Unabashedly Episcopalian

Proclaiming the Good News of the Episcopal Church

C. Andrew Doyle

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780819228093
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Episcopalians newly discovering their church home or long-time members who may have forgotten why they love the church will appreciate Unabashedly Episcopalian. Bishop Andy Doyle has mined the Baptismal Covenant and his own experiences leading the Diocese of Texas. The result is a heartfelt, smart and practical book that calls Episcopalians to wake up to the church s unique gifts and story, and equips them to share that witness in their neighborhoods and out in the world."

chapter one

We Are Episcopalian

We are tied together in a single garment
of destiny, caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality.

— THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

On Wednesday, September 7, 1774, at the inaugural session of the Continental Congress, with the weight of war and the hope of freedom on their minds, the Reverend Jacob Duché, an Anglican clergyman and rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia, was invited to read prayers to the Congress. As it happened, the 35th Psalm was appointed in the Book of Common Prayer as a part of Morning Prayer that day. Duché began, “Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help.”²

On June 28, 1836, it was an Episcopal service that accompanied James Madison, our fourth president and founding father, to his grave.³ And they were Episcopal prayers that comforted the mourners in their grief.

It was an Episcopal service of Morning Prayer with hymns that inaugurated the Atlantic Charter between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales on the eve of World War II.⁴ And at the service commemorating Roosevelt’s third inauguration, in the midst of war, an Episcopal prayer was used to petition for our enemies and pray for peace.⁵

As an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan M. Daniels followed the call of Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Selma, Alabama, where he lived with an African-American family and helped integrate the local Episcopal Church. On August 20, 1965, Daniels was shot while saving the life of a young black woman.

Three years later, at the Washington National Cathedral (an Episcopal church), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. climbed the thirteen steps into the pulpit during an Episcopal service and said:

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.⁶

I remember watching on television then president-elect Barack Obama begin his day by walking into St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, prior to being sworn in as our 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009. In the days surrounding the inauguration he would attend a national prayer service in Washington National Cathedral, and deliver a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed his dream.

In New York City, on September 11, 2001, St. Paul’s Chapel (the chapel in which George Washington, our first president, worshiped following his inauguration) became an epicenter for relief workers and a nation in crisis. In this modest chapel of the venerable Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street, some five thousand volunteers transformed an eighteenth-century landmark into a sacramental vessel pouring out love and care.

Episcopal relief workers have rebuilt homes, assembled temporary shelters, and provided clean drinking water in the wake of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes. After Hurricane Katrina we led efforts to rebuild cities across the Gulf Coast from Mississippi to New Orleans to Texas. We have housed tens of thousands in Haiti. We have labored in the midst of the urban poor and bleak rural desolation.

The Episcopal Church welcomes all and we have a tradition of putting into action the words of Isaiah, which Jesus spoke in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:18–19): “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Like Jesus himself, we the faithful members of the Episcopal Church have sought through the years to make God’s love incarnational—to make God’s love real in the mission and ministry of our church.

The Episcopal Church is the community in which I was raised, the son of a priest. It is the faith tradition that I was baptized into at the college chapel on the campus of Southern Methodist University, where my parents helped to lead the Episcopal Student Center. It is the tradition I studied as a young adult prior to my own confirmation; having memorized the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, and the Catechism (or the church’s teachings) from the back of the “new” Book of Common Prayer of 1979. I knelt before Bishop Jose Guadalupe Saucedo of Mexico, at that time a diocese of the Episcopal Church, and was confirmed. I came to appreciate this tradition even more in my adult years as a summer camp counselor and camp staff member at Camp Allen, an Episcopal camp northwest of Houston, as a participant in college mission at the Canterbury Association at the University of North Texas, and as a member of the staff at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas.

When I discerned a call to serve Jesus Christ in the ordained ministry, the Episcopal Church gave voice to my own faith and belief in God and God’s revelation. The tradition of daily Morning Prayer and the singing of hymns and canticles rang throughout my theological studies at Virginia Theological Seminary. The words and prayers of the Book of Common Prayer comforted me as I ministered to the victims and their families at a deadly bonfire collapse at Texas A&M University in 1999.

