Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

One of the challenges of being in church these days is trying to find the balance between speaking to what’s happening in the world and recognizing that we are also a Body apart from the world. We are in but not of—in the same way that Christ blended both the heavenly and the earthly in one body we are called to hold a similar tension.

The notion that the Church could be separate from politics or the problems of the world would have been something of a foreign notion for much of Church history. For good and for ill we have been intertwined with the realities of the state and the world.

From week to week, I get emails or calls or letters asking why we don’t do or say more about x, y, or z. Sometimes it’s about an issue such as the death penalty or abortion. Sometimes it’s about a global issue such as Gaza or Ukraine. Sometimes it’s about a candidate and their various outrageous statements or conduct. Sometimes it’s about an ethical matter such as food deserts in poor neighborhoods or soaring home prices.

It’s rare that a week goes by without a couple of these communications. They are all deeply felt and, indeed, all point toward real brokenness in our common and global life together. They are all reflections of the deep desire to connect the life of faith with the lived experience of the world around us. They also reflect a deep desire to live out the call to be our brother’s and our sister’s keeper.

The challenge for the Church is to not get caught up in each outrage of the day but, by prayer and worship, to hear where God is calling the Church to act. Week by week we help shape the moral imagination of our members through the regular encounter with Christ in Word and Sacrament. We exist to help people find and be found by Christ.

In that process of seeking and serving Christ, we naturally come to the place where our soul feels tugged by the world’s need. That nudging is the push to live our faith. Each believer will feel this tug in different ways. And, sometimes, those ways may be in tension or even conflict. An example might be around the issue of abortion. A person of faith might feel a call to protect the autonomy and dignity of women by promoting reproductive rights. Another person of faith might feel a call to protect the autonomy and dignity of the unborn by promoting a culture of life in different ways.

Every day I talk with people trying to figure out these challenges in their spiritual life. Part of the Church’s role in respecting the conscience of her members is not telling them what to think but how to pray. We help guide the hearts and souls of members toward Christ trusting the Holy Spirit to shape what they believe and how they will live that belief out.

This does not mean that the Church doesn’t have a position on various matters. It does mean that we are a Church that has members who are all over the ideological, theological, and sociological spectrum. We are a Church that holds in community those who disagree profoundly for the sake of being a witness to the world of unity in diversity, connection beyond divisions, and a timeless connection to not just the concerns of the day but the movement of the Spirit across millennia.

We will never speak to any issue with the clarity any one person might hope for because the person in the pew next to you may believe something profoundly different. What we will speak to, with clarity, is our call to live as one as Christ prayed that we “all may be one.” Yet we will strive to learn to love beyond those divisions as we live as one Body with so many parts, with one faith no matter where we’ve come from, and with one Lord who is both of this world and of the world to come.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert