Eat This Book -- A Review of Eugene Peterson's book

Eat This Book -- A Conversation in the Art of Spirital Reading by Eugene H. Peterson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006)

A Review by Richard Kew

The other day I heard of a large congregation in a denomination whose theology and style mean it presents itself as far more conservative and orthodox than my own. Indeed, they make great play of their willingness to place themselves under the authority of Scripture. The pastor of this congregation was discovered to have been sexually involved with a female staff person for a considerable time. When the matter came before the staff and the board there was a strong move to retain that pastor's services before it was headed off by a vigilant staff person who pointed out that this man had contravened the very fundamentals of Christian morality.

The point of this story is that it does not matter where we look today, the churches are being shaped more and more by the prevailing culture than by the mind of the God who called them into being. It is voices like that of Eugene Peterson who remind us that if we are the People of God then we cannot allow ourselves to be formed by the culture, we must put ourselves in the place where we are formed by God -- which means rediscovering how to read, nourish, and form ourselves through our drenching in God's Word. He says, "An enormous amount of damage is done in the name of Christian living by bad Bible reading" (Page 82).

Eat This Book is a slender volume by Peterson standards, a mere 180 pages, but it took me two months to get through it. Part of the reason for this was that I did not have the time to sit down and read it with a lot of continuity, but part of the reason was that even if I had had such time, I would not have been able to hurry along because there is too much in here to rush over.

I consider Eugene Peterson as one of my mentors. I joke that I knew him before he was famous, which is true. Back then I was drawn to seek his friendship and counsel because I perceived a person who (to use a quote from John Updike that he uses early in this book) had discovered "that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession" (Page 8). Eugene Peterson is a truth-teller, par excellence, someone who had been captured by the truth, was determined to follow it wherever it might lead, someone who I felt worth learning from and make a model for my life.

This book is the second of a series in pastoral theology, and is all about what it means to be in the business of the Truth. For Peterson this is about getting on with what Austin Farrer calls "the forbidding discipline of spiritual reading," which is the text being used to form our souls. The task is forbidding "because it requires that we read with our entire life, not just employing the synapses of our brain. Fordigging because of the endless dodges we devise in avoiding the risk of faith in God. Forbidding because of our restless inventiveness in using whatever knowledge of 'spirituality' we acquire to set up ourselves as gods..." (Pages 9-10).

This gives a flavor of the book. This volume not for the fainthearted. It is not for those who are interested in fashionable spirituality or culturally acceptable and ecclesiastically respectable religiosity. This book is about absorbing the Book so that the one who reads might run. "Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assumulated, taken into the soul -- eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight" (Page 11).

The last several paragraphs I have just looked at the introduction to Eat This Book, and it took me several days get beyond them into the rest of his carefully crafted case. He begins that case with these words: "The Christian Scriptures are the primary text for Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is, in its entirety, rooted in and shaped by the scriptural text. We don't form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstancs; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture" (Page 15).

And so the stage is set for one of the most eloquent pleas I have ever encountered that the People of God have body, mind, and soul captured the the substance of the Word of God. This is a message that needs to be heard by chic and trendy Episcopalians, learned Presbyterians, arm-waving Pentecostals, miracle-obsessed Charismatics, Pope-loving Catholics, and every other believer wherever they are on the spectrum. Peterson does not accuse any of us of not being biblical, but he suggests in as winsome a way that there is a strong possibility that all of us have fallen short of what it means to delve into the heart of the living God who has revealed himself in this library of books that we call Holy Scripture.

I want to pull the Scriptures back from the margins, Peterson asserts, for that so often is the place to which the church and individual Christians have consigned it. It is only when we do this and digest the Book with the passion of the prophets of Jerusalem, Babylon, and Patmos, that we discover its words are like honey on our lips and in our stomachs. "Holy Scripture is something other than mere gossip about God, it must be internalized" (Page 20).

There has been a baffling array of offerings presented in the last generation or so and labelled as spirituality. The extraordinary thing is that when the culture calls something spiritual the churches jump onto its bandwagon. Eugene Peterson is not against spirituality, but he doesn't have a lot of time for the ersatz spiritualities of our age. Christian spirituality "means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized by the menial status of producers and performers, (and talking to clergy) constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees and our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we've been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me" (Page 23).

This leads him on into some strong Trinitarian theology, for it is only by allowing ourselves through Scripture to be enveloped by the wholeness of GOd that we discover precisely what it means to be a follower of Jesus, the incarnate second person of that Trinity. So having plunged us into the nature of the Godhead, Peterson brings us back to the text of Scripture the place where the Triune One reveals himself, for if we are to discover God in these pages then we need to take what we find with the utmost seriousness.

It is Eugene Peterson's belief that every man and every woman is capable of entering into a fuller understanding of Creator and Redeemer by becoming a bible reader. The living God speaks to us through Scripture, he asserts, and as we seek to live out obediently what the Word says to us we find ourselves in the presence of that living God. He leans heavily on Calvin's assertion that all right knowledge of God is born of obedience.

Peterson also challenges us to careful exegesis of the text. This, he says, is neither small-minded nor is it pedantic. "Exegesis is the care we give to getting the words right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last for long" (Page 53). As we look at what has become of our own denomination and as we then look at the slipshod way that Scripture has been treated, it is hardly surprising that lacking an adequate foundation the building is toppling.

The first part of Peterson's works is a pretty demanding theological work out, but all of it is good stuff exceptionally written. I did not learn anything new, but I was asked in a fresh way to consider old truths that too readily get overlooked. After this theological work out Peterson becomes more practical, and provides in the second section the best presentation of the Lectio Divina that I have ever read.

"Lectio divina is the strenuous effort that the Christian community gives... to rehydrating the Scriptures so that they are capable of holding their own original force and shape in the heat of the day, maintaining their context long enough to get fused with or assimilated into our context, the world we inhabit, the clamor of voices in the daily weather and work in which we live" (Page 88).

Lectio Divina is a way of handling the Scriptures that abandons any attent to take control of the text, but to allow the text to take control of us. It is not a linear process but one that allows us to read and loop the words back into the moment-by-moment business of thinking and living. It is learning to listen to the Word that was first spoken and which we now encounter as written. I will not bore you with the details of Peterson's instruction about Lectio Divina and will allow you to read them for yourselves. However let me end my comments on the lectio with his final statement on the issue that "it is astonishing how many ways we manage to devise for using the Bible toi avoid a believing obedience, both personal and corporate, in receiving and following the Word made flesh" (Page 117).

The final section of the book is Peterson's own meditation on the history of biblical translation and his own experience of doing it as it grew out of his own ministry a number of years ago. The fruit of that work was The Message, a paraphrase that stands alongside J. B. Phillips' great paraphrase of an earlier generation.

What Eugene Peterson says at the end of the book in reflection on his own ministry is that "I wanted to gather a company of people together who read personally, not impersonally, who learned to read the Bible in order to live their true selves, not just get information that they could use to raise their standard of living. I wanted to counter the consumer attitude that uses the Bible as a way to gather religious data by which we can be our own gods, and then replace it with an attitude primed to listen to and obey God, to take us out of our preoccupations with ourselves into the spacious freedom in which God is working the world's salvation. I wanted to somehow recover that original tone, that prophetic and gospel 'voice' that stabs us awake to a beauty and hope that connects us with our real lives" (Page 176).

In short, what Eugene Peterson does here is give us an in-depth guide on eating this Book, the greatest of all Books, God's revealed Word.

Avian Flu -- Puzzle or Pandemic?

While news sources today have been giving much more time to Osama bin Laden, the Palestinians, and Immigration legislation in Congress, probably the most disturbing piece of news was quickly rushed over if it was mentioned at all. It came from the island of Sumatra in the huge nation of Indonesia, and is about the possible transmission of the H5N1 virus by humans to humans.

I had to dig into the web to find more information than that, but, as is often the case, the BBC came up with a very full and very thorough story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5011210.stm).

It would appear that beginning with the death of a woman several weeks ago, six other members of her family have gone down with the disease and subsequently died. There is no evidence of their close proximity with poultry or other birds, neither is their evidence that the virus itself has mutated. However, this puzzle has the World Health Organization flustered and worried.

As those of you who have kept up with my meanderings for a while will know, pandemics in general and the avian flu in particular have been on my mind for several years now. This, I have suggested, would be one of the great challenges to come before Christians as part of a troubled world. The question we need to be asking is whether this is just another puzzle and false alarm, or whether this might be the start of what could become a global pandemic that will take many lives.

I pray that it is not the start of a pandemic, but we as Christians and churches need to be prepared for the worst while praying for the best. I have for a while now been following the work of Dr. Tim Foggin of British Columbia, who has kept apace with the possibilities of what might happen and how churches might respond. You can get onto Dr. Foggin's list by emailing him at church_emergency_preparedness-owner@yahoogroups.com.

Now is the time to be thinking and preparing for the consequences of such a terrible event -- putting it off will make it too late to respond effectively and meaningfully. We need also to pray that those fighting this disease will be able to quarantine it and prevent a break out from Sumatra, or wherever else a human-to-human virus might be mutating and incubating. We need also to think seriously about how we would respond in such difficult and demanding circumstances.

Can A Phoenix Fly?

