Here are some of my thoughts about the Anglican 1000 church planting conference put on in Seattle by the ACNA this week.
It was wonderfully refreshing to converse with men (and a women) of very similar theological and ecclesiastic stripe. This, being a religious conference featuring pastors and writers and thinkers, you would think there would be some debates about theology. There was virtually none. Nobody argued about soteriology. It was essentially reformed. Some may have leaned slightly another way, but it never came up once. There was zero discussion about sexual ethics. It was never even mentioned except in the context of pastoral care. This is a group that formed (among other things) along the lines of the traditional orthodox position on sex and marriage. In a world (both local and online) that is SO saturated in debates about gay marriage and such, it was strikingly quiet and peaceful to hang out with a group of people who wanted to talk about Jesus and how to contextualize the liturgy, etc. There were no fundamentalists beating the drum about the culture war – not even as a 5-minute aside. There were no progressives trying to start a “conversation” about marriage equality. Good Lord, that was restful.
The other thing I discovered was that nearly everyone I talked to was charismatic. They spoke it tongues, prayed for divine healing, and raised their hands during worship. But they weren’t pentecostals. This sort of activity was not the essential core of the faith and wasn’t emphasized in the liturgy or required of disciples though, depending on the person, it may be encouraged to varying degrees. It was there just under the surface if you brought it up, but wasn’t always being mentioned. The broad range of the Anglican tradition allows for a range of expression, but strict cessacionism is outside of that – thank God.
One thing I was expecting to find was a lot of bi-vocational ministers. After all, nearly everyone I’ve talked to, both in Anglican circles and just evangelical circles in general have been saying that bi-vocational ministry was going to soon be the new normal. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this means pastors and priests who have day jobs and receive only a small amount of their income from their church responsibilities.) But, what I found was nearly everyone, even all the young guys, working full-time for their churches. Some of them described working part time for the first year while they were starting a new congregation, but every person I talked to, once they past about the 50-60 mark, pursued paying a full-time rector. This took priority over paying rent for a nicer space to meet or any other thing. Nevertheless, I still had several people tell me that this IS changing – that in the future it will be more likely to find teams of part-timers with shared responsibilities. BUT, for now it seems that the old way of supporting the clergy is still largely in place. I think some of the hurdles related to formal ordination have made this take longer to catch on in the Anglican church. Other groups who have more relaxed rules about who can serve the eucharist are able to be more agile in this regard. But I guess it’s a price worth paying to keep the larger tradition intact. You can’t have it both ways. Sometimes you just have to make a call and stick with it. With Anglicanism, at the end of the day, to have a legit congregation, you need to have a full-blown priest who had hands laid on him by a bishop of apostolic succession. End of story. So work from that.
Several guys discussed new innovative ways to train and credential clergy. This was something I was particularly interested in and asked quite a few people for their opinion. Do you HAVE to have a Masters of Divinity to serve in any kind of formal capacity? Are other kinds of theological education potentially acceptable? The answer I got is that, yes, other things are being accepted. A Masters of Religion from institutions held in high regard (like Trinity School of Ministry or Regents) are probably going to be “good enough” for most bishops nowadays. Some people are even pursuing ordination through apprenticeship programs outside of the academy. Believe it or not, this is actually the old, old way of doing things. This is all encouraging to me as someone who might want to eventually serve in some kind of capacity as a priest or deacon, but who does not want to uproot his family to go to seminary and descend deep into debt (terrible idea). One guy in Chicago even had a network of fast multiplying congregations run by lay-ministers. This is apparently the African model used in parts of Nigeria and Rwanda where there are way more people than they have priests to handle anyway.
The men running the ACNA are very interested in contextualizing the gospel and reaching people for Christ, but they have no interest in being cool. One of the speakers recounted a story about how he was helping a young guy (from another denomination) who was trying to plant a cool alt church. He had a fo-hawk, skinny jeans, some tattoos, and some thick hipster glasses. It wasn’t working. Finally he realized that the guy wasn’t cool at all – he was a nerd. “Dude, you need to knock this off. Plant a nerdy church. You can actually do that. Don’t worry. It’s OK. There are lots of nerds out there and Jesus loves them too.” This reflect the theme of their worship philosophy as I see it. Worry about worshipping God well and not being seeker-sensitive. In the long run, this works because it lifts up Christ, not the people.
One of the few Bishops in the Northwest, Kevin Bond Allen, led the Eucharist service in the evening. It was a wonderful mix of Celtic prayers (some of them taken from the Northumbrian Prayer Book), psalms, and some contemporary worship songs with guitar and piano. I don’t know what else to say about the service except that I was rather emotionally moved, which is unusual.
Afterwards, some of us went out for drinks at an Irish Pub and discussed (among other things): whether Christian universities are actually Christian anymore, what it’s like to pastor a church deep in the Yukon, adapting the Alpha Course for the military, and how different Seattle is from Texas. We also traded pictures of our children and argued over whether the Scotch Ale was better than the Hefewiezen.
I had to get home and back to the office so I left after the second day. I think they are just wrapping up today (Friday) and then traveling to Boston to do it all over again soon. For me, it was fortunate that they decided to put on several small regional gatherings this year instead of one large national one. It certainly made my participation possible. It’s one thing to read books and blogs and correspond by email. It’s another to meet face to face and I was really blessed by the openness, friendliness, and practicality of everyone I met. I’ll be posting my notes and thoughts on some of the discussions here later once I’ve thought through them a bit more.