This tradition has supported me at my best and challenged me at my worst. In this church, I have found the clearest reflection I know of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith delivered to the saints and handed down through generations of the faithful. This faith sung and prayed by a thousand tongues before me—this is the church I love. It is the Episcopal Church and its particular and unique witness to Jesus Christ that inspires me to mission and inspires my desire to be a better bishop and human being.

Bound by a Promise

Why begin a book geared to the newly baptized and confirmed, and those who long to recall those vows, in this fashion? You have taken a profound oath to God and to your community in the sacrament of baptism and/or confirmation or by reception into the Anglican Communion, and you have done it specifically in the context of an Episcopal Church. You have made a covenant with God, one that is rooted in the waters of baptism.

It is my hope that, as you turn these pages, you will explore your sacred promises to God and walk your pilgrim journey with greater intention. More importantly, I hope you will find what many have found: that God is calling you to serve and minister in the world around you. The combined work of prayer and mission has been the bedrock of the Episcopal Church (and the larger Anglican Communion) since its birth in the sixteenth century and its development under the leadership of Queen Elizabeth I and the Stuart kings in the 1600s. You are a part of a long line of Anglicans who—strengthened by liturgy, sacrament, prayer, and Scripture—take their faith seriously.

In the Episcopal Church we understand that our promises are to God and to our fellow human beings as well. These are promises made to help build up stone by stone the reign of God, and they are promises made for the communities in which we live and move and have our being, the communities we call home.

The reality is that the Episcopal Church has always found its mission rooted in contexts across our country and across the sixteen other nations worldwide in which we find our home.⁷ We are a great and global church with wide-reaching partnerships that are changing lives on a daily basis. Countless people whose names we know and even more whose names we do not know have called on the strength of our tradition and our liturgies, from the firefighter at Ground Zero to the woman in the pew praying the Psalms out of the Prayer Book.

It is my prayer that you, in your own life, will find that same strength. It is my hope that all who are seeking might find in the Episcopal Church the possibility and reality of a strong relationship with God. I pray that you will find a store of wisdom you can draw on when you are unsure of a course of action. May you find a deep well of spirituality that you can draw from when you are in trouble, fearful, or in pain, as well as when you are celebrating life’s joys. I hope you will discover that the firm foundation of Jesus Christ revealed in our baptismal promises and in our tradition will be a foundation upon which you may, with others, reshape the world. We in the Episcopal Church have a particular and beautiful way of understanding the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, and we stand as bearers of the gift of God’s abundant grace for humankind.

There will come a time in your life, a moment when every word will matter, every prayer spoken or silently prayed will count, every action will be an opportunity for change. Into these moments, let the wisdom of our Episcopal heritage, worship, prayer, and Scripture be present for you, uphold you, and sustain you.

We do all of this worship and prayer and tenacious pursuit of living out our faith for one reason. We are called through Christ’s own love and by our baptism to devote our lives to the coming of the reign of God. We understand a virtuous citizenship that beckons us to fulfill our duty and responsibility as missionaries of God’s love in the world around us. So we pray:

Send us now into the world in peace,
and grant us strength and courage
to love and serve you
with gladness and singleness of heart;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.⁸

chapter two

Choosing to walk
the Pilgrim way

Celebrant	Do you desire to be baptized?
Candidate	I do.^9

Jesus said, “Follow me.”

— LUKE 9:23

Sociologists, observers of culture, and church leaders have been talking for some time about an important book: Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Published in 2005, the book is based upon some three thousand interviews with teenagers, and it highlights the emerging sensibilities of this new generation of spiritual pilgrims.

The authors claim that five concepts make up the foundation of this generation’s faith, which together add up to a perspective they call moralistic therapeutic deism. It asserts the following beliefs:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.¹⁰

This is not a bad set of beliefs to live by. In fact if the whole world abided by these basic beliefs it would be a far better place. But I would say that we as Episcopalians have a different way of seeing the world and our place in it. When we are asked if we wish to be baptized, or when we reaffirm our baptism, we step forward and say to the world that we believe differently. There are some things we hold in common with all religious beliefs and others we hold in common with the larger family of Christian believers. But when we rise and affirm the faith of the church and reaffirm our own faith, we are challenged to be a particular and unique people of God.

Not Just Any God

The Baptismal Covenant we make with God and our communities says we believe in a God who created and ordered the world but who ordered it for a particular purpose: for beauty and relationship. We believe in a God who watches over human life and interacts with all life on...