Seven whole days

When I was thinking about ordained ministry, the idea of wearing a clergy shirt was appealing to me. The attraction was not any perceived power, or the desire to have a piece of plastic around my neck. Rather, it was the knowledge that every morning, I would have no decision to make about attire. Reach into the closet, grab the next black shirt, and put it on. I suppose that bias is one reason why I was particularly disturbed by two recent Facebook postings.

I’ve reconciled myself to pastel clergy shirts (for someone else, not for me). But this is over the top. It’s a “Standing on the Side of Love Campaign” advertisement in the guise of a saffron-colored clergy shirt. I don’t know what the “Standing on the Side of Love Campaign” is, and I might support it. But it makes me want to start a “Standing on the Side of Non-billboardesque Clerical Garb Campaign.”

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I’m very glad to have a small role in a new project: The Bible Challenge. It’s a way to get people to read the whole Bible in a year. Already seven dioceses in the Episcopal Church in the US have signed on, along with many parishes and people in England, Tanzania, Pakistan, and other places. Certainly this isn’t the first effort to encourage people to read through the whole Bible, but this one is getting quite a bit of traction among Episcopalians. That’s new.

This program was created by Marek Zabriskie out of his ministry at St. Thomas Church in Washington, PA. Zabriskie saw what happened when people were challenged to read the Bible and supported in doing it. It was transformative. I saw the same thing in my previous parish ministry. It’s not all the complicated, really. You get people to read God’s Word and good stuff happens.

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The big Anglican news yesterday came as the Vatican announced the formation of an organization to receive Anglicans and Episcopalians into the Roman Catholic Church. What distinguishes this “ordinariate” from other ways of joining the Roman Catholic Church is that parishes and their clergy can join together, and these former Anglicans can continue to make use of some Anglican elements in their liturgy.

There were articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Go read them if you want to understand the ordinariate and its function. Also, you’d probably want to visit the website of the ordinariate. Now, here at 7WD, there are a few things to note.

First, most of the folks joining the ordinariate are not leaving the Episcopal Church. They already did that, if they were ever members. It’s largely a hodge-podge from the quasi-Anglican alphabet soup who are heading to this new home. Second, it’s worth noting that the numbers of Roman Catholics — lay people and clergy — who have gone the other way will dwarf these numbers. Rome is trying to stem the flow here, make no mistake.

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Everyone here on the 7WD blog team joins me in wishing you much joy and many blessings in the year to come.

For a fantastic gallery of celebrations from around the world, visit In Focus. This photo shown here is from Jiangsu Providence, China.

This is one of my favorite posts to write, and it’s an annual tradition. Below you will find actual queries that people typed into Google to land on 7WD. I have not edited these. Because I care about the reading public, I have taken the trouble to answer these questions, which are a select few from thousands of queries which land people on my blog each year. If you look at the last two years’ questions (2009 or 2010), you’ll see that some things keep popping up.

What does God hate? God hates plenty of things. Shrimp, to name one. Also, bad typefaces, especially these.

How Christ overcame hell by descending into hell? Plenty of Christians think that everything about salvation can be expressed by the bumper-sticker saying, “Christ died for us.” That’s true, but it’s only a sliver of a great mystery and a profound truth. The New Testament itself has plenty to say about a more expansive view of salvation. For the best answer to this particular question, turn to St. John Chrysostom.

How do i know what God is saying? We don’t, really. Anyone who claims to know the mind of God with 100% certainty should not be trusted. But generally, we can test what we think God might be saying to us or to the church using the three-fold Anglican approach of scripture, tradition, and reason.

How to make a Lenten wreath? Don’t. Unless you are Satan. The Lent wreath (along with “Sarum blue” vestments) is an invention of ecclesiastical hucksters out to get your money.*

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In an annual tradition, and in keeping with year-end roundup stories in the media, here are the top blog posts of the year, based on page views. Enjoy a blast from the past on 7WD!

1. Hymn for Maundy Thursday: Brother, sister, let me serve you
2. Practicing our slogan
3. Of the 39 Articles of Religion
4. Holy women, holy men? Whatever.
5. Of the General Ordination Exam
6. Angels: setting the record straight
7. Killing in the name of Jesus
8. Death by grief
9. Article I: Of faith in the Holy Trinity
10. To reinvigorate the life of the Church

On this list, numbers one and seven were posted last year, but they continue to be popular thanks to Google. The next two posts if we limit ourselves to this year’s content would be Advice for the HoB: Don’t try this! and The seven deadly LOLcats. If you enjoyed this trip down memory lane, here is the roundup from oh-ten.

I was glad to see the new website of the Episcopal Church launch this week. It is a major improvement over the previous site, and in almost every respect I think it serves our church well. Kudos to the staff of the communication office at the Episcopal Church Center for a job well done. A few people have asked me what I think, so read on if you like.

Finally our church’s website is organized to present who we are and how we carry out our mission. This is a change from the previous few iterations of the website, which were organized around our org chart. Now it’s easy for a seeker to learn more about what we believe. It’s easier for a leader within the Episcopal Church to find out what we do and who’s doing it. My understanding is that in the future, there will be more content about various offices and departments.

