further salt is rubbed in our wounds when there are partings of friends, something that is happening to me almost every week as I see men and women who I have traveled and world alongside for so long saying that they are not prepared to take any more of the Episcopal Church's particular brand of fallenness.

Thus we find ourselves undone by levels of stress that cause us great discomfort, and then at the same time we are called to walk alongside others who battle depression and anxiety because of the strains that are endemic in our culture. If Alvin Toffler thought we were suffering the bumps and bruises of futureshock in the 1970s, in the 2000s there is little doubt that we are at the mercy of hyper-futureshock as tomorrow takes place yesterday, and life is so frenetic that we are unable to keep up with ourselves. And when we attempt to do so, we badly damage our souls and psyches.

This is the kind of world in which we are called to minister, and when we who are the pastors fail to take care of ourselves there are all sorts of negative consequences. Since late September this has been my lot. Because I have some knowledge of the way my own inner being works, I did not deliberately plan it this way, and looking back I can see no other way I could have done things, but now my priority is to recover equilibrium and rectify this situation.

During the days ahead I will be more careful about diet, exercise, and I will be trying to listen carefully to the promptings of my soul. In addition, I will be giving myself more space, as well as attempting to read, refersh my imagination, and sit silently in the presence of the One who has called us to himself. Ministry is a high stress business, and woe betide us if we fail to take that reality seriously.

I find that when I am stretched to the very limits I read more fiction than would otherwise be the case. This "cure" has usually begun to work itself out unnoticed long before I realize what I am up to. I think the reason for this is that my imagination and creativity are starved and need to be nourished. Another element of this is that I also find myself prone to write fiction, too, not caring whether anyone ever publishes it or not. Things deep down inside work themselves out when I do this.

But there is a stress we are facing that we seldom talk about. We are great at examining therapeutic categories, but we usually overlook the fact that today's world casts us as foreigner in what was once our own culture. I am utterly convinced that the speed with which secularism and paganism have been advancing in the West has accelerated by the speed of communications. We are in the middle of this huge culture war in which those of us who are seeking to cultivate a biblical worldview, and then live according to that worldview, are frequently losing ground.

You don't need to spend long poking around the Internet to discover this -- and I am not talking about the preponderance of pornography and kinkiness that is readilly available. Ideas and ethics are being accepted as normative that fly in the face of revealed values, so we constantly need to be on our guard to critique what we are reading and come to believe or think, to protect ourselves from the kind of syncretism that is in the process of doing such harm to the old line denominations.

And the old liners are not the only ones who are in trouble. I was looking at some supposedly evangelical stuff from a blue ribbon conservative source the other day to find notions being accepted as normative that when measured against the thrust of the biblical witness were highly questionable. Materialism and relativism run rampant, and so we have to dodge and weave, as well as needing to defend ourselves against those who believe that we should shut our mouths and disappear because we are dinosaurs from a frozen past.

I have been ordained for 60% of my earthly existence. Over the years ministry has gotten harder, and like so many of my peers I have the scars to prove it. Yet I believe that today it is even harder than it has ever been, and I don't see that forecast altering. We Christians are no longer spokespeople for any other cause than that of God's Kingdom, the challenge is going to be how to live, think, and act as Kingdom people.

Outcomes of the Battle of Trafalgar

This last weekend the British celebrated one of the most significant sea victories in the nation's long and illustrious history. It was probably one of the ten great sea victories of all time -- and that is the Battle of Trafalgar. Fought in the Atlantic off the Iberian peninsula's Cape Trafalgar on October 21-23, 1805, the British fleet under the leadership of Admiral Lord Nelson, defeated the combined fleets of France and Spain.

If the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had saved England's independence as a Protestant nation, Trafalgar guaranteed that Britain would rule the waves for more than a century that followed -- and in doing so shape the modern world.

Nelson's signal to his sailors as the battle commenced is one that every English child learns at elementary school, and few forget: "England expects every man to do his duty." And do their duty they did, especially Viscount Horatio Nelson who was mortally wounded on the decks of his flagship, "The Victory," by a French sniper high in the rigging of an attacking man o'war. Today his achievement is remembered in the most spacious of central London's squares, and Nelson's statue is atop of the column in the middle of that place, Trafalgar Square.

I am at present working my way through Patrick O'Brian's magnificent books set in the Royal Navy of those years, the Jack Aubrey books that begin with "Master and Commander." O'Brian captures perfectly the flavor of that time, the sense that Britain was stretching its muscles are taking its rightful place as leader of the world. The Royal Navy was to be found everywhere, and even if some of their practices left something to be desired at that time, over the next decades the world's first really professional navy emerged.

Yet it is not the wonders of British naval power that I wish to wax eloquent over, but instead the way in which Trafalgar set the course of history for so long. While everyone knew that this was a significant victory, far in excess of Nelson's other greatest win, the earlier Battle of the Nile, I do not get the sense from reading the history of that period that they realized just how significant it was going to turn out to be.

As we look back at history with 20/20 hindsight it is so often the unexpected that turns out to be a major turning point of great importance. As in our own lives. If the woman who is now my wife had decided to skip church on an October Sunday evening in 1966 when I was being introduced to the congregation where she worshipped as their resident seminarian, then it is entirely possible that we would not be married today. All of us can probably point to such fortuitous circumstances in our own lives.

The values of a whole generation were shaped forever by the events of October 1928 when the Stock Market crashed, none of them would ever be the same again -- a theme that is played upon in all sorts of ways in the movies, most recently, perhaps, in the story of the champion race horse, Seabiscuit. Sometimes we can see this tipping points as clearly as the nose on the center of our faces, but often it is only by looking through the rearview mirror of history that we discover the truth.

On my day off today I have been trying to see if I can identify events in our own time, especially in the life of the churches, that we will look back on and see as of major significance. I suspect as far as North American Anglicanism is concerned that the foundation of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in 1976, an institution that opened its doors during my first week in this country, is of more significance than perhaps more publicized events of that year -- maybe even the General Convention's endorsement of what is today the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

There was a vision around Trinity that has reached far and wide since those days, and had put in place a significant evangelical body of leadership before ECUSA began self-destructing in 2003. Perhaps it was in some way a catalyst of that self-destruction because it played a role in establishing a body of congregations who were willing with Luther to stand up and say, "Here I Stand," when actions counter to both the word and the spirit of Scripture were enacted. Maybe there would not have been that orthodox balance in ECUSA without Trinity, and perhaps the Episcopal Church would have begun its journey to denominational oblivion far sooner.

Only time will tell whether this reading of history is right, and perhaps at this moment we are up too close for that to be considered anything more than a supposition. I suspect, also, that out of this conflagration will come a newly shaped and formed Anglicanism, although I am not sure that I will see all of its possibilities in my own lifetime.

The victory of Nelson at Trafalgar had so many direct and indirect consequences that the mind boggles. A few years later the Slave Trade was abolished in the British Empire under the leadership of William Wilberforce. This could not have happened without the power of the Royal Navy to patrol the seas and end that barbaric travesty. Without global naval power, Britain's empire would not have spread its tentacles far and wide, and with it went missionaries of every nationality and flavor that took the Gospel to unreached corners. World Christianity today, whether Catholic, Anglican, or otherwise, owes something to that great naval feat.

In the providence of God, as ghastly as battle might be, there is much to be thankful for as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Denying that Actions and Ideas have Consequences

Today I received the November-December issue of The Futurist magazine, a journal to which I have subscribed for many a long year. The lead article is an analysis of what it calls "The Superlongevity Revolution." In other words, how all the advances now taking place in medical science are going to give us lives that will be considerably extended, and that within this century it will be possible for human beings to live for 300-400 years.

Firstly, we have to wonder whether this will ever be possible, and secondly, whether it would be wise to pursue this course of action even if it is possible. But having said that, the author really minimizes, ignores, or skates over the surface of some of the blacker consequences such advances might have. His emphasis is thoroughly postmodern, focusing on the possibilities and not on the other side of this conundrum. This is merely an illustration of an issue that I want to explore because it has been pressing itself home on me wherever I have looked of late.

It is that the contemporary mindset has managed to loosen its hold on the fundamental notion that actions and ideas have consequences. The article about superlongevity that I read this afternoon was a fine example of this, not stopping to either explore or examine the veracity of some of the base assumptions behind the points it was making. I don't know whether it is possible for someone to live almost indefinitely, I rather hope not, but I suspect that if the natural order were so badly disrupted by a cadre of almost ageless people, the consequences would be catastrophic in ways the author does not point up.

As a Christian whose thinking and believe is, I hope, shaped and formed by Holy Scripture plainly understood, I have the conviction that there is a God-given moral order that undergirds the universe, and that it is an act both of foolishness and idolatry to fly in the face of that moral order. In its various shapes and forms postmodernity sits light to such a moral order. It is a self-vaunting gnosticism. The high priests and priestesses of this rapidly maturing culture have deliberately separated North American and European culture from not only its Judeo-Christian roots, but also to the debt it owes to some of the undergirding principles of classical philosophy, logic, and reason.

We now live in a world where, as Daniel Boorstin put it, fantasy is more real than reality. "We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them." This quote comes early on in Neal Gabler's book, Life, The Movie, a work whose thesis is that entertainment no longer interprets our society and its ways to us, but is the template through which we must now understand our world and its environment.

