My Church Presentation

TMM 2015
Dr. Greg Garrett
Good evening. It is an honor and a privilege to join you at Catalina United Methodist
Church for this dinner marking the 40th anniversary of TMM Family Services. Id like to
thank Don Strauch for his invitation and his many years of service, our emcee, Mike
Shaw, and all of you for being here. I bring greetings from my colleagues at Baylor
University, where I have written and taught for 25 years, and from your brothers and
sisters at St. Davids Episcopal Church in downtown Austin, Texas, where I am
privileged to serve.

We live in a time of great uncertainty. Institutions are in transition. Churches and

denominations are in flux. If youve ever been in an earthquakeeven a minor oneyou
know it can be disturbing. We dont like it when the landscape shifts beneath our feet.

A couple of months ago at St. Davids we had to abandon the buildings when the fire
alarms sounded. It was the Sunday closest to the Feast of the Epiphany, and since we are
Episcopalians, it will not perhaps surprise you that a childrens Sunday school teacher set
off the alarms by burning frankincense as a lesson about the Wise Men. When I was the
convention speaker for the Episcopal Diocese of Delaware in January, an incense-loving
priest told me, wide-eyed, that setting off the fire alarms was one of his biggest fears.

Any fears that our buildings would be engulfed in flame were quickly extinguished, but
all the same, the law is the law. The church filed out onto the city streets, into the parking

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garage, and down onto the labyrinth. Rabbi Neil Blumhofe, an old friend of our
congregation, relocated the class he was teaching on Sarah and Abraham to the deck
outside our coffee shop. The choir stood out on the corner of Seventh and San Jacinto,
one block from Austins fabled Sixth Street, and regaled passersby with song as they
practiced the anthem for the Holy Eucharist. It was, in some ways, an atypical morning,
but in one thing, it was typical: we reminded the worldand ourselvesthat St. Davids
is not a building, but the people who exit the building and interact with the world outside,
the people released by the closing benediction to love and serve the Lord.

As a writer, teacher, and theologian, I am a sucker for storiesespecially stories that look
like they can tell us something about ourselves, our institutions, or about God. This
particular story seems to illustrate some things Ive been thinking about for the last
decade. Church Publishing, the Episcopal denominational publisher, asked me to write a
book that will launch in April called My Church Is Not Dyingyou can buy it right now
on your Kindle!and tonight many of my reflections will be inspired by that work.

The book is a collection of stories and conclusions about the life-giving elements of my
faith tradition. Its my attempt to remind Episcopalians and to tell others why we have
chosen to pursue God in this particular fashion, and to assert that what we are finding
life-giving in the tradition might also be life-giving to others who havent found us yet. I
want to suggest tonight that although every denomination is facing a decline in Sunday
attendance, any of usBaptist, Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, and, Id guess, our friends
and fellow workers from the Muslim and Jewish traditionscould produce a book such

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as Ive written to talk about the ancient and brand new ways God is moving in our lives
and our communities.

My Church Is Not Dying is of course a catchy but ridiculous title. As a friend from
seminary told me before I ever started writing, in case I didnt already know, Its not
your church. Greg. Its Gods. And of course it isnt dying.

Of course the Church isnt dying. But I wrote the bookas you may have guessedin
response to all the gleeful reports of the demise of the Episcopal Church, to the decline
that is reflected in every mainline Protestant denomination. Like it or not, larger cultural
changes are buffeting Christianity. As I mentioned earlier, every denomination is staring
into the abyss of loss and change. Baptisms are down in the nations largest Protestant
denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, and without the influx of Catholic
immigrants, the Roman Catholic Church in America would be facing decline as well. All
our churchesand many other organizationsare being affected by the phenomenon
sociologist Robert Putnam wrote about years ago in his bestseller Bowling Alone.
Membership across the board in groups, organizations, churchesand bowling leagues
has declined in recent years, and this has led to widespread losses of church members as
we formally reckon them.

This trend and these statistics have brought out the naysayers, the pessimists, the gleeful
cynics all suggesting that the Church is done for. In one thing, these folks are right:
Things cant go on the way they have. Although our churches arent dying, some old

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ways of doing and being church are dying. My friend Phyllis Tickle, in her wonderful
book called The Great Emergence, writes that every 500 years, the Church cleans house
and holds a rummage sale. It gets rid of things that no longer work or are just taking up
space to make room for new furniture, new fixtures, a new way of life. Its been, as some
of you know, almost exactly 500 years since Martin Luther launched the Protestant
Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church, and
according to Phyllis theoryand the very clear changes that are taking place around us
we are due for another garage sale.

Now, I have held more than one garage sale, and I for one do not like them. Will anybody
show up? What if they dont value my collectors item antler chair the way I think it
deserves to be valued? Wouldnt it maybe be better to just put this stuff in storage instead
of having to relate to a bunch of strangers?

The prospect of wholesale change is daunting, even frightening.. We have our ways of
doing, our ways of being, and it can be hard to live with the mystery and the uncertainty
that comes when you cant see the next thing yet. Its human nature. But I am here
tonight, and I think, on this planetto testify to the good news that our communities of
faith are here not just to save souls but to save lives.