I especially like the multimedia features, including videos of worship and other content too. The news section (Episcopal News Service) has been broken out into its own site now, which makes a great deal of sense. Now the corporate site and the news site can each carry out their work with more clarity. Ads, for example, can appear on the news site, and one wouldn’t want that on a corporate site.

The prayer section is nice too. Our prayer functions at Forward Movement get lots of viewer interest, so I know folks will find the online prayer features both edifying and inspiring. It’s good to see the collect of the day right on the front page Generally, the whole site looks fresh and professional — just as it should. Some might quibble with this or that, but that’s inevitable.

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Oops. Advent got away from me. Guess I wasn’t doing my job. I had thought I’d write a series on liturgy, but I never managed to get to that. So this post will compress several rants into one.

I’ll cut right to the chase. I have a problem with ad hoc “creative improvements” to the prayer book liturgies of our church. Quite often, these supposed improvements are based on the notion that our liturgy is somehow deficient. I’ve heard people describe it as “boring” or “out of touch”. And so people, usually clergy, attempt to rectify these perceived problems with ad hoc edits.

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Happy new year and holy Advent to all! My resolution for liturgical new year is to devote some more time to 7WD, so I’ve lined up an Advent feast. But first, I have a few appetizers. In no particular order:

• Sure, the Advent Conspiracy is a few years old, but it’s still fantastic.
• Trinity Wall Street is offering their online calendar again this year. Visit it regularly.
• Our English-speaking Romish sisters and brothers are getting introduced to a new liturgical translation today. While the imagery is more vivid than the 1960s Vatican II work (this is a good thing), it is a retrograde step theologically. This matters to Anglicans and other Christians because the Vatican’s liturgical work ends up influencing the rest of us (usually this is a good thing too). Anyway, the folks driving this liturgy have a real theological axe to grind, and axe-grinding rarely leads to positive developments.
• If you only buy one Advent recording, get this one. Or this one. Well, you could do pretty well with this or this, for that matter.
• We at Forward Movement will be posting loads of great stuff throughout Advent on our Facebook page. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to find us on Facebook.
• There’s a whole treasure trove of Advent goodness right here on 7WD. I especially commend to you my investigative report on the worst Advent calendars ever (correcting yet more errors from my archnemesis in the process).
• UPDATE: Here’s a late-breaking nugget from St. Margaret’s in Annapolis, MD. This Advent podcast series is organized by my former coffee buddy, Peter Mayer. I only listened to one, but I think there’s probably quite a bit of talk about hockey on these things. Enjoy!

This Advent, I’ve decided to post a series of rants thoughtful posts on liturgy, mostly looking at various bits of our eucharistic rite.

I was captivated by this set of photos on Big Picture from the National Geographic Photo Contest.

Go enjoy the photographic wonderments. You’ll be glad you did.

I contributed an article for the Fall 2011 issue of Reflections, the journal of Yale Divinity School. It’s a whole issue on new media, and I was humbled to join some pretty great company among the contributing authors. Here’s my article, and you can see the table of contents for the whole issue here. At some point, I believe, the entire issue will be posted as a PDF. Meanwhile, you can request a printed copy for free or even get a free subscription.

Not long ago, I begin a new ministry leading Forward Movement, a publishing ministry of the Episcopal Church that dates back to 1935. Like all publishers, we face the challenge of moving into digital publishing and adapting to new reading preferences. You can layer all these challenges onto the church, which is facing its own struggles to discover how we should be the church for the twenty-first century.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about social media. It is too early to say for sure, but it looks like social media might be a disruptive technology that changes how we do church at a fundamental level. Other technologies have made only slight changes in our common life. The electric light, for example, was a major technological disruptor in society at large, but it didn’t fundamentally alter how we engage in our mission as a church.

But several questions confront us as we look at social media and consider the many complex issues about our religious identity and place in the world. Exploring these questions could help us think about how to embrace (notice I did not say whether to embrace) social media – and help us see whether Facebook will resemble movable type as a revolutionary force in shaping church history.

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This posts accomplishes two things. First, it is part of my effort to clear up my backlog in the blog hopper. Lots of stuff here that I’d never get around to blogging. Second, it should provide some good procrastination for Saturday night sermonators. Without further delay, I present the October 2011 edition of Sundries on 7WD.

Non-churchy sundries first.

• Isao Hashimoto has created multimedia art depicting every nuclear explosion from 1945-1998. It’s staggering to watch. Don’t complain about the slow pace. Instead, think about the enormity of what you’re seeing.
• If QWERTY were a city, this is what it would look like. I dare you to reply to this post without using the letter E.
• Listverse has compiled the Top 10 Misused English Words. I’d like to add compose/comprise to the list. Really, we ought to require a permit to use the word “comprise.” It’s almost always used incorrectly.
• I love maps. If you do too, go download FOR FREE the first two volumes of The History of Cartography from the University of Chicago Press.
• Speaking of maps, here’s a map of US stereotypes. Apparently, I live in Horses, with a view of Fried Chicken.

Now, for those of you who are reading this when you should be finishing up your sermons or getting ready to teach Sunday School, these churchy sundries will get you back in the groove.

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