Speaking Our Faith

Kit Carlson

Description

Ways to help Episcopalians articulate and feel comfortable about speaking of their faith with others.

Today, in a rapidly changing religious landscape, the structures of Christendom—which once almost automatically instilled faith in generation after generation of believers—are gone. For faithful Episcopalians, it has become essential to learn how to “tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.” This is especially important for those generations born after the Baby Boom, which are experiencing the rapid rise of the “nones”—people who have lost their faith, or who have no faith at all. The time to speak, to share our faith, is now. Kit Carlson offers a road map for those who want to learn to speak about the faith that lives within them. Speaking Our Faith will help them put words to their own experiences of God, create their own statements of belief, and to begin to have compassionate, caring conversations with other people about spirituality, belief, and Jesus Christ.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Ministry
• Philosophie et théologie
• Evangelism

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 17 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781640650282
• Langue: English

Extrait

Speaking Our Faith
Equipping the Next Generations to Tell the Old, Old Story
K IT C ARLSON
© 2018 by Kit Carlson
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The stories and observations of younger adults in this book are real. Their names, along with other identifying characteristics, have been changed in order to protect their identities.
Church Publishing Incorporated Editorial Offices 19 East 34th Street New York, NY 10016
Cover design by: Jennifer Kopec, 2 Pug Design Typeset by: PerfecType, Nashville, TN Printed in the United States of America
A record of the book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-1-64065-027-5 (pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-64065-028-2 (ebook)
I Love to Tell the Story
I love to tell the story
Of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory,
Of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story,
Because I know it’s true;
It satisfies my longings
As nothing else would do.
I love to tell the story;
’Twill be my theme in glory.
To tell the old, old story
Of Jesus and His love.
—Hymn 64 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II Words: A. Katherine Hankey (1831–1911)
To Andrew and Katie
Acknowledgements
This book grew out of my doctoral project at Virginia Theological Seminary, where I was able to transform my angst over the future of the church and the “decline of the nones” into an experience that has brought me hope and joy. I have to thank—first and foremost—David Gortner, who was director of the Doctor of Ministry program at that time, and whose work with young adults and whose work on evangelism has deeply informed mine. Also, much love and gratitude to my thesis advisor, Lisa Kimball, and the thesis readers, Tim Sedgwick and Al Johnson. And many thanks to Al Johnson for bringing me out on the road to further develop Speaking Our Faith with the clergy of the Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania.
The best support network ever was my doctoral cohort—Rachel Nyback, Diane Vie, Ketlen Solak, Jenny Montgomery, and Mary Hudak. We are FOUR forever.
The vulnerability, commitment, and courage of the post-Boomers whose stories are told in this book have been an inspiration to me. I am particularly grateful to the members of the very first Speaking Our Faith group—Blake, Lisa, Kelly, Abigail, Alejandro, Mike, Natalie, Julia, and Cherie—whose names and identifying details have been changed, but whose very real selves and spiritual lives are dear to me. Later, I trained leaders for more Speaking Our Faith groups, and they took this program to its next level. Thanks to Becky Beauregard, Chris Thomas, Jo Hartwell, Gerardo Aponte, and Matt Penniman. I am deeply appreciative of those who nudged this project along—Chris Yaw, who pestered me to turn Speaking Our Faith into a class for his ChurchNext online learning school, and Nurya Love Parish, who told me the first time we ever met to get going and get this book out there.
For all their love, support, and encouragement, I am grateful first, for my husband, Wendell Lynch, as well as the people of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Michigan. And to my own Millennial children, Andrew and Katie, who are not active in church anymore, I offer thanks for challenging me to learn more about the reasons church might no longer have meaning for you and your peers.
Finally, Sharon Ely Pearson at Church Publishing has been a gentle, encouraging, and insightful editor. And a shout out to copy editor Tess Iandiorio, because copy editors toil behind the scenes and get very little credit, and I want to remedy that fault.
Kit Carlson September 1, 2017
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: A Whole New World—The Rising of the “Nones”
Chapter Two: Why Is It So Hard to Talk about Faith?
Chapter Three: Where Is God in My Story? The First Steps in Speaking about Faith
Chapter Four: How Firm a Foundation: Building a Faith That Will Stand
Chapter Five: Making a Statement about Faith
Chapter Six: Reclaiming Evangelism: Learning to Listen, Learning to Speak
Introduction
