I feel confident that I am not alone in noticing the proximity of the Feast of the Holy Cross, September 14, to the anniversary of September 11, 2001. The feast day originally set aside to celebrate Constantine’s mother, Helena, finding the cross in Jerusalem circa 324 is likewise an opportunity to reveal hidden truth, a truth covered over by our comfortable expectations for life. September 11 marked the end of the 20th century not merely chronologically, but also culturally. The 1980s’ “morning in America” and the end of the Cold War was followed by the bubbly 1990s, an upbeat period in the United States featuring the Dave Matthews Band and the comedy of Seinfeld.

The new century, which began with the falling of those towers, has turned out to be far less optimistic and less secure. The 2008 economic downturn, only a few years later, called into question for young adults (including me at the time) an expected course of life: buying a house, starting a family, following the road to being middle class. During the 2010s, the two political parties began to widen to their polar extremes, birthing the bitter fruit of (without hyperbole) lunatic fringes gaining credit on the national stage. There has been palpable social change, some of which seems like satire and whose ultimate ends are still unknown, and there is a pervasive uncertainty about democratic institutions that have long been trusted. Oh yes, and there was a global pandemic through which many of us were trying to raise kids.

But hey, life ain’t so bad. Please forgive me if this sounds like moaning and whining. After all, most of us are not living through the sack of Rome or even the ravages of war and famine that are happening right now across God’s good creation. In truth, many of us in the West are very comfortable; many of us have a reasonable hope to pay for our kids’ college and our retirements. My point, however, is that 9/11 seems to have marked the end of a particular culture of certainty and expectation embraced in America during the second half of the 20th century, a certainty about the course of life that had endured even during the Cold War.

Perhaps the tragedy of 9/11, now almost 25 years ago, inaugurated an era of clarity. I certainly do not mean that 9/11 was somehow helpful; that would be grotesque. And likewise, it is a strange assertion during a season when trust in the former “givens” of Western life is bottoming out. But that is the point. We see, or at least I hope some of us see, the truth about real security. Older liturgical calendars list the feast as the “invention” of the Cross, an echo of its Latin title. The word Inventio has the connotation of uncovering that which was always there. It has the sense of revelation or unveiling, not creation or fabrication. Consider the emotionally powerful moment in our Good Friday liturgy when the cross is brought out for veneration. The cross is unveiled; the truth is revealed. According to Eusebius, the true cross was hidden underneath a Temple to Venus; it was covered over by lies. Hail the cross, indeed, our one hope. And this uncovering is not merely seeing two pieces of wood fixed together, but the truth that our security is found in that place, the cross of Jesus Christ, where pain and hope meet, where death and life intersect, where (once more) perverse human failure is swallowed up in divine provision. There is God’s victory and our security.

Here, then, is a short catena of Christian voices on the Cross, a gathering of sources for reflection on this day. I have only lightly amended language and translations for ease of reading.

Cyril of Jerusalem (313-86), Catechetical Lectures
Let us not be ashamed of the cross of our Savior, but rather glory in it. “For the word of the Cross is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,” but to us, it is salvation. And “to those who are perishing it is foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:23). For it was not a mere man who died for us, but the Son of God, God made man. Further, if the lamb under Moses drove away the destroyer (Ex. 12:23), did not much rather the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world deliver us from our sins” (John 1:29)? The blood of a silly sheep gave salvation. Shall not the blood of the only begotten save?

