‘A lie from the pit of hell’: Episcopal leaders push back on rumors of fatal decline

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (RNS) — The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is drained of hearing that his church is doomed.

The denomination has misplaced about half of its baptized membership since the 1960s, declining to about 1.5 million adherents this present day, and quiet faces scared congregations and growing outdated demographics. But the church is now now not ready to offer up.  

“I believe that — as a remaining be conscious and as a remaining chronicle — is a lie from the pit of hell,” a feisty Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told church leaders in the opening session of Episcopal Parish Community’s annual conference on Wednesday (March 4) in a Sheraton Resort in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. “That’s now now not the instructing of Jesus.”

That mix of defiance and hope struck home with the greater than 850 clergy and other denominational leaders who came together for the ultimate recurring gathering of Episcopal church leaders exterior of the denomination’s Commonplace Convention. When requested from the stage if they were optimistic about the future, most in the audience answered with a convincing certain.

“Despite the incontrovertible reality that it’s going to rob rather a lot of work!” the Rev. Henrietta “Rhetta” Wiley known as out from the audience.

Wiley, a dilapidated college professor who has been rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson, Maryland, since 2019, acknowledged her church experienced some decline in attendance sooner or later of COVID-19 however has rebounded. The congregation, which runs a thriving preschool and thrift store that serves the community, has begun an outreach to native residents who bolt by the church parking zone on the formulation to work.

But as Episcopalians see to the future, Wiley defined, the denomination is processing wretchedness for what it once turned into. The inheritor of the dominant Church of England after the American Revolution and the church of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the Episcopal Church turned into long a key denomination of the mainline Protestant establishment.

“The onerous work everyone on this room is doing is finding out how to blueprint community between those folks who’re looking backwards and those participants which would be looking forward, who were all grounded in Christ,” acknowledged Wiley.

The EPN started in the Eighties as a community of noteworthy parishes and at last developed into a gathering for church leaders to chat about what Joe Swimmer, who has been the executive director since 2018, known as the “tactical and incandescent” capabilities of running a church.

“Everyone learns from each other,” acknowledged Swimmer. “We are looking to be of service to this church, which is altering.”

A lifelong Episcopalian who grew up in a tiny congregation in Oklahoma, he acknowledged the church won’t ever lumber back to what it turned into, he acknowledged. “Nevertheless it quiet has a most significant be conscious.”

The Rev. Stanford Adams, rector at the Episcopal Church of the Exact Shepherd in Austin, Texas, acknowledged the conference is a gamble for church leaders to learn from one another and to hear how other church buildings are reaching their communities. It also offers them a mode of what’s going on in the greater church, acknowledged Adams, who served on the conference planning committee.

Adams acknowledged Exact Shepherd has been drawing about 700 participants to fancy on Sundays, including a rising quantity of teenagers. Many contain moved to Austin for work, acknowledged Adams, and are seeking “a kind of deeper function and meaning that rings upright for folks.”

The speakers at the conference’s common sessions defined one of the ultimate challenges the denomination faces: Getting church participants and leaders to chat more about the Bible and about their beliefs to those exterior the church. Church leaders who believe they contain a most significant message to offer are often reluctant to be considered as pushy about faith.

Episcopalians contain a culture of Christian niceness, acknowledged the Rev. Scott Gunn, and don’t prefer to be considered as “one of those participants” — Christians whose dedication to evangelism overwhelms participants’s consolation zones.

“Which is a silly thing,” Gunn, one of the keynote speakers on Friday, acknowledged in an interview. “The instance I consistently employ is, there are rather a lot of in actuality gruesome drivers on the street, however I’m now now not going to teach, effectively, I can’t lumber anyplace consequently of of those depraved drivers. I’m going to head make what I have to make.”

Gunn, luxuriate in many attendees, is bullish on the future of the church. “I sight church buildings, congregations of all shapes and sizes — immense, puny, liberal, conservative, urban, rural, you name it — we are capable of search out examples of church buildings which would be thriving and bursting at the seams,” he acknowledged. 

