Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

I tend to find that there are two basic axes (the plural of axis not the Viking weapon) in the Church.

One axis is what I call the mystery-meetings axis. It is the amount a church emphasizes these different aspects of church life. For example, most Presbyterian or Methodist churches are going to tend to be further over on the meetings side of the axis while an Armenian Orthodox Church is going to tend over toward the mystery side.

The difference gets at what that church finds to be its reason for being. Churches that developed as democratic, locally focused expressions of Christianity pulling away from monarchical Anglicanism (such as the Methodists) have at their very founding essence that need for meetings—for the business of being church—because democratic leadership was essential to their beginning.

Churches whose beginnings reach further back almost inevitably sit further over on the mystery side. The Orthodox and Coptic churches are prime examples. Their essence pre-dates modern political notions and Enlightenment obsessions. Their essential quality is a sense of historicity bound and intertwined with the earliest days of the Church.

Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church are a funny hybrid. While our roots reach far back, to the earliest days of Christianity in Britain, our official beginnings are painfully bound with political realities. While our structures (literal like cathedrals and figurative like bishops) hearken back to medieval mystery, our processes reflect modern democratic notions formed when the Constitution was being signed.

So we have days where we dive into the most ancient expressions of faith such as Communion and then break to head into that most modern of liturgies, the annual meeting.

A rector in New Haven, after a particularly contentious argument with the Vestry, used his sermon on the following Sunday to address the dispute. His sermon was one line, thundered from the pulpit, “God’s Kingdom is not a democracy!” Then he sat down.

While God’s Kingdom is assuredly not a democracy, the Church has some democratic norms which we live out even in the midst of our mysteries. They are the ways by which we maintain the broad balance by which we exercise our shared ministry. So annual meetings, while not always thrilling, are their own form of liturgy when we look at how our gifts are used, where God is calling us, and how we’re being challenged in a new time.

I’m thankful to God for welcoming us into a Kingdom prepared for us from before the foundations of the world. Until we reach it though, we need to keep the lights on—so I’m thankful for our democratic particularities even in this almost ancient of churches.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert