Lenten Choices: Accumulating and Sharing

One of my ministerial BFFs let me in on a concern he experienced in another denomination.  Since 90+% of what Episcopal clergy do looks like what clergy in just about every other denomination do it made sense to hear his concern as addressing something of our lives, too.

He talked about how too many churches in his group operated to provide all that was needed both place and program of the spiritual practice each member attempted.  The article he shared called it simply, "program piety."

The implied message was "we've got what you need. Come and get it."  Pushing through the implication were other veiled messages about soul competence, value of membership and perhaps most of all individual subservience to an institution.

In our Episcopal world the old monster of "program piety" looked like clericalism.  "Father knows best" supported by a Book of Common Prayer.  It's not all bad but we still have a foot in that world.

Our annual parochial report measures first and foremost Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) to indicate the congregation's vitality.  Along with the comings and goings of communicants we are evaluated on a kind of Sunday morning "program piety."

The priest and other leadership plan programs that are seasonally appropriate, that affirm a gentle and broad orthodoxy, that foster mostly personal and therefore individual spiritual practices and that do not interfere or contradict engagement that is measured by the annual parochial report.

I'm not complaining.  It makes sense especially because we are so bound by tradition, custom, history, etc.  But it also too often makes us work against our own best interests.

The question isn't so much "how to do the new thing so more people will come to church?" but more so "how do we help initiate, nurture and share our spiritual lives at all age levels such that growth is obvious?"

ASA can't measure that.  Our Bishop and diocese agree and provide a "page five" so that we can at least give some narrative recognition to growth not measured by ASA.

Let's use Lent to share and grow and to do so in all the ways we have, both measurable and abstract, numbers and spirits,  ASA and "page five" and more.

The change will not be found in how we exercise or increase "program piety."  We're going to do that anyway.  The best indicator of growth will be in noting how we share with each other as many of those aspects of our individual and corporate piety and we can.

The movement Jesus initiated with his life, death and resurrection was not a system of delivering a "program piety" packaged and quantified for the records.  It was first, foremost and finally, sharing.