Ecclesiastical dieting for better health

Approximately 70% of the U.S. population is overweight or obese. Similarly, The Episcopal Church (TEC) after decades of declining attendance and membership is organizationally overweight or even obese. The sooner TEC diets, the greater the probability of TEC returning to ecclesiastical health and vitality.

TEC can lose weight. A prior Ethical Musings post examined the episcopacy. In that article, I advocated reducing the number of dioceses to better serve TEC’s declining number of congregations. This essay identifies ways TEC’s congregations (a category that includes both parishes and missions) can improve their organizational health by shedding unhealthy burdens of excess programs, staff and facilities.

Corporate worship constitutes the programmatic and spiritual heart of most Episcopal congregations. I have served a congregation that needed to add a third Sunday morning service to accommodate the growing number of worshippers because of limited parking. I have also served congregations with two Sunday morning services held in naves that could accommodate three or four times their combined peak Sunday attendance.

New congregations invariably begin with a single Sunday worship service. A congregation adds a service when seating or parking ceases to accommodate attendees. Unfortunately, one unintended result of adding a service is that attendees at each service quickly evolve distinct identities based upon their preference for a particular time or style (silent or sung, Rite I or II, etc.). Those separate identities then take precedence over identity as members of the larger congregation. Consequently, congregations continue to offer multiple Sunday services even after the disappearance of the original reason for those services.

Fragmentation of congregational unity is perhaps the most visible cost of unnecessary Sunday services. Clergy while conducting a service are unavailable for pastoral conversations, teaching, or other ministries. Volunteer time is wasted on marginally beneficial, duplicative activities such as needing two sets of ushers and lectors. Multiple services may increase the cost of utilities, janitorial services, and bulletin preparation/printing if each service has its own leaflet.

Small savings in small congregations may have an outsize impact on growth and mission as well as aid in balancing budgets. Although consolidating Sunday services is frequently contentious and may result in losing a few regular attendees, potential gains usually exceed costs. Surveys consistently suggest that newcomers tend to seek thriving, larger congregations instead of inwardly focused, small congregations.

Concomitantly, many congregations can realize gains from eliminating some special services and other programming. Neither Scripture nor tradition dictates that every congregation offer a nearly identical schedule of worship and programs. Instead, reasoned cost-benefit analysis can point the way to shedding the excess weight of once important, now superfluous services and programs. Illustratively, in some small congregations, an early Christmas Eve family service and a Christmas Day service designed for the elderly who do not like to drive after dark may better meet needs than the diffusion of effort and attendees entailed in also offering Midnight Mass. Likewise, not all congregations need a Sunday School, a program initiated in the nineteenth century to teach reading and writing to children whose parents could not afford to send a child to school. Additionally, congregations can reap savings at little or no cost by eliminating any service or program that exists primarily to satisfy the clergy’s needs or wants.

Congregations, by prudentially retrenching the number and variety of worship services and other programming, will reduce the amount of staff time required to support the remaining services and programs. This will permit cutting the hours of part-time musicians, sextons, educators, and secretarial help and/or boosting their compensation. Few small congregations need or realistically can afford a secretary, by whatever title the position has, i.e., parish administrator, operations manager, etc. Mobile phones, ubiquitous word processing skills (who can graduate from college, let alone seminary, without word processing skills?), online liturgical resources, and other twenty-first century technology allow priests to perform those duties about as quickly and efficiently as coordinating and supervising another person’s completion of the tasks. Many non-ecclesial organizations have already streamlined their operations by eliminating similar positions. Contracting with human resource and accounting firms may generate significant savings over employing a bookkeeper to perform those functions.

Most importantly, congregations should closely examine their need for clergy. Estimates vary, but congregations with an average Sunday attendance under 150, and probably under 200, do not require a full-time priest. Compensation for a priest is usually a congregation’s largest budget item. Congregations may want to share a priest with another congregation (made more feasible by reducing the number of worship services), call a bi-vocational priest, or call a non-stipendiary priest. An intriguing and innovative possibility is for a diocese to pay all seminary tuition, fees and living expenses for a candidate for holy orders with the mutual agreement that the person will return to the diocese for ten years of ministry in a bi-vocational or non-stipendiary setting. A payback of 200 to 300% over ten years in lower costs for clergy makes the high up-front cost an attractive investment. This scheme may prove especially attractive to individuals pursuing ordination as a second career. This proposal will never be the complete solution to educating mid-career clergy but may be one element of a mosaic of solutions.