Dream of the Rood (c. 8th century)
Listen! I will speak of the sweetest dream, what came to me in the middle of the night, when speech-bearers slept in their rest. It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree … Then the young hero made ready—that was God almighty— strong and resolute; he ascended on the high gallows, brave in the sight of many, when he wanted to ransom mankind. I trembled when he embraced me, but I dared not bow to the ground, or fall to the earth’s corners—I had to stand fast. I was reared as a cross: I raised up the mighty King, the Lord of heaven; I dared not lie down. They drove dark nails through me; the scars are still visible, open wounds of hate; I dared not harm any of them. They mocked us both together; I was all drenched with blood flowing from that man’s side after he had sent forth his spirit … “Now I bid you, my beloved hero, tell them in words that it is the tree of glory on which almighty God suffered for mankind’s many sins and Adam’s ancient deeds. Death He tasted there, yet the Lord rose again with his great might to help mankind. He ascended into heaven. He will come again to this middle-earth to seek mankind on doomsday.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), Commentary on Colossians
O the abundant riches of God’s mercy! O the unspeakable goodness of his heavenly wisdom! When all hope of righteousness was past on our part, when we had nothing in ourselves whereby we might quench his burning wrath and work the salvation of own souls, and rise out of the miserable state wherein we lay; then, even then, did Christ the Son of God, by the appointment of his Father, come down from heaven to be wounded for our sakes, to be reputed with the wicked, to be condemned to death, to take on himself the reward for our sins and to give his body to be broken on the cross for our offenses. “He,” says the prophet Isaiah, meaning Christ, “has born our infirmities and has carried our sorrows; the chastisement of our peace was upon him and by his stripes are we made whole” (Isa. 53:4-5) … St. Paul likewise says, “God made him a sacrifice for our sins who knew no sin, that we should be made the righteousness of God by him” (2 Cor. 5:21). And St. Peter agrees, writing, “Christ has once died and suffered for our sins, the just for the unjust” (1 Pet. 3:18).

Martin Luther (1483-1546), Commentary on Galatians, Erasmus Middletown, trans. (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1979)
Carnal glory and ambition is a dangerous poison … Our glory is increased and confirmed because our cross and suffering is the suffering of Christ. Our Savior, who is greater than the world, pronounced us to be blessed and wills us to rejoice (Matt. 5:11-12) … Our glory, then, is a different glory to the glory of the world, which does not rejoice in tribulation and persecution, but in power, riches, honor, and its own righteousness. But mourning and confusion will be the end of this kind of glory.

Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-82), Sermon, “Joy out of Suffering”
The joy of the world ends in sorrow; sorrow with Christ and in Christ, yes, and for our sins, for Christ’s sake, ends in joy … Faint not then, you weary soul, but trust! If you can see nothing but hell before you, shut your eyes and cast yourself blindly into the infinite abyss of God’s mercy, and the everlasting arms will receive you and bear you. Hide in the cleft of the rock riven for you, your Savior’s wounded side, until this tyranny is past. If buffeted by the waves, you would not let go of a rope which held you to the rock! So now, though “all his waves and storms seem to pass over you,” hold faster to him who, unseen, holds you.

J.C. Ryle (1816-1900), Sermon, “On the Cross“
What did St. Paul mean when he said, “I glory in the cross of Christ,” in the Epistle to the Galatians? … He simply meant, “I glory in nothing but Christ crucified, as the salvation of my soul. Reader, Jesus Christ crucified was the joy and delight, the comfort and the peace, the hope and the confidence, the foundation and the resting place, the ark and the refuge, the food and the medicine of Paul’s soul. He did not think of what he had done himself, and suffered himself. He did not meditate on his own goodness, and his own righteousness. He loved to think of what Christ had done, and Christ had suffered — of the death of Christ, the righteousness of Christ, the atonement of Christ, the blood of Christ, the finished work of Christ. In this he did glory … Are you one that finds his heart too ready to love earthly things? To you also I say, “Behold the cross of Christ.” Look at the cross; think of the cross; meditate on the cross, and then go and set your affections on the world if you can. I believe that holiness is nowhere learned so well as on Calvary. I believe you cannot look much at the cross without feeling your will sanctified, and your tastes made more spiritual. As the sun makes everything else look dark and dim, so does the cross darken the false splendor of this world. As honey tasted makes all other things seem to have no taste at all, so does the cross seen by faith take all the sweetness out of the pleasures of the world. Keep on every day steadily looking at the cross of Christ.