One of the things that has been said to me repeatedly by liberal/progressive/revisionist (or whatever you want to call them) friends during the last three years is, "Why can't you get over what has happened?" My responses have varied, sometimes angry, sometimes self-pitying, but essentially to do with the fact that it is hard for truth and error to live in union with one another. By the standards of the breadth of universal Christianity throughout the ages (throwing in the values of Islam and Judaism also) the actions of the Episcopal Church in 2003 led down the dangerous path of error.

I have spent much of these years grieving what is as well as what might have been. One doesn't get over such pain in the twinkling of an eye, but as I have hinted before, we cannot spend the rest of our lives being mad at what happened. A former colleague of my wife's had maintained his resentment against the university for several decades, in the process turning himself into one of the grumpiest old men I have ever come across.

I recognize that tendency to grumpiness within myself and must fight it for it is neither helpful, nor constructive. I cannot spent the rest of my life mourning the folly of the Episcopal Church, as Queen Victoria spent the residue of her long life dressed in black and wishing her "dear Bertie" would come back from the dead. The Episcopal Church that once was died in August 2003, the mortal wounds being inflicted by its own governing body. Soon that body will meet again, and I doubt whether it is capable of being loyally Anglican despite the desperate desire of tens of thousands of faithful Episcopalians -- perhaps an overriding majority.

Just the thought of another General Convention after the last one stretches my grumpiness quota, and to misquote Scripture I find myself wondering, "Can anything good come out of General Convention?" But whatever misguided ecclesiastical power players come up with, we must get on with the business of being the church, that gloriously beautiful Bride of Christ. We have turned it into Cinderella with amnesia.

This is something to which I have been giving considerable thought over the last months, and which I intend to be talking about at a gathering I will be participating in later in the summer. During the next few weeks my first faultering attempts to get my thoughts into some kind of order will find their way to this forum. I will not so much be being prescriptive as attempting theologically and strategically to look for ways beyond the chaos that General Convention 2003 thrust us into -- despite the endless warnings that they received.

What I am presenting is meant to stimulate creative discussion. Faithful North American Anglicans have gone off in a variety of different directions during the last few years, and while certain courses of action have been misguided, I am trying to start where we are now rather than where we wish we were. I am hoping that we can do something in this discussion that will help us recover from the wounds that have been incurred.

There are many on all sides of this equation who want nothing better their old denomination back. What has to be said from the outset is that whatever our yearnings and desires, we cannot put the clock back and so have no option but to move forward playing the hand that has been dealt and is now on the table.

As soon as one says something like this ECUSA loyalists (especially on the left) turn on you and say that all you want to leave the Episcopal Church and do the dirty on it. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, what the left does not seem wiling to realize is that by forcing their agenda upon the church in August 2003 they themselves cut off the legs from under the Episcopal Church as we had all known it. They changed the agenda themselves, and in so doing opened the door for a discussion and decisions that were far more far reaching than they ever imagined possible. Actions have consequences, something postmodern people do not seem to realize.

August 2003 was the tipping point of something that had been happening for a long time. While the presenting issue was to do with sexuality and was focused on one particular individual who probably ought not to have been elected bishop, August 2003 was more like a swollen gland in a child's neck, which points to a much greater malaise in the whole body. As the left pursued their agenda of what they believed to be human and civil rights, they were (perhaps unwittingly) raising huge theological, ecclesiological, missiological, anthropological, spiritual, institutional, political, and cultural questions.

Pandora's box was opened and what flew out was a lot more than I believe they bargained for. However, as the old Greek myth goes, when the lid was finally forced back on Pandora's box all that was left inside was hope. It is that hope which I now find myself clinging to and am toying with. By bringing these cards into play the left have actually given us an opportunity to remake North American Anglicanism for mission in a post-Christendom and post-denominational world, we fail to pick up the challenge at our own peril. I have no idea where that might lead, but I suspect that God has something significant in store for us if we are but prepared to follow the pillar of fire through this dark wilderness night.

One of the delights of my recent trip to England was a private lunch with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. I came away from sharing sandwiches and juice with him in his study so thankful that God had put such a sensitive and thoughtful man at the helm of the Communion at this particular moment in history. What struck me particularly was the pain he feels over the divisions in the Communion as a result of North American actions, and his determination to do all that he can to try to keep this rich fellowship of believers together.

His commitment has had me pondering for the last couple of weeks the close relationship that there has always been between unity and mission, and trying to work out what on earth that means in our present circumstances. During the last several years we who claim biblical faithfulness and orthodoxy have often responded from the less settled parts of our gut rather than with the heart and the regenerate mind. We have a huge amount of work before us, and doing it wisely and well precludes sticking out our tongues and saying dreadful things about those who disagree with us, however tempted we feel to do so. We are being tested just as much as those who stand to the left of us, God forbid that we be found wanting.

So, to my subject line question, "Can a phoenix fly?" I don't know the answer. I don't even know whether there is a phoenix left in the ashes, or what that phoenix might look like, all I know is that God is calling us to something different that builds on the foundations of the past, not sweeping them away -- whether we are still part of ECUSA or not.

My old friend and mentor, Alec Motyer, writes in his commentary on Exodus that, God "wants us to live in the courts of earth according to the rules of the courts of heaven... (therefore) we are called... to ransack Scripture to discover the distinctive features of a godly lifestyle and to follow through with a discipline of obedience to the word of God. This is what the Lord sought in his redeemed at Sinai, and it is still the calling of the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16)" (J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus. InterVarsity Press, 2005, pages 244-245). This is the challenge

When A Wanderer Returns

WRITTEN IN THE DELIGHTFUL VILLAGE OF NETTLEBED, ENGLAND

It always takes a few days to readjust to being back in Britain. While it doesn't take long to get used again to driving on the left hand side of the road, or to thinking in pounds rather than dollars, there are some elements of reacclimation that require more significant acclimation.

The first emotion I always feel when I arrive back here is an overwhelming sense of 'home-ness.' Whether it is the rich green fields and the hawthorn in full bloom (as it is at the moment), there is that sense of relief that comes with knowing that this is where I came from, and ultimately, as a result, this is where I belong. Yet on every trip there are the moments that tell me I am perceived as something of an interloper: like the comments of the young Muslim woman in the watch and clock department of a Birmingham store the other morning who drew attention to my vaguely mid-Atlantic accent.

Whenever I return to England, the visit begins with the romantic haze of a returning exile, and it takes five or six days to get beyond this and start seeing the country as it really is, as Oliver Cromwell put it when posing for a portrait, "warts and all." In the last few days I have found myself seeing and hearing things that make the country stack up poorly against the American South, where I have lived for more than two decades now.

What impacts me almost every visit I now make is how secularized a nation this is. Little by little over the years the trappings of Britain's Christendom heritage have been peeled away as the layers are removed from an onion. When we left some thirty years ago, for example, there was barely anywhere on a Sunday where a store would open, but the other morning in search of food for my mother-in-law, we slipped into a supermarket and discovered wall-to-wall people. I would hazard that Sundays are now a healthier business day for many British retailers than any other day of the week. The quiet English Sunday with worship as a primary option is a thing of the antediluvian past.

Then there is the way in which the churches in general, and the Church of England in particular, are pilloried. Very little of any good news about the church is shared by the media, and good news there is, but do anything that questions the prevailing values of the land and bishops, archbishops, or faithful laypeople are howled at by a ravening hoard. Last week, when the bishops and other religious leaders speaking in the House of Lords opposed the Assisted Dying bill on good solid theological grounds, they were mauled and accused of not listening to the voice of the majority.

Yet if the churches were then to start reflecting the prevailing culture, they would be accused of not doing their job properly and watering down what they believed in order to curry favor with the masses. The Church of England is not alone as the target of such criticism.

Ruth Kelly, a newly appointed minister for equality in the Tony Blair government, has been given a battering in the last few days because she is a conservative Roman Catholic and a member of Opus Dei. How can Ms Kelly do her job fairly if she holds these personal views, the critics scream, and behind that assertion is the unspoken wonderment that so intelligent and successful a person could be so benighted in her beliefs.

To the majority of native-born Brits religion is irrelevant, and it is hardly a big step from there to an increasingly ferocious opposition of things religious. It may have been there before I left this country, but these days there always seems to be a sting in the tail of this criticism that is both poisonous and barbed.

This all stems from the fact, I believe, that Britain has shed almost all its historic Christian clothing, and with that comes an increasing intolerance of faith, and in its place is put a crass materialism that I find intensely unattractive. This is not to say that the USA is not also an intensely materialistic nation, too, but in the corner of America where I live there is still enough overt faith within the public system to soften some of the harder corners of this one dimensionalism.

As I wandered around the center of the city of Birmingham the other morning I could be forgiven for being tempted to believe that Muslims are the only observant people of faith in that city. Perhaps 10% of all the women I saw were dressed in various degrees of Islamic modesty, from colorful scarves thrown with studied nonchalance over their cascades of dark hair, to total coverage in black with nothing but a slit for a pair of eyes to peer through. Such women were a profound contrast to many of their non-Muslim sisters, some of whose level of undress left virtually nothing to this lustful male's imagination -- and I am not talking just about teenage girls.