Clergy compensation too often saps congregational funds better spent on other ministries and missions. The answer is not to cut clergy compensation for those serving small and mid-size congregations. The answer is to rethink how best to deploy clergy and the hallmark(s) of “successful” congregations. At a minimum, the hallmark of a “successful” congregation is a congregation vitally engaged in loving God, one another, and their neighbors.

The prevalent view that having a full-time priest is a (arguably, the) hallmark of a “successful” congregation is anachronistic. TEC is not an established church that must have a priest in every parish. Furthermore, TEC congregations lack geographic boundaries. People, including clergy, generally commute by vehicle and communicate electronically. Meetings, for example, occur by videoconference with increasing frequency. Religion’s cultural marginalization is diminishing expectations for clergy participation in community and civic events. Distinguishing parishes from missions based upon the former’s ability to pay a full-time priest reinforces the mistaken perception that “successful” congregations must employ a full-time priest.

Finally, TEC can reap great benefits from reducing the property it owns. Too often, most of the resources small congregations have – money and volunteers – are devoted to a losing struggle to support a priest and maintain aging buildings crippled by deferred maintenance. Few small congregations attract the visionary, charismatic leaders who are catalysts for numerical and spiritual growth. Allowing small congregations to fritter away scarce resources on their few remaining souls neither honors God nor best serves God’s people.

The unhealthy congregational mentality that permeates TEC complicates implementing this strategy. Congregations tend to view themselves as largely independent entities. Many congregations ignore TEC’s connectional polity and property rights. The courts have upheld those property rights in a flurry of recent court cases filed by various schismatic groups.

A relative handful of small congregations have a strong missionary justification. For example, some serve isolated constituencies, though the number of such congregations diminishes as TEC establishes full communion the ELCA and other denominations.

More commonly, small congregations result from changing demographics such as changing urban neighborhoods and the depopulation of rural areas and small towns. These demographic shifts have also caused a clergy distribution problem: too many priests hear a call to urban and suburban areas; too few hear a call to rural areas and small towns.

Meanwhile, newer suburbs and revitalized urban areas may lack an Episcopal congregation (or a congregation of a denominations with which TEC is in full communion). Proactive bishops and dioceses will identify dying congregations. Then, instead of futile life support efforts which are extremely unlikely to reverse that prognosis, they may close the congregation, sell its underutilized property, and redeploy the funds to establish new church plants in under-served areas, even if that means transferring assets from one diocese to another. This process, painful as it may be, is arguably more faithful to the intent of the donors whose gifts paid for those properties and will most probably best advance God’s work.

Losing weight is rarely easy. The habits and values that prevent weight loss are deeply ingrained. Yet, by almost any measure, TEC is overweight, burdened with too many small congregations, many of them in the wrong location, and most of them doing little more than struggling to survive. God calls us to be and do better. God calls TEC to renewing its commitment to following the way of love, honest examination of our stewardship, and then to take the painful yet essential steps to better align our resources with the world’s current needs while never forgetting any part of the faithful remnants in small churches. God wants and deserves our best effort. Then and only then can we, with the author of I Timothy, say that we fought the good fight and, with Paul, say that we raced to win.

Our imperiled democracy

Democracy in the United States, already endangered, took a step closer towards extinction when President Trump declared a national emergency to reprogram federal funds in order to build a border wall separating the U.S. from Mexico.

Warning signs that U.S. democracy has been becoming endangered include presidents:

·       Issuing Executive Orders in lieu of obtaining Congressionally passed laws

·       Signing statements that identify portions of new laws that the president believes unconstitutional or which the President states the executive branch will ignore because of policy disagreements, attempting to exercise a line item veto when none exists

·       Refusing to spend authorized funds in another attempt to exercise a non-existent line item veto

·       Waging de facto wars without the Constitutionally required Congressional authorization

Over the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Presidents have employed those devices – and others – to move government when Congress was either stalemated or the opposition party blocked Congressional action.

Concurrently, economic inequality has been rising sharply, returning to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.

Together, the political dysfunction and economic inequality eerily parallel conditions in ancient Rome prior to the end of its democracy. The poor were kept pacified through distribution of free food. Rome itself was governed by an elected Senate and two consuls. Senators largely came from a recognized wealthy elite. In the face of Senatorial stalemate, senators sympathetic to a consul would vote or figuratively stand aside to allow the consul to exercise greater authority. This increased the power of consuls. The Roman system also allowed appointment of a dictator in an emergency situation. Declared emergencies became more common; consuls acting as dictators gradually seized more power; democracy became increasingly imperiled.

