Why the Episcopal Church Needs a New Commitment to Holiness
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The second aspect was the Book of Common Prayer(BCP). The BCP, I believe, is one of our strongest assets! It is a book full of treasure in the faith, filled with liturgical beauty unmatched in the English language. It was through praying the BCP that I found myself growing to love this church.
There were many questions and doubts, however, that made my transition to TEC somewhat troubling. In my personal experience, I seldom found in TEC a serious call to holiness.
It appeared to me that the church was mostly preoccupied with other issues like social justice and human rights. Don't get me wrong, I believe those issues are important and even essential to the gospel, but never at the expense of a radical call to discipleship and personal holiness. Indeed, I believe until we marry our pursuit of justice with a renewed call to discipleship and holiness, our efforts will only take us so far. Whatever gains we will make will be temporary, forced, or marred with self-righteous Pelagianism (let us build God's reign and the beloved community!).
Unfortunately, I still have not found much to change my opinion of TEC, with perhaps a few notable exceptions.
As I found myself looking for contemporary sources that inform my pursuit of personal holiness, I have found them from many places. Most of those places come from the Christian right, however. I have found nuggets of wisdom here and there, but I have also found much more that leaves me perplexed and confused.
Those sources, especially those coming from American Christianity, are many times filled with the political baggage of the extreme right. There is the unholy marriage between Christian ethics with political ideology.
It is filled with nationalistic sentiments of "taking back our country from the radical left". It sees no contradiction between the love of guns and God. It is many times homophobic and transphobic. It indulges in conspiracy theories around issues of COVID-19, the vaccines, and a supremacy of individualistic personal freedom as the hill every true Christians must die on.
It is anti-social justice. It sees no issues of racism in our country or the way we manage wealth in our country.
I am sick and tired of it. I have no stomach for it, and I want no part of it.
These sources leave me confused. They seem to suggest that the only way to savor whatever nuggets of wisdom they offer when it comes to a complete surrender to our Lord is to also swallow whole the sack of their political ideology.
They seem to suggest that a far-right ideology is the only one compatible with a pursuit of holiness.
But this confusion is created in a vaccuum. A gap that is left by the mainline's abandomenet of a serious call to discipleship and personal holiness.
And this is why, I believe, TEC needs a serious and new commitment to holiness.
If this seems as far-fetched to you as it does to me, it is only because we have been swimming in our divisive waters for too long. This is a sign that we have effectively abandoned this call of the gospel and left them to other sources, sources that seem more catechized by their political ideology than with the gospel.
Now, the solution is not simply to create a "Progressive" version of holiness and call it good. To do so will be to commit the same fallacy many of our conservative brethren do. The solution is to delve deeply into our own tradition to inform our pursuit of holiness, rescue them from the past, and transpose them faithfully to our own unique contexts.
This is no easy task. It is possible (perhaps probable) that it is too late for us to even try to engage in this. Perhaps we have abandoned this ideal of holiness for far too long that to retake it now is only a laughable and naive endeavor.
Perhaps. But I don't believe God is through with us yet. I believe God is calling many of us to sound the trumpet, the call back to a renewed calling of discipleship and holiness in TEC.
Think of what is at stake if we don't respond to this call. The vacuum we have left will be happily filled with less discerning voices. In the end, the nationalistic American Christianity will be the only voice calling for holiness.
Their call will continue to be an unholy mess of political ideologies and tribal resentment. And this vacuum will leave the church and its people confused and unnourished because I believe all of us are born with a desire for holiness.
Why is that? Because we all crave union with God, and holiness is nothing else but union with God.
We cannot allow one political ideology to hold the monopoly on holiness any longer. This is why The Episcopal Church needs a new commitment to holiness.
Good Evening. You speak of holiness but I really didn't see how you define it. And I admit that I, who was raised and confirmed Lutheran and then became Episcopalian in my 20s, don't really know what it is. You mentioned the BCP, but it doesn't define it at all. So it may be intuitive to you, but perhaps not to as many people as you think? Or it could just be me.
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