The historiography of Reformation-era England, that is, the reflection on how we tell the story (or, better, stories), is a field in itself. This is not merely because of some narcissism or insularism (yes, that’s a pun) among those who work in that particular subfield, but rather because suspicions have reigned for centuries about the motives and methods, often driven by calcified church party commitments, of the writers. These suspicions became so pronounced that some scholars grew doubtful that anyone who is an Anglican could possibly do sober work on the subject. I vividly recall having a cup of coffee in the café at the National Archives in Kew, outside of London, 15 years ago with a leading scholar whom I still tremendously respect. We were discussing an important monograph and he whispered to me, “I’m not sure I would trust her. She’s an Anglican.” He didn’t know that I was likewise an Anglican and pursuing ordination.

While I have no intention of reviewing in this space how historians of the period in the early 20th century adapted the Annales School and started digging in archives or offering a rundown of the major voices of revisionism and post-revisionism, I want to bring to the fore a simple term coined by the historian Ethan Shagan at the turn of this century: spiritual amphibians. Eamon Duffy’s monumental The Stripping of the Altars (1992) marked a major turning point in how we tell the story of Reformation-era England. Looking to real village life rather than big documents like royal decrees or even official prayer books, Duffy’s work appeared to overturn the lingering Protestant triumphalism of A.G. Dickens. Duffy gave us Catholics who had to deal with a series of Tudor regimes forcing them to be Protestants. But, as many have since recognized, there was a gap in Duffy’s story: the monasteries. What does one make of these devout people who loved the saints and the Mass, who had little interest in Protestant preaching, rising to loot the monasteries? Knee-jerk Marxism won’t solve the question either; these people were believers. They were, to use Shagan’s term, spiritual amphibians, people who were complex and who held a variety of commitments and lived in a messy world.

In short, people are complicated. I’ve written previously for Covenant about the importance of listening to converts and not pigeonholing them. Not all evangelicals who become Anglicans, for example, are “ex-vangelicals,” people who love the Bible but who have adopted a more progressive moral theology. But neither are they all “Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail,” people who are still theologically conservative but who now desire the sacraments and maybe a few references to Augustine in the sermon. No, everyone has a story. People migrate and commit themselves and their families to church bodies for all manner of reasons, some rather imaginary. I know one former Roman Catholic who became an Episcopalian in his mind before he ever set foot in an Episcopal parish church, largely by reading select things on the internet and envisioning the kind of church he’d like. A little of X. A little of Y. A dash of this. A pinch of that. In reality, I fear, it only existed in his mind. But am I any different? Real flesh-and-blood relationships make things harder and yet more lively.

Again, people are complicated, and they have a story. Their motives jostle against one another in their hearts, their minds, and their relationships. But this in no way makes their experiences less interesting, less able to generate a conversation, elicit questions, and perhaps shed light on our common hunger for the peace of Jesus Christ in his body the church. As I take on this work of caretaking and curating the stories of spiritual amphibians, I can’t help but recall that the sixteenth-century Zurich publisher, Christoph Froschauer, a man who also cared for the ideas and stories of others, used the image of a frog as his printer’s mark, a play on his name “frog meadow.”  While I’ve always been fond of owls as a totem, perhaps the amphibious frog is better.

I have clear theological convictions, which I hope I hold charitably, and likewise this online journal was formed and perdures with some clear theological and ecclesiological commitments. Our leadership is not hiding any of that. I have no desire to descend into a morass of uncertainty. But nuance and complexity, guarded by a spirit of charity, are not to be feared. My hope, as editor, is that we foster conversations, and in so doing see more clearly and grasp more firmly the hope of the New Jerusalem, the cross of Christ and his empty tomb — a hope for me and for you, dear reader. I hope you will return to this space often to be challenged and encouraged, to think carefully, sometimes to laugh or maybe even grumble a bit. But I hope you will find your mind and heart kindled by what you read here, by the arguments, the reflections, and the stories.

To mark the occasion, I’ve pulled up a couple Covenant classics on the Blessed Virgin for your edification. The first is from Covenant‘s new editor, who is stepping into the role this week.

He has her eyes

The second considers the weird, wild, and wonderful character of embodiment.