Julius Caesar, returning from wars in Gaul, formed a triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus. The triumvirate used the combined military power of Pompey and Caesar along with Crassus’ wealth to end Roman democracy.

Although the percent of the population receiving various forms of welfare in the U.S. has remained relatively constant in the last few decades, the percent of people receiving all forms of government assistance (this includes welfare as well as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, etc.) is rising. Collectively, welfare and other forms of assistance are analogous to first century bread distributions. Both are intended to quiet the poor in the face of staggering economic inequality.

As in Rome, the U.S. Congress is frequently stalemated, regardless of which party controls the House or the Senate.

Meanwhile, authority and power increasingly flow to the executive branch, headed by the President.

Democracy, as the authors of the U.S. Constitution realized, requires a set of checks and balances to prevent any one branch, and any one individual or group of individuals, from acquiring too much power. U.S. democracy is badly bent, heavily tilted in favor of the executive branch.

Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for creating the imbalance, with each successive president since Truman contributing to the imbalance.

Under President Trump, the slide towards tyranny has rapidly gained momentum.

President Trump publicly praises the media and reporters who support him; he castigates media and reporters who oppose him as “fake news,” implicitly redefining truth as what he says rather than as objectively verifiable facts. Indeed, Trump in his public statements and interviews displays little grasp of facts, repeatedly asserting false claims and sometimes contradicting himself. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a border wall rests on several untruths that Trump repeatedly asserts. Contrary to Trump, (1) the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border is declining, not increasing; (2) illegal drugs primarily enter the U.S. through legal ports of entry, not illegal crossings; (3) few violent criminals and even fewer terrorists enter illegally.

Loyalty now trumps fact, pun intended. This is the behavior of a dictator, or would be dictator, not the behavior of a democratic president. Indeed, during the 2016 election Trump declared that he would not accept defeat at the polls. Will he accept defeat in 2020 or, if re-elected, step aside at the end of his second term?

The U.S. Constitution presumes that government will generally act incrementally rather than through the major changes possible in a parliamentary democracy. Incremental change necessitates compromise, something that legislators from both parties increasingly seem unwilling to do (the most recent appropriations that avoided another government shutdown are a noteworthy exception). In the absence of compromise, Congress usually becomes deadlocked. The executive branch then faces an almost irresistible urge to fill the resulting power vacuum, further contributing toward a slide away from democracy and toward dictatorship.

The Christian tradition has long identified pride as the principle human sin. Checks and balances in the federal system are intended to prevent members of any of the three co-equal branches (executive, legislative, and judicial) from becoming excessively arrogant, gather a disproportionate amount of power and thereby unbalancing equality among the branches.

Justice for all has greatly increased in the last seventy years due in significant measure to Christian efforts. Though justice remains imperfect, Christians now need to shift a major part of their focus to protecting democracy in order to preserve those improvements in justice, gains certain to be lost under a dictatorship. Defending democracy is a core, non-negotiable Christian ethic.

Learning to fish for people

Someone was bemoaning the lack of growth in their congregation. One listener responded sympathetically, remarking that "A lot of congregations struggle with that issue." To which the complainer replied, "Yeah, but how many churches do you know that have an unlisted phone number?"[1]

When I look at this congregation, I mostly see familiar faces. What is it that brings you back here to St. Clement’s, Sunday after Sunday?

While reflecting on today’s gospel reading,[2] I identified four factors that collectively explain why I personally return to St. Clement’s Sunday after Sunday. They fit the mnemonic ABC and F, like the familiar grades, except that the goal is to journey from A, B, and Cs to F.

A stands for acceptance. Here, I feel welcomed as who I am, without a need for pretense. In our liturgy, acceptance connotes God’s affirming love and embrace. Over time, I’m becoming part of the parish community. I hope, and pray, that your experience at St. Clement’s is similar. Incidentally, new attendees participating in today’s newcomer’s brunch offers an opportunity to experience that acceptance, community, and affirmation.

Nobody screened the crowd that gathered on the shore of the Sea of Galilee to hear Jesus. Not only was there no security screening, people were not excluded because of education, wealth, gender, ethnicity or religion. The gospels depict Jesus interacting with illiterate peasants and affluent lawyers, both women and men, Samaritans, Syrians, and others, Gentiles as well as Jews. We are called to follow Jesus’ example in genuinely welcoming all, even if we do it imperfectly.