I find myself now wondering whether the onion of our Christian past in Britain has now been peeled of so many layers that little or nothing remains except materialism in all its harshness, and a sensual permissiveness that has buried within it the seeds of its own destruction. Could it be, I ponder, that we are watching the last chapter of Britain's glorious Christian heritage disappearing, and what will replace it? Islam is certainly one of the contenders, but it is certainly not the only one.

Yet there might be some straws in the wind that the worm is turning, and maybe I will cling to them and hope against hope. For example, there is a modest upturn in church attendance, and a senior cleric told me last week that there has been a surprising and significant increase in vocations to ordination. Could this be the early warning of a change in the spiritual and moral climate?

What is very clear to me is that the United Kingdom in particular, and the whole of western Europe in general, is a needy mission field. While I do not expect it to be an easy field for ministry and evangelism in the years ahead, I recognize that it is one that we ignore at our own peril. Last week we had lunch with some old friends and former parishioners and talked about 'retirement.' None of us are eager to spend our golden years tending roses, walking our dogs, or looking for new aches and pains to be hypocondriacal about.

Our conversation began focusing on our peers, rising elders who are part of a generation that has up to now not taken much notice of its soul, not taken care of its personal and familial relationships, and not saved for old age as it should have done. Could it be, we wondered together, that just as we teamed up to minister together in the Sixties and early Seventies in what was then known as Swinging London, we might now team up again and reach out in Christ's love to an older generation that is increasingly restive about its own mortality? We will see what God has in mind.

The Tyranny of Choice

I spent some time yesterday watching on the BBC Parliament channel the procedings of the House of Lords. They were debating the second hearing of a bill on Assisted Dying. I did not see the whole debate by any means, which was more than seven hours long and had over eighty peers addressing the issue, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, together with other bishops and religious leaders.

I confess that I greatly appreciated both the manner and the quality of a discussion that eventually led to a fairly significant defeat of the bill, although this only delays its reintroduction for a few months. Interestingly, afterwards the BBC 24 Hour News channel did not then have a balanced discussion of what had happened, but gave six or seven minutes to the disappointed emoting of a woman whose brother had gone to Switzerland last year in order to bring an end to his own severely ill life.

While one cannot but be sympathetic with such agonies euthenasia is not the solution, for it raises far too many questions and creates far too many dilemmas for patients, families, physicians, the helping professions, and so forth. This was something that, as I listened, the proponents of this bill both on the floor of the chamber and in discussion on air, were conveniently overlooking or minimizing. Those making arguments for assisted dying constantly backed up their statements by arguing that an apparent overwhelming majority of the public think it a good idea, and, more important, people should be free to choose.

Our culture in the west is one that seems besotted with the notion of choice. Under every circumstance, it would appear, we must be as free to choose from as many options as possible, whether it be the model of car we drive, the brand of coffee we drink, or where and when we meet the Grim Reaper. The right to choose is now being as ferociously applied to the ending of life as it has for the past 30+ years been applied to the beginning of life. It is argued in both these cases that the right to choose says something about the dignity of life, I would contend that it says a great deal more about the desire for autonomy by the individual.

Euthenasia is a slippery one, because when dealing with the voluntary termination of life we are dealing with a complex set of issues. Like so many clergy I have sat with families who have been agonizing over the dying circumstances of a loved one, and the choices before them are often neither easy nor attractive -- and there is often that sense that people have been artificially kept alive beyond their capacity to cope.

However, those arguing for assisted dying in the House of Lords debate yesterday were speaking from the presupposition that a person's life belongs to them alone and, therefore, is something that they can choose to end for themselves if it becomes too much of a burden. Lord Joffe, the author of the Lords bill, wasn't too impressed by the arguments that had been put forward by religious leaders who sit in the Lords, although he rightly castigated some of the religious media for being crass.

In a society where everything has become a commodity choosing has acquired an almost tyrannical dimension. I have the right, it seems, to choose anything and everything I want, and boundaries of any kind are an unwarranted limitation on my freedoms. Putting off or putting on life, therefore, has become akin to putting off and putting on clothes at the beginning or ending of the day.

When a culture declares itself independent of God, then what is God's and is Godgiven becomes my own to do with as I like. Life is therefore something to be consumed as and when I want to do so, rather than something that is given to me by my Creator and of which I am a steward. Indeed, in the midst of this contemporary autonomy, the very notion of stewardship seems old-fashioned and out-of-place, especially if aligned with John Donne's noton that "no man is an island until himself."

The truth is that behind the arguments for euthenasia that I heard on the television from the Houses of Parliament there is ultimately a utilitarianism. When persons become a burden and cease to be useful, then they should be free to shuffle off their mortal coil and cease being a trouble to themselves and, if they have them, their loved ones.

There is little doubt that within the next few years the debate about assisted dying will be coming to an elected assembly near you, if it hasn't arrive already. The Oregonians, the Dutch, and the people of the Northern Territory of Australia, have already passed legislation allowing for controled euthenasia, and surely we are all going to be forced to engage this discussion as well.

Religious arguments were impatiently swept on one side by some in the Lords yesterday, but these really seem to be the primary bulwark that stand between us and practices that once established are open to the most blatant abuse. The questions that, perhaps, we ought to be exploring is what might be the legitimate limits of choice as well as what is the nature of life, and is it ours to do with as we please.

What On Earth Is Going On In Tennessee?

It is Monday breakfast time in Tennessee, and I expected at this moment that I would be sitting in my daughter's home in Birmingham, England, bouncing my granddaughter on my knee. Instead, due to the machinations of the airlines and the weather, I am at home and we will be making another attempt to get across the Atlantic Ocean today -- this time going through Cincinnati rather than Atlanta, and having been upgraded to the more comfortable seats "up front."

However, such unexpected time at home with nothing scheduled to fill it gives me an opportunity to ponder the last few days, which have been a marathon, and have included a failed third attempt of the Diocese of Tennessee to elect a new bishop. One bonus from the weekend is the strange sense of relief I have that one of questionable theology and ethical values was elected Bishop of California -- rather than some of the alternatives! I envy the Californians in that they were able to achieve this feat in three ballots, whereas we haven't managed to get a bishop in three meetings of the Convention.

So, what is going on in Tennessee? The truth is that we are caught on the horns of a dilemma. I think we are living with the convergence of several streams.

The first is that in August 2003 the ground shifted. The actions of the General Convention were received with anything but enthusiasm by the people of the Diocese of Tennessee. Rather than walking out the large majority of orthodox and conservative people have got themselves organized, and during the succeeding years have become a force in the diocese. This has meant major shifts in a number of the organizational facets of diocesan life.

The second is that as a diocese we have continued to attract (and develop) biblical and orthodox leadership so that today the majority of the active clergy will broadly lean in that direction. This diocese under its present leadership has been committed to a strategy of evangelism, discipleship, and growth, and the truth is that those without a biblically-shaped passion for the transforming love of the living Christ have a patchy track record and limited passion in this area of Christian ministry. We are, I think, starting to struggle with what it means to be faithful Christians in a postmodern, post-Christendom, post-denominational world.

The third is that the diocese is trapped by its past. Historically the three dioceses in Tennessee have sought a 2/3 majority in both orders to elect a new bishop; this is the first attempt to elect a bishop in Tennessee sinc 2003. What happened in Minneapolis scoured out what might be called the middle ground. The candidates in our election were not voted on in the light of who they were, but in the light of what they were perceived to represent. The outcome, therefore, was predictable polarization. Clearly, there is enormous sense in today's climate in altering the diocese's constitution to bring us into line with the rest of the church with a simple majority being required.

But we are trapped by the past in other ways, too, because retired and non-parochial clergy have the vote. It has been fascinating to see characters appear from the woodwork who haven't set foot in Tennessee for years in order to participate in an episcopal election. These priests have never met the candidates, never attended any of the any of the walkabouts, or asked any searching questions, and as a result have warped the electoral process. It is seldom that I applaud the House of Bishops, but I concur with their willingness to remove vote but not voice from their number who are no longer in active ministry. We in the Diocese of Tennessee have to come in line in the same way with this one.

What we are seeing is yesterday's tired tail wagging today's dog. The fear of many of these individuals is that the Diocese of Tennessee will leave the Episcopal Church, and for many of these retired priests do not seem to care that the denomination that they served has changed radically, neither have they listened to the responses of the candidates when challenged on this issue.

Talking with some of these older priest fascinated me, because what became clear was how lightweight and theologically fuzzy they are. As one man began a statement to me on Saturday, "It would be nice if..." and then came up with something that he did not seem to realize was way outside of the parameters of Scripture, catholic Christianity, the Book of Common Prayer, etc., etc.

I am firmly of the mind that if an ordained person does not have any responsibility or accountability to keep a diocese alive and moving forward, then that ordained person ought to be asked to prayerfully sit on the sidelines, to speak but not to vote. It has convinced me that when I retire while I intend to continue exercising a ministry, I will not engage inappropriately in the counsels of the church. I am convinced that if we were to remove this group from the electoral reckoning in Tennessee, then a very different picture would emerge.

So the task ahead of us now is to find some way of building a consensus around a candidate who is acceptable to the overwhelming orthodox majority in the diocese, but at the same time who can pick up a good proportion of the dissenting minority. I think we can see the beginnings of this happening, but no one is going to pretend it will be easy. It is frustrating that yesterday's men and women have played a dog-in-the-manger role in preventing the diocese from moving forward at a critical time, but we must accept the sovereignty of God in our circumstances and prayerfully ask him to show us how we can make something positive out of this.

