The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

Forum Jorge François, Nice   •   October 22, 2021

Text: Isaiah 48:20: “Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea;
declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it forth to the end of the earth:
‘The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!’”

It’s daunting to realize that this is already the third time I have had the privilege of speaking to our Convention; and the occasions on which I’ve done so have been three very different occasions. Two years ago in Geneva, none of us could have imagined that we wouldn’t be able to gather the following year; and last year, when we met entirely on line, we could not have imagined that this year our Convention would be a mirror of what our church has become and will remain, a hybrid gathering of people who are far off and people who are near.

The canons of our church say that among the obligations of a bishop is to make a report to the Annual Meeting of the Convention on the state of the church since the last Annual Meeting. 

In some respects that is a straightforward task, because as it happens each year the statistical office of the Episcopal Church releases its annual report on attendance and membership across the whole church. 

But of course, nothing was straightforward last year. What the report shows is actually quite good news; in the crazy year of 2020, our average Sunday attendance across the Convocation was only down 1.7 percent, and our membership was down 1.4 percent. 

Now, the way we calculated those numbers changed dramatically in March of last year, and we’re still not quite sure how to collect attendance figures for Zoom church.

But even so, everyone across the whole Episcopal Church had the same challenge and had to apply the same rules; and it turns out that we compare really favorably to the rest of the church. Certainly one of the reasons for that has to be that the vaccinations made faster progress in Europe than in the United States.

So is that the state of the church? No, I don’t think so. 

There’s another story to tell—a story about the resilience of our congregations, the creativity and devotion of our clergy, the green shoots of new missions in places as far apart as Georgia, Paris, and Germany. 

There’s a story to tell about what we’ve learned about ourselves and about each other from spending a year listening more intently to our experience of racism and discrimination, and a story about spending an hour in conversation with new friends and fellow disciples once a week over a bowl of soup. 

So yes, we have come through difficult times. And yes, we have challenges ahead. But let’s start here: We’re okay. We made it through. The pandemic isn’t over, and there may be more hard times ahead, but we’re okay—and now we know what do to if the virus surges again.

Still, we know that’s not the whole story, too. We are not the church we were before all this happened. Maybe one of God’s purposes in all of this was to teach us not only that the church needed to change, but that we weren’t the church we thought we were, either.

I think the full story of the state of the church has to offer an account, a vision, of what all of this has prepared us for. The state we’re in is not supposed to be the state we stay in, not ever; and especially now, after we’ve been through, we’ve been prepared for something. But just what, exactly?

Well, I believe we’ve been being readied for two things. 

The prophet Isaiah had seen his people evicted from the Holy Land and taken into exile in a faraway country—in Babylon. Their time away from normal wasn’t eighteen months; it was nearly a hundred years. A hundred years of being shut out from their usual places and their usual patterns of worship. And, like us, they adjusted pretty quickly to their new normal—maybe too quickly.

Because for at least the last part of Isaiah’s career as a prophet, there’s no longer a reason for them to be in Babylon. Isaiah’s prophetic message to them is that it’s time to get up, pack up, and get back to Israel—to end the exile and start rebuilding. 

It takes some convincing. That’s one of the reasons Isaiah goes on for sixty-six chapters. The people of Israel have gotten used to being in exile. They have new patterns of life, new practices for worship. They’re comfortable. They’re not exactly eager to leave.

But they must. They must because where Israel belongs is Israel, not exile. They must because it is time to rebuild the temple, that place where God had chosen to dwell among them. They can’t do that working from home. It’s time to end the exile. It’s time to go back.

That’s part of the state of our church today. Our exile is over. Our time of returning has come. We made it through; we survived our ordeal. But now we have to go back where we belong. We have to get up, pack up, and get moving—back to our communities, back into our gatherings. 

Of course, when we do this, one of the things we have to bring with us is the new hybrid church we made in exile. We have to keep reaching out to the people who found an open door in Zoom that they had never found in our buildings.

We already know that what we’re going back to isn’t going to be the same. And that’s true not just because of Zoom, and the members of our communities who are now part of the “church virtual.”

It’s true because the pandemic accelerated a trend that was already in place, one that is calling us to a different way of thinking about church. The state of our church is both returning—and renewing.

