Published May 22, 2023 on Substack
“I’ve come to realize that I don’t need to reform the church. I just need to love people.” This is what I said when interviewing for my current position as the rector of a small, urban Episcopal church in the midwest. Eight years before I had begun working for our diocese as a “missioner,” a kind of free-floating staff position charged with figuring out what was coming next for the church. I worked with a brilliant priest named Jane Gerdsen, whom I credit with saving my ministry. When I met Jane I was in the midst of one of my periodic moments of wondering whether I was truly called to the priesthood. I loved preaching and celebrating, but I didn’t love, or even like, the institution of the church. I would go to clergy meetings and everyone would be competing with each other, bragging about the importance of their ministries so that the bishop would hear them and send them a trickle of resources so that they could keep going, at least for another year. This spirit of competition made it hard to make friends. And, at least twice, retired priests had approached me when at these gathering and told me all of the things that they didn’t actually believe. They had spent their lives preaching and teaching these things out of a sense of plodding duty, even as they began to question, then doubt, then cease believing altogether. What was I doing, I wondered, competing for scant resources in a church that couldn’t be honest about its fundamental hopes and dreams?
Jane saved me by bringing me into a creative, hopeful, relationship-based network that was sometimes called Fresh Expressions and sometimes called Praxis Communities. We read Diana Butler Bass and Brian McClellan, and agreed that we were living on the cusp of a third reformation (the first being an attempt at centralization that took place in the 11th and 12th centuries, the second being the one with Martin Luther that you’re probably familiar with). We talked seriously about improv and play. We founded urban farms and art galleries. We met for dinner church and Art of Hosting trainings. I really believed in this work. I still do. But a strange thing started happening. We thought that we were creating a church for young people, but older people kept showing up to our events and conferences. It seemed that the yearning we were feeling didn’t have an age requirement. So I began to wonder if the practices we had learned, the wisdom circles and shared leadership and community organizing skills, could make its way into the parish. There was a practical side to this. We were able to do this work because we had a visionary bishop. Any new bishop might not support it. And the parish is still the basic economic unit of the church. If the work was to continue, it had to find a home in the parish. Hopefully it would do so to the parish’s benefit.
But I wasn’t lying when I told the search committee at my parish that I wasn’t hoping to reform the church. For one thing, I was pushing fifty, and reformation is the work of young people. For another, I had, and have, a real sense that the church I want to live in can be a model for compassionate understanding, and compassion isn’t unidirectional. One has to be as compassionate towards the grief of a way of being that is ending as one is towards the uncertainty of a way of being that is emerging. Any reformation without love isn’t a real reformation, and if one has to pick, I will pick love every time.
Does that mean that the first two reformations weren’t real? Well, neither ended the church’s historic alliance with empire. We call that alliance “christendom,” and it was as strong in the kingdoms and states that abandoned Roman Catholicism as it was in Italy or Spain. Both previous reformations were periods of great violence and persecution. Both ended up constricting the boundaries of what could be thought or said. Both had their dogmas, their witch hunts, their antisemitism, their racism, their unexpected and bewildered scapegoats. Both tied themselves to wealth, status, and power. Perhaps this is because they were led and enacted by human beings, and any human endeavor will have its share of violence and oppression. But why start there? Why start with the violence of telling people that their opinions don’t matter, their practices are old and stupid, and that everything they love will die if they don’t change?
I was honest when I said that I would choose love over reformation. I try to make that choice every day. Yet the end of Christendom is arriving. Perhaps it’s already arrived. And many things are changing as a result. I am fortunate that I serve a church that is progressive and open to change, at least in some ways. But every group has its third rails and sacred cows, and new people arrive with fresh ideas and passions, which means that serving any church is a continual tightrope.
So I walk the tightrope, day by day, and I am choosing to reflect on that balancing act here, in this newsletter. I will tell stories of daily encounters, with respect and with permission. I will delve into liturgy, into religious anthropology, into the contemplative tradition, and into art and poetry. These are the things that interest me. Fortunately, many of my parishioners share these interests. Or at least they’re polite and complimentary when I preach about them. But mostly I will reflect on what it’s like to live through the end of Christendom, a fifth of the way into the twenty-first century, in a liberal city in a conservative state, in a progressive denomination within a religion that is widely thought of as reactionary. I hope to do so in community with you, honoring your thoughts and opinions, and learning from you as I go.
KPB Stevens 