The Welsh observer, Meic Pearse, builds on this notion in his book, Why The Rest Hates the West, by saying that "The unprecedented comfort of our lives allows us, if we are not careful -- and we have not been careful -- to lose hold of the fundamental realities that underpin human existence. We can, after all, use our wealth to cocoon ourselves from those unpleasant realities -- at least for a while" (page 25). But, he goes on to point out. We are naive in our obliviousness, and we are setting ourselves up for a horrible fall when reality finally snaps back into place.

Thus I return to my thesis that our culture's approach to understanding life is strangely surreal, so that now we act as if there are no consequences to the actions we are taking. We can point our finger in countless directions to illustrate this point. I can do what I like if it makes me happy, we think to ourselves. The government spending billions of dollars that it does not have and will not raise, counting on the rest of the world indefinitely to carry the debt Americans are accumulating. We burn fossil fuels with blithe abandon, and even now are ignoring the danger signs of glaciers, the the icecaps, the heating of the oceans, and the intensification of hurricanes that are giving us warning that we can't go on as we have been.

The other day I was in an elevator as this woman was complaining to her friend that it was now costing her more than $70 a week to commute to work. It wasn't fair, she asserted. I had watched her manouver her grossly oversized behemoth into the parking lot. She had bought the thing, she knew it guzzled gallons per mile when she signed on the dotted line, and now she was whining about the consequence of having bought such a beast. She was, at the everday level, a wonderful example of someone not prepared to recognize that actions and ideas have consequences.

During the last few weeks my ministry has given me the opportunity to talk at length with a whole lot of interesting people, Christian leaders of various differing flavors, and I have learned a tremendous amount from almost all of them. However, I have found my ear pricking up and asking questions whenever someone has said, "But at heart I'm an optimist," after having attempted to address a question dealing with something difficult or demanding.

As I have prodded, coaxed, and listened some more, I have concluded that what this person is actually saying is that while the facts seem to point in one particular direction, I am going to ignore the facts and go with what my gut tells me I want things to be like. While I have no problems at trying to look at the positive side of circumstances, cheerful denial is neither a wise nor a healthy way of carrying on. It is the entertainment-driven hedoninsm of postmodernity that encourages such cheerful denial of reality.

Near the end of Life, The Movie, Neal Gabler writes, "The great cultural debate that loomed at the end of the twentieth century and promised to dominate the twenty-first, then, was one between realists who believed that a clear-eyed appreciation of the human condition was necessary to be human, and the postrealists who believed that glossing reality and even transforming it into a movie were perfectly acceptable strategies if these maked us happier -- a debate, one might say, between humanness and happiness" (page 244).

Many of our debates, therefore, boil down to this kind of trade off. The debate about sexuality and human choice that is at present tearing the church apart is just one component of this. I could list many others because such denial of reality is the motif of our age and our culture. Realism does not mean living under a black cloud all the time, but it does mean facing up to the fact that we cannot do what we like and expect we will be able to get away with it indefinitely.

I do not see our culture changing any time soon, so we must continue to live with this appalling shortsightedness until a crisis does occur, and some perhaps, are then able to hear. But we Christians should not be living as postmoderns in this environment, our task is to live as biblical men and women, and be learning how to present our worldview in ways that people will eventually be able to hear and see.

Networks -- Again

This is always a most beautiful time of the year in Middle Tennessee, and I had the pleasure this afternoon to drive through the fields, woodlands, and hillsides to make plans for a Blessing of Animals to celebrate the Feast of St Francis. As I drove I thought and prayed, although I seemed to constantly find myself behind every less-than-perfect driver on the road, which didn't improve my driving.

A whole tangle of ideas, bits, and pieces that I had been reading tumbled around in my brain, and it surprises me that anything constructive has emerged -- but it has. I guess the trigger was what is for me the sad departure of most of the people of St. John's, Tallahassee from the Diocese of Florida. I never cease to find such events painful, marveling over how stupid supposedly intelligent bishops can be. When it hit the press in the last few days it plunged me for a time into deep depression.

Yet as I thought about it I remembered that period in the 1990s when I was involved in the shaping of ideas that might shape the denomination, and especially being part of a taskforce that was formed to re-envision the mission ministry of the Episcopal Church. Because of the way the resolution of the 1994 General Convention was phrased we were able to do some real big-picture dreaming before we were pressed to focus in on our specific task.

The truth is, we opined, as you look at the way the world is developing, flattened overlapping networks are the way of doing things and not the hierarchical structures that we live with right now. A lot of imaginative thinking and writing about networks was being done at that moment, because it was clear that the whole way in which the emerging world was doing its business could not longer cope with the pyramidic organizations of yesteryear.

One of the more radical (in every way) individuals who did some work with the taskforce, when we had got our first draft together said something to the effect that "if they don't accept networks voluntarily, then they will have networks thrust upon them." These weren't his precise words, but they were the mood of what he said. Well, it does seem that the Episcopal Church has been totally unwilling to accept that the time has come to alter the way we do business, and so networks are little by little peeling the old structures away.

Eric Dudley and the fellowship in Tallahassee that has followed him out of the structures of ECUSA has sought the networked covering of an unnamed archbishop somewhere else in the Anglican Communion. You probably don't need to be a rocket scientist to guess what continent that archbishop might reside upon! Another brick is taken out of the ECUSA building, and then is affiliated with a new way of doing things, a way made possible by the information revolution.

The management guru, Robert Quinn writes that "an organization is a coalition of coalitions... the entire system is constantly evolving and changing" (Deep Change, Robert Quinn, page 91). In the past that change has come incrementally, so there have been ways of managing that evolution so that it is minimal in its disruption, but we live in a wholly different world. Quinn then goes on to suggest that "The operative goals (of these coalitions of coalitions) are usually congruent with the interests of the dominant coalition" (page 91). He further suggests that virtually every dominant coalition justifies the current equilibrium which gives it power, and limits changes to minimal incrementality rather than transformational efforts.

Going back to that taskforce, then Presiding Bishop Browning when he discovered the groundwork we were doing just about blew a gasket. I had not arrived at the meeting where he did this because of a flight delay, which may have saved my hide from a nasty tanning. Browning, and those who have followed him, have not been willing to let go of the reins that give them power in order that transformation that will release the Gospel can take place.

Meanwhile, the networks keep on networking, and these days among the orthodox, there is an interesting melange of ECUSA types, Reformed Episcopalians, AMiAs, those affiliated with dioceses and provinces elsewhere, and so forth. There might be certain distrusts, but we share seminaries, in some cases share clergy, share mission agencies, and are gradually finding ways of doing work with one another.

While I don't want to suggest that attitudes in these emerging networks are always good, honest, true and lovely, what is happening is that the waters of spiritual life are finding other ways of doing things. If the received structures refuse to budge, then we must get on with Gospel ministry in another way. I suspect that in some form or another, this is one of the seeds of what will be future settings within which faithful ministry and mission takes place.

Those who entrench in the old structures are behaving like King Canute. Tomorrow's church will thrive where it learns how to communicate in a holy manner yesterday's theology that is rooted and grounded in God's revelation, not where it adjusts its theology to the mood of the age. But it will also thrive where it is prepared to adapt to meet a different kind of world. Doesn't the Lambeth-Chicago Quadrilateral talk about "the historic episcopate locally adapted?"

Brothers and sisters in Christ, now is the time to adapt, whenever we are in the messy network of emerging Anglicanism. As the man said, "if they don't accept networks voluntarily, then they will have networks thrust upon them."

A Serious Call to A Devout and Holy Life

What is the real issue confronting the churches today?

Most of us in the Anglican trenches of North America are probably going to focus on sexuality, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians might do the same, while other traditions are going to focus on different things. However, I am not sure that any of us are right. Sexuality for my money is only one presenting issue of a much deeper set of malaises.

Regular readers to Toward2015 are aware that I consider the sexuality battle to be merely an unpleasant and ferocious conflict in what will be the 21st Century's great war -- and that is over what it means to be human? I say again, that this is going to be an intellectual and moral challenge that will test us to the uttermost, and could well overwhelm us. The tragedy for me is that there are those in the churches, whose views are shaped by their own desires and wants, and so they are setting a path away from a revealed understanding of the nature of our humanity.

Neither do I think that the issue of the authority of Scripture is the greatest issue facing us today, although, God knows, there are strong forces at work within the churches that want to apportion the written Word in their own terms and not at its own face value and plain meaning within the continuum of catholic believing. Indeed, I listened to a leading Episcopalian recently trot out that tired old postmodern stalking horse that each generation should read the text through their own grid of presuppositions. Interestingly, he was far less willing to approach the interpretation of other ecclesiastical documents in the same lax manner.

No, I believe the major issue before us today is individual and corporate holiness. Indeed, the Windsor Report talks about the "radical holiness to which all Christ's people are called, and thus rooted in the Trinitarian life and purposes of God" (paragraph 3). Holy living is at the root of faithful following of Jesus Christ, and holy living rather than aping the fallen world in which we live should be a witness to that fallen world that there is a much better way of living, being, struggling with sin, and ultimately being in communion with God. Unholiness is at the heart of the problems we have in the churches in the West right now. Indeed, in my darker moments I wonder sometimes whether we thumb our noses at the notion of holiness and opt for a vapid godlessness.

