Counter-Reformation

We think, and rightly so, that we have a lot to teach our young people. But just as often, as our wonderful St. John’s youth leaders will tell you, the wisdom flows the other way around.

The photo shows eight-year-old Sierra Schwarz at a recent meeting of the St. John’s Parish Council, on which her mother, Bishop’s Committee member Erin Schwarz, serves. Sierra just happened to be reading a biography of Elizabeth the Great, founder of the Anglican Church and royal protector of the Book of Common Prayer, which unites Episcopalians to this day.

In a just few years, Sierra will be eligible for youth group – whose middle and high schoolers recently gave me a lesson of their own in Anglican theology.

For a couple of years, I’ve experimented with a deconstructed Holy Eucharist service that puts enormous emphasis on congregational participation. I first used it when Thom’s, Orange County’s so-called emergent community, worshiped at St. John’s. For the 2013-14 year, I adapted it for our monthly Youth Eucharist services.

If you listen carefully to the Eucharistic prayer on Wednesday, Saturday, or Sunday, you’ll hear the whole history of human experience. The wording varies from rite to rite, but the story’s always the same. God’s creation began in unity and love and fell into disunity and sin, to be called back to oneness in Christ.

During my deconstructed service – you might have called it a messy mass -- I closed Elizabeth’s prayer book and invited worshipers to retell the creation story in their own words. They took turns elevating the bread and wine, and we said the prayer of consecration together. By your Holy Spirit, make this bread and wine into your body and blood. (Don’t worry. I had a bishop’s permission!)

I thought that by stepping back from the familiar liturgy and celebrant’s role, I was giving people a renewed sense of ownership and individual involvement in a powerful sacrament that Jesus Christ gave not to the church but to the whole people of God. Hoping to attract a younger generation of skeptical seekers, many churches are experimenting with this kind of liturgical democratization, giving congregations a larger voice in worship, deemphasizing the ordained orders, and setting aside the old prayers and music.

But as it turns out, my experiment wasn’t that popular with the new generation at St. John’s. During their postmortem meeting at the beginning of the summer, our young people said they wanted the old service back.

Don’t get me wrong: Before last year’s experiment, Youth Euch was hardly the drill from Sunday morning. Using music and other means, I did my best each month to vary the first part of the service, the Ministry of the Word, when we hear scripture, share a homily, and pray for our needs and those of others.

But when it comes to the second half, the young people missed the solemnity, piety, and predictability of the prayer book mass, the words we all know and the traditional roles we play. Whatever we’ve experienced in the course of our day, whatever sadness or joy, we come together and bind ourselves to Christ and one another just as we have for 2,000 years. The Lord be with you. And also with you.

Patti Peebles, our chaplain and youth leader, put it best when she gave me the kids’ verdict on my messy mass. “They’re Episcopalians,” she said.

Elizabeth would be proud. And so am I. 

This post first appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

They're Not Your Father's Young Republicans

For GOP youth, socially moderate aren't dirty words.

Hey, Kids: Don't Leave Church. Complain!

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager says universities turn young people into liberal secular humanists, but I don't believe it. I was largely impervious to professors' politics, right (yes, there were a couple) or left, and I'll bet almost everyone else is, too. Rebutting Prager, Conor Friedersdorf has a more practical, persuasive explanation for why highly educated young adults become less religious:

[P]eople who attend college leave home. That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don't go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they're surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all. For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs. Another reason education correlates with secularism is that secularists are more likely to seek advanced degrees, partly because they're more focused than their religious counterparts on career.

To give at least part of the argument back to Prager, one thing about a good education is that it destroys, or should destroy, simplistic theodicies by giving the student a glimpse of the full range of human misery and injustice across the centuries. Knowing how relentlessly the good and innocent suffer, it's hard to believe that God is spending much time protecting me and those I love because we happen to be living in the safest country in the world, going to the right church, or singing hymns in the right key.

Indeed a crisis of faith probably should result from a liberal arts education as night follows day, as should the ability to discern the difference between the divine and its poor reflection in human institutions. Religion sometimes glorifies God and sometimes lets God down. That's why I always tell our St. John's middle schoolers that if they're not getting what they deserve from church, synagogue, or mosque -- a sense of God as a loving, inspiring, challenging, saving force available in every aspect of their lives -- then they should find out who's in charge and tell them.
Hat tip to The Dish

Enough Love To Go Around

The youth of St. John's, fresh from their summer occupations and distractions, gathered tonight for their first weekly meeting of the school year under the loving supervision of our chaplain and youth leader, Patti Peebles, and adult volunteers Daphne Berry, Kathleen Driscoll and Eric Sherman, Dina Kubba, and Paul and Paula Reza. (For fear of scaring them off, I'll preserve the anonymity of the wonderful couple we're hoping to recruit to join them.)

Once a month I have the inestimable blessing of presiding at what we call (well, I call) a Yoot Euch -- a service of Holy Eucharist -- using a paten and chalice Patti and the young people made last year during a visit to Color Me Mine. Tonight we talked about the Syrophoenician (or Canaanite or, not to put too fine a point on it, Palestinian) woman, whose plea on behalf of her daughter Jesus first appears to spurn since she's a Gentile rather than a Jew. When she argues that even the dogs under the master's table usually end up cadging some scraps, Jesus relents, impressed not so much by her faith as her irreducible logic. God obviously cares for all his people, does he not? You don't have to ask the St. John's kids twice.

Memo To Fellow Clergy: Go For Undecideds!

In the March 24 issue of "Christian Century," which credits "Junior Achievement and Deloitte," we learn that when teens are asked to identify their role models, 54% say family, 13% friends, six percent teachers or coaches, five percent siblings, and (gulp) three percent clergy. We're not holding up our end! Good news: 11% are still up for grabs; they say, "No role models."

No More Toots For Yoots

Pre-Nov. 4 conventional wisdom on U.S. youth: Tired of politics as usual; hope of the future. New CW on youth: Figures of fun because they're not sure who Caroline Kennedy is.