The church is constantly renewing itself with each generation, and we are either part of that renewal or part of standing back and letting it fall. So it almost feels like a “trust fall” exercise for the church. The church is constantly falling into the arms of the next generation of people who are catching it.
—Mike, a father of two in his mid-30s
The church is taking a “trust fall” into the arms of that next generation, but the numbers of arms extended to catch it are dwindling. The rapidly changing American religious landscape is one of growing secularism. People who might once have been nominally Christian are walking away from church in dramatically increasing numbers. With this growing indifference to religion, the Church can no longer assume that there is religious cultural literacy in the United States. And all the research points to people under age forty as the primary demographic drivers of this drift from religious faith and practice.
Across America, religious affiliation is declining. Every time a new research study on American religion is published, it reveals a growing number of “nones,” people who express no religious preference. In 2015, Pew Research Center put the percentage of unaffiliated at almost 23 percent, 1 a percentage that had risen significantly in the previous decade. While churches of all varieties—including Catholic and evangelical churches—are losing members, the Protestant mainline has taken the hardest hit. “In 2007, there were an estimated 41 million mainline Protestant adults in the United States. As of 2014, there are roughly 36 million, a decline of 5 million,” Pew Research Center reports. 2 And the Episcopal Church is suffering those same losses: average Sunday attendance in the domestic church declined more than 26 percent between 2005 and 2015. 3
Younger adults are driving the decline. One-third of Millennials—people born between 1982 and 2004–identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, and that percentage is still growing. 4 The faithful, church-attending generations that built and filled churches in the 1950s and 1960s continue to die away; they are not being replaced by new, younger church members. By any measure, our “trust fall” is a perilous one.
But there is a new energy afoot in the Episcopal Church these days that perhaps will help to break our fall. There is a sense that the Spirit is moving, drawing us into a movement of love and reconciliation that can change the world—into the Jesus Movement. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has reminded the church that we are part of the Jesus Movement, and we follow a loving, liberating, and life-giving God into deeper relationships with God, one another, and creation. In a video he made shortly after his consecration in 2015, Curry told the church, “Now is our time to go. To go into the world to share the good news of God and Jesus Christ. To go into the world and help to be agents and instruments of God’s reconciliation. To go into the world, let the world know that there is a God who loves us, a God who will not let us go, and that that love can set us all free.” 5
Evangelism is moving front and center. There have been evangelism conferences, and even revivals (!) across the wider church. Evangelism is one of the three main priorities of The Jesus Movement in our church, with four audacious objectives: Inspire Episcopalians to embrace evangelism; Gather Episcopal evangelists; Equip all to be evangelists; Send all as evangelists. 6 The purpose of this kind of evangelism is much larger than simply a “church growth” project—although the hope is that as people hear the Good News, they will want to grow in faith in community with others. There is a bigger purpose to evangelism—sharing what God is doing in the world. The point is to “listen for Jesus’s movement in our lives and in the world. Give thanks. Proclaim and celebrate it! Invite the Spirit to do the rest.” 7
This is easier to write on a website than to put into practice. Bishop Curry has called Episcopalians “God’s shy people,” and for this, and a variety of other reasons, it has not been the practice in our church—or in most mainline Protestant churches, either—for members to speak freely about their faith. And so a bridge must be built: between the ingrained reticence that most faithful members feel, and the joyful ability and desire to speak about faith. Before we can speak evangelically, sharing the Good News of how Jesus is moving in our lives and in the world, we have to get comfortable speaking about Jesus in the first place.
I understand it can be hard. That is why I wanted to help “God’s shy people”—like those in my own parish—learn to speak about faith with confidence and conviction. And I knew the focus had to be on the fugitive generations that are walking away from faith, on those younger adults under age forty. So I began to explore this phenomenon—the “rise of the nones”—and to ponder how to approach the problem in an average congregation. This became the focus of my research for my Doctor of Ministry degree at Virginia Theological Seminary. I wanted to understand why this is happening. Where are the young people going? Why have they walked away from church, and what might be done to reach out to them, listen to them, and perhaps speak to them about Jesus in a way that might bring them home? How can we help the younger adults who still are in church to reach out to their peers, their friends, and colleagues, and share the j