Every era expresses human fallenness in its own particular way, and it is easy to exaggerate the declining moral state of any era when compared to another. However, with the drift of our culture away from even a modicum of pretence of rootedness in Judeo-Christian revelation, we do seem to be eager to plumb new depths. And at precisely the moment when the Christian church should be using Gospel values to engage this dark cloud that hovers over our world and the way it thinks, we are more inclined than ever to join the world's noisy procession.

I am not just talking about sex, although our fixation with sexual sinfulness is symbolic of what is wrong in our culture; I am talking about arrogance, blatant materialism, the seven deadly sins coming in every shape and form, and the attitude of the builders of Babel that we know best, as if God should shut up and listen to our cleverness! Baptists and Pentecostals have, perhaps, a different set of of banalities and shallowness than Episcopalians, Catholics, and Prebyterians, but as I look at churches (and at my own life) we all fall so far short that the angels must weep daily over us as we dig deeper trenches.

Yet it is at times like these in the history of the church that movements of renewed zeal and holiness are born. From the Desert Fathers shaking the dust of the Egyptian churches from their feet and following St. Anthony into the wilderness onward, holiness has become a major quest of what becomes an influential in the church at times of moral torpor and ethical dreadfulness.

The Reformation was a renewal movement that tore the church apart, but on both sides of the Protestant divide there was a questing for holiness that bore considerable fruit -- whether in the richness of proclamation by John Calvin, or the call to spiritual arms that came from Ignatius Loyola. While the Borgias were dragging the papacy into the pit of unbelievable nastiness, seeds of renewal had been planted that flowered and bore much fruit.

There was a rich moral fervor in the lives of the Puritans, but following the Restoration of the monarchy, the Great Ejection of 1662, and in the philandering of Charles II, the so-called Merry Monarch, we see a weariness with the earnestness of those men and women of God. Yet even in that smutty period something new was stirring as people like the anonymous Country Parson with his Advice to his Parisioners set forth a standard of Christian living that burst into flame a couple of generations later, helping kindle the extraordinary Great Awakening of the 18th Century.

The Wesley brother, George Whitefield, and others, banded themselves together and formed the Holy Club at Oxford that sought to assert serious Christian living in the midst of the lassitude of latitudinarianism that seemed to prevail as the Enlightenment's roots dug deep. The renewing work of the Spirit that was the Great Awakening came upon the lives of individuals desperate to reflect the glory of God. These are a handful of examples that come to mind, I am sure we could come up with dozens of others if we all set our minds to it!

This search for holiness is not something that begins either in high places in the church, or in prominent settings. Those who sought after God's holiness in their lives in Christian history were often outcasts and mercilessly ridiculed. I suspect there was what my old seminary Principal called "piosity" in the lives of these men and women so that they set themselves up for opposition, but beyond that there was a genuine yearning that their hearts would beat in time with the heart of God -- and it attracted those weary with worldliness.

I see inklings that something like this might be happening. Just taking the Anglican scene for the moment, in conversation and correspondence with those at all points on the spectrum I see few people who are proud of, or happy with the state of the church. Indeed, I would say there is a profound discomfort with where we are and what we are doing to each other in the name of Christ.

The answer to this is not going to be found in the actions of canon-wielding bishops throwing the book at what they perceive to be malcontents, nor in the ferociousness with which some conservatives make their case. It is ultimately going to come to fruition in the lives of those who take biblical holiness seriously, and who determine that they are willing to be part of the minority when it comes to living a devout and faithful life, even if it means being cold-shouldered, ridiculed, and even persecuted.

There will perhaps be pockets of resistance to the way things are, and a willingness to surrender all to Christ in fresh ways, that we might be made holy by the one who surrendered his all for us and our redemption. I pray to the Lord that this will happen, because if it does not, then we will disappear into the quagmire of cultural rottenness that is around us. I am not sure there are any formulas for what God requires of us, except to throw ourselves weeping over our sinfulness into his arms, asking him to take us forward to where he wants us to be.

"Francis," God spoke to the saint in Assisi, "Build my church." Francis was lying in the rubble of St. Damian's church on the edge of his home town. Thinking that God was saying literally put one stone upon another, this former playboy got up and started rebuilding the ruins. That was the first step in a movement that led to a wonderful renewal of medieval Christianity.

I don't know how God makes his call upon us, and with what words, but I have a strange hunch that somewhere, or more likely, in pockets in all sorts of places, there are men and women who are turning their backs on the world's values, even the way the world's values have blown apart the church, and are listening for that voice which Francis of Assisi heard.

The Purpose Driven Life

At the beginning of this year the small groups in our congregation began a study of Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. I had skimmed the text fairly thoroughly before we started working with it, and at the time wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was about this book, but certainly didn't think it could doo any harm. It seemed to me to be a pretty unremarkable guide to Christian living by a man who has been successful in church planting and spreading the Gospel.

Each week I have prepared for each chapter of the book a small bible study to accompany Rick Warren's material, thinking (rightly, in this case) that the book while long on good advice for Christian living, is a little short of actually getting into the text of Scripture. These studies and sets of questions have, for the most part, been well received, and we are now in the home straight as far as completing the book is concerned. (If you would like copies of these let me know and I will see how we can get them to you).

While I wouldn't say that The Purpose Driven Life has grown on me, I would say that I am much more enthusiastic about it, because there is a lot of good sense about Christian growth and discipleship within these pages. One of our congregation said to me that she felt I wasn't that enamoured by it because lots of the substance within it is something with which I have been familiar for a long time. "For someone like me, for whom all this is such new stuff, it is a most exciting book." That's probably right.

One reason why this book is a such a winner among so many Christians, I think, is because so much of postmodern life is without shape, purpose, or objective values, and people crave these things. Here, at last, is something that tries to fill that gap and give them the essence of what living purposefully as a Christian believer is all about. Each chapter of the book focuses on one issue or doctrine only, and each is practical and helps the individual apply the lessons to their daily life. I am wondering now how we are going to follow up on this study.

My sense of Rick Warren has changed as we have taken this journey together. I don't know what I thought of him before we started, but there was a certain snootiness toward him that made me take him less than seriously. Then there was that young woman in Atlanta who used "The Purpose Driven Life" to talk that escaped murderer to give himself up to the authorities, and suddenly Rick Warren was on every news program, as was the book.

I caught him on CNN with Larry King, and was deeply impressed by the way he talked and presented himself and the Christian message. What impressed me more was when he told Larry King how he has from his royalties paid Saddleback Church back his whole salary over the last quarter century that he has been their pastor, as well as making considerable other donations. He sounds to me as if he has put money in the right perspective, and it using it to the glory of God rather than self-gratification or self-aggrandizement. Here is a man who walks the talk. I am glad that he will be speaking at an Anglican gathering in Pittsburgh in November, because we need to hear more from men like him.

Now, I have not become a Purpose-Driven junkie, but I have been given a fresh set of insights into Gospel living by a man from a tradition very different from my own -- and his teaching has been a great blessing to people I pastor. This makes me profoundly grateful for him.

Once or twice in the last year or so I have seen reviews or comments by Episcopalians who disparage the contribution Warren has made. While I respect those who have weighed up Rick Warren's book and found him wanting, I would humbly suggest to those who have discounted it because he is a Baptist, or something absurd like this, take a serious look at what Warren is saying. There are some fundamental lessons that we can learn from this man who has planted a single congregation that is much larger than many of our dioceses.

Something is Stirring

Something seems to be stirring deep within me. I tend to find that when some kind of inner rearrangement is taking place, the discomfort is at times almost physical. I continue my daily round and appointed tasks as vicar of a small, but beginning to grow, congregation, as well as the various responsibilities I have in the diocese, but the stirring does not go away. I have abandoned any work in the wider church, or perhaps it is fairer to say that the wider church, especially the denomination, has abandoned me; yet now able to stand back from the whole sorry picture I find that an immense task of reassessing going on.

Somewhere at the root of all this is what I would describe as yearning for spiritual integrity: a consistency of life and faith that is more than just a few small successes in the on going quest to narrow my own personal hypocrisy gap. What I think I am feeling after is a manner of life as a Christian that has a cascade effect outward from the re-formation and renewal taking place within.

I know that my life is confronted by constant transition, and that if I am to grow I must engage that transition that the Spirit through the circumstances of existence are pressing upon me. Yet I also realize that the place I have reached in my development as a human being is one that demands thought and prayer that I might be generative in this later chapter of my allotted span. This is something of a wrestling match because for the first time in my life I can hear the siren song of retirement, and there are moments when it is enticing.

The question behind this is whether I want to retire, or whether that is, indeed, a faithful thing to do. Besides, if the actuarial tables are anything to go by I could still have a good few thousand miles of servicabilty before me yet. I have watched far too many priests and pastors during my years of ordained life reach their sixties and then slow down and begin to prepare for retirement while they are still on the job. As I think and pray I believe God has something more significant for me to do than that.

And yet during the last couple of weeks I have found myself in the presence of enthusiastic young leaders from other traditions. Watching and listening to them talking about the new ministries they had launched has been exhausting, because although this is something that has been a hallmark of my ministry over the last thirty years, I know that I no longer have the resources to take the world by the scruff of the neck and attempt to have visions and dream dreams that would require me to build something new. Exciting as it is to watch younger men and women who are so in love with the Gospel that they will go to the ends of the world, that door is now closed. It is no longer my calling.

