Since those who sing, pray twice and since sometimes
we have to pray something for a long time before we believe it (and even longer before we live it) I want us to begin this time by having us stand and sing a
hymn that I imagine is familiar across the diocese. (I realize in my travels
that there are in fact very few hymns from that blue Hymnal that one can say that about, because our musical traditions
across this diocese are pretty diverse. But I think I can say it about this
one, which is called, I Come With Joy. There are copies of it in your packets today. The poem was written by Brian
Wren, who was born in 1936 and the tune is called Land of Rest. Since no one wants me to lead this, I have asked Cricket
to get us started…
+ +
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Recently I had occasion to meet with the vestry and
interim at Trinity Church in Ware. It was (I know that you will find this hard
to believe) a snowy night. I pulled in on the street to park, a bit worried
about if my car was close enough to the curb. But of course the snow was out
from the curb so there was no choice. I pulled in behind someone I would learn
very shortly was on the vestry at Trinity and I said, “am I ok here” and he
assured me I was. And then this other woman, clearly unknown to him and
shoveling some snow – directly across from the church—asked him this question,
“what kind of church is this?”
I heard him say, “we’re an Episcopal Church” and I
could tell even as I stepped out of my car that she was not going to have any
idea what that meant, and he would need to dig deeper. He did not disappoint. And
so he, and then a few minutes later I, began to engage her in conversation. She
shared a lot in a short time with us: that she was in recovery, that she’d been
raised Roman Catholic, but was now attending, or had been attending, a
charismatic church. But she was still looking, still searching and so she was wondering,
“what kind of church is this?” And he told her it was the kind of place where
she would be welcomed, and that he thought might be what she was looking for,
and he invited her to “come and see.”
He did great, and I pray that every Episcopalian in
this diocese (and especially every vestry person) is able to respond as gracefully as he did. It helps us to have a kind of three-minute elevator
speech, I think. I brought the question inside with me and we continued that conversation
a bit with the whole group: what kind of church is this? And the follow up: what kind of church are you becoming, with God’s help? Avoiding the insider
language that the average person does not necessarily understand, how would you
answer that question? What kind of church are we? And how do we translate that
in a way that is both accessible to the stranger, and still true to our core
values?
I submit to you that if you don’t yet have a good
answer to that question, then perhaps Brian Wren’s hymn is as good a place as
any to start. It’s focused on Jesus. It’s Eucharistic. It’s about hospitality
to the stranger. It’s about our call to be ambassadors of reconciliation. It’s
about our call to go into the world so that the service can begin, and to
spread the good news, sometimes even with words. What kind of church are we? I pray we are a place where strangers are becoming
friends.
I come with joy to meet my Lord, forgiven loved, and free / In awe and wonder to recall his life laid down for me.
Our faith is deeply personal and God calls us by
name, and then claims us and seals us and marks us forever. So I come, but never
alone:
I come with Christians far and near to find as all are fed / The new community of love in Christ’s communion bread
Dayenu. This would be
enough. But there's more. We come to communion to
discover community and the promise that where two are three are gathered in his
name he is there, among us, with us, through us. Even in Lent, the Risen Christ
deigns to be our guest. And then gives us the work of reconciliation.
As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends. / That love that made us makes us one, and strangers now are friends.
And thus with joy we meet our Lord, his presence always near / is in such friendship better known, we see and praise him here.
Together met, together bound, we’ll go our different ways / And as his people in the world, we’ll live and speak his praise.
Now here is my question for you this afternoon. Do
you believe all that? And if you do believe it, then here is an even harder
question: is what you sing with your lips being made manifest in the life of your congregation? Are we acting in ways that make this prayer’s claims real? Is it the
kind of place where strangers are becoming friends?
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Most of my time is spent with the congregations in
the eastern part of our diocese. One weekend I arrived at Grace, Oxford and the
sign outside said, “Welcome Canon Simpson.” The whole neighborhood knew I was
there! And while I have known the priest there for many years, most of the people
there were strangers to me. But probably more than any other place I have
visited, there seemed to be an intentionality to build relationships and to
welcome me – for strangers to become friends—and for that I remain grateful.