Our bodies are magic

This is only one example of hundreds of instances in early modern Britain in which the set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer were adapted to meet pastoral needs. Yet we can make three observations. First, the crafting was done to redress gaps in available forms, not to supplant what was there. Second, they were usually set within or drew on the existing material. And finally, and most important, they were crafted with the grain of the prayer book, that is, along the prayer book’s internal theological ethos.

Recently in my work as a pastor, I experienced the need for two different liturgies that are not neatly provided in the Book of Common Prayer (1979). While I could have turned to a flurry of resources both approved and unapproved, or even cooked something up myself, I found there was material in the book that could be used to meet the pastoral need if I could provide or borrow some fittings or structures, so to speak. This allowed me to pray and minister with theological and liturgical consistency. But I also want to highlight the enormous material between the covers of the 1979 prayer book that I suspect many clergy and parishes neither know about nor use.

Several months ago, a woman contacted the church office because her father, well into his 90s, had died. He was tangentially connected to our parish, and she was exploring funeral possibilities. The catch was there were five grown children (who had children and grandchildren) and, having no clear burial plan left by their late father, there was significant disagreement. Eventually — and blessedly before I made any plans — I was informed that the funeral was indefinitely postponed. They simply could not agree.

But I got another phone call. The woman who had initially called me shared with me that her wing of the family (numbering close to 30) had already made plans to come to the area from all over the country on the original date we had discussed. She was hoping that I could offer some sort of service, even though this was clearly not the funeral. She hoped for something to acknowledge his death and make prayers. In other words, she wanted a “not-funeral funeral.”

Probably one of the most unused forms of prayer sits between the Ministration at Time of Death and the Burial rites. There are, indeed, Vigil prayers on pp. 465-66. In 13 years of ordained ministry, I have never used them, nor even known many instances of their use. With the ashes on a pedestal in the crossing, I sat in a chair nearby, not my usual seat in the chancel. To the Vigil prayers I added a time for short informal remembrances, a lesson (1 Cor. 15:51-57), a short homily, the Lord’s Prayer, and a collect for mourners. In other words, I drew on existing materials in the prayer book and what I added was consistent with it. I prayed and ministered with the grain.

Another call was quite different, but wonderfully welcome. A young woman had recently been healed of sickle cell anemia. I had believed this was a lifelong condition, but recent gene therapies have proven nearly miraculous. Family members wanted to give thanks to God for this and asked for not merely prayer, but a full service of thanksgiving. I was delighted to join with them and craft something.

Most services of thanksgiving that I found resembled the Daily Office, but with some subtle changes. What I crafted used Psalm 95, the First Song of Isaiah, and some obvious hymn choices and Scripture lessons about healing and restoration. Following the Lord’s Prayer, we used the Thanksgiving Collect for the Restoration of Health on p. 841. During the prayer I laid on hands and invited the family to do likewise. Then we shifted into the Litany of Thanksgiving on p. 837 with some suitable personal additions.

Here is yet another form of prayer in the 1979 prayer book likely unused by most clergy, or perhaps only used on Thanksgiving Day. The family, being from Ghana originally, came forward to make offerings during a hymn — an act of thanksgiving — rather than passing the alms basins. This, I have learned, is a custom in parts of Africa. The point, however, is that I used what is in the 1979 prayer book and prayed and ministered along its internal logic and ethos.

These services could have easily come from the existing prayer book. When she printed the leaflets, our parish administrator remarked that she hadn’t worked with these services before. She had not realized that I was crafting something. But in truth, I wasn’t really creating anything novel. I was leading worship with the grammar of the Book of Common Prayer (1979).

One should acknowledge, up front, that there is a smoke screen that needs to be blown away first. We in the Episcopal Church are uniquely cursed with a sense of imperial grandeur; our presiding bishop preached a royal wedding and we host presidential funerals at the Washington National Cathedral. That can give many people a hazy sense that we’re established and quite stable. But neither the big scary stats about decline (which are disturbingly true) nor the romanticism about establishment is very helpful. One has to get into the weeds — the details — about actual dioceses and parishes. As I have argued elsewhere, the mission of the church is always in local congregations.