Sure, I work in a relatively new ministry, and long for the Church of the Apostles to acquire land (something that looks as if it might be happening), construct our first facility, become a self-sustaining congregation, and then call into leadership a younger priest who will be able to take the reins from me and lead this fellowship forward. However, doing that is the task to which God called me several years ago, and I am merely doing my duty to the Lord who invited me to take up this challenge. It might take two, five, or seven years, but we will see.

Meanwhile, against this backdrop the inner work goes on, and what I am finding is that I am being attracted to folks who, like myself, are discomforted by what the future holds for our culture and our church, but who are engaging the possibilities constructively and without rancor. Much of what I see in the churches in general, and our denomination in particular, is the triumph of various self-interests over collective responsibility, which is a recipe for a slow, drawn-out death. We need real change, but most of us do not seem willing to engage the change necessary, and instead hold onto past forms and past resentment. Of course, that change begins within the heart, which brings it back to my own inner spiritual work to be done.

The couple of years since August 2003 have been for me years in which I have been in mourning, and as Shakespeare put it, "He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend." I have been mourning in order that I might mend. While romantic longings about an idyllic past that never existed within the Episcopal Church are immensely attractive, such notions are neither tenable nor relevant any longer. We have been asked to adjust to new circumstances, and then to make something beautiful for God out of those circumstances.

Right now, none of this is taking place. The underlying reason seems fairly simple, on the political left of the controversy that has torn us apart is a triumphalism that seems determined to push forward with an agenda that is having the domino effect of pulling both ECUSA and the Anglican Communion apart. While on the political right of the issue is an anger that is either forcing people to give up and leave (which is what the left wants), or to dig in and be obnoxious. Now, I realize this is an over-simplification, but anyone with any sense of reality must be able to see that this is a pitched battle in which there can be no winners.

If we take seriously the observations of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the grieving process, those of us on the orthodox side of this conundrum have not done the work necessary for health because we have not yet got beyond denial, anger, and depression, and to move into acceptance. Meanwhile, those on the left are oblivious to the fact that they might have done anything amiss. While two armies are dug in like this, death and destruction are the guaranteed outcomes.

Now here comes my confession, and it is one that might alienate me further from my conservative brothers and sisters, and that is that while I believe it vital to stand firm upon Scripture's revelation, it is an issue of how we stand. I am either too old or too stupid to want to continue being mad at the revisionists, not because I think they are right but because I do not believe this is the way to build for the future. As Robert Quinn puts it, "When internal and external alighment is lost, the organization faces a choice: either adapt or take the road to slow death" (Robert Quinn: Deep Change, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996, page 5).

Quinn goes on and says, "Usually the organization can be renewed, energized, or made effective only if some leader is willing to take some big risks by stepping outside the well-defined boundaries. When this happens, the organization is lured, pushed, or pulled into unknown territory. The resulting journey through the unknown is a terrifying experience, with the possibility of failure or death a reality rather than a metaphor. At such times, organizational memebers face wicked problems, problems for which there are no existing answers" (page 5).

Now, if that does not describe the situation in which we find ourselves, I don't know what does. The truth is that if we are to take such a journey, then we need to be prepared for deep changes to take place within us personally. The question is whether we are prepared to open ourselves to such changes, or whether we want to dig comfortably into our present destructive pattern. The time has come to lay ourselves on the line, to step outside the safety of our traditionally prescribed roles and strive for the new birth that is inherent in faithful Christian believing and living.

Thus the inner struggle goes on. The choice before us is to make significant changes based upon the wholeness of the Gospel, or alternatively to commit ourselves to a pathway whose end result is death, entangling us in a web of fear, anger, helplessness, while we inexorably move toward what we fear. The future does not belong within the boxes in which we still live, boxes that were constructed in the past. The challenge before us is to go back to the roots of what it means to be a Christian, which is what happened at the Reformation, and then to see how that rooted faith propels us into a different, more Christlike and generative kind of tomorrow.

What I guess I am saying is that I find myself uncomfortable with the stance of just about everyone. I find my inner being want to dive back into the faith of our fathers (and mothers), and then to see what we can make of this under God. As I have scratched my way deeper and deeper into 2 Corinthians this year, I find in Paul an instinct both to affirming the truthfulness of truth, while at the same time seeing within Christ and his redeeming death a focus for reconciliation.

Those on the left who have been shouting for reconciliation have done so on terms that are unacceptable to orthodox believers, because they want us all to finesse revealed truth, while those on the right who affirm truth seem determined to do all they can to avoid any kind of reconciliation. In all this I have to confess that I do not find myself looking into the face of Christ.

As I have already intimated, however, I find that there are a handful of fellow-travelers who share my angst, but right now few want to walk this road. The reason is simple. If we are to remake the church, we must first allow Christ to remake who we are. Going in this direction will be a difficult, even terrifying journey, that is why I find myself almost in physical pain over this for we are, as Scott Peck put it, "traveling naked into the land of uncertainty." I have gone this way before, and, quite honestly, it is neither easy nor nice. It is, however, only by getting lost and losing those landmarks that are so familiar to us that we will be able to explore our way into a new kind of future and ecclesial organization.

Clearly, this is the place where the inner journey of the individual and the outer journey of the fellowship meet and merge. There is a lot of hollering and finger-pointing going on, and I have done my fair share of it, but this solves no problems. This is the place of discomfort beyond which we need to be prepared to move if something new is to emerge. The alternative, as I see it, is both a spiritual dying and an slow institutional death.

A Country Parson's Advice To His Parishioner

A few years ago my old friend, George Koch, a priest in West Chicago, Illinois, gave me a copy of a book that had been written and published anonymously during the reign of Charles II. A Country Parson's Advice had never been reprinted or republished until George re-edited it to make it accessible to contemporary people, but it seems to have been an influential book in the development of English-speaking Christianity.

Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles used it in his ministry, as did his illustrious sons, who made sure that their younger contemporary, George Whitefield, thoroughly digested the volume. Its teaching on small groups was clearly seminal to the whole Methodist movement, as well as being to cell group ministry in congregations today.

George Koch writes in his introduction to the book, "I first came across a reference to this book during research I was doing on evangelicals in the Anglican and Episcopal Church. Early attempts to locate a copy of it proved fruitless, and only after several worldwide book searches was a microfilmed copy found" (page 21). These words should be a warning to any author who thinks he/she has written something significant that will have a long shelf life!

This book had sat unread on my shelves for several years until I had some time to kill while manning the church for evacuees from Hurricane Katrina who live across the street to come and go if they wanted. The earliest pages fed straight into some thoughts I had been having about the post-Christian lifestyle, the rampant secularity of Europe, and the impact this has had upon my own family. My ponderings about Europe are largely true of the scene in North America, as well.

In some ways the opening chapter of A Country Parson's Advice To His Parishioners is a 300-year-old prologue for The Purpose Driven Life! The opening sentence is a difficult one (and Koch has simplified it), but sets the tone of the rest of the book. "Foreasmuch as you know that you are God's creature, and received being and life from him, and subsist altogether in him, you must necessarily acknowledge that you are and ought to be at his disposal, and to live and act according to his intention, and the end for which you were made" (page 31). In a long-winded way he is saying roughly what the Westminster Confession has said, that a human's purpose is to worship God and enjoy him forever.

That is the Christian presupposition for life. A couple of paragraphs later he asks, "Can you think, when you consider your own faculties and capacities, that you were made merely to get a little money by burdening and caring, by toiling and sweating, by plotting and contriving? A poor business surely for such an excellent creature! And you debase yourself extremely, and reproach your maker, if you imagine it. But you know that money is not a thing desirable for itself, but for its usefulness as it procures necessities, and pleasing to appetites and desires. Therefore, you must enquire further, whether you were made only to eat and drink, and having made provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof" (page 32).

When I read these words they tuned into precisely what I had been thinking about our extended clan. I am deeply attached to my family, being something of a patriarch of the brood these days, and I look at my relatives who are financially so much more successful than me living what they believe to be the good life. They are on a treadmill of getting and gaining so that they might go a-pleasuring. I see huge sums of money being shelled out on nice cars, fancy hotels, rich dinners, lovely homes, trips to the opposite side of Europe just to go to the theatre, and so forth.

As I listen to them talking what I hear is men and women whose entire raison d'etre is literally to eat, drink, and be merry, and therefore they are in the marketplace enduring rather than enjoying their work in order that they may have more leisure time to indulge. What comes after this life is over? Well, nothing, of course, so let's make the best of what we have in the here and now. The older the members of our tribe are, the more they seem to be into this lifestyle, desperately seeking to eke out their remaining years according to the "pleasure principle."

Ours truly is what Christopher Lasch described it to be three decades ago, a culture of narcissism, and as I have treated myself to a tour of the Internet in the last weeks I have found this being reinforced again and again. The Country Parson writes, "Here is your end, and this is your work, a work worthy of so excellent a creature: to serve God" (page 33). With every thoughtful believer I say "Amen to that."

But then the Country Parson restates this even more strongly, "We were made in the image of God, not to live like beasts, no, nor to please ourselves in any way; but to serve and please and glorify God here, and to possess and enjoy him for the hereafter" (page 34).

During the last years we have heard a lot from our political leaders about defending and preserving what they describe as 'our way of life.' After the London bombings in July, this seemed to become Tony Blair's mantra, and we have heard the same song being sung by everyone from George W. Bush to John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia. But the question should be what is the way of life that we are supposed to be defending from attacks? Certainly, there are freedoms that we cherish, but what are we free for... to cram every moment with pleasure, living in fear that it might be our last?