But I also need to say that is not the norm. I think
we “frozen chosen” are better than we once were, but we have miles to go before
we reach our destination. There is lots we can do, and need to do and even in
Oxford there are “next steps” to take. Always with God’s help…
I know that there is some percentage of us here
today that are in recovery from one addiction or another, and still more of us
who come from families where addiction has left a mark. I’m not asking for a
show of hands, but my guess is that it’s a fairly high percentage. Many of us find
the “twelve steps” to be a vital resource for our spirituality, and we rely on
those steps as a way to the higher power we name as God the Holy Trinity.
So I would wager to say that most of us here today are familiar at least with step
one of the twelve steps, but for anyone who is not, it is about admitting that we
are powerless over alcohol or whatever it is that we are addicted to, and that
our lives have become unmanageable. In other words, step one is about admitting
that we have a problem.
I hear it again and again in my travels (and I know
the bishop and my canon colleagues hear it also) – “Canon Simpson, this is a friendly congregation. We are like family. We welcome everybody.”
Now without shaming anyone, I want to say that we
are by and large in denial about this problem we have when we continue to say we
don’t have a problem. Step one for us is to admit that this has become
unmanageable for us. Berkshires, Pioneer Valley, Worcester County: we do not,
as a whole, do a very good job at welcoming the stranger into our midst. So
let’s just admit that and work on it. People do walk in on a Sunday morning and
no one says hello to them and they are not invited to coffee hour, and then
they leave disappointed and they never come back. Strangers do not become
friends. And we miss the living Christ in our midst.
Is this too strong an indictment? I have worried a bit
about what I knew I wanted to say today; like most clergy I like to be liked. I
want to tell the truth and still have you smile and say, “you know he’s right…”
without having this come across as if I’m judging your congregation or you. I’m
just trying to say what I see. And a lot
of this is cultural. There is a reason why people don’t tend to talk about northern hospitality. I have a theory
about this. We have these long, cold winters, and they take a toll on us. Hathy
and I moved a year and a half ago into a new neighborhood, without young
children because we are now empty-nesters. In the summer we see our neighbors
out in the yard and we smile and wave. But for like nine months a year as the
snow piles up we hibernate. To be hospitable to the stranger, for the most part
in this part of the world, is a countercultural act. We have to learn how to do
it. We have to practice it. With God’s help.
But we keep ourselves from taking that risk, I
think, when we claim to be “like a family.” I want to “exegete that text” and
suggest that this is part of the problem. And let me just say that I love my
family. But the problem with families (my own included) is that most of them have
issues, even the healthiest of them. No, let me correct that: all of them have issues; some more
intense than others. And even in the healthiest of families, they all have
their own insider language and their own stories. Thanksgiving with my family
of origin can leave me feeling about 15 or so – which makes my brother Jimmy
about 14, Susie about 10 and Tricia 7. A great Thanksgiving is when no one ends
up in tears! We may all be adults and more or less successful people in our
communities, and we all have children of our own. But family gatherings have
the potential to bring out the worst in us – and the worst in me. And it’s really
not fun when that happens for any of us, but especially it isn’t fun for the
in-laws and for our kids.
Recently I was meeting with a vestry and someone
said that the parish was “just like a family.” I bit my tongue and waited; I’m
learning how to do that better as canon to the ordinary. And then I asked: “in
what ways?” And what the person said was real, and authentic, and lovely. They
said, because you can always go home, no matter what. If this is what we mean
by family, that is so beautiful. If the church is ready to run out with open
arms to welcome home the prodigal child, I’m there.
But of course we all know that not every family is
exactly like that. As a pastor I was always amazed how many extended families
have people who are estranged from the family for a whole variety of reasons. And
they don’t feel like they can come home. More often, in my experience,
congregations are like family in the dysfunctional ways I have named. We should
ponder a bit about what it’s like to try to break into a close-knit family.
Imagine attending a family reunion that has been happening every year for
thirty years, in the same place – the same food, the same stories. And now you
are the boyfriend or the girlfriend of a member of that family and this is your
first such gathering. How does that make you feel? How does it make you feel if
no one notices you for the first three hours, but they keep saying, “we’re such
a close family!” How does it make you feel if the menu is always roast beef and
it’s always been roast beef, and you are a vegan?