B connotes beauty, pointing also to the joy, hope and sense of wonder that beauty evokes. The Sea of Galilee and the surrounding countryside, even today with the land browner, more barren and drier than in Jesus’ day, is beautiful. I cherish vivid memories of eating fresh, grilled St. Peter’s fish lakeside, watching boats on the lake and people fishing. At least some in the crowd who gathered to hear Jesus teach would have noticed the setting’s natural beauty.

The Episcopal Church generally values beauty, preferring to have beautiful buildings, liturgy, music, vestments, altar vessels, etc. I’ve conducted worship in unusual settings such as a WW2 Quonset hut, aboard a ship, and out in the field using a Humvee’s hood for an altar. But when I conduct worship in a magnificent Christopher Wren chapel, such as the one at Greenwich Royal Naval College in London – even with its elevated, rickety wooden pulpit, or here at St. Clement’s, the setting helps greatly. Our aesthetic sense is one dimension of the human spirit. Enhancing the beauty of the setting, the liturgy, the music, and so forth, helps to create a “thin place” where discerning God’s presence is easier.

C stands for compassion, broadly defined to include both mercy and justice. Jesus attracted people partially because he healed the sick, embraced the outcast, saw beauty in persons society regarded as ugly, and fed the physically and spiritually hungry. Vibrant, growing congregations consistently seek to respond to the needs of the people in their neighborhoods with the love that gives life, promotes justice, liberates, and heals.

Years ago, the captain of a Greenland whaling vessel had a strange experience. One evening, icebergs trapped his ship near the Arctic Circle, and he decided to cast anchor until morning. As the day dawned, he sighted another ship dimly visible through the morning mist. The captain and some of his men in a small boat rowed around icebergs to the mysterious vessel. Boarding, they discovered every crew member dead and frozen stiff. Some lay in their hammocks, others on the deck where they had fallen. The captain was sitting at a table as if writing in the logbook. The log’s last entry, on which the captain's lifeless finger rested, indicated that the ship had been drifting around the Arctic Ocean for 13 years.[3]

Although there are Episcopal churches frozen in time, with no meaningful effort to love anyone, thankfully this parish has numerous initiatives designed to love our neighbors locally and globally. These include programs to feed our hungry neighbors and actively campaigning for Palestinian rights, prison reform, and ecological justice.

Acceptance, beauty, and compassion can be found in the Lion’s Club, social groups, or even a political party. Those are good organizations, but insufficient. I return to St. Clement’s week after week because here I meet, converse, and journey with people on a faith journey toward that mystery we call God. British theologian and philosopher John Cottingham argues that what brings “people to God is not intellectual debates about the transcendent, but the immanent aspects of religion--the transformative power of religious ideas and practice in our human lives and experience."[4]

In the gospel reading, when Jesus finishes teaching, he directs the boatmen to put own to sea again and cast their nets one last time. In spite of unfavorable circumstances – no catch all night, too late in the morning for good fishing – the crews haul in nets full of fish. Astounded, they recognize God’s presence in that moment and in their morning experiences. Repeatedly experiencing God’s presence and activity in their midst attracted the disciples and the crowd to Jesus. Neither acceptance, beauty, nor compassion keeps me, and maybe you, returning to St. Clement’s Sunday after Sunday. Instead, its discerning, even if only occasionally, the light of God’s loving, transformative activity in our midst.

Jesus instructs his disciples that from now on they are to cast their nets for people, not fish. We are the successors, the spiritual descendants, of those disciples. Yet, according to one study, the average Episcopalian invites somebody to church only once every 27 years.[5] We may as well have an unlisted phone number, given that nationally 75-80% of new church members begin attending because someone invited them.[6]

May whatever brings and keeps you returning here – whether the acceptance, beauty, compassion, and shared faith journey that drew me to St. Clement’s or other reasons – also become a catalyst used by the Holy Spirit to move us to reach out to the spiritually hungry, the broken, and victims of injustice who surround us. Amen.

Sermon preached the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 10, 2019, in the Parish of St. Clement, Honolulu, HI

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[1] The Lutheran, Aug. 1993, p. 63.

[2] Luke 5:1-11.

[3] George E Knowles., A World to Love (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1990), p. 265.

[4] John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 112.

[5] The Rev. Christopher C. Moore, “10 Operating Principles of the Church,” The Living Church.

[6] David Kalvelage, “Pretty Nice Folks,” The Living Church, 12 March 2000, 11.

Some musings on moral responsibility

From the window behind the computer at which I write Ethical Musings, I can see the busy intersection at which a speeding driver last week killed three pedestrians and injured five other people. He was fleeing police who had sought to stop him for a prior traffic violation; police also think that the man was driving while intoxicated. Nine lives were inalterably changed, including that of the perpetrator who was seriously injured and now faces multiple manslaughter and other criminal charges.