This will require a lot of grace, but that grace must be accompanied by a robust theology, not the watering down to a lowest common denominator that Episcopalians are so good at. Sloppiness might solve immediate problems, but in the long term it creates a thousand other difficulties.

So, hopefully today I will head for England today to a couple of weeks of just being grandpa. While there I will be praying, dreaming, and seeking what God's will might be for us. We have clearly become a bellwether diocese, and we have to find a way of breaking free of what are now negativities from our past so that we can move forward with Gospel power into the future -- and all this within the context of leaking barque that is the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA. That is no small challenge.

Critique of Stem Cell Research

The other day there was an article published on the Episcopal News Service website regarding Stem Cells and Stem Cell Research. I shared it with Dr. D. Joy Riley, a physician, former medical researcher, and bioethicist. Joy is an increasingly important voice among orthodox Christians dealing with this issue. I asked her if she would comment on the article.

What follows is first the ENS piece and then Joy Riley's responses. I think you will find them interesting.

Richard Kew

FROM THE EPISCOPAL NEWS SERVICE

While the debate over the many ethical implications of stem cell research rages, studies in molecular genetics, genomics and cell development continue to yield new information. One of the learnings which may be surprising to many is that the differentiation of a stem cell depends on the environment or microniche where it resides.

"What a cell's neighbors 'say' to it chemically, and what it says to its neighbors, impact what kind of cell it becomes," reported Dr. Christie A. Holland, retired Professor and Chair of Virology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Children's Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

"If context matters in ethics as well as in the development of a cell," posed Karen LeBacqz, bioethicist in residence at Yale, "we need to realize that we are talking about a different context here. It is a great pity that the debate around stem cells got framed in terms of the abortion debate. They are very different contexts."

Holland and Lebacqz were addressing the Ecumenical Roundtable on Science, Technology and the Church, as part of the program, "Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Churches, Ethics, and Politicians" presented by members from the United Church of Christ. This year's Roundtable was hosted April 27-30 by the Executive Council Committee on Science, Technology and Faith at the Emrich Retreat and Conference Center in the Diocese of Michigan.

Ron Cole-Turner, H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, led off the panel with a review of the history of the debate surrounding stem cells, and with the hope that the panel would serve as a resource for those at the meeting who may be called upon to speak to the issues in the political arena.

Olivia Masih White, who teaches biology at John Carroll University in Cleveland, reviewed the basic biology of stem cells, clarifying terms and adding "What I taught 20 years ago is completely different than what I teach my biology students now, and the best contemporary science is still changing."

Sandra Michael, convener of the Episcopal Network on Science, Technology and Faith, commented that she was glad White made the distinction between the two types of stem cells, totipottent and pluripotent. "This is rarely clarified in popular presentations on stem cells and is critical for understanding how they work."

Michael's research as Distinguished Service Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton is in the genetics, endrocrinology and immunology of reproduction. "Just as people who aren't specialists in these topics need clear and thorough scientific explanations, scientists and clinicians need to consider the issues in a religious context as they apply the knowledge gleaned from their research."

The interplay of science, ethics and theology in the panel enabled the 40 Roundtable participants -- Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists as well as the UCC team and Episcopal hosts -- to clarify the other scientific terms which are used confusingly in politics and the popular media, as well as to explore the implications of stem cell research and therapies.

Lebacqz raised the question of just access to therapies developed from stem cell research, since the stem cell lines approved by the current administration for federal funding are not diverse enough to meet the needs of different ancestral groups. The ethics around the acquisition of eggs and somatic cells for research are exceedingly complex, and also generated discussion.

Stem cell therapies hold the promise of both increasing longevity and of improving the quality of longer lives, giving rise to another cluster of questions. Interestingly, the Working Group on Faith and Genetics in the Diocese of Massachusetts, also ecumenical in makeup and represented by several members of the Roundtable, has announced that the science of human aging and efforts to slow it will be the group's next topic for study.

Lebacqz conlcluded the formal presentaion with a series of her own theological questions. "What," she pondered, "Does being 'made in the image of God' mean in our time? For me, our dignity is relational; it has to do with communication, with being in communion with others and God." She concluded by returning to the science. As we understand more about how cells communicate and provide a context for one another, we see the resonance between science and theology deepen.


FROM DR. D. JOY RILEY

This is a proactive group; they are ecumenical in scope, but I am not sure there
is a diversity of opinion RE stem cell research. That is unclear. I mostly
take issue with such comments as these:

1) "If context matters in ethics as well as in the development of a cell,"
posed Karen LeBacqz, bioethicist in residence at Yale, "we need to realize that
we are talking about a different context here. It is a great pity that the
debate around stem cells got framed in terms of the abortion debate. They are
very different contexts."

Embryonic stem cells have, by definition, embryos as their source; in harvesting embryonic stem cells, embryos are destroyed. That is precisely what the abortion AND the ESC debates are about: embryos are human. These vulnerable humans are destroyed in both instances, with the latter utilizing them effectively for parts. Whether a calf is killed on the roadway, or cut up with a butcher’s knife for veal parmesan, the calf is still dead. The differing “context” is that of the garbage heap or the diner’s plate.

2) "Ron Cole-Turner, H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, led off the panel with a review of the history
of the debate surrounding stem cells, and with the hope that the panel would
serve as a resource for those at the meeting who may be called upon to speak to
the issues in the political arena."

Cole-Turner advocates being a resource for the political arena, although he does not say on which side. The book he edited on human cloning (Human Cloning: Religious Responses, Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) however, does support research up to fourteen days after fertilization or zygote formation, on what he terms “pre-embryos.” It should be noted that this is a term usually employed for semantic purposes; it is not a scientific term.

3) "Lebacqz raised the question of just access to therapies developed from stem
cell research, since the stem cell lines approved by the current administration
for federal funding are not diverse enough to meet the needs of different
ancestral groups. The ethics around the acquisition of eggs and somatic cells
for research are exceedingly complex, and also generated discussion."

The question of justice is a valid one, but I think this is a back door approach. The argument here is one for ESC (embryonic stem cell) research. What the embryonic stem cell research lobby wants is tax dollars in order to do research that is at least controversial. I think the real question here about justice, is, should those who understand this destruction of nascent human life for what it is have to pay for something they consider morally reprehensible? As there are no therapies to date from embryonic stem cells, the question of justice between ancestral people groups rings rather hollow at this time.

The acquisition of eggs is ethically very questionable; on this we agree. The number of human eggs required for therapeutic cloning research would be astronomical. From whence would these come? Egg procurement requires females of reproductive age, but over 21 years, in order to give consent (at least in the United States), for a procedure that entails a number of risks. In South Korea, two egg “donors” from the Hwang Woo-Suk debacle have filed suit for not being duly informed of the risks.

The acquisition of somatic cells is not typically problematic, ethically or physically, unless one has a problem with his/her cheek (mouth) being swabbed with a Q-Tip! The inclusion of somatic cells as ethically complex is somewhat spurious.

4) “Lebacqz concluded the formal presentation with a series of her own
theological questions. ‘What,’ she pondered, ‘Does being made in the image of
God mean in our time? For me, our dignity is relational; it has to do with
communication, with being in communion with others and God.’ She concluded by
returning to the science. ‘As we understand more about how cells communicate and
provide a context for one another, we see the resonance between science and
theology deepen.’”

Does this mean that only those who can communicate with others are human? How far
does this argument extend? Embryos cannot relate, so they are not made in
the image of God? What about those whose disease states render them incommunicado with others? Are they "no longer made in the image of God" or "never were in the image of God?" What about their eschatological potential for being in communion with God and others? What if they "speak" a language of angels, and not of men, so we are the ones without understanding?

These are a few of my thoughts. . .

Dreaming of a Future for North American Anglicanism

Today I intend to finish reading James Holland's huge book, Together We Stand: America, Britain, and the Forging of an Alliance. Recently published in the USA by Miramax Books, it focuses on the North Africa campaign of World War Two, when for the first time Americans and Britons effectively fought alongside each other, cooperating and even merging their resources as necessary. The northern coastlands and deserts of the African continent was where the Anglo-American special relationship was properly forged, and political and military tactics that are still being used today were pioneered in 1942 and 1943.

That extended battlefield was the test bed from which has emerged many aspects of our contemporary world, yet even as the leaders on the Allied side were fighting for their lives, and victory seemed anything but a slam-dunk, they were already talking about the sort of world they wanted when the war was over. Churchill, aided and abetted by others from half a dozen nationalities, foresaw a totally different scene than the one which had entered the conflict in 1939.

Foreseeing required dreaming, envisioning, planning, and winning adherents to the vision. When Europe and parts of Asia lay in ruins when finally the hostilities ceased, when Stalin was intensifying his grip on Central and Eastern Europe while the Soviet Union was licking its wounds from at least 20 million casualities, and when the world was reeling at the discovering of the extend of the Holocaust, many of those dreams must have seemed beyond achieving.

