I have mentioned how much I enjoy Magdalene's Egg. Sometimes it takes a little patience to figure out where Father is going with his reflections. Today it was worth it to go back to his home town, his detours on "Old Catholicism", ancient gossip about a church scandal, and a hippie priest and you will get to this - what it really takes to be part of community:
"...don't sleep with your church members, for example. Put up with meetings where nothing gets done, and learn to work and worship with people who share your creed but not your reading of it. And all the other stuff that the rest of us do more or less easily, because we know that living in community, while difficult, is worthwhile."
"worship with people who share your creed but not your reading of it." Thank you for sharing that. I have a tendency to get stuck on my way of doing faith and forget that other ways may work equally well for other people.
ReplyDeleteAs I pointed out at his original post, there are unqualified and occasionally unethical clergy in the Old Catholic/Independent Catholic/Independent Sacramental Movement, but many of us are at least as highly qualified as our mainline sisters and brothers. We are ordained unconventionally solely because of injustice and discrimination in the mainline churches: against women and married men in ministry in the Catholic context and LGBT people in virtually every mainline group as well. Those of us in this situation scrupulously follow all the same ethical guidelines for ministry as mainline clergy, and we certainly live our Christian lives and ministries in real community--whether in the house churches/emergent communities we pastor, in our own small jurisdictions, and in the whole body of Christ through collaboration with both other independent groups and mainline clergy and faithful (as in my own involvement in RevGals and elsewhere).
ReplyDeleteI think probably your situation was the LAST thing Father had in mind in his critique. As I am dealing with schism in my own church body I just find the paragraph I quoted very profound and very apropo to our body's particular situation.
ReplyDeleteI definitely see the relevance of his points to your situation (as in the case of the similar Anglican misogynist and/or homophobic breakoffs)....He, however, made no restriction of his blanket condemnation to such groups or certain problematic individuals, but included all of us in the independent sacramental movement, including not just me but many people like me. The imputation of sexual misconduct/abuse solely to our movement--falsely implying that it doesn't happen in mainline groups--was especially cruel, which is why it hurt to see it repeated here. My personal trauma of clergy sexual abuse was perpetrated by a male mainline Protestant pastor and repeatedly mishandled by his denomination, and the work of Marie Fortune and others has demonstrated how prevalent both such perpetration and collusion has been in all sectors of Christianity.
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