Every year congregations have to submit parochial reports to their diocese and, by extension, national record-keepers. These are in keeping with centuries-old processes of gathering information. Historians of the middle ages and early modernity find visitation records enormously helpful in piecing together not only a portrait of religious activity but also how the questions posed to local clergy reflected what bishops and other leaders up the ecclesiastical food chain thought was important. The visitation articles from Laudian bishops in the 17th century started asking questions about rails around the Communion table and whether the minister properly wore his surplice. While we ask different questions today, record-keeping seems to be a constant charism of the Anglican tradition.

Today’s parochial report form is uniquely interested in three things, all asked about in different ways: worship attendance, money, and demographics. There are questions about attendance at Sunday and weekday liturgies and the numbers of baptisms, weddings, and burials. Then there are a few questions about education opportunities and participation for both children and adults. There are questions about total membership (a truly mystifying question for many clergy) and an interest in racial diversity. There are questions about money — how it comes in, how much, and how it is spent. Then there are some open-ended questions about challenges and opportunities and in what ways the congregation has engaged in dismantling the injustices of racism. As any rector or priest in charge knows, this exercise is largely about crunching data, but it is a helpful diagnostic.

General Convention staff have already prepared a number of helpful and perceptive analytical reports of the data. What is truly remarkable is that most of these data then are tabulated into a searchable index. Right now we have access to the information up to the parochial reports submitted in the early spring of 2023, meaning the data for 2022. Parishes are now (early spring 2024) submitting for the year just completed, that is, 2023. Yes, in one respect, it is like filing tax forms.

The searchable database is completely open to the public. The database begins with total information about the whole Episcopal Church. In general, one “de-selects” until the vision comes into focus, much like the lenses your optometrist uses to check your glasses prescription. It is very important to always unclick a previous search, or it will simply start adding data together. For example, one can search the whole Episcopal Church for those congregations that, in 2022, have an ASA (Average Sunday Attendance) over 300. Be sure to de-select all the other years and then click just 2022.

The answer is 77. There are 77 such parishes in the whole Episcopal Church. This includes not only the dioceses in the United States, but also those seven dioceses in Latin American that form province IX (Colombia, Dominican Republic, Central Ecuador, Litoral Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela). A takeaway, though, is that the overwhelming majority of those churches are in the swath from Virginia through Texas, mainly Province IV.

Raising the bar a bit more, there are 13 congregations that report 600 or more on Sunday. Of the four largest congregations in the Episcopal Church, two are in Texas and two are in Colombia: St. Martin’s, Houston; Incarnation, Dallas; San Pedro y San Pablo, Bucaramanga; San Estaban, Giron. Remember, this is based on Average Sunday Attendance (ASA), not membership. The latter number is important to keep, but is not terribly reflective of mission and ministry.

But one should focus more closely. What is happening in your own diocese? This is important for everyone in a diocese, not just diocesan staff. This is true, yes, because you pray for your sisters and brothers, join in the work of convention or, at least, people from your parish do, but also you, in one way or another, contribute to the work of your diocese financially — assessment, mission share, whatever your diocese chooses to call it. Everyone has a stake.

One can click on a diocese, select one year or multiple years, and then sort parishes. You can sort by Membership, Average Attendance, or Plate & Pledge. According to the data, of the 71 parishes that submitted in my diocese, two-thirds of them now have an ASA under 50. Only 13 parishes reported an ASA over 100. Only four reported more than 150.

Again, this is 2022. Some parishes may have grown some; some may have declined some. To be clear, I still have COVID concerns and still mask from time to time; I was horrified to see some folks indoors, often unmasked, well before there was a vaccine in the spring of 2021. But I believe that by the spring of 2022, we were back as much as we ever were going to be back. Yes, in one respect, the long-term effects of COVID still ripple. In other words, the damage is done and the “asterisks” need to be dropped in our reflection on where we are now. The people who were going to come back were back in 2022. My point is, the data does not need to be qualified because of COVID. This is where we are now.