Hurricane Katrina has been nature's way of jolting us, challenging the triviality of our culture. Yet the other morning I almost choked on my coffee when I heard a report that suggested the most important thing to do in Biloxi was to get the gambling boats functioning again because they are such a source of income for the state of Mississippi. Is this the best lesson we learned from the storm?

What was it that the Rich Fool said? "Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry." And what was God's reply to the Fool: "Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (Luke 12:20-21).

While there are components of our culture that I am most passionate to preserve, there is much about our way of life that I think should be challenged. It is obvious that we are called to be counter-culture people, rather than allowing the prevailing culture to squeeze us into its image. Indeed, I think I would assert that if we are to live holy lives then they will be counter-culture lives.

One of the reasons I am at such odds with the denomination to which I belong is that it has like a puppy dog with its tongue hanging out, followed every twist and turn of the sensuous narcissistic culture to which we belong. A little later on in his book, the Country Parson writes, "Ity was the sayings of a devout man many years ago, 'That it had been better for us never to have been, than to dwell in ourselves and to our selves" (page 39). This, I fear, is exactly what we have done, shaping the faith to suit the culture, rather than challenging the values of the culture with the essence of the revealed Gospel.

I haven't finished with the Country Parson yet, and I am even a little frightened what the implications will be when he has finished with me.

*******

(If you want to buy a copy of A Country Parson's Advice to his Parishioners, then go to www.georgekoch.com. The book was first published in 1680 and George Koch's edition of it was republished by Monarch in London in 1998)

Katrina Blows In On The Church of the Apostles

All of us have been staggering under the blow of Hurricane Katrina, and suddenly the whole business landed right in the front yard of our little congregation. Here we are worshiping in an old boot warehouse and suddenly the city of Franklin, TN, the Red Cross, and Lasko Products, agreed to house 500 evacuees from New Orleans in the facility immediately opposite our church.

We have prayed for visibility in the community: we now have it in spades! Yet it is stretching our slender resources - human and financial - to the limits, and we are attempting to draw on other parishes and other denominations to help us.

We have offered the Church of the Apostles to the community as a place where volunteers, all the churches, etc., can hang out, see folks, and perhaps even be a "safety valve" from the institutional living of the Red Cross Shelter for the folks who will be there 90-180 days.

God is being wonderfully good, however. This afternoon our volunteer who is there at the moment had to leave and I found myself wondering how we would have the place covered. At that very moment that I winged an (angry) prayer to the Lord, my computer intimated an email, and I hear from a college student from St. Bartholomew's, Nashville, saying he has time right now, can he help for the next few hours!

We believe that God has given us a great opportunity, right now we are working out how to use that to the glory of God, as well as in the service of those who have experienced the loss of everything. I have during the last 48 hours been heartened by the kindness of people as well as infuriated by some of the meanness we have seen.

We don't know what this means about how Church of the Apostles develops in the future, but it does mean that we have more than we are able to say grace over for the present. Please keep us in your prayers.

Katrina, 2 Corinthians, and Giving

As some of you are aware, I have spent most of 2005 immersed in Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians, and have found it one of the most fruitful bible studies that I have undertaken for a long time. While I feel that I do not spend enough time in in-depth study of the text, I believe this is a shortcoming in all church contexts -- and accounts for the incredible ignorance of Scripture that there is in so many settings, even those that claim to know it. Much of the narcissism we confront in the churches comes from an ignoring of Scripture because we remain ignorant of it, but that discussion is for another time.

The other evening I got an email suggesting that in the light of the response we now make to the catastrophe along the Gulf Coast, it might be helpful to have some insights into Paul's thinking on giving from 2 Corinthians. As you know, 2 Corinthians 8-9 are two of the key chapters about the nature of Christian giving in the New Testament. In past times I confess that I have come to this passage with stewardship eye, wanting to interpret what the Apostle says in terms of what the church's needs might be. In other words, how can I use Scripture to help people to understand the nature of Christian giving? This has been selfish eisegesis -- reading into the text what I want to be there.

Behind that, of course, is the realization that there is a budget that needs to be met, and it is one of my responsibilities to raise those funds. Thus, how can I tweak the Word of God so that it means what I want it to? I became conscious of my bias when handling 2 Corinthians a couple of years ago when a member of my congregation quizzed me on what I was actually trying to say when I preached a short series on this passage.

However, it was not until this year, when I started to look at this section within the context of the whole letter, and with the help of half a dozen commentaries written by far greater minds than my own, that I was able to face up to the fact that I was coming at the text in a totally wrong manner. These two chapters are about grace, God's riches poured out upon us. The key verse, if there is one is 8:9, where Paul writes, "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich."

The starting point for giving must always be the person and work of our Lord Jesus. As Tom Wright puts it, "What counts is a work of grace in the hearts and lives of ordinary people," not whipping up sympathy or guilt over a particular project so that people will shell out in support (Paul For Everyone: 2 Corinthians). It was about four or five months ago that I found myself suddenly reading these chapters through the eyes of grace and not the eyes of giving, and I found them making sense as never before.

The word "grace" (charis) appears a number of times in these two chapters, yet as you go through the text word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence it is implied or described time and again. Grace is about the God who gives, Paul tells us. Paul was Christocentric through and through, and as he coaxes the Corinthians to think about fulfilling their commitment to this great project of sending relief funds to the church in Jerusalem, he effortlessly links the liberality of God's giving (which is his grace), with our responsiveness.

It would appear that the Macedonian believers, far poorer folks that the Corinthians, had already been overwhelming in their support of the Jerusalem project, and Paul does not want either the Corinthians or himself to be embarrassed by footdragging (9:4). In this, he spoke like every fundraiser I know!

We also see woven within this Paul's recognition that checks and balances should be in place to ensure financial responsibility. It isn't just him that is involved with this purse, but there is also Titus, "the brother who is famous among the churches," and depending on how you read the text there are others. Just as Christ was above reproach in what he did sacrificially on our part, Paul implies, so he is above reproach when it comes to raising and handling funds. This is a lesson we should all take seriously.

But from beginning to end the theme of these chapters is the gift of God. 8:1 begins with we want you Corinthians to know about the grace of God that has been shown by the Macedonians in their response to God's loving self-giving, and at the end of chapter 9 he writes, "Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!"

One of the problems with those of us who are preachers is that we tend to concentrate on passages about God loving a cheerful giver (9:7), and less on God being an overwhelming giver to whose grace we respond. We also play up the rewards of giving, as it were, with great play on verses like those who sow bountifully will reap bountifully (9:6) -- in effect functioning like hucksters who always want there to be something in it for the donor... "Have I got a reward for you!"

What is in it for the donor is that in giving we are reflecting the nature of God, at whose heart is the determination to give and give and give. This isn't going to appeal very much to those who are not overwhelmed by God's love and grace.

The Creator gave us the universe, the planet on which we live, the air we breathe and the food we eat. Above all, and capping all other gifts, he gave us our salvation in the person of Jesus, the Messiah who Paul had persecuted but now whom he served with all his being. 2 Corinthians is about what apostolic service and ministry really mean. Three times in the letter Paul spells out what it costs to be an apostle, but there is nothing whining about his description because he gives of himself willingly, just as God gave to us willingly of himself.

Throughout Chapters 8 and 9 there is the steady reiteration that giving can never be coerced, but must be from the overflow of the heart as we look at what God has done for us in Christ (9:12). We give because God has given, and with all our being what we want to do is reflect in our lives and actions the face of God.

What does this mean in our present circumstances? Well, I believe that as we look at those who have suffered and lost everything, we need to understand that we see the face of God. Didn't Jesus tell his disciples in the parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25:40), that "as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me?"

As I have watched in horror rescues taking place from streets that I know from my own visits to New Orleans, fellow-Episcopalians worshiping in Mississippi on the concrete slab of what once used to be their church, children screaming from hunger and fear as they hung on their mother's clothes outside the Superdome, and the hopelessness on the faces of elderly people sitting resignedly in lawn chairs, I realize that I am seeing the face of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, and these words of Jesus have eaten themselves into my heart with fresh urgency.

We respond to our fellows in need because of our common humanity. We respond because we cannot imagine, perhaps, what it would be like to be in their shoes. We respond because we have friends and family caught up in this tragedy. But whatever our subordinate reason for responding, we do so because of what Christ has given to us, and because the compulsion is upon us to reflect by our giving the indescribable gift of grace and salvation.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians in flattery, "It is superfluous for me to write to you about the offering for the saints..." (9:1), and it should be superfluous for us to remind our fellow-believers of their obligations to give as God has given to us. Yet, here's the rub, while it might be relatively easy to open our hearts and give to fellow-Americans who have fallen foul of the worst the climate can throw at them, the test of our generosity will come when the crisis is overtaken by other news and we see other faces further away and in different lands who require our generosity, faces that are "the least of these my brethren."

The rub will also come when the bill is totted up for this crisis in the USA and the government, perhaps despite its instincts about taxes, requires us to pay more of our own means to underwrite the expenses that are being incurred. We have been shocked, perhaps, by the fact that the response was so slow in coming, but now, having demanded that response, are we prepared to pay for it? I like taxes no more than anyone else, but there is a place were civic responsibility in obedience to the Gospel takes over from my desires or wants. Will we be generous givers or will me-first materialism take over?