Yet the dreamers were not bowed down. They were thinking up the United Nations, NATO, the liberalization of world trade, the extension of human rights and freedoms, and so forth. It may seem that in the intervening years some of their initiatives have gone awry, but we cannot underestimate the good that they did at the time. Where would Europe have been today without the Marshall Plan? What would have happened to Japan if the United States had not picked its old enemy up and helped dust it down? That generation of heroes who made this happen, the Greatest Generation, were extraordinary men and women to whom we owe an enormous amount.

Those who built the world we now inhabit became and arms, legs, and heads of an older generation like Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and so many others who dreamed how such a world could be born, but knew that age and energy would prevent them from necessarily going there. Like the landowner planting acorns so that generations hence will sit in the shade of mighty oaks, so it is our responsibility to do the hard work of dreaming into being a new kind of church.

Some years ago I read Karl Slaikeu and Steve Lawhead's book, The Phoenix Factor, a helpful little manual to enable individuals survive a personal crisis and grow as a result. The book is full of good advice that I know I have used on myself and with others in my years in ministry. The truth is that even the most traumatic crisis can itself become the springboard for growth and health. In their introduction the authors write, "Crisis theory points to a remarkable fact of human growth and development: newer, more satisfying, and more productive ways of living can come about only after the old ways have died" (Page x).

This book came off my shelves several months ago as I started to think what might be beyond the crisis that the Episcopal Church has inflicted upon itself, the climax of that crisis being reached with the actions of August 2003 that have been so destructive of fellowship and of worldwide communion. It could be that there are all sorts of people thinking long and hard about this, developing a strategy, and I am just not privy to what is going on, if so then discount what I say. If not, then can those of us who are mainstream Anglicans get down to doing the kind of planning and dreaming that enabled the Allies of the Second World War to remake their world.

I tend to see a lot of anger, despair, peeling away from the denomination, finger-pointing, and downward spirals of disappointment. I confess that I have shared these feelings in great depth, and have often wondered on a month-to-month basis whether my own little mission congregation can even survive in the midst of such a troubled pond. There is one chapter of the Slaikeu/Lawhead book that is entitled, Managing Painful Feelings, and I can assure you that I have spent a long time going over some of its pages again.

"In some cases the intensity of the current crisis ties directly to the fact that it dredges up old feelings -- you are now experiencing the pain of the current crisis and the pain of a previous crisis all at the same time" (Page 83). I certainly think this has been the case with many of us who are historic Anglicans within the American Episcopal scene. August 2003 was the trigger, a boil burst and out flowed years of resentment, anger at a compromised theological education system, bitterness at mistreatment by high-handed bishops, and so forth. Like a surgeon on an old-time sailing ship in the midst of battle, we have been knee-deep in blood and guts, and wondering why we are making such little progress.

Maybe the wastelands of the Gulf Coast are a visual aid. Katrina swept through and left behind total devastation. There are now pockets of restoration, and in many places a lot of the mess has been cleared away, but the whole area is a long way from restoration, and that is not going to happen overnight. I saw a piece the other night about the recovery of San Francisco from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and it took about twenty years for the city to get back into its stride -- meanwhile Los Angeles overtook it as the greater metropolis of the West Coast. The Gulf Coast will take years to come back, and right now they are looking toward another Atlantic hurricane season. Anglicanism won't recover overnight, despite our native impatience.

The impact of August 2003 upon the Episcopal Church was not unlike Hurricane Katrina, and while there are pockets of recovery here and there, and while some of the mess has been cleared away, we can see that it will take years to build something new. Meanwhile, we face with increasing dread the prospect of the next "hurricane season:" General Convention 2006. This is likely to be preceded by another destructive firestorm coming from San Francisco and the Diocese of California this Saturday, where any notion of theological sanity seems to have been abandoned.

Yet even in the midst of this we need to be dreaming and trying to envision the sort of future that we want for Anglican Christianity in North America. If we do not start envisioning and dreaming in this way, then the likelihood that we will have little or no future. If we cannot get beyond our anger and hurt, then we will be taken down by our anger and hurt, and in the process will do great damage to the wonderful Gospel of grace that has been committed to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.

If we are to rise from a crisis like a phoenix, then we need to start making radical changes -- not just outward changes, but inward changes, too. This process begins and ends on our knees. Those in the secular world who plan for the future have developed all sorts of wonderful tools to help envision what sort of future God might be calling us to, and we should learn how to make use of these. While there are encouraging islands of hope, they need to be linked together and expanded, and instead of a culture of fear and despair, the time has come to develop a strategy that has a vision attached to it that tens of thousands of lay and ordained Anglicans can focus around and move forward toward.

Such a vision will need to be looking not just three, four, or five years out, but ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and be willing to hold our course in terms of the objectives we set ourselves, despite inevitable setbacks. Mission must be the organizing principle of our work, holistic mission that is rooted and grounded in the fact that when Jesus came into Galilee and from there sent us into all the world. He came saying that with him the Reign of God planting a foothold in their midst.

The last few years have finally stripped us of our carriage trade image, and despite the posturing of the Episcopal Church Center and company, we are recognizing that we are a small and almost irrelevant denomination on the American scene. This may be a painful realization, but it is an incredible relief, too. We can now stop pretending to be chaplains to the culture, and can get on with the business of taking the transforming message of Christ into that culture. We may have lost something, but if we are missional people then we have gained a lot more.

Too long we have been living, for example, with the negative imagery of a denomination that is coming apart, if we are to be creative and effective in the future then not only do we need a vision and a strategy for tomorrow, but we must find ways to start thinking like winners again. By that I do not mean replicating the crass morale-boosting sessions that crop up in business enterprises, but by recognizing that we are under the sovereign hand of God and he who calls us will enable us to be his agents in this hard place -- and agents of transformation. He knows exactly where we are because he put us here!

I have a dream of a very different American Anglicanism some fifty years down the road, but as a sixty-year-old I know I will never see it, at least from this side of the grave. I dream of an Anglicanism that has been cleared of the debris of these turn-of-the-millennium crises, and is moving gracefully and faithfully across what will be a very different post-Christendom landscape reflecting in its love and dynamism the Good News of our biblical heritage.

I see it as an Anglicanism that is flexible and not wooden in its structures, recognizing that it needs to be moved forward by mission opportunities not held back by political in-fighting and turf-wars. I see this Anglicanism as self-giving and self-sacrificing, moving ahead without counting the cost, toughened as it engages in spiritual conflict rather than weak, flabby, compromised. I see it as a caring partner with other Christian traditions, teaching them and yet eager to learn from them.

This Anglicanism I envision will be rooted and grounded in the triune God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and thoroughly biblical. It will have thought through the biblical faith in such a way that it will have shed its Enlightenment age packaging and come up with something a lot more appropriate and beautiful for that time. Indeed, because it is missional it will be constantly willing to test all its theology and attitudes against Scripture, modifying them where they are found wanting.

I suspect it will also be instinctively global, engaged in mission with Anglicans in orther parts of the world, and welcoming Anglicans from far away places to share the mission with us. It also has every possiblity of being flamboyantly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural.

I do not believe that a compromised Anglicanism will have survived in anything but small pockets here and there. Endowments can keep religious institutions alive for a long time, and there will always be those who prefer their faith to be tamed or undemanding. However, I believe the confusing tangle on the orthodox side of the spectrum now will have reached a far greater degree of order and cooperation. We need to remember that division is a characteristic of the Enlightenment approach to Christianity, not the more centrapetal approach that will prevail in these, by then, far post-Enlightenment days.

Slaikeu and Lawhead write, "You know you have successfully resolved the crisis when the crisis event has been woven into the fabric of your life in such a way that you are ready to face the future and get on with the business of living... There is a big difference in people who have integrated the crisis event into their lives and those who have not. Those who have are looking ahead: those who have not are directing their main energies backward toward the past" (Pages 202-203).

I like the look of the Anglicanism that I dream of, and I pray that my generation can, like the Churchills and Roosevelts of the World War Two era, set the trajectory that this future might face, leaving it for the next generation to put flesh and sinew on these bones. If we are to do this, then there is much inner work that we need to get done in fellowship with Christ and one another, and then a lot of planning and dreaming.

Perhaps our mental image needs to be that of King David and the Temple. Forbidden by the Lord to build his Temple in Jerusalem, David said, "Well, at least I can provide the materials for my son to do what is barred to me." So, he made preparations, but it was Solomon who did the building. Let us pray that in the days ahead orthodox Anglicans will stop taking it out on one another and starting sitting down at the table together and say, "Now, how do we rise like a phoenix from these tragic circumstances that have been thrust upon us?"

This, I believe, is the godly way forward.

The Da Vinci Code and Company

A few evenings ago I slipped down to Barnes & Noble, and spent an hour going through the religion shelves looking for books that are riding the rapidly rising Da Vinci Wave. I ended up with nine or ten volumes that I spread out on a table in the Starbucks section of the place and perused. I finally chose three or four to read and returned the other volumes to their shelves.

The last few days have found me going over these books in an attempt to get to the bottom of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon that has been riding high now for several years, and which is reaching something of a fever peak as the relase date for the move of the best-seller draws near. The hardback of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown has now been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 159 weeks, and this week was its second week on the top of the paperback lists. There is now an illustrated Da Vinci Code, Da Vinci Code tour guides, and I expect all sorts of other ephemera will appear in coming months. This has become a big cultural "event."