And because I can testify to that, I am here to affirm that these hard times are not the end,
but a new beginning.

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I have a coffee cup on my desk at Baylor University given to me by an ex-wife in a rare
loving moment. It bears the Chinese ideogram, or hanza, for crisis on the front, and a
short inspirational note on the back. John Kennedy, Condoleeza Rice, and Al Gore are
just a few of the many people over the years who have also told my coffee cups story
that in Mandarin, the word for crisis is made up of the individual characters meaning
danger and opportunity. It turns out that this is not exactly true, but like people
sometimes say of the Historic Creeds, many stories, whether or not we accept all the facts
in them, are true in all the ways that count.

Heres what it means to say that crisis is a marriage of danger and opportunity:
When we face danger, our fight or flight mechanisms go to work. Maybe we circle the
wagons to fight off the opposing threat. Maybe we run for our lives, hoping to
outdistance that threat. Maybe we pull the covers up over our heads and try to pretend we
dont know about the threat; if we dont see it, it wont see us!

But these moments of danger and potential destruction also offer clear opportunities for
change, growth, and renewal. You know from your own life how difficult it is to make
important, even necessary changes in the middle of day-to-day events. Often, its not until
things fall apart, in times when we must change or die, that we are able to do what we
ought to have been doing long ago. And that seems to be the situation for the Church as
well. We can see the crisis of the past five decades as an opportunity to change, to grow,
as well as to continue offering the world the things it desperately needs.

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So what does it mean to be a church (or the Church) in the twenty-first century? Thats
the most meaningful question we can ask. How we respond to changing demographics,
shifting views of faith and spirituality, negative assessments of faith traditions, and new
ways of being communitywhile still remaining true to the mission of the Churchwill
dictate whether we indeed decline and fall, or whether we demonstrate a meaningful
rebirth for however many people choose to be in some way a part of our journey.

My bishop, the Right Reverend Andrew Doyle, says that the work of the Church is
evangelism and mission: Evangelism is sharing the Good News of Salvation through
God in Christ Jesus with the world around us. Mission is doing that Gospel work through
deeds. As Episcopalians we do both; it is not an either/or proposition. It is the very work
of the Church to help people come to God.

If you accept this formulation of what the Church is called to do, telling and doing, our
question shifts. How do we help people experience God in a world where fewer people
believe in God, fewer people attend formal church services, public respect for
Christianity from non-Christians has plummeted, and people are simultaneously more
connected and more alienatedfrom each other and from themselvesthan at any time
in history?

How do we bring people to God when the fastest-growing demographic in American

religion is people who dont claim affiliation with any form of religion?

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Rachel Scott Held is a major cultural figure who writes in books and on social media
about her life as a Millennial on a spiritual journey. She moved from the church of her
youth to a period of skepticism to a mainline Protestant church. She didnt turnor
returnto Christianity because of cool programs or entertainment value or a rocking
worship band. Millenials, she said in an interview last week, can detect when
someones just trying to sell us something. Were not looking for a hipper Christianity.
Were looking for a truer Christianity.

What did she mean by that? Her answer will not, perhaps, surprise you. She was looking
for a tradition that would, as she puts it, creatively re-articulate the significance of the
traditional teaching and sacraments of the church in a modern context.

Rachel was looking for a community that believed in communionliteral and

metaphoricalin baptizing sinners, in preaching the Word, in confessing its faults, in
anointing the sick. Like many of the people I talked to for my bookand many others
who have made the journey from no faith or little faith to living faithRachel was
finding that the Church is not a building where people go to be entertained or reassured,
but the body of believers who serve as the hands and feet of Christ in this world.

So: it might seem to some passersby that the Church is on fire. They hear the sirens, and
they interpret the noise to mean disaster. But, in keeping with the wisdom of my coffee
cup, I think that this crisis grants us even more license to carry our music out into the

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streets, our teaching out into the courtyard, and to tell some great stories about who we
are and how we found ourselves here.

I shaped my book around the stories people told about my tradition. I asked Rowan
Williams, the past Archbishop of Canterbury, about his first memories of Anglican
liturgy. I asked our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, to tell me what its felt
like to preside over a particularly fractious period in our history. I asked priests and
bishops about their favorite vocational moments. In his Foreword to the book, Greg
Rickel, a Bishop in Seattle, writes that for him there is nothing more powerful than that
moment when he lays hands on a confirmand to bring her into the Church and something
mysterious and holy happens.

We all know what hes talking about. Like The Edge, the guitarist of the Irish rock band
U2, I like to say at such times, God walks in the room.

In the process of asking, I heard stories that inspired me, stories that assured me that this
tradition I love has plenty to offer to a broken world that is filled with conflict, despair,
and hopelessness. The people who told me their stories were meeting God in our liturgy
and beautiful worship experiences, in day-to-day connections with God and with other
people, and in the thoughtful and communal experience of discerning how God is still
moving in the world. And as I said at the outset, I know that you have such stories
yourself, and could hear others just by asking the questions. All you need is a little
willingness to listen.