From late December to early April, I occasionally see humpback whales apparently cavorting and spouting. When whales are spotted offshore, small boats and the two vessels that thrice daily take people out for an excursion and meal at sea congregate. Federal regulations mandate that boats stay a prescribed distance from whales and not otherwise interfere with the whales. Of course, the whales don’t know the federal rules and may violate those rules by approaching a stopped boat too closely. And, the truth is that nobody knows what a whale thinks. From a whale’s perspective, at what distance will a boat not interfere with a whale? Do whales sometimes enjoy humans?

A common thread – responsibility – links those two diverse views.

Determining the drunken driver’s individual responsibility requires ascertaining whether the driver is an alcoholic, a person addicted to alcohol who cannot control her or his drinking. If an alcoholic, then the driver suffers from a disease. One of the twelve steps toward recovery is to take responsibility for those the alcoholic has harmed, including himself. Yet castigating the driver, if he is an addict, for alleged immoral behavior (driving while drunk) may impede rather than aid the driver’s progress toward sobriety. Multiple convictions for driving under the influence is one indicator that points toward addiction. The addict, in any event, must take responsibility for his or her recovery. Being sick is not an excuse for refusing to get well. Alcoholism is a treatable disease.

If the driver is not an alcoholic, determining responsibility is simpler: the driver acted irresponsibly in drinking excessively and then driving while intoxicated. Clear evidence shows a substantial link between driving under the influence and harming others.

In both sets of circumstances, our criminal justice system appropriately holds the driver accountable for his actions. Too often, people regard accountability as the first step toward punishment. More helpfully, accountability is the first step toward treatment for the addict and prevention of further episodes of drunk driving by the addict and non-addict alike. Learning that actions have consequences is vital in either case.

Incidentally, imprisonment in Hawaii costs between fifty and sixty thousand dollars per year per inmate. The median income in Hawaii is about fifty thousand dollars per year. Imprisonment that serves no preventive or deterrent purpose is a costly error because no punitive sentence – imprisonment, execution, or anything else – can restore those killed to life or those injured to their pre-accident health. Tax dollars spent on punishment may help victims or their families to feel better, but have few if any benefits for the larger community. Tax dollars spent on restorative justice benefit the offender, victims and their families, and the larger community.

Determining human responsibility with respect to whales is much more difficult. Humans cannot speak to whales. Thus, knowing what a whale thinks or feels is impossible. However, scientific research is expanding our knowledge of actions, intentional or unintentional, that may harm whales and how to avoid those actions. Regulations directing vessels to maintain a theoretical safe distance from whales illustrates an effort to be ecologically responsible in spite of incomplete, sometimes inaccurate information.

Limited information and wisdom (knowledge of how to live well) similarly effects good faith efforts to make responsible decisions about many things, e.g., parenting and the potential harms/benefits of new products.

So, what is moral responsibility?

Moral responsibility requires some degree both of awareness that an act is wrong and of ability to avoid that action. In retrospect, I know that painting the exterior of houses with lead paint was environmentally hazardous. At the time, I had no such knowledge nor was that information commonly available. I could have refused to use lead-based paint, but that would have bewildered my customers and cost me at least some of the jobs I had sought. Alternatively, as a Navy chaplain on active duty, I believed at the time, and continue to believe, that some Navy policies were wrong. However, even though I raised my voice in protest, I had no power to change those policies. By staying in the Navy, I may be morally complicit in those policies (e.g., the Navy’s prior policy of discharging gays) but am not morally responsible for those policies.

Abundant living entails pausing to reflect on ordinary and extraordinary occurrences.

·       For what actions am I clearly morally responsible? In those situations, what can I do to act more morally?

·       For what actions am I morally complicit but not personally morally responsible? What, if any, steps can I take to become less complicit or to change the situation such that it results in more moral outcomes?

·       For what actions do I lack moral autonomy? What steps can I take to become more autonomous and then choose a more moral path? (One immense difficulty is that humans generally lack sufficient self-awareness to know when one has autonomy and when one’s choice is determined by genetics, nurture, and other factors entirely beyond one’s control.)

·       For what actions do I have incomplete or perhaps inaccurate information, causing me to make poor or even immoral choices? How can I, if it is possible, obtain better, more complete information? (Humans generally cannot foretell the future to know with certainty the future consequences of an action taken in the present.)

Always, I remember Jesus’ words: Go and sin no more. I wish life were as simple as that exhortation seems to suggest!