For more than a hundred years, really from the time the Episcopal Church began gathering communities in Europe, our model for how the church worked was something scholars call an “attractional” model. We built beautiful churches, and we filled them beautiful things and beautiful music. We put a sign outside and an Episcopal flag somewhere to tell people who we were and what was inside.

And that was our whole plan. That was all the plan we needed. Just that was enough to tell the people who were looking for us where to find us; and, of course, we simply knew that they were looking for us.

That wasn’t just us. Pretty much every church since the nineteenth century has been built on an attractional model of ministry. We build it, and they will come. All we have to do is open the door and wait.

We love the attractional model. We love it because it affirms us. People come to us; we are what they’re seeking. It’s like hosting a party; we clean the house and prepare for the guests, and then, well, they just come.

Theologically, the attractional church says to the world: “come and see.” But if you want to see, of course, you have to come. What the church does—our worship, our service, our education—is basically like a concert or a show; you come to the place where it is, and experience it. 

The attractional model worked for a long time. It worked because the culture outside the church and the culture inside the church was basically the same culture. You could move from outside to inside easily; it was familiar, it made sense.

But that isn’t true anymore. When people make the move from the culture we live in now to the language, the expectations, the practices inside the church, it’s bewildering. We’ve tried to make the transition easier by doing things like modernizing our language and expanding the cultural horizons of the traditions we include in our worship. 

But in the end, that doesn’t really bridge the gap. Because the culture of the community of faith is a culture of belief; and belief itself is a foreign idea to the culture outside our doors.

So maybe we’re being called to imagine a different model of ministry. Maybe instead of basing our model on attracting people in to listen to us—we have to go out to listen to them. Instead of relying on the attractional, maybe it’s time for us to be missional. Or, to use a word that goes down a little smoother among Anglicans, incarnational. 

Instead of a church built on attracting people inside, it’s a church going outside to meet the world, and to imagine that the world has something to teach us about what God needs the church to do.

One writer has put it this way: A missional / incarnational church makes the shift from “come and see” to “go and be.” To be the church—the church named after Jesus, who spent his whole ministry on the road and out among the people—means to be with the people God calls us to love, and once we are with them, to listen to them.

We’ve spent all this past year learning how to listen better. To listen to our own stories, to listen to each other—because that is at least one of the ways we hear the voice of God. 

But there’s something more to this than simply learning a technique. Because a missional church, an incarnational church, must be—must be—a listening church first of all. 

We can be taught this by from a witness very close to the heart of our church in Europe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his brilliant little work about Christian community, Life Together, Bonhoeffer wrote this:

“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to God’s Word, so the beginning of love for our sisters and brothers in the church is learning to listen to them.... 

So it is God’s work that we do for them when we learn to listen to them. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.

Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But the one who can no longer listen to a sister or a brother will soon no longer be listening to God either; that one will be doing nothing but prattling in the presence of God, too.”

So what is the state of our church? 

The state of our church is returning, returning to the communities we have made, returning to our companionships with each other, in order to prepare and sustain each other for the work God is calling us to do.

And then the state of our church must be one of renewal—renewing our sense of God’s call in mission, renewing our willingness to venture out among the people God loves and who are waiting for us to listen to what they have to say—to teach us about their struggles to find space for the sacred in their lives. Renewing our purpose by listening to the longings of people around us, people longing for a way to hear about God in the terms of their own language and culture.

Throughout our history, our understanding of mission has taken different forms, not all of them good. Mission has meant crusade and conquest, colonialism and conversion. It has also meant compassion and education, activism and advocacy.

A missional church today must not be a captive of the culture, but a companion to those caught in culture’s limitations. It must go out among the people who believe they don’t believe, because the only way we can walk with them and listen is if we go where they are, and stop presuming that it’s their task to come in and listen to us.  

We can still have the beautiful things we’ve created, and that have been our path to a deeper relationship with God. But we have to remember that the gospel’s purpose isn’t just comfort—it’s redemption. And in these past months, God has been teaching us that the people Christ came to save probably aren’t going to come in among us looking for those answers; we, just like Jesus, are going to have to go out to them. 

So let us return. Let us be renewed by the love and the support we know in these communities. Let us listen constantly in prayer—prayer that springs not from a longing to change God’s mind, but to open our hearts.

And then—let us dare to venture back into the world, to listen to the needs of people held captive by our cynical culture, and to walk as companions with the least, the last, and the lost. Amen.