Maybe it was fitting that I read The Da Vinci Code soon after it was published, on my way home from Minneapolis in July 2003, where I had been addressing a pre-convention gathering. (Needless to say, I have not be invited to speak at any gatherings in Columbus in June, and probably never will be again!). The book was commended to me be someone as a great read, and so it is. If you are looking for a page-turner, then this is it! However, from the supposed factoids on the first page, I was irritated by the way it played so fast and loose with facts, and was so badly researched.

Don't get me wrong, The Da Vinci Code is a terrific yarn, my problem was that its author seemed unable to separate fact from fiction -- which makes him a very contemporary kind of person! The book leans heavily on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which when I read it some years ago struck me as a puzzling piece of pseudo-religious exotica, a book that seemed determined to make a massive case with a minimal amount of evidence. The Da Vinci Code is very much the same in its use of facts, scholarship, and evidence.

This week's New York Times Best Seller list has no fewer than three of these kinds of books on the non-fiction lists, and then The Da Vinci Code is there in the fiction lists. One of those non-fiction pieces is The Jesus Papers, written by Michael Baigent, one of the co-authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. He and his colleagues recently challenged Dan Brown in the British court system for plaigerizing. They lost their case, but gathered huge amounts of publicity, which translated into book sales, and in the midst of it out comes this latest offering that is sub-titled, Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. Coincidence?

There seems to be a cycle of these kinds of books. Every few years out comes another little batch filled with what purports to be 'new evidence' that Jesus did not die, Jesus did not rise, Jesus did not exist, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, or whatever the latest flavor of the month might be. With some of his own flourishes, Michael Baigent actually warms over and adapts the arguments of Hugh Schonfield, whose book, The Passover Plot, was published while I was in seminary -- and I remember clearly the delight I had in watching Michael Green, who taught me New Testament, using careful scholarship to demolish it and show was a shallow piece of work it was.

Well, just like alien space craft crashing near Roswell, NM, or extra-terrestrial research taking place at Area 51, there are some bad ideas that never die. Indeed, what Baigent and, earlier, Schonfield mostly do is re-present notions that have been around for at least 1900 years and regularly come up for air. Baigent writes well, and some of the things he asserts are fascinating, but the book is a little bit like attempting to make a fine Persian rug with colored grasses!

What fascinates me about all these kinds of books is that there are extraordinary juxtapositionings of ideas, facts, half-facts, and fictions, and then they are all tied together and something is made of them. Furthermore, they read like papers I wrote when a student, where I would attempt to make a huge case with very, very limited information. For a time, I thought I was a master at making one or two pertinent points stretch for ten pages, until a professor called my bluff and threw the paper back with a failing grade. At that point the penny dropped, if I was going to write something with substance I needed to do the requisite research and preparation.

As I read Baigent, I find that he doesn't stack up well against the great New Testament and Church History scholars whose work I have delighted in over the years: Oscar Cullmann, Joachim Jeremias, Tom Wright, Leon Morris, E. Earle Ellis, Howard Marshall, William Barclay, C. H. Dodd, Charlie Moule, and so many others. Reading his stuff is like watching a club golfer trying to make his way in an Open Championship at St. Andrew's. He might get some good shots off here and there, but he is no match for the real pros.

Again, as I read Baigent, I found my own brain putting some interesting connections together. There is a flavor about his writing that seemed to ring bells with me and I found myself asking where I had read material presented in this kind of way before. Finally, I realized that there seemed to be an affinity between Baigent and the way that John Shelby Spong writes. A pleasing style takes limited scholarship, evidence, and facts, and somehow manages to weave something interesting but highly questionable out of it.

The problem with The Da Vinci Code and its flotilla of other products is that these things get the kind of marketing that rebuttals will never get. Tom Hanks playing the lead role in the movie of The Da Vinci Code is going to be heard and believed by far more people than the attractive written response of a Lee Strobel (which I would thoroughly recommend).

People have always loved stories, and what these detractors from Gospel truth have done is to hijack the story and make it their tool for presenting their question mark that they want to raise over the Christian faith as it has been revealed. Somehow or other, in this age when narrative and illustration goes far further than careful argument, we have to learn how to repossess the form of the story so that it grabs the attention of those who are seeking after truth, much as Jesus's parables did for his followers two thousand years ago.

This is the point where scholarship, faithfulness, artistry, media talent, and resources intersect. It is not that the church does not have access to these (although perhaps not the financial resources that are available to Hollywood, etc.), but it does have an abiding story that when artistically presented catches imaginations. I find myself wondering whether it is an accident that this latest surge of pseudo-scholarly attacks on the faith come three or four years after "The Passion of the Christ" was in the cinemas, or maybe I am paranoid.

Yes, it is important that we challenge with evidence these cases which are made with such slender evidence, but it is also important that somehow we find a way to winsomely and wonderfully present the alternative case.

The other day a friend suggested I look at the Author's Note at the end of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Anne Rice is not a writer I have taken a lot of interest in, but at my friend's urging I got the book and found myself fascinated, for here is a novelist who really understands the importance of careful, methodical research and scholarship. In this afterword she tells of her journey from old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, through atheism, and back to the Christian faith.

As she had prepared to write this book she had expected that she would find fellow travellers among the more skeptical writers and scholars who have flourished since the Enlightenment, "and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud" (Page 312). She goes on, "In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it -- that whol picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years -- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read."

Her assessment becomes even more tart: "I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts" (Page 314).

I, too, sense that there is this dislike of Jesus in certain corners of the church, but that dislike turns to something stronger in the writing of a Dan Brown, a Michael Baigent, and others. All this means that those of us who love Jesus with heart, soul, mind, and strength, have our work cut out.

Outside of Logic and Reason

Some Holy Weeks and Easters have been a romp for me, others have been more like marathons -- this one has fitted into the latter category. So here I am on Easter Monday, exhausted and shell-shocked, sitting at my computer mulling over the last few days. Two things have kept coming back. The one is what I would consider to be the interrelated furor of the Gospel of Judas and the renewed interest in The Da Vinci Code sparked by the outcome of the High Court trial in London. The other was a conversation I had at our Easter Egg hunt with a young father whose family are on the fringes of our congregation.

While mothers and kids were scampering around the yard of the home where the Easter egg hunt was taking place, this young dad and I got talking about video games and gaming. That morning, as I had "chaplained" the YMCA Soccer Field opposite the church, and had noticed a geeky looking guy sitting apart from other parents. I had approached him with the eagerness of a Golden Retriever puppy, only to be held at bay by an icy glare.

It was then that I caught sight of the magazine he was reading while supposedly watching his seven-year-old daughter play soccer: an online games publication. It didn't take a split second to deduce that this parent was a loner whose life to some degree revolved around the fantasy world of an online game (or two). I backed off, but raised the subject in the afternoon when talking to this dad about his first grader's interests and how they are attempting to steer him away from getting lost in games.

The afternoon dad is in the retail business, and began talking about how big the games industry already is, and how big it is going to become. I was already aware of some of this from television, radio, and other news outlets, but Adam quickly gave a seminar in its growth curve, and how deeply it had dug into the lives of so many of their contempories and their children. I confess that my computer game experience has been limited to an occasional round of Freecell and variations on Tetris, but I have been amazed when browsing through places like Circuit City to see how realistic so many games now are. I can fully recognize how easy it would be for an impressionable or compulsive person to get caught up in this fake world to the exclusion of reality.

I have written before about my concern over our increasing inability to relate cause and effect, or action and consequence. Now here I was being given the alarming picture of just how big is another component of our culture that is facilitating this separation of reality from fantasy or imagination. It would seem that it is a sign of inner health to be able to allow an interplay of your inner being with the world around you so that each is appropriately interpreting the one to the other. All of us have mental boltholes into which we escape, but the majority know the difference between a pleasing fantasy and the reality around us.

However, I found myself wondering whether this indulgence in online entertainment is yet another erosive factor attempting to give the fantasy world a far higher profile than is appropriate for mental, emotional, and spiritual health. It may be harmless for two small boys to slip into the character of their favorite figure in Star Wars and then to spend several happy hours acting their imaginary world out, but is there a point in a person's development where such an ability is first counter-productive and then even dangerous?

I don't have any answers to such questions, but it seems that in the world of entertainment and illusion in which we live today, there are increasing numbers of individuals for whom this is a relevant question -- and will it go further? Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was made bearable for its inhabitants by large doses of illusion and consequence-less sex: how far have we proceded down this road?

This all then ties into what I perceive to be the fraying of the edges as we look at the wider world and irrational or a non-logical disconnect between actions and consequences. It may be good that postmodernity takes intuition more seriously (something I rejoice in as an off-the-Myers-Briggs-chart intuitive), but we cannot allow intuition and the warm fuzzies to take over in such a way that we abandon reason and logic.

Not only do we seem to be doing so, but this in turn is doing damage to the fabric of our culture and society. For example, falling in love (clearly a non-logical experience informed by Hollywood romances) has in the minds of millions become more important than remaining married -- with the most awful consequences. Or individuals are eager to buy themselves out of melancholy with ther credit cards, all the time ignoring the fact that eventually the bills need to be paid. In politics, business, world affairs, the life of the churches, we see equally abherent behaviors.