One of the things I have always loved about America is that it is a place of possibilities. I have been given opportunities and possibilities here that I would probably never have received in my homeland, and for that I am profoundly grateful. By and large, the USA has given me a fulfilled and fulfulling life, but part of the reason for this is that before America came onto the scene, the Lord Jesus reached out and redeemed me, calling me to be his own. So in the end, as Paul writes so clearly, it all comes back to him. If my life is surrendered at the foot of the Cross, what can I do but to give it all back to him. The question for each of us is whether we are prepared to glorify God in our response to his grace with overwhelming generosity(9:13-14)?

Let me leave the last words with Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham.

"When Jesus, for the sake of us all, became poor, we became rich; now, when people who follow him are ready to put their resources at his disposal, the world and the church may benefit, not only from the actual money but from the fact that when the Jesus-pattern of dying and rising, of riches-to-poverty-to-riches, is acted out, the power of the gospel is let loose afresh in the world, and the results will be incalculable" (Page 91).

Katrina and How Others See Us

It is my practice each morning to get up sometime between 5.00-6.00 a.m., make tea, and then ride my exercise bike for 20-25 minutes while watching the News on BBC America. Not only do I usually get a good overview of what is going on in the world, but I catch up on important issues like how England are doing against Australia in cricket, and the latest goings on in the world of rugby football! Obviously, much of the focus of the last few days has been on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. A news source outside the country also allows one to see ourselves as others see us.

Yesterday evening I happened to be home and tried to first read, and then to watch a movie, but my mind wouldn't stay on it and I found myself hungry to know every minute detail of what was going on 400 miles or so to the south of us. Several times yesterday, particularly when watching babies airlifted from Charity Hospital, New Orleans, I found myself in tears imagining how I would feel if one of those little ones was my granddaughter.

Like everyone else I am horrified at the slowness of response and the total breakdown in law and order. Which brings me back to the BBC this morning. As I watched they wheeled in the Professor of Organizational Psychology from the University of Lancaster. I shrugged as I peddled and thought, here's another Brit about to pontificate about the misfortunes of the USA.

Well, this professor turned out to be an American (although surmising from his online profile, he is now a UK Subject) who is watching from that distance and obviously is intensely involved in what is going on -- much as people in Britain were when 9/11 happened, or Americans were when the terrorists bombed London in July. He was asked the usual questions and then he started to make some of the most incisive comments that we in the United States, and especially in the churches, ignore at our peril.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have deteriorated to worse than Third World status in a matter of days, he pointed out. Within 24 hours there was news of looting in the Big Easy, and yesterday there were reports of shootings, women being raped, babies being abused, and there were the awful, awful pictures of thousands of sheep totally lost and without a shepherd. Also, it cannot have escaped anyone's attention that most of the faces of suffering that we saw on our screens from N. O. were those of a permanent black underclass.

Professor Cary Cooper from Lancaster was saying this ought to be a wake up call for the United States as we review our values in the wake of this catastrophe. I cannot remember his precise words but he suggested that a lot of what we are seeing is the fruit of a materialistic, me first society, in which dog-eat-dog individualism prevails, and where an impossible gulf exists between the rich and the poor that there is virtually no sense of commonality and community. The professor was, in effect, asking America not only to get its organizational act together, but also as a result of this to look very carefully at its soul.

I realize that there are a lot of folks doing heroic things at the moment in circumstances that are close to impossible. However, I think that when inquiries take place after the event there will be an awful lot of blame to go around, not least to our politicians and leaders who not only feed off, but also feed, the radical individualistic selfishness that is at the root of a lot of the anarchy that we are seeing. Now, it is easy to blame our politicians, but we should not forget that they probably reflect our values because we put them there.

A lot of what we have seen in the last few days is rooted in generations of history in the United States, a corporate history that we all of us, native-born and immigrants, in one way or another share. We have tended to avoid or downplay issues like the lasting legacy of slavery, or the manner in which our social structures provide such a limited safety need for the needy. The middle class and wealthy were the ones who fled the city and the Gulf Coast before Katrina hit, but who gave a thought to the plight of those without money or vehicles who would be left behind whether they liked it or not? They got warehoused in the Superdome.

I admire Bishop Charles Jenkins for coming straight back to Louisiana and into the eye of the hurricane from his visit to Hawaii, as soon as he knew what was happening. I pray for him and his clergy and lay leaders almost every hour, that God will use them in some way as a result of this horrific crisis. Yet how does one pick up after a crisis this big?

This morning I feel guilty and have a nagging depression deep inside. I am implicated in Professor Cooper's indictment, and I find myself asking how now do I... we... honor God in the midst of this appalling crisis. Perhaps one of the fruits that will come out of this situation is that we have been jerked around enough by what has happened to start asking questions about our core values, and then as Christians might begin to be able to work toward a modification of them.

The core values that have until now shaped most of our lives have more to do with American capitalism than with what it means to be the servants of King Jesus, and this is something I will be sharing with my congregation on Sunday. I don't know what the right way forward is, but perhaps a starting point is to strip down and examine the message that we proclaim, its undergirding worldview, and the values that we live by, and to ask ourselves, whether we are conservative or liberal, how much of this is selfish narcissism and how much is from the Lord.

American brothers and sisters (and I chose to become an American), we have been humbled by the weather and we have been humbled by the inadequacy of our response to this situation. The time has come for us to sink to our knees to confess our sins, and then to rise onto our feet and do our part in making both a church and a country so that when the day comes when we meet him face-to-face our Master will say, "Well done, good and faithful servants, enter into the joy of your master."

Hurricane Katrina

On Saturday afternoon Bishop Charles Jenkins of Louisiana got an email to some of his friends asking for our prayers and saying, "Living below sea level, we are particularly vulnerable." I have also had in prayer at this time my good friend, Chris Colby, Rector of Trinity Church, Pass Christian, Mississippi, whose church bukldings literally sit on the edge of the beach right in the eye of Katrina's storm. Trinity lost its building with Camille in 1969, and certainly they seem to be facing major damage today.

As I was getting out my online daily devotions yesterday evening to my congregation and other friends who receive them, I went looking for a prayer to be used in natural disasters to replace what I had put in there already. I found none -- even though I have about 15-20 books of prayers and collects. However, this morning after another prolonged search I did find one that is appropriate to pray now there is nothing else that we can do except prepare for the aftermath of this horrendous hurricane.

Lord of compassion and power,
be with those who have survived this disaster:
minister to their needs of mind and spirit,
body and circumstance;
heal those who are hurt;
give peace to the dying;
comfort and support the bereaved;
and to all who are working to bring relief and restore order
give strength and resilience to do their work well;
for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen

This prayer was composed by Dick Williams from Britain.

Meanwhile, today is going to be spent preparing for Katrina's arrival here. We are being told to expect high winds, heavy rain and storms, power outages, and the possibility of tornadoes -- and we are 450 miles from where the storm came ashore. Between there and here, of course, there are folks who are facing a great deal more than we can expect.

For weeks now I have been praying for rain. It looks today as if the Lord will answer that prayer -- but why is it that he always has to overdo things?!

On Turning Sixty

It is a dreary, sticky, overcast day here in Middle Tennessee. Last night we got the first measurable rain that we had seen at our house for weeks, and today the grass is turning several shades greener, while the trees look a great deal more perky. Weather patterns seem to be changing, bringing a welcome relief after an exhaustingly hot, dry summer.

Tomorrow, on the Feast Day of St. Augustine of Hippo, I cross another of those human thresholds and turn sixty! I have been sitting here quite a while trying to see what sense I can make of it. As I look back over the course of my life it has always been the years ending with a nine that have been the most challenging, and certainly this is true of much of the last twelve months -- and the twelve months prior to that.

But Rosemary and I have weathered the spring and summer better than could have been anticipated, both as individuals and as a congregation. Tomorrow I intend to cast the vision for the Church of the Apostles for the coming year, confident that after many trials we are ready to move forward. I have found myself saying of late that the Church of the Apostles is about where I wished it had been when I was parachuted in to pick up the pieces several years ago.

Yet there is a destructive potential akin to Hurricane Katrina looming in the not too distant future as the Episcopal Church stumbles toward its next Convention in 2006. However, for the moment, that is in the future. Closer at hand on the ecclesiastical scene is the business of electing a new bishop in Tennessee, and surviving our own diocesan convention. I never thought events like these would become such horrifying punctuation marks sent to try God's faithful people to the limits!

When I was in seminary and then first ordained the life of the institutional church was one of those necessities, as it were, that went with being Christian. Through the middle part of my life, the institutional church may have loomed too large in my estimations, but I truly believed (as I copiously wrote) that it might somehow be turned into a blessing rather than being either neutral or a curse. As I move toward senior status my thinking has reversed again, so that today I see it as the least unappetizing aspect of the Christian journey, getting in the way of our mission -- especially the national church.

In many respect, however, I am no less excited about the redeeming power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ than I was more than forty years ago when this journey began. With all the experience now under my belt I can still say with all my heart that as far as I am concerned it is the power of God unto salvation for those who the Lord is calling into his Kingdom, and the games-playing of regiments of ecclesiastical politicians are so much dross when set alongside it.

While I believe it vital that we seek to understand and explicate the Good News with every ounce of our intelligence, I happily join Karl Barth in repeating the old chorus that "Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so!"