Why, some may ask, am I preoccupied with ASA? In order to be nimble in our mission field analysis, there are other (perhaps obvious) vectors to be explored – but these double back on ASA. First, what exactly is ASA? It is average Sunday worship attendance. I have written before on Covenant about the need to avoid reducing “church” to worship, and I agree we should have a fourth category to observe in this database: numbers of adults and children/youth in education. Those numbers could easily be tallied.  One wonders (with dreary pessimism) why we don’t have that field at hand. In fairness, we could consider all manner of other markers of church life, serving the poor, for example. But education participation is something more demonstrable, just as worship attendance.  Ultimately, though, education numbers – children/youth and adult – are always going to be relative to worship attendance. For example, what percentage of the ASA participates in education. Raising that percentage in a parish (and a dioceses) represents more people who are more dialed in and more engaged in the life and mission of the church.  Setting that as a mission goal with the aim of growth seems like a no-brainer. Let’s say more about relating other vectors to ASA by considering the question of membership.

Yes, the membership number is important to keep in view, and one can access and sort by membership in this database. But we should accept that this is a hard number to establish with accuracy. The parochial report, with its questions about how often the parish membership list has been evaluated (culled?) evinces as much. I believe, however, that the analytic opportunity, from a pastoral and discipleship perspective, is in running the membership number against average worship attendance. Most of us are aware of changing patterns in worship attendance relative to congregational membership over the past generation. A major change in parish life across the Episcopal Church (and across mainline Protestant churches) is that our “active” people are not as regular in attendance as were our “active” people twenty years ago. For example, a generation ago we may have considered an “active” member someone who comes to worship three or four Sundays a month. The bar has been lowered considerably. Now we often perceive someone as “active” if they show up one or two Sundays a month with consistency.  In other words, most congregations get less participation out of the total pool.  Granted, there could be outliers (the dream!). In other words, imagine a congregation with a total membership of 200 and all of those people are so sold out for Christ and the mission of the church that they are all there almost every Sunday.  But more often, the membership number is much, much higher than the ASA.  I would imagine a congregation with a total membership of 200 probably has worship attendance in the 70s.  And, given most clergy’s propensity to count membership fairly liberally, that ratio might be charitable.

Notwithstanding the inaccuracy of membership numbers, there is an practical analytic opportunity.  Could the pastor identify those folks who are “marginally active” (i.e. coming to worship six or seven times a year) and consider how they might become “active” (i.e. attending worship once or twice a month). One avenue fostering personal relationships between the marginally active and the fully active.  Now we’re using data to help with ministry! One of the first steps to growing a church, i.e. adding new members, is having existing members dialed in and engaged, i.e. showing up at least a couple of times a month to worship and other activities, especially education. Who, after all, would want to join a church filled with folks who are marginal and luke-warm (Rev. 3:16)? Life is too short for that.

But even when we start asking these sorts of questions, we simply can’t get away from ASA. We always wind back to that number.

This data also begs other questions. Consider the issue of representation in leadership and decision making at the diocesan level. Should a parish that has an ASA of 9 (not exaggerating) have the same representation as a parish with an ASA of 215? We can also do some analysis with an eye to geography.  Here I raise the question of forming relationships between, for example, a larger healthier parish and a nearby smaller, arguably struggling parish with the intent to grow congregations which present the possibility for growth. This has happened in Birmingham, Dallas, and Nashville. I submit that church planting and church revitalization needs to be a project of networking with healthy churches, rather than top-down initiatives from a far-away hierarchy.

Just as a perceptive rector spots where the health is in a congregation and then feeds and builds on that health, so too should diocesan leadership identify where health is in a diocese and build on that health through creative partnerships.  My father was once a community college dean and an old story he often relays was the time they built a few new buildings, but intentionally didn’t pour sidewalks. Instead they watched where the students walked through the grass for about a year, and then poured the sidewalks along the “dog tracks.”

This data begs to be analyzed for sustainability and mission. And we have to start asking ourselves, with sobriety, what will the Episcopal Church look like in 10 or 20 years, and what do we really want to do about it.

The information is accessible.  Now, let’s get a good look at who we are. Can it tell us everything?  Certainly not.  But it can give us a clearer vision.