So:
step one: admitting we have a problem. I think there is a
reason that Wren’s poem avoids the family language and focuses instead on “the
new community of love” and on friendship. And he doesn’t mean being friendly
with our friends. He means creating a space where strangers now are friends.
As a general rule I think in many if not most of our
congregations, the insiders see Sunday morning as a day to catch up on church
business. So wardens and rectors and vestry and staff are tempted to talk with
each other, not the stranger. If I had a nickel for every person who has said
to me, “I wanted to talk to that newcomer but I needed to see the senior warden
first.” NO! The stranger will slip away every time. The senior warden is very
likely to be the last to leave!
As a rule, ushers are tempted to be engaged in
conversation with the person they have known for twenty years, as the stranger
slips in and is handed a bulletin with barely an upward gaze. Sometimes the
usher just grunts. They seem to have been trained not to offer hospitality but
to perform the menial task of handing over a bulletin which to many of our
guests seems to be written in a foreign language.
On the whole, we are not very good at welcoming the
stranger, and yet this is a mandate of the gospel. There are some tasks of
Gospel work that are really hard. We have been focused on some of those in trying
to be more vital congregations in today’s workshops. For Episcopalians, leaving
the building and heading to the streets and sharing the good news – sometimes
even with words – on a soccer field or a dance recital – this is really hard. That
“e” word part of our Baptismal Covenant—evangelism—is
surely a place for growth. So we need to remember that Jesus did not ever say it
would be easy and we need to ask God to be with us through the Holy Spirit as
we do that work for always we do it with God’s help.
The problem is that most of us suffer from amnesia.
We are (I venture to say every single person who would attend a Parish
Leadership Day – ordained and lay) all insiders. We are, dare I say it, too
often more like a family, and not in the good ways. And so we forget. We forget
what it is I like to be the stranger – the outsider.
Except maybe when we come to an event like this.
When there are so many people we don’t know, people from other congregations.
Now this is not really super threatening, but it’s a good laboratory for us.
Here we are, just our little extended Episcopal “family” from this part of
Massachusetts that is west of 495 to the New York border, with some Lutherans
thrown in to spice it up a bit. (I love it when the spicy Lutherans are around!)
We have to admit that we have a problem embracing
this work. I know we have a problem because even with a collar on and a fancy
job title I walk into congregations and you know what happens? I say, “Hi, I’m Rich Simpson.” And you know what happens
far too often? Well, watch…
Hi, I’m Rich Simpson. (Pam: I know who you are…)
Hi, I’m Rich Simpson (Steve: Yeah we’ve met before…)Come on, Bishop – show us how it’s done:
·
Hi, I’m Rich Simpson. (Doug: Hey, welcome, I’m Doug Fisher. I hear you are
a fan of The Boss…)
Those first two responses put the burden back on me
and whether intended or not, they put me a little on the defensive. We may well
have met before, but if it was in line at church or at Leadership Day, I was
probably meeting a lot of new people then. The third response offers an opening
– an invitation. A welcome. We can move forward. A wall has not been erected… We
can begin to engage, and maybe strangers will become friends.
I didn’t make up these responses you know. The first
two are more common than the third, no lie. Notice I said, “hi, my name is Rich Simpson.” I did not say, “Are you new here?” I did not say, “I don’t think we’ve met” –
precisely I know that maybe we have met three times already. I’m trying to get
a name out of you, because if I had it on the tip of my tongue then I’d say,
“Hey Pam…or hey Steve…or hey Doug.”
We are not alone. When I told my canon friends
across New England over lunch that I was going to do this I got an earful and could
not shut them up and they all told me I could use their congregational stories
anonymously when I said I didn’t want to name congregations. Each of them had the
same stories I have about walking into a congregation with their collars on
where they had just preached and celebrated minutes earlier, representing the
Bishop, and then went to coffee hour and stood there all alone. It does make
one wonder, doesn’t it, that if this is how the collars from the bishop’s
office get welcomed, then what it’s like to show up without a collar on and try to break into coffee hour.