Bishop Rowe also brought on Episcopal leaders to salvage over their shyness about speaking about Jesus or the Bible. On the conference’s opening day, Rowe acknowledged sooner or later of an onstage conversation with creator and journalist Jonathan Rauch that their reluctance affects the church’s public be conscious on social considerations.

Rauch, who describes himself as a homosexual, atheist Jew, acknowledged that he once underestimated how exceptional American democracy relied on the values of faith. With out that undergirding of faith, he told the audience, Individuals contain turned into politics into a kind of non secular battle, in search of transcendent meaning in electoral wins. That makes political compromise an act of blasphemy, rather than a process for fellow voters to are living together.

“You’re speculated to glance your antagonist sooner or later of the table as fellow voters — now now not as the anti-Christ,” acknowledged Rauch, whose recent e book, “Wrong Functions,” connects the deepening polarization in the United States with the loss of what he calls “thick Christianity.”

Rauch acknowledged he has come to see the values of Christianity and the values of democracy espoused by the nation’s founders as a pair of wooden boards. Neither can stand on its bear, however together they encourage the nation up. That’s now now not Christian nationalism, he acknowledged, however a recognition of the values undergirding democracy

Rauch pointed in explicit to what he known as three core teachings of the Bible: Don’t be timid. Be luxuriate in Jesus. And forgive one another. “A liberal democracy is now now not a proposition the save, if I obtain, you contain got to lose, and I in actuality prefer to dominate and abolish,” he acknowledged. “It’s now now not about destroying the other side. It’s about living together and finding paths together to portion your nation.”

The presiding bishop acknowledged the Episcopal Church had in the past allied itself with those in vitality and overpassed its bear values, evaluating his church to portray-day evangelical Christians. Even this present day, Rowe acknowledged, when his church speaks about social considerations, the focus is more on political policy than on elegant readability. The situation, he acknowledged, is to converse with elegant readability, now now not to make more political noise.

Civil rights lawyer and Howard University professor Sherrilyn Ifill, who took the stage after Rowe and Rauch, also urged church leaders to let their faith lead in their response to The USA’s challenges, while reminding them that they contain a responsibility to rob part in democracy. “You don’t salvage to be separate and aside from democracy,” Iliff acknowledged. “Everyone has a role to play.”

Iliff, who grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Unlit denomination, mourned the loss of norms and the common courtesies that develop cooperation that it’s in all probability you’ll presumably maybe presumably factor in. “What we had been drawn into is an international that’s 24-7 confrontation,” she acknowledged. “And it’s a ways freaking us out.”

The conference commonly ranges into more prosaic matters corresponding to church property, funds, young leaders and other ministry matters.

On Friday, Brian Steensland, a sociologist at Indiana University in Indianapolis, shared results of a see looking at the role Episcopal fogeys play in passing the faith from one generation to the subsequent. Whereas fogeys contain a most significant impression over their kids’s non secular pattern, he acknowledged, many outsource it to the church, taking what he calls an “exposure for preference” method — instructing their kids about religion with out making a case for any explicit faith.

He suggested that folks attempt an “equipping for dedication” mindset. Dedication can in actuality feel luxuriate in a constraint, he acknowledged, however also opens the door to community and belonging. As for church leaders, he commended they encourage fogeys grow in their faith so as that they can better lumber that faith on.

The Rev. Penny Bridges, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego, California, acknowledged she turned into leaving the conference inspired and willing to lumber on what she had realized. She turned into also expecting getting home and speaking together with her grandson more about the Bible.

But every little thing she had heard, she acknowledged, made her hopeful about the church’s future. “We’ve been floundering spherical for a long time,” she acknowledged. “We know there’s something we prefer to make in a different way, and I consider we’re progressively attending to readability about it.”