“How do we go from a world consumed by the imagination of Pharaoh to a world consumed by the imagination of God?”
As rectors and deans from across the Episcopal Church began our time last week with Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, that was the question he began with. The war in Iran had just started. The ascendency of Christian Nationalism was weighing on our hearts. And we were about to take a closer look at some of the demographic headwinds facing the mainline church in America, and the Episcopal Church in particular.
The post-pandemic church continues to experience great change, and we are called now to think both strategically and faithfully about how we carry out our work. If we look closely, though, we might also listen for an invitation to become a church that responds to a changing world by drawing more closely to the imagination of God.
We live in a world today where we must be countercultural. How do we raise our voice so that it can be heard above the din of the “chaos machine” in which we live? How can we serve our churches faithfully and help them to remain steadfast amid a climate of alienation, secularization, and retreat from communal life?
The answer is not simple, but it starts with anchoring our work not on fears or anxieties, or on reactivity, but on gospel witness and proclamation of God’s grace. We speak with clarity when we speak of justice grounded in Christ’s love for the world, and we build thriving communities when we cultivate communities of belonging and transformative faith.
In many ways, our witness has not changed; it has simply become more countercultural.
This Sunday, I’ll share some of what I learned at the Episcopal Parish Network in my Dean’s Forum. The Church is changing, to be sure, but Bishop Rowe reminded us that even headwinds present rich opportunities.
Faithfully,