One of my colleagues from a diocese that will not be
named told this great story of being all alone in coffee hour and then seeing
someone else all alone and going over to talk to them. It turned out they were
a newcomer! So they chatted and then my colleague introduced the newcomer to
the senior warden, who did take it from there and then later said, “that’s a
little embarrassing…” Yes. It is.
I know a lot of people don’t go to church when on
vacation or business, but I urge you to do that. Go into a congregation not
your own and see what happens. If they are really good at welcoming the
stranger, then you have some ideas to take home. And if they are really bad at
it, then you will have had the experience of what that’s like, so that maybe
the next stranger who walks into your congregation will catch your eye. We have
to hold each other accountable for doing this work better. We have to be intentional.
We need to expect guests.
Let me be really clear: I don’t say this to shame
anyone – please, we don’t need more shame in the church. Not ever. I say this because
I don’t think that anything I have to say today will have any meaning at all in
transforming your congregation unless we admit that we have a problem – as New
Englanders generally and as Episcopalians in particular. If we can admit that
we have a problem, then by God’s grace, we can come to believe that a power
greater than us can restore us to sanity and that we can do this, one day at a
time, with God’s help. So I’m pushing this hard, like an intervention – because
I want us to break out of denial, which is not just a river in Egypt!
Where to start? Let’s start with what not to
do. I want to shamelessly steal from a blog written by a guy I don’t know, but
this came to me by way of Facebook and I liked it. (Literally.) The guy’s name
is Thom Rainer. The post can be found here.
Take what is useful there and leave the rest. But here is the challenge I want to set before you: how can you go back home and go to Church tomorrow and try first just to see it through the eyes of a first-time guest? If you are just too churchy to do that then take that list of new friends you made today and let’s create a collaborative project. Find three people to come and visit your Church on a Sunday morning in cognito – no lying, but they don’t need to walk in and say, “hey I’m the senior warden at St. Swithin’s and I’m here to do some undercover work!” Or next time you have family or friends in town, go in two separate cars and ask them to be honest about their experience in your parish.
Take it all in as data – no judgment. But invite
them to tell you what they saw, what their experience was and ask them to be brutally
honest. Ask them if anyone said hello to them. Ask them to report back on the
website, the service, if anyone told them they were in the wrong pew, if they
could find coffee hour, if anyone spoke to them there. And then maybe they will
invite you to return the favor and do same in their congregation. Find some
twenty-something friends to do this and then have a conversation with them
about why young people aren’t flocking to our congregations and what you can do
about that. I think you will be surprised.
This raw data needs to be interpreted. Part of
what’s hard is that some people want to be recognized in worship and stand up
and say their name, but in my experience most do not want that kind of
attention the first time they are in a place. And in my humble opinion that is
a cop out; it turns the tables on the stranger and puts the burden on them. I’m
an extrovert and I would never go back to a church that made me feel I needed
to do that and I assure you my introverted wife wouldn’t go back. Rather, we
need to find ways to become more intentional. At the very least we need to talk
about this at vestry. We need to be strategic and purposeful We need to find the people who
have the gifts for hospitality and use them as greeters. We need to look around
in the pews to see who we don’t know and go talk to them.
We have to make a fearless inventory of our
congregations, so that we can make the corrections we need to make. You know we
often say these days that the days of people just walking in through the red
doors are over. And I agree, mostly. We have to do more. But listen – some people do come through those doors!
Lord have mercy on us if they take that risk in this day and age and leave feeling
that those Christians were “like a family reunion” that wanted nothing to do
with them…
Some people do come through those doors. Why? What
got them to do that? They just moved to a new community? They left another
denomination? They just went through a personal epiphany or a faith crisis? I
was recently in a parish in Worcester on Ash Wednesday when this
twenty-something couple came in and as a visitor myself it was obvious they
were visitors. I engaged with them after the liturgy; she’d grown up
Episcopalian and while they’d been worshiping recently in an emergent kind of
house church, she felt drawn on that day, the beginning of Lent, to touch base
with her roots.
I don’t know where that will lead if anywhere but I talked for about
twenty minutes with this young, engaged twenty-something couple who had a story
to tell.