Which brings me to The Da Vinci Code and the Gospel of Judas. I love the comment of Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary following a conversation with A. J. Levine of Vanderbilt Divinity School, recorded in his blog about the Gospel of Judas before it was aired on National Geographic, that "we need to all have our baloney detection meters set to 'heightened alert' as we watch the special on the Gospel of Judas tonight."

In the following days Dr. Witherington in his blog (http://benwitherington.blogspot.com), unpacks this 2nd or even 3rd Century Coptic Gnostic piece using all the tools of modern biblical and historical research to demonstrate the baloney factor. He then goes on through Holy Week in his blog to take on James Tabor's book about Jesus founding his own dynasty -- with the same acute baloney meter in play. Here is a scholar using reason and intelligence to debunk something that is rather interesting but has very limited foundation in facts.

Yet, alas, our culture does not listen to the Ben Witherington's of this world, but the Dan Brown's who then take this half-baked scholarship and make a ripping yarn from it, and there is no doubt that The Da Vinci Code is a fabulous story. However, here again we see the inability of people to separate truth from fiction because having enjoyed the tale, there are many who have swallowed the Mary Magdalene mother of Jesus's children thesis. A few years ago it was "The Celestine Prophecy" that filled this kind of role.

There is much that was lost in the modern Enlightenment Age which we have in recent years begun to recover, and to our enrichment, but we do ourselves untold harm if we do so at the expense of rational and logical thinking. If I ruled the world, as the old song goes, I would insist that every high schooler take at least two or three semesters of good old elementary logic as a requirement for graduation. I would also provide remedial courses in logic in colleges, universities, and workplace in-service training.

The value of learning to think logically is that it helps you ask the right questions and to root out the fallacies upon which more and more of our postmodern life is founded. It feeds our internal baloney meter. It is like a correctional lens that helps us to see reality with a clarity that we might otherwise be missing. It is when we see reality clearly that we are able to recognize the place of Christ within this brew that is human life, and to minister Christ appropriately.

The Millennium Development Goals

The other day one of our deputies to General Convention wrote to several of us, "There will be a great deal of pressure on us... to support the MDGs. In principle it is difficult for Christians to be against such lofty goals." The email then raised several concerns that this particular deputy had, asking for insight from this little group.

If you don't know or don't remember what the Millennium Development Goals are they are as follows:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

The goals were established within the context of the United Nations in 2000, and have resulted in unprecedented efforts by many governments and groupings around the world to respond to these international needs and challenges.

Just glancing at them, they are hard to gainsay, especially for citizens of God's Kingdom. Having worked in global ministry until relatively recently and done a lot of traveling around the world as a result, I can from experience and observation say that each one of these targets is vital for the health and future of humanity. So, in many respects this should be a no-brainer for believers.

It seems that the problem with the MDGs comes in the unpacking and the application of them. As a Christian who has the privilege of a roof over my head, food on my table, adequate healthcare and access to education, then I have the obligation laid upon me by the compassion of Christ to take seriously the wants and needs of those who have few of these blessings -- which is a huge slice of the world's population. The conversation that Jesus had with his disciples which is recorded in Matthew 25:1ff makes clear the obligation of the agape (love) to which we are bound as the greatly blessed followers of the Lamb of God.

Yet the question is just how we are going to attack even the small sliver of these goals of which we are capable. This seems to be one of the places where we come apart because the bodies engaged in this task that some trust others do not. In response to this question about the MDGs were responses, for example, that denigrated the United Nations or praised it. (BTW, I think there is a different perception of the UN among those of us who come from smaller, weaker nations, than that held by so many Americans, citizens of the most powerful nation in the world). There are also very mixed feelings about the Christian and church agencies that might involve themselves in this work.

Having worked internationally, as well as being concerned about those we support who are able to put boots on the ground, food in bellies, and schoolbooks on desks, there is also the huge issue of accountability. After having been misled by even the most godly people, when I was working with Global South dioceses and in Russia, it became my practice when visiting somewhere that might be the recipient of resources to ask to see the accountant. I would also try to discover the network of interrelationships among those who would administer work at the receiving end, for in some places those with a job have a primary obligation to family, clan, or tribe.

The reason for this carefulness was simple: it did not matter how good people's theology might be, or how much they said they loved the Lord Jesus, money and resources going into so many places where they were a scarce commodity would too often get channelled off into other pockets or to meet other needs than those being funded. We might tut, tut, over this, but quite honestly it happens in the developed world as has been seen from some of the scandals that have surrounded certain significant philanthropies. Those of us called to administer funds and resources not only have a responsibility to the recipients, but also to the donors.

So, when trying to assess things like the Millennium Development Goals there are a whole series of questions that need to be asked and answered. Not only if these are appropriate goals for Christians to put their weight behind, but also how we are to approach the challenge, which challenges we are going to take on for ourselves, who is going to administer the work we commit to undertaking, and who is going to be accountable for the right use of funds and resources at every stage of the process. There are more questions, but these are a good starting point.

A further concern has to be what will happen to monies that might released for other work as a result of donations from the rich world, especially if one of the key partners is the government of a nation. If, for example, we put funding that might help with the area of public elementary education, will the government then withdraw funding from there and use it to help buy the president a jet or add another armored vehicle to that country's army? And if this happens, would this be a good thing or a bad thing?

Which brings us back to the goals themselves. In principle they all look pretty good to me, but the way I might interpret them, given my biblical Christian worldview and presuppositions, might be very different from the way that a secular body would interpret them. For example, having seen child mortality at first hand in needy countries, I am deeply moved by the reality behind simple song we all learned that "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world..." This means feeding, clothing, medicating, and educating must be on the front burner, but how do we relate to those for whom challenging child mortality means preventing the birth of "unwanted" children by means of abortion?

Since being asked this far-reaching question I have found myself trying to frame my own personal response to the Millennium Development Goals, which I have not had to this point. I have concluded that they are in principle a valuable tool to use to measure our involvement with the needs of the world, and that we as Christians will be failing in our discipleship if we do not support them. However, I would further suggest that there should then be a multiplicity of ways of responding creatively to them in our policy-making, giving, and involvement.

First, passing ecclesiastical legislative affirmations of them is cheap and easy, and is something American mainline Christians love to do, but developing a trusted partnership in the Global South requires a lot more effort -- and then the willingness to back that effort with years and years of support and follow through. We are even worse at that.

For a number of years now, my wife has worked with a particular Sudanese refugee camp in northern Uganda providing scholarships in an elementary school that is run by one of the Sudanese dioceses. Each year seventy or more students, primarily girls, have had their needs covered by parishes and individuals in the Diocese of Tennessee. This isn't big, but it makes a huge difference that could be amplified over the years as Southern Sudan settles down to nation building. I like such hands-on micro-partnerships very much because there is a relationship that does good and by its very nature demands accountability.

But there is a component of these goals that I have not looked at yet, and that is to "ensure environmental sustainability." This one comes home to each of us and our lifestyles. Those of us in the developed world, however responsible we seek to be, are the most profligate in the use of the world's resources. This is having its impact on the climate globally, which is surely going to lead to a lot of tears as a relatively short period of time passes. When the environment is handled irresponsibly, the poor and needy are almost always the first to be hurt.

This requires each of us to look at the way we live, the way we do transportation, the way we do church, the way we educate our children, and so forth, to ask some pretty fundamental questions, and then to act upon them. It may be politically correct to trumpet the value of the MDGs from the housetops, but are we prepared to take these goals into our own houses and start asking what the real implication is for ourselves and the way we manage our lives? This is where the rubber really does hit the road.

There is a lot to be dealt with in a question like the one that was asked by our deputy, and I am grateful to have been asked it. I do not know how adequate my responses are, but I would hope they are a springboard from which those who are brighter, more intelligent, and more dynamic than myself might launch themselves.

How Are The Boomers Aging?

It was an article in last Sunday's New York Times (March 26, 2006) that brought back to my mind the plight of Boomers. On the business page was a relatively small piece about the median size of the inheritance that Boomers are receiving from their parents' generation. Many had been hoping for gazillions, but what they are getting is around $29,000. As the article pointed out, once nursing home bills are paid, and so forth, the average Boomer will get about enough to buy little more than a new car.

But that isn't all. Social Security is now on an age scale that is sliding upward, and 65 is no longer the assured retirement age for this generation and those coming afterward. Then there are all these corporations who have found their traditional pension schemes too onerous and are transferring across to 401k plans. This means that those in their forties and fifties who are caught in the middle of this alteration are suddenly looking at far less in the way of a retirement haul than they had anticipated.

Add to all this the fact that the Boomers have been famously profligate with their funds, and it looks as if this a good portion of this generation is facing a financially bleak old age. All this is before assessing the price of healthcare, something all of us are going to need a lot more of in years to come, and is being
delivered through an expensive and tottering system. It would seem that a huge number of Boomers are going to have to work, and work hard, well into what we consider today to be old age. In addition, they are often going to find themselves doing it without the family support that they want and need.

Programmed to be self-actualizing, Boomers have not only been profligate in the way they have used their money, they have also been profligate with relationships. Marriages too often have been treated as disposable, which has meant that relationships with children (spouses, and former spouses) have been tenuous or badly damaged. While past generations of aging parents have been able to look to their offspring for assistance with growing old, many in this generation are in a big fix on this front.