I spend a great deal of time in the UK, and in the Celtic Christian tradition we find the
idea of thin places, the saying that Heaven is only six feet above a persons head, the
belief that Christ accompanies us as our brother and companion on the way, as my
favorite Welsh Eucharist would have it.

The Celtic tradition, as John Philip Newell has taught, was closely aligned to the
Johannine tradition, and the title of Philips seminal introduction to Celtic Christianity,
Listening for the Heartbeat of God, was a reference to how the Celts understood
revelation to be something akin to what the Beloved Disciple discerned when he reclined
on Jesuss chest at the Last Supper. My Dean at the Seminary of the Southwest, Cynthia
Briggs Kittredge, writes of how the resurrection appearances in John also teach us
something about this kind of attention: Authority in the community of friends, she says,
derives from gifts of seeing and speaking. Seeing how God is moving in the world.
And telling othersor reminding them.

A couple of years ago, one particular Celtic Christian, Bono, the lead singer of U2, was
asked to preach at the National Prayer Breakfast. After an opening prayer:

Mr. President, First Lady, King Abdullah, Other heads of State, Members
of Congress, Distinguished Guests

Please join me in praying that I dont say something well all regret.

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he arrived at what is perhaps the most profound spiritual lesson in his homily, his
message that God is on the moveand we might have to pay attention to keep up.

A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In

countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lords blessing.
I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it I have a
family, please look after them I have this crazy idea

And this wise man said: stop.

He said, stop asking God to bless what youre doing.

Get involved in what God is doingbecause its already blessed.

For those of us who are ordained or lay leaders in the Church, for those of us who read
books about how to save the Church or our churches, for the creators or purveyors of
marvelous worship or missional programs, for those seeking to shape the future of our
institutions, this story offers a jarring but absolutely necessary insight.

Sadly, we dont get to tell God stories about how God should be moving, or how we
would like God to be moving, or why this particular phenomenal idea is one God really

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should get behind. We have to listen, and discern where God is truly moving, and that
may require us to reassess some things.

Bishop Rickel wrote in the Foreword to my book:

In these past decades the Church has tried so many programs, strategies, and
models. They can be effective, but the primary thing is knowing our motives,
spending enough time digging ever deeper into our collective soul to see the
sometimes rather self-centered nature of all of our effort to save the Church. It is
not enough to know the how and the what; we have to also know the why.

The why is why I wrote My Church Is Not Dying, why I think all Children of God
could and should claim its promise and find places of resonance.

Why do we do the things we do as people of faith? Well aside from the obvious fact that
we seek to honor, love and serve the one holy and everliving God, we do it because the
world is full of broken people that our God would see blessed with healing and
wholeness. Because the world is torn with conflict and rife with selfishness, and God
would see us exalt humility and seeking service. Because the world is full of loneliness,
and God would remind us that we are only complete in community.

Augustine reminded us that the Christian life is actually remarkably simple: Love God,
Love your neighbor. We make it more difficult than it needs to be by adding to those two

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conditions. Or we distract ourselves with cultural reflectionswe seek success, we want
our worship to attract crowds, we hope the world might pay attention to what were
doing. But its simple. Love God. Love the people God has given you to lovewhich is
everyone.

Jesus demonstrated this Two-Fold Commandment, which he sad was all the law and the
prophets. He fed, he healed, he accompanied, he restored. It is, incidentally, the very
work TMM has emulated for 40 years.

The inspirational stories I collected in my book, the stories from theology, culture, and
personal experience, and holy scripture are all telling us that we are part of an ongoing
human quest for connection, compassion, and community, a quest ultimately leading us
to God.

Gods Church can never die since that quest is at the heart of what it means to be fully
human.

But Church Publishing liked my title. So there it stands.

One last thought. When I led a conference for the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of
Oklahoma a couple of months ago, together we told stories about Gods rescue project for
the cosmos, about how human brokenness was being revealed and healed in small groups
and in the sacraments and in Meals on Wheels.

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On my last day with the Oklahoma clergy, several of the priests and deacons came to me
to talk about our time together. Thank you, they said, for not talking to us about
congregational development. And, with apologies to everyone who does that vital work
and knows more about it than I do, I knew what they were saying. So often these days we
are preparing to do CPR, preparing to evacuate the building simply because someone has
smelled smoke. But that wasnt what I went to do in Oklahoma, its not what I did in my
book, and its not what I came to do here tonight.

I came here to celebrate the good work of your last 40 years, to encourage you in the
years ahead, and to pray with you and for you as you navigate the seismic changes in our
faith traditions weve been talking about tonight.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote Christianity has had a series of revolutions, and in each one
of them, Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it
had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

For forty years TMM Family Services has served, grown, shifted. I suspect it has died
and been reborn on more than one occasion. In the process it has healed and helped, it has
encouraged and loved, and it has been a clear sign of Gods love for a hurting world.

To all the churches and faith communities who have had a part in creating and continuing
this work, thank you. Thank you for your commitment to the service of those that Jesus

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called the least of these: to the hurt and the hungry, to children and senior citizens and
families in need.

Thank you for the good and hard and life-changing work that you do.

And may the God who is our home now and forever richly bless you as you go forth from
this place to love and serve the Lord.

AMEN.