So after they left, if someone asked them, “what
kind of church was that?” – what might they say? I hope they would say, at
least, that they felt they belonged and they felt welcomed and the liturgy and
sermon gave them some food for the journey, even if they never come back or
even if it just becomes an Ash Wednesday tradition for them. We simply miss too
many opportunities to engage with the stranger that are right before our very
eyes and this much is certain: if you don’t ever say hello to the stranger, the
chances of them becoming a friend are very slim. This ought to be the easy part! If someone comes in and leaves
without a single hello or they walk into coffee hour and feel like they are at
an eighth grade dance, we have to own that. And we have to do better…
Say “welcome.” You know, every time I log onto my
computer, it says “welcome.” And every time I go the Greendale YMCA in
Worcester, someone says “welcome” or maybe it’s “hey” or even a nod of the
head, depending on who it is. But my arrival is acknowledged. I don’t need to
be best friends, but it’s nice to be acknowledged. Every time I walk into Moe’s
in Shrewsbury they look up and shout, “welcome to Moe’s!” What if our greeters
and ushers did that? What if everyone in the narthex visiting before worship
turned to the stranger and said, “welcome
to Church?!”
On January 4, which was the Second Sunday of
Christmas (even though some places rushed the wise guys in 48 hours early) Hathy
and I went to church together at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Holden. I did not
wear a collar. In spite of the fact that we lived in that town for fifteen
years and in spite of the fact that there are deep bonds of affection between
St. Francis and Immanuel, I can still sneak in there and be pretty anonymous.
We went because my friend who is the pastor there does his first sermon of the
year in verse, and I have always thought that’s pretty cool. So we walk in on a
snowy morning and the guy walking in with us holds the door, a guy I’ve never
met and he says, “welcome.”
There may be more we can do but never should it be
less than this – less than what a laptop or employee at the Y or old spicy Swedish
Lutheran can do. Welcome! From the
Old English, wilcuma: a person whose
coming is pleasing.
Does it please us to have new people in our midst?
Do we expect it? Because if we do, we need to be intentional about how we’ll
let them know and build-in redundancies. Don’t rely on the ushers, but do re-train
them so they try. No one should be handed a bulletin without eye contact or a word
of welcome, but ushers need to be partnered with greeters whose sole job it is
to do this and perhaps help people find the nursery or let them know which
books we are using for worship. Don’t find a person or persons who people don’t
enjoy seeing. Here is the litmus test, and I say this with Christian charity
and with a deep awareness that we are all God’s beloved. (God is crazy about
all of us, but we have a variety of gifts.) The person who has no social skills
is not your greeter. The person does not need to be a used car salesman,
but does need to be someone who genuinely likes people, is warm and is willing
to learn some skills. Don’t say “are you new?” Say, “Welcome, I’m Rich
Simpson.” (Only better to use your own
name!) And hopefully they won’t say, “I know who you are…” And then everyone
needs to be deputized to cover a pew or a couple of pews so that if someone is
worshiping there and is a stranger to you, that you will not let them leave
without saying “hello…welcome.”
Can we work on this together, across this diocese?
We should be expecting guests every week and even when they aren’t there,
practicing so that when they are we don’t feel socially awkward. This means
that leaders – all of you—this is not your time to meet with the rector on
Sunday at coffee hour, or with each other. Greet the strangers, even if they have
been there six months or a year. If there is someone you don’t know, do NOT go
up to the rector and say, “hey, what’s that person’s name?” Go up and say,
“hello, my name is Rich Simpson…” Find out what they do and who they are and
where they have come from. Keep practicing what we practiced today and pay
attention. And listen. Act like you are welcoming them to your own home. And
then debrief what you are learning about this ministry of hospitality at vestry.
Not just the successes but the failures. Someone is going to forget and say,
“are you new here?” and that person is going to say, “I’ve been here going to
the 8 am service for forty-seven years buddy…” So don’t ask “are you new!” Practice
until it becomes second nature. And keep asking, how does a stranger feel here
today?
