WHY…?

A newcomer to the Episcopal Church recently asked me why I was an Episcopalian. I began by saying that I had been raised as an Episcopalian. I was baptized when I was three years old, attended Church and Sunday School every week, sang in the junior choir, served as an acolyte, went to church camp and was confirmed. I also shared that I had left the Episcopal Church during college and had joined the local Friends meeting. Being a Quaker was a very good thing for my spiritual life, but during the time I was a Quaker, I had a very close friendship with both the clergy and many members of my home parish.

My return to the Episcopal Church was precipitated by an unexpected phone call. While working for a neighborhood group in Wilmington, Delaware, a long distance phone call came while I was out of the office. I thought it might have been about my grandmother who was seriously ill at the time. I did what I had always done as a teen – I found a church and sat and prayed for a while. The next Sunday, I was there for the early service and was there every Sunday after that until I went back home to finish college. During those months in Wilmington, I helped teach the confirmation class and had long conversations with the parish’s priests about whether I was being called to the priesthood.  The bishop there was very supportive, but suggested that I enter the discernment process in my home diocese, which I did when I returned to college.

What led me back to the Episcopal Church were the sacramental life and the thoughtful and challenging preaching that I had heard in both my home parish and the parish in Wilmington. In our seminaries we hear the purpose stated as preparing people for “the learned ministry of Word and Sacrament.” While I heard some inspired speaking among the Quakers, I missed the sacraments and the excellent preaching that I had heard growing up.

Nearly 40 years after returning to the Episcopal Church, the sacraments are still of central importance and, although I rarely hear anyone else preach, I have been blessed by the preaching of Fr. Bill and Deacon Polly and our seminarian last year, Cathy Dempesy. I have also come to value other things about the Episcopal Church during the past 40 years. The community life that I have found in the parishes to which I have belonged has been a great blessing, as has been the commitment of parishioners to ministry to one another and to the wider community. I have also valued something which is being threatened the Episcopal Church – diversity of convictions on important questions. I experienced that diversity as a very good thing during the Viet Nam war as I saw people who disagreed about the war worshipping together around the Lord’s Table. We were able, sometimes with difficulty, to acknowledge that people could in good faith disagree about this very divisive issue.

Today that honoring of diversity has been threatened by those who would insist that there is only one faithful position on certain issues that are being discussed in the Episcopal Church and by our brothers and sisters in other provinces of the Anglican Communion. Elsewhere in this issue of The Apostle you will find an essay by the Rt. Revd Paul Marshall, the Bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem. While Bishop Marshall’s essay deals with the relationship between the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury, I believe that it also addresses the importance of accepting diversity of convictions within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion and I hope that you will all read it.

I am thankful for the way we have honored the diversity of convictions within the parish and pray that we will continue to be united in worship and in ministry to one another and the wider community.

Your brother and priest,

Daniel