I am also excited by the task that lies ahead of us of translating the Gospel into the language of today's post-Christendom culture. I first came across the words of Dean W. R. Inge when I was in seminary. The good dean said that "he who marries the spirit of the age will soon become a widower." This pithy little saying made good sense to me then, and today it makes even more sense.

During my ministry I have had ring-side seats to watch this remarkable slide away from any pretense of Christian values within the wider culture, and have looked onw ith distates as the church, like an eager puppy dog wagging its tail, has gone right along with that fall from grace. As Graham Leonard, who ordained me to the diaconate said when leaving the Church of England for Rome, "The Church today, having lost her nerve, shows at times an almost pathetic desire to be loved by the world."

Yet as morose as all this sometimes makes me feel, my whole being seems to brighten when I realize the extraordinary privilege that God has entrusted to us of discovering how we might make the story of the central event of all human history, the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, meaningful to a band new kind of culture. I know that in this there is a role for oldies like me to play, perhaps rather like the defense in a soccer game, but we can no longer be the forwards scoring the goals, that is for the next generation.

So, on this murky late summer afternoon, I am heartened by the grace and wonder of the Good News that has been committed to us, and I want to walk in the footsteps of the Apostles. I find myself encouraged that I am called to serve the congregation that I do, and within the diocese in which I am situated. I look forward to finding exactly what role the Lord would have me play in the years ahead, and I pray that God will give me the grace to play that role wisely and well.

Yet this sense of delight is tempered by the distress that has dogged so many faithful Episcopalians during the last couple of years. That sense that we have allowed our denomination to be hijacked, and that in human terms we do not have the capacity to do anything about it, and our voices are being ignored.

But hope springs eternal. I have been pondering something I read not long ago that 50 passionately committed people can change the world. I think that there is more than a grain of truth in that. The Gospel is about this world-changing business, not the tawdry relativism that is being hawked around as the church's business. Perhaps what we are looking for is those 50 passionately committed people to step up to the line and take up the challenge. If that is the case then, aging as I am, you can count me in.

The Threatened Pandemic Approaches?

In March 2003 I wrote the following words:

In the wake of the First World War a huge influenza pandemic swept the
world, and it is estimated to have killed around 20 million people.
600,000 died in the USA and another 20,000 in Canada -- the so-called
Spanish flu often being brought home by soldiers returning from Europe. That epidemic was one in a regular series of mutations of the structures of influenza which have resulted in major infections around the world.

The question is, has this happened? Last week a new pneumonia came piling out of China, and through Hong Kong is beginning to spread its tentacles around the world. Already two Canadians have died from this disease that has been dubbed Severe Acute Respitory Syndrome, while two more have died in Hong Kong and Vietnam, and there are five possible victims in southern China. The good news is that researchers in Hong Kong have identified the nature of the disease today, which means they are now able to proceed to finding ways of treating it or ameliorating the symptoms.

However, the jury is out on whether this is the "big one" that folks have been expecting; but, as researchers say, even if it isn't, it is only a matter of time before influenza or something akin to it mutates, jumps from other species, and begins to wreak havoc. They remind us that it isn't a case of if something like this happens, merely when. We can hope that when it does researchers will be able to concoct vaccines that might help minimize its impact, especially in the lives of those of us who are fundamentally pretty healthy; but it is among the old, the young, the weak, and the sickly that such epidemics really "do their thing."

Well, SARS did not turn out to be the "big one," at least, not yet, but if you have kept your eyes and ears open you will have noticed way down on the news docket, behind the soap opera of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston, that there is a rising level of concern about the avian flu that is creeping its way westward from China and Indochina, carried along by the wild birds that have been infected. These birds have in turn infected domesticated poultry, and now there are isolated cases of this virus jumping from birds to humans. In Holland it is now illegal to keep domesticated birds out in the open.

All we are waiting for now is the leap from human to human and then the "fun" really begins. Leslie Garrett, one of America's leading authorities on pandemics writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs: "In short, doom may loom. But not e the 'may.' If the relentlessly evolving virus becomes capable of human-to-human transmission, develops a power of contagion typical of human influenzas, and maintains its extraordinary virulence, humanity could face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed."

With words like these, you are tempted to drop to your knees in long bouts of fervent intercessory prayer, while at the same time reaching for the anesthetic power of the brandy bottle! But Leslie Garrett continues, "Or nothing at all could happen." She writes, "Scientists cannot predict with certainty what this H5N1 influenza willd do. Evolution does not function on a knowable timetable, and influenza is one of the sloppiest, most mutation-prone pathogens in nature's storehouse."

OK, we say, putting the brandy bottle down for a moment, but still maintaining a posture of prayer, what might all this mean? If all I have read in following through on this is anything to go by, then the likelihood of this virus completing the transition from birds to human-to-human transmission is substantial if not 100% certain. What we don't know is how virulent it will be when it makes that jump, but let's suppose it is as lethal as the Spanish flu of yesteryear.

The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1920 probably killed a lot more than the conservative estimates of 40-50 million deaths. However, if we take that figure and project it onto the world's population today it would be a deathtoll of about 300 million -- or the rough equivalent of the population of the United States spread worldwide. The most vulnerable elements of the population are the very young, the elderly, those whose health is already compromised, and caregivers. There was no escaping the Spanish flu, either: isolated villages in Alaska were found where everyone had died, for example.

The effects of a flu epidemic, if it is only of Spanish flu proportions are hard to predict. The economy would take a beating, that's for sure, and some countries around the world would probably see a precipitative decline in population. Here's another thing to keep your worried in your bed at night, even if they could get the flu vaccine cocktail right to include avian flu, the pharmaceutical industry has never ever been able to produce more than 300 million doses in a single year. "The slow pace of production means that in the event of an H5N1 flu pandemic millions of people would likely be infected well before vaccines could be distributed."

So I ask again the question that I asked when SARS looked like the killer, "Are Christians ready to confort the afflicted, and offer Christ's love and attention to those who are dying or seriously ill? Are we aware of ways that we can protect ourselves from whatever comes down the pike if we are called to minister in an infected situation?"

What baffles me is that I have heard nothing from anyone in any of the churches about how we might pastorally and medically handle this eventuality if it presents itself. Indeed, I would say that the churches are like western culture in general, and have buried their collective heads in the sand.

So, as summer begins to turn to fall, and as the flu season approaches, it is possible (note the word possible) that within the next months or year or two flu could become the synonym for a killer, not something unpleasant that has to be endured. Are we ready?

Whatever Happened to Charismatic Renewal?

The other day a friend shared something he had written about what the future might look like for Anglicans in North America. It was, as is always the case with his work, clear and insightful. I had heard the talk on which the piece had been based, and had liked it very much, now he was asking for input before finalizing what he had written.

I slid his text into a file and took it to a meeting with me on Saturday, so that in the dull moments I might chew it over (I call that redeeming the time rather than letting my mind wander!). Just as the gathering started to get interesting and I needed to concentrate something occurred to me, and that was that there was no mention of the Charismatic Renewal in what he wrote -- although he had played a key role in that renewal himself a while back. I replied and pointed this out, sharing my response with another friend who had been part of this discussion. His immediate words were, "But why has the Charismatic Renewal disappeared in the Episcopal Church?"

Having written this far, I am certain that there will be an outpouring of responses that will say that the Charismatic Renewal has not died, that it is alive and well, and that they resent the implication that it is no longer part of the picture. Yet the truth is that while there are many, like good folks in my own congregation, for whom charismatic renewal was their springboard into a committed Christian faith, the movement as such seems to have run its course. I don't want to necessarily write its obituary but to ask where it has gone to.

I have been conscious of the Charismatic Renewal since 1965, the year I entered seminary. At that time Dennis Bennett visited the seminary and so began a heady time in that student and faculity community. Some rather crazy things happened, but there was much good that came from it. While for several years the charismatics "stood apart" from those of us who were more comfortable with the label "evangelical," by the time I was ordained and starting out on my active ministry, there was something of a merger that was starting to take place, and gathered apace.

In the years that followed many of the insights of the renewal movement found their way into the mainstream of Anglican evangelicalism, while at the same time the rather ragged theological base of the renewal movement was clarified and refined by the intellectual discipline brought to it by "renewed evangelicals." Add to that the rapprochment that took place with Anglo-Catholics who were drawn into renewal, together with a handful of broad church types, and something interesting seemed to be going on.

Yet this pattern did not seem to shape the ECUSA experience at all. When I arrived here one of the things that struck me was how weak evangelicals were in the Episcopal Church, and the other was that the renewal movement was a great deal more about experience, and lacked the firm theological undergirding that I had seen in Britain. Whereas in Britian the renewal had, by and large, shed its rather ungainly pentecostal theological and cultural trappings, that was not necessarily what had happened here.

Now in the years since then it has seemed to me that there has been something of a coming together of evangelicals and renewal people, particularly as a result of the influence of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry; but there has also been a contraction of that distinctly charismatic base, and I suspect it would be unusual to find an Anglican parish of any Anglican jurisdiction these days that is as overtly charismatic as many used to be.

Part of that may be that God does a work for a particular time in a particular place, and then as balance is corrected, the church moves on. We needed to be reminded of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit in the 60s and 70s and early 80s, but a lot of those lessons have been learned by faithful people, even if a lot of seed fell on thin soil. These days I expect the Spirit to do things that thirty or forty years ago I would have been extremely dubious about in my evangelical uptightness.

