Thoughts from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church • Birmingham, AL

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Old Testament: Jeremiah 25:8-17

Psalm [120], 121, 122, 123 * 124, 125, 126, [127]

Epistle: Romans 10: 1-13

Gospel: John 9:18-41

This year’s Education for Ministry (EfM) group is working through the theological practice of integrating belief, behavior and doctrine. EfM provides resources and processes that are intended to support a person in living authentically as a Christian. Authenticity involves coherence, wholeness, integrity, and honesty. Something is incoherent whenever a dissonance occurs between thought and actions or even between two incongruent ideas. The crux of our conversation required us to take a deep dive into the gaps.

The subject matter for this discussion was Diana Butler Bass’s work Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. The power quote here is “Accordingly, Christianity is moving from being a religion about God to being an experience of God.”

A. M. Allchin, in Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition, concluded his introduction with: “To become fully human, to realise our human potential, we need to enter into communion with our Creator… There is nothing static about this communion. It is the beginning of a process which will lead us through death into life, life in this world and life in the world beyond this one, an eternal process into the inexhaustible riches of the divine life.”

 We identified and connected the different gaps we presently experience or have known sometime in our lives:

The Belief Gap: the separation between orthodox teachings and personal belief,

The Practice Gap: the separation between orthopraxis (correct conduct, both ethical and liturgical) and personal behavior and practices, and

The Congruence Gap: the disjunction between personal beliefs and personal action.

As a result of our conversation, we concluded our session with the following collect:

Dear God, who gives us the ability to reason and the heart to feel, Thank you for this space to grapple with the gaps and contradictions in life and faith, and the slippery rock that puts us in the river. Help us to clearly discern what is most important, so that we may nourish our community and be ourselves nourished. Amen.

Michael Barnett, Linda Foster, Betty Frey, Josh Goodin, Ben Johnson, Karen McIntyre, Ann Mitchell, Robin Ousley, Martha Jane Patton, Bridget Tytler, Tommy McGlothlin, Gerald Wildes