As the first wave of Boomers is reaching sixty and is beginning to think about its golden age, it is discovering that the currency of these "bonus years" has acquired quite a tarnish. I have been talking and writing about this for quite a while now, but most of the time my observations have been greeted with the "How interesting" kind of response, and the page has been quickly turned so the subject can be changed. For many a Boomer just the idea of being old is hard to digest!

This does not mean that all Boomers are going to have a rough time of it. We are both sixty, and while Rosemary and I will certainly not be rich, as things look right now we are well placed for an active "retirement" that will be adequately financed (unless the whole world economic system collapses, and then we will all be in trouble!). There are millions like us who have paid our Social Security, have good pension funds, have salted savings away, have taken care of our real estate, and have managed to educate our children and maintain an excellent relationship with them.

As we look at the Boom Generation, it seems likely, however, that there will be a strong mismatch between the Haves and the Have-nots. Some of us will be able to travel, live in our dream house, and watch our grandchildren grown from toddlerdom to adulthood, while others could well find themselves living in seedy isolation, working as greeters at Walmart, and be attached to the world through our Internet umbilical cords. My nightmare vision for certain males of our generation is that they will live alone in a one-room apartment indulging as they are able in the excesses of gambling and pornography that the online world is able to offer.

One thing that we can be certain of is that retirement is not going to be the same for the rising generation of elders. While the G.I. and Silent generations were able to look forward at a relatively early age to hanging up their cleats and settling into an easier and less stressful existence, possibly in some resort area in the country, Boomers face a much more bracing time, and this will present some
extraordinary challenges to those in ministry.

For example, as we get older we spend more time pondering our mortality. I am watching my contemporaries succumb to various complaints and diseases of aging, whether it be cancer or arthritis. Some of my peers are beginning to die as a result of their ailments, while others are unable to live the active and freer lives that they had anticipated by this point in their earthly journey. As these realities press in upon us, there is every reason to do what Boomers have spent little time doing, and that is wondering if there is anything after this.

I first focused on this in a big way when I wrote Brave New Church several years ago, and as I look back over the chapter about The Fast Approaching Gray Wave in that book, I see few reasons to radically modify my forecasts. This is a great opportunity for the churches, but I do not see us taking it seriously, and few if any have any strategies in place.

During the last couple of years we have been thinking about what might come when in due course we hang up our spurs here. What should we do, if our health holds steady, with those years that God gives to us when we do not have to be out there in the marketplace earning our keep any more. Right now we only have ideas, but they will be relatively easy to flesh out as the reality approaches and we become more focused on the task. What we are certain of is that ministry will not cease but will go on. Freed from the need of a package of salary and benefits it is possible that we will be able to take on tasks for which there are no funds available, or even to focus our ministry on working with our peers who have spend the whole of their lives at odds with the Christian faith and organized Christianity.

There are, in fact, all sorts of wonderfully creative things that churches and elder Christians are able to pioneer and to do. There is also a huge amount of incredible talent that is being wasted on golf courses all over the country, as Christians with fabulous skills to share have no outlet, so as a result they let themselves go to seed.

In a culture that is as youth-oriented and youth-fixated as ours, it is extremely difficult to raise much interest in the elder generation, but in many ways it is the next ministry frontier, and there are profound possibilities for the future. The problem is that these possibilities will not be noticed until they are upon us. Actually, with an older than average membership, North American Anglicans are beautifully placed to begin doing something about all this, but I suspect we are too engrossed in our own ecclesiastical navel-gazing to be able to do much constructive about it.

Email Daily Devotions

One of our ministries at the Church of the Apostles, South Williamson County, Tennessee, during the last three years has been an email Daily Devotion.

Each Monday to Friday it is delivered to your email box every morning and provides a Scripture Reading, a Thought for the Day, a Topic for Thanksgiving, a Topic for Intercession, a short Collect, and the readings from the Daily Lectionary for that particular day.

It is now being used by people in various parts of the world, and we invite you to receive them. If you would like to give it a try then email me at RichardKew@aol.com.

If you don't like it after you have given it a try you can always email to get yourself removed from the list...

We are working on putting together a new website for the Church of the Apostles, and it will include not ony the usual stuff, but access to the Daily Devotions, as well as audio and video from our worship each Sunday. Our website has not been updated for a while because we are in this transitional period, but you can find us at

Ecclesiastical Meditions from a Lawnmower

It is that time of the year again in Middle Tennessee: plenty of rain, warm sunshine, sweet breezes, all of which make the grass grow and bring the mower back to the lawn. Just as against all reason my wife enjoys ironing, so I get pleasure from mowing the lawn, especially during these last couple of years that we have had a riding mower! Mowing gives a person time to think, and this afternoon I did.

As is always the case with lawnmower meditations my mind was initially all over the place, but little by little it became focused on one concern. In this case it was a comment made by a lay friend who left ECUSA for AMiA, and who said to me the other week, almost in wonderment, that it amazed him that folks like me had hung on for so long. I confess there are days when it amazes me, and regularly I have to ask myself whether it has to do with native stubbornness, the fact that I am so deeply entrenched in the Pension Fund, or what?

Besides, aren't evangelicals like me supposed to be sticklers for correct theology, so why on earth am I clinging to the hopeless wreckage of a church that is so compromised some folks find it difficult to think of it as a church? Yes, we are sticklers, and I think that in the last few years I have become more of a doctrinal stickler than ever, but this is precisely the reason I stay rather than taking my toys elsewhere, although elsewhere would a lot more comfortable.

As I rode my mower, the spring breeze in my face, I started to ennumerate reasons why I stay. As I have said before, it is certainly not because I still love the Episcopal Church as a denomination. Respect for ECUSA has long since evaporated, and my attitude toward those in leadership is somewhere along a continuum from disdain to despair. But as my friend, Bishop Ed Little, wrote in Christianity Today just recently, quoting another friend, Bishop Jeffrey Steenson, "The true identity of the church as Christ's body is in no way diminished by the imperfections of its human members."

Bishops Ed and Jeff are neither of them saying something new, because doesn't the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion state that "in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments?" (Article XXVI). The compilers of the Articles did not make this up, they were standing on the shoulders of the likes of St. Augustin of Hippo, and neither was Augustine out on a limb of his own because he was merely extrapolating from the words of our Lord Jesus.

When Jeffrey Steenson was a seminarian and I was his field education supervisor, I remember having several conversations about Jesus's parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30), and about the Net (Matthew 13:47-50), where the Lord makes it blatantly clear that it is not for us to measure the visible community of faith. It is when time is wrapped up and eternity begins that the Sovereign Judge who knows the secrets of all hearts will work that one out, separating sheep from goats.

It is because I want to be faithful to Scripture that I am still part of the Episcopal Church of the USA. The seamless robe of Christ has been torn just too many times for me to want to be part in ripping it further. I understand the discomforts that have led so many to leave, but understanding does not give me permission to follow.

Another significant reason is rooted in the history of our Anglican tradition, especially its evangelical emphasis. We evangelicals look particularly fondly upon Thomas Cranmer, the Reformation Archbishop of Canterbury, who did not demolish the historic structures of the church, merely renewed them by cleansing from the tradition unnecessary accretions that had attached themselves to English Christianity during the centuries leading up to the 16th.

Deep within our spiritual DNA is the assumption that if God could reform then, then he will enable reformation again. Of course, we assume reformation is essential for within our consciousness is the Reformation's watchword, Semper Reformandum. The church is, in one way or another, always in need of reformation, and that reformation will not take place if all those with a reformation vision march rapidly for the doors as soon as things get uncomfortable.

But as well as being the spiritual children of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, we are also the spiritual children of those Puritans who stayed after the Restoration of the monarchy following the English Civil War and Commonwealth. With so many of their fellows leaving as part of what became known as the Great Ejection in 1662, it was not easy for those stalwarts who stuck with the Church of England to do so, but they did and much that was good in following generations can be traced back to this particular root.

Since then there have been other opportunities to leave, like the rise of Methodism, and the cruel demise of Anglicans on this side of the Atlantic following the War of Independence, but often from that tiny handful who have stuck it out have come the seeds of future renewals and revivals of faith. Evangelical Anglicanism has this tenacious streak, and deep within it is a providential sense that God has put us in this tradition for an hour like this.

There is still more, for it is love of biblical truth that makes us want to challenge the excesses of overt error. We are not given the truth to keep it carefully protected, wrapped in cotton, hidden in a bank vault, but to be put to use. Being a bearer of truth means willingly entering into debate and dialogue with those who have missed the point when measured by revelation and the catholic faith, for it is only by engagement that minds, hearts, and souls are changed. This does not mean that we believe we have got it right, for all of us are called to measure our convictions against the scrutiny of Scripture's message.

I guess this is why I echo the words of Ed Little:

Why do I not join those who have left or are leaving? Why do I stay? Serving a broken and divided church is a hard calling, and I do not minimize the difficulty of the task or the inevitable disappointments that I will encounter on the journey. But the Lord, for his good purpose, has (I humbly believe) thrown into one church Christians of radically different and sometimes theologically incompatible perspectives. Is it possible that in the midst of this painful discontinuity, he may do a work that none of us can foresee? It is in that hope and in remembering that he is Lord of the church and in charge of the big picture that I follow Jesus in the Episcopal Church.