Part of this decline in overt charismatic witness may be that God has, in fact, withdrawn his Spirit from parts of the church. As the Spirit is the Spirit of truth, when a church toys with overt error, then the Lord has, as Revelation puts it, no alternative but to remove the lampstand. I suspect that we are seeing some of this.

Another component may be that because the Renewal Movement in the USA was not as theologically rooted as it should have been, there has been a trickling away of many of its blessings into the sands. When Christians rev up experience and become hungry for experience, miracles, healings, or whatever, while ignoring the rooting, grounding, and discipline of God's Word that is necessary, then a diminution is going to take place. Experience that is genuinely from God, in these circumstances, gives way to the manufacturing of experience, which ultimately is going to shrivel and die.

One of the tragedies of these last 20 years has been watching folks who were once leaders in renewal moving away from biblical values because they have made experience one of the defining components of their theology, rather than a historic grounding in Scripture. This is certainly the case with at least one individual who comes immediately to mind, and the values he now affirms are in stark contrast to what is taught in the Old and New Testaments.

I am inclined to think that all of these above thoughts have some merit, but I would go further and suggest that the Charismatic Movement broke upon us at a certain time, and enabling a particular generation or two to meet God in an intimate way -- which might not have otherwise been possible for them. It might have borne more lasting fruit if the blessing of the Spirit had not been squandered in some many instances, being reduced to a rather self-centered revelling rather than seeing that experience as the starting point for equipping for ministry and selfless mission.

Not too long ago one of the venerable leaders of the Renewal Movement in the Episcopal Church at its prime was talking to me about the various Holy Spirit and Evangelism congresses that took place in the 70s and 80s. He shook his head and said that he felt they were of far less value than they could have been because they were 90% about experiencing the Spirit and only 10% (if that) about mission and evangelism. I have to endorse his insights. I would add that this is probably true of the Cursillo movement, too.

My observation of the rising generation is that the whole charismatic thing cuts very little ice with them. The best insights of it have already been mainstreamed into the life of the church, but it is too frothy for many of them. They are looking for rooting and grounding, being the children of a culture (and often families) that is rootless. The generational cycle has moved on, and as this has happened we find a searching back for the ancient treasures of our faith within the context of a throwaway culture, rather than redressing other balances that were necessary 30-40 years ago.

I don't know what others think. I admit that I have always viewed the Renewal Movement more as an interested outsider, rather than one who identified with it. This means that I might suffer some innate myopia which the insights of others can correct.

Ecumenical Jihad?

There was yesterday an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (Sunday, July 31, 2005) in which the writer did what I would describe as the "Prudery Polka." The article is about books for young people, and draws attention to a novel that is built around teenage oral sex parties. What we got was the I'm-not-easily-shocked-or-particularly-prudish routine that we tend to hear when the ethically laissez-faire elite have yet to digest and come to terms with something that revolts them.

I guess that I am going to do something a little bit similar as I get into this piece today. I don't want you to think that anything I say is meant to be a support or endorsement of terrorism or terrorist activities. Indescriminate destruction of ordinary human beings is never justifiable, and however angry or disgruntled one might be about anything, violence is very seldom the answer to that problem.

And this brings me to another piece in the Sunday New York Times, a well-written and well-researched article attempting to get to the roots of terrorism in the British Muslim community. Amy Waldman, the author, spent a lot of time combing the back streets of the Yorkshire city of Leeds from which three of the four July 7 bombers came. She tracks the generational changes in attitude from those who came to Britain forty years ago and who believe it to be as one said, "the greatest country in the world," and their chldren and children's children who dismiss the older generation and the mainstream mosques as "timid."

Ms. Waldman suggests that behind the rise of aggression in British Islam is a deep-down identity crisis for they don't know whether they are Muslim, British, or both. "Going religious" seems to be the way they describe beginning to take their faith seriously, and when they do so they find themselves being radicalized not in the staid mosques but in fringe Islamic centers and bookshops that has popped up over the last decade or so. In these settings the sins of the Crusades are brought into play, and they are coaxed along by visual materials that, for example, "superimpose a cross dripping with blood over Iraq and Afghanistan."

Yet there is something else, and this is what I have been aiming toward, and that is the struggle they have to live as Muslims in the West with its lack of values, profusion of scantily clad women, endless television programming that is corrosive in every way. As Waldman states, "The transformation (of these returnees to Islam) has had positive elements: the men live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime."

There is something about this young Muslim quest with which I find myself deeply sympathetic because there is little doubt that they are right in diagnosing our culture as decadent beyond words. When a novelist commenting on teenage books tries to swallow her revulsion at the success of a book that focuses upon horribly promiscuous behavior among adolescents, then we have a pretty clear example of the sexual nihilism of our culture. Add to that the demolition of values and the juggernaut of materialism that has ridden over us in the last forty years, and it is not difficult to see why the alienated are turning to what are, in effect, self-destructive behaviors.

The irony is that these young Islamic extremists in their protest against the world in which they live (and on behalf of world Islam), are merely turning to a different kind of self-destruction than their contemporaries of all races raised on the streets of cities like Leeds, Chicago, or Sydney, as members of an angry underclass. Rather than falling into an unthinking alliance with the culture as their peers have, their response is to lash out and try to destroy it.

The truth is that mainstream Christians, Jews, and Muslims have a great deal upon which they can make common cause, living as we do amidst the decay of the West. This was a point that Peter Kreeft was making a decade ago in his book Ecumenical Jihad, and subtitled, Ecumenism and the Culture War.

In his introduction Kreeft (A Roman Catholic originally from a Reformed background), writes, "One of the main points of this book is that we need to change our current categories and our current alignments. We need to realize, first, that we are at war and, second, that the sides have changed radically: many of our former enemies (for example, Muslims) are now our friends, and some of our former friends (for example, humanists) are now our enemies" (Page 9).

The first chapter of Kreeft's book is a stellar pen portrait by a witty and highly intelligent philosopher of the damage done by everything from the sexual revolution ("the most destructive revolution in history"), to the deconstructionist thinking that persuades us that "'Truth' is only a hypocritical mask on the face of Power" (Page 20). The reality is, he says, that those of us who adhere to the absolutes given by the absolute God are allies on the battlefield that is now before us. "We are living in that split second between the disappearance of God and the disappearance of His image in the human mirror. The image is the life of our souls, our consciences. That is what our present'culture war' is about" (Page 20).

We live at a time of unprecedented moral and cultural confusion, and some of what motivates young Islamic extremists motivates me. Again, that is not to justify their response, but it does help me understand them. When I committed my life to Jesus Christ nearly 46 years ago, one of the initial fruits in my life was a sense of moral exasperation with myself and the world in which I was living. My conscience had been heightened, and while it prodded and shaped my choices and lifestyle, it also made me take a good look at what was going on in the world around me -- and much that I saw seemed alien to my understanding of the desire of the Creator God who had redeemed me.

That understanding of God has, I hope, strengthened and matured over the years. I wish I could say that I have always followed the promptings of my own conscience, but alas I have not. But for the grace of Jesus Christ I would be a lost cause. However, as the years have passed I have a deepening sense of dis-ease at the world in which we live, our selfishness, our consumerism, our inability to control our bodily appetites and compulsive behaviors that run riot. I see a culture that has abandoned a constructive worldview in favor of something that is going nowhere fast, and whose dangers are hidden by psychologizing and intellectual subtleties.

Within this context I look at the churches and see that they have compromised with this culture, much as the medieval Catholic church was compromised by the culture in which it functioned in the 15th and 16th Centuries. It took a renewing work of the Holy Spirit to begin making new, and that is what it is going to take again in our own time. I am not just railing against the obvious shortcomings of the Episcopal Church, but of the failures and blindspots of the whole Christian community.

In the churches sexually-related offenses are often the presenting problem; as Kreeft puts it, Modernism has broken the link between God and our gonads! However, this is merely the presenting issue of a far deeper and darker woe. We have, it seems, abandoned those things that make us the salt, the light, the leaven, in the world in which we live. Clearly, there is not only the need to call upon the Holy Spirit for his renewing work, but also for an intentionality on our part -- in our personal lives, in our thinking, and in our church lives, to restore the essence of who we are and what God intends us to be.

"The Enemy's battle-strategy has been the oldest and most obvious in military science: divide and conquor. Insofar as he has been able to foment civil wars and divide God's people, he has been able to weaken them. And he has fomented wars not only between churches but also within them" (Page 14), writes Kreeft. Clearly, the time has come to move beyond this and make common cause with those who are eager to be agents of transformation in a society that is being flushed down the toilet.

Again and again after July 7th, Tony Blair, the Queen, and George W. Bush, among others, asserted that we will not allow terrorists to destroy our way of life. But the truth is, while law, order, and peace on our streets and trains is of paramount importance, how much of our present way of life is worth defending? We value our freedoms, but has the point been reached where freedom has become license, which is itself then self-destroying? Could it be that the lineups we saw in Britain of bishops, moderators of churches, presidents of mosques, and so forth, be the starting point from which common cause on a whole variety of issues can be found?

That our culture is under attack from forces that have been raised in our culture should give us cause for thought as we move forward into an uncertain future. The challenge is enormous, and we avoid to confront it, and to confront it with all the allies we can get, at our own peril.