The New! Improved! Episcopal Church! (Not.)

On my recent sojourn to the place of my birth, I had the opportunity to revisit the church of my youth. I grew up in the Episcopal Church – St. Mark’s Episcopal Church of Shreveport, Louisiana, to be exact. As a child, my parents had been searching – unsuccessfully it turns out – for a church home, when they enrolled me in the Kindergarten class of the school run by St. Marks. I came home spouting Episcopal theology. It occurred to them that the Episcopal faith was the only thing they’d not really explored among the mainstream Christian denominations. Soon, we all became card-carrying Episcopalians.

Episcopalians are generally a stoic lot. My Mom used to say, “we know we are going to heaven, because we’re Episcopalians, and it’s in the Bible that the dead in Christ shall rise.” (Even our humor is pretty dry.) I always thought of the Episcopal Church as “Catholic Lite” (you know…all the tradition…1/3 the guilt). That was the thing I loved about the Episcopal Church. The tradition. The beauty of the liturgy. The language. And I’m not alone…why do you think virtually EVERYbody that gets married in a movie, gets married in an Episcopal church? Our Mari age Sacrament is the Gold Standard of marriage ceremonies.

That all changed in the late 60’s. Seems a bunch of priests of a liberal bent had infiltrated the church hierarchy, and began work on infusing the Episcopal church with their more liberal theology. They began with the liturgy – what we call The Book of Common Prayer. They argued that the language in the ’28 book was just too antiquated and archaic, and was driving people away. (These are the same geniuses that try to rewrite Shakespeare to make it more appealing to modern audiences.) Like the Republicans of today, the traditionalists in ECUSA (Episcopal Church of the United States of America) just didn’t have the stomach to defend their beliefs. The liberal wing took over, and the result was the ’72 Book of Common Prayer.

Interestingly, they even tried (unsuccessfully) to rewrite the Lord’s Prayer. Old or New version of the Lord’s Prayer or not, the ’72 Prayer Book (and it’s mandatory usage enforced by ECUSA) was the beginning of the liberal takeover, or the beginning of the end of the Episcopal Church’s traditional conservative underpinnings.

You’ve probably heard about the schism in the church between the liberals and conservatives. The conservatives have had enough – and appealed to the rest of the worldwide Anglican communion for help. They/we don’t hold with cherished liberal ideas like ordaining gays in active, homosexual or lesbian relationships, or gay marriage. The liberals see nothing wrong with this, and insist that conservatives are simply out-of-step with today’s values. Interestingly, the worldwide Anglican communion agrees with the conservatives, and has effectively excommunicated The Episcopal Church (or “TEC” – nee: ECUSA), even going so far as to sanction “missions” from Asia, Africa and South America to foster new, conservative Anglican churches here in the U.S.A. – and allow breakaway churches to affiliate themselves with African, Asian, or South American bishops for pastoral oversight.

In Amarillo, we choose to attend a Reformed Anglican Church – a group that broke away from ECUSA/TEC over 100 years ago. It’s more conservative than the Episcopal churches of my childhood. My former church in Plano, Christ Church, has already broken away from the liberal TEC, and are now an “Anglican” church. That takes us to St. Mark’s – the church of my childhood.

I attended St. Mark’s this Sunday last. They have not chosen to break away from the liberals. They use the service drawn from the ’72 Prayer Book (like many churches, they choose to print the service text in their bulletin, instead of using the pew books). Now understand, the St. Mark’s building is, hands down, the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen. The stained glass windows are breathtaking. The stone, brick, and oak is gorgeous. The organ is impressive. You can’t but help being inspried in that building. The service, on the other hand, was to tradition what Cliff Notes are to a novel.

Behind all the tradition and beautiful language of the liturgy of the Anglican church is an internal logic that is not readily apparent to the casual observer. In the Anglican tradition, you kneel for prayer, sit for instruction, and stand for praise. The service is likewise divided into two parts: you can think of the first part of the service as instruction, lessons, and prayers. The second part is the sacrament of the bread and the wine – the observance of the Last Supper. There’s a tradition that states that if you’re late for the service and miss the first part of the service, as long as you get there in time for the General Confession, you may still take Communion. Miss that, and you’re supposed to sit out the Sacrament.

The service at St. Mark’s was…weird. I had to go back and read the bulletin several times over. Nope. No General Confession. They did the Collect, the (Old Testament) lesson, the (New Testament) Gospel, the Sermon, and (of course) the Communion – but no General Confession. To the uninitiated, that would seem like just a step toward streamlining the service, in the same way that the Reader’s Digest ‘streamlines’ literature. To the faithful, it’s more like a sacrilege.

I don’t know why St. Marks chose to eliminate the General Confession from their order of service. But I know I missed it. Somehow, it didn’t feel right taking Communion without first confessing my sins. But I can say this for certain – it takes more than an impressive building to make for a meaningful worship experience.