August 01, 2005
posting in the morning
Good morning all...
The coffee is brewing. Trish is walking Texas...the little terrier. He's a mess. This is our last day here for a while. I don't know when the family will go out of town again. I always enjoy staying here. The wireless internet, the cozy surrounds, the big windows...it is a nice place and we like it here.
Today is the first day of "integrative time" for my CPE unit. Today I start working on my thesis again. Wow. So, the plan is to revisit my draft, tweak and such. I need to outline two more chapters and then crank out those 40 pages. I also need to write thepastoral care appendix. That will be the bridge piece between the two subjects of liturgy and chaplaincy. I have to write it for my work in the hospital anyway. I may as well talk about John Calvin, liturgy and pastoral care, no? Tacking it on to the end of the paper will make some sense in the end.
Camassia has posted on her visit to Reconciler. It is an interesting reflection. Her challenges are honest as are her affirmations. She is a generous thinker. What I am excited about is she is one of the few "non-churched" who have come to Reconciler. Her perspective is unique for that reason and valuable to me as I continue to work with the church plant.
[The] attitude of the service was highly liturgical and serious, showing more Episcopalian influence than the low-church origins of two of its pastors might suggest. (The fact that Larry was wearing a clerical collar suggests he has higher-church aspirations, since I’ve never seen an EC pastor wear anything other than street clothes.) Still, there were populist touches: the host was passed around the group rather than administered entirely by the pastor(s), and right after the sermon came a discussion of the sermon, in which Larry’s wife disputed one of Jane’s points.Al kidding aside about being a high-church Baptist, this is the one thing that has been most challenging for me as we live our liturgical life together at Reconciler. We Baptist, I believe, can best be understood by what we omit from our worship than by what we do. This is, of course, a generalization. At Reconciler, we don't omit a whole lot. So what would be seen as Baptist liturgy may be overshadowed by the other two traditions...Anglican, Lutheran Pietist...but I think that this is unavoidable. Weekly communion, vestments, icons, candles, use of all the texts in the lectionary...the list goes on.
I am not complaining per se...I am more noticing the tension for me. I love all the liturgy. And I think that it is an inroad for Baptists as we seek ecumenical reconcilation. But it does mean that the Baptist voice becomes an internal one, an interior witness...a "spirituality" within Christianity. It would have no other place to go.
We can still muse over Baptism...infant or believers?...we can still muse over real presense, though that argument is changing a great deal in many non-SBC circles. So, I experience excitement as I find inroads to ecumenical healing...and I mourn the possible loss of a tradion in the process.
But, as Camassia suggests, this may be inevitable. For ecumenism to work, traditions will have to change or disappear. My personal hope is that the traditions will become something akin to monastic traditions within the wider "Tradition." Jesuits and Franciscans are Catholic but have different charisms. Is the same thing possible for the current denominations?
I cannot say for certain, but it is what I am thinking about lately.
Posted by tripp at August 1, 2005 05:43 AM