Announcements are a big one, I think. Don’t stand up
and say, “as everybody knows, it’s that time of the year again...” Introduce
yourself and state why you are taking time to stand up – are you the
stewardship chair or is a fair coming up that folks need to bake for or is
there a kids pageant? Write it out so you don’t ramble – so that you can be
clear. Tell them where you will be after worship if they want to learn more and
don’t say “I’ll be in the narthex” because they might not have any idea what a
narthex is. (My spellchecker doesn't even recognize that word, and wants to suggest I mean "earthen!")
As we get better at making some technical changes, some very small ones, it can lead us to deeper questions and to more adaptive change that goes beyond that initial welcome. As strangers start to become friends, it means we need to allow them space to move from being guests to becoming hosts. It means making space in our buildings and in our hearts and on our vestries and in the parish hall kitchen where the same group has been cooking the same supper for thirty-seven years. And in the sacristy. I am not suggesting that when a newcomer shows up say, “hello, welcome, you want to teach Sunday School?” Not good safe church practice! But the strangers who do come have gifts and after that initial welcome we need to learn what they want to do, and how they might use those gifts for the sake of God’s mission of mercy, compassion, and hope. We have too many ministries in our congregations that seem to be like Supreme Court Appointments and if people become LEMs or wardens until they die – then you only get about as many openings as a President gets over four years in office or maybe less. This is a problem!
As we get better at making some technical changes, some very small ones, it can lead us to deeper questions and to more adaptive change that goes beyond that initial welcome. As strangers start to become friends, it means we need to allow them space to move from being guests to becoming hosts. It means making space in our buildings and in our hearts and on our vestries and in the parish hall kitchen where the same group has been cooking the same supper for thirty-seven years. And in the sacristy. I am not suggesting that when a newcomer shows up say, “hello, welcome, you want to teach Sunday School?” Not good safe church practice! But the strangers who do come have gifts and after that initial welcome we need to learn what they want to do, and how they might use those gifts for the sake of God’s mission of mercy, compassion, and hope. We have too many ministries in our congregations that seem to be like Supreme Court Appointments and if people become LEMs or wardens until they die – then you only get about as many openings as a President gets over four years in office or maybe less. This is a problem!
Here, I think we discover the roots of the issue and
the reason for our denial: in my humble opinion it is about our resistance to change. We may like our
congregation just as it is. It’s like a family. It’s like Cheers, where everybody knows our name. If too many new people come
in, then it won’t be like that anymore. They won’t know who I am, and I may not
know who they are. It might not feel like “family.” And it definitely won’t be
the same. And that’s true, it won’t be. New people bring new energy and new
perspectives and new possibilities…
So I want to remind you before we go our different
ways today (“as God’s people in the world, to live and speak God’s praise”) that
this work takes us to the very heart of the gospel. It’s not an option; it’s a
requirement. And once we admit that we have a problem and we’ve been stuck, we can
begin to deal with that problem. We can start to “work the program” one day at
a time.
The
adaptive work to which God calls us is for strangers to become friends.
To do that we need to practice hospitality. Our faith, to be real, is always a
shared faith. Our journey in Christ offers us companions on the way – literally
those with whom we “bread with.” This is how God forms this new community of love
where strangers are becoming friends. How can we better embody that reality in
our congregations?
Monastic communities have much to teach us about
this, and for more than a decade now I’ve been part of the Fellowship of St.
John the Evangelist, in Cambridge. There is a chapter in their Rule of Life on “Hospitality” and as I
close I want to share that with you.
The source of hospitality is the heart of God who yearns to unite every creature within one embrace. Only in the fullness of time will God gather all things in Christ; yet God’s boundless welcome is something we already enjoy here and now in the Eucharist. Our life together as a community gives us a foretaste of the communion of saints. So we have the power to be a sacrament of God’s hospitality, a house of God, offering (God’s) nurture and protection to all who come under our roof. Just as we enrich our guest’s lives, so they enrich ours. We welcome men and women of every race and culture, rejoicing in the breadth and diversity of human experience that they bring to us. Their lives enlarge our vision of God’s world. The stories of their sufferings and achievements and their experience of God stir and challenge us. If we are attentive, each guest will be a word and gift of God to us.
May it be so for us.
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