Getting Loose

Farewell

It’s now the night before we are to leave tomorrow.

I have very mixed feelings.  I did not know what this experience would bring me.  I tried to be as open as I knew how to allow to emerge whatever was going to emerge.

I come away with an appreciation for heritage.  In American we think things are old at 50 years.  In the British Isles, you have to get a few hundred years under your belt before you are talking about some serious history.

I have an enhanced appreciation for social conventions and customs.  Having tea is a civilizing process as much as it is taking a break. 

I have learned that you do not always have to be in a hurry at break neck speed.

I have learned that you simply cannot do everything, but you can do some things, and that is sufficient.

I have learned on the whole how polite the English people are to each other, and how effusive they are in greeting one another.  I have also experienced their generosity—not in just a monetary way, but also of their time.  Time has always been extraordinarily precious to me, and they willingly share it with you.  That is a luxury that stupefies me.  I need to learn that lesson better than I have.

I have learned how very different the polities and customs are of the Methodist cousins across the sea.  I can see that the United Methodist Church operates far closer to how the Church of England does things, than to how British Methodism does things.

I remember thinking as I walked around from time to time that I may be seeing people who are distantly related to me.  I have roots in England with the Gifford and Anderson and Taylor names.

I have learned how differently at times we use the same language.

I have also learned that I want to come back some day and experience more than I possibly could on this trip.  Maybe get into Scotland and Ireland and France as well.

 I have loved the weather as much as these people may want to complain.  At least it was not 100° F with 100% humidity like Houston.  I think our entire range in England was 78° maximum, and 48° minimum!

I will never, ever, ever forget these wonderful English.

Eucharist

At its root it means to be thankful, to give thanks, to be grateful.  And I was all three.  Not just today at half past 12 GMT, but also every first and second Sunday at our church.  That is the essence of the sacrament of holy communion.

We went to see St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Take the virtual tour on that site.  It is stunning)  It was well worth the price of admission.  This is the church where Prince Charles and Lady Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales,
married.  This is where the famous architect, Christopher Wren, is buried.

We got to participate in the Eucharistic service there in the nave of the cathedral.  It was interesting to me that the flow of their service is identical to ours:

 

 GATHERING

LITURGY OF THE WORD

LITURGY OF THE SACRAMENT

DISMISSAL

Whereas our flow is:

ENTRANCE

PROCLAMATION AND RESPONSE

THANKSGIVING AND COMMUNION

SENDING FORTH

I leaned over to my wife and said, “I sure am glad they have learned something from the Methodists about the order of worship.”  She was not amused.

This is a statue of St. Paul on the grounds outside. 

The Clerical Collar

Over here in JOE (Jolly Ole’ England), all denominational clergy wear a clerical collar.  

I knew that before I came over, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about it.  I tend to wear clerical collars only very occasionally—like for a funeral in a funeral home (which they call crematoria over here), or an occasional wedding, or when I have to act  in some official capacity at a public event, or very, very occasionally when I go to the hospital, or when I get my driver’s license picture made.

But to come to JOE, I went ahead and bought 2 additional clergy shirts (one black and one grey--both long sleeved).  Here, I use them exclusively for Sunday service, going to residential homes (i.e., nursing homes), and other sundry activities. 

I’ll have to admit it does tend to make me feel a little more official somehow, like I have on a costume that people recognize the credentials that go with it. 

What will I do when I get back?  I just am not sure.  I like travelling incognito in a lot of ways, yet on the other hand, wearing a clerical collar opens a lot of doors.

I’ll just have to see.

Pitshangar

The Methodist Church of Great Britain is quite a different animal from the United Methodist Church.

 

With exceedingly few exceptions, by definition, a Methodist Church in England is part of a circuit to which might be appointed 3-4 ministers.  I am taking the place for five Sundays of a clergyman who is appointed to a 10 point circuit for which he has the pastoral care of two churches—Pitshanger and Kingsdown. 

 

Pitshangar has approximately 30 members, and Kingsdown has around 100.  Both have members who can remember when there an additional 100+ more people in worship decades ago than today, yet there is a liveliness and vitality that is refreshing to me when compared to so many churches of which I know that are that size in the states.

 

My first service was at Pitshangar (pronounced PITTS hanger).  They all sat on the south side of the sanctuary in front of the pulpit, and as soon as I came out to start the service, they applauded.  I can only remember that happening twice before—once when I preached in an exchange with the St. Luke’s Catholic Church at Houston.  After I finished my sermon they applauded.  I wasn’t clear if they really liked it, or if they were relieved that I was finally done.

 

The other time was when I was pastoring a church and I announced that the bishop would be moving me to a different church come June.

 

At 10:30 in the morning, Pitshangar was attentive.  They sang with unusual gusto and verve.  I think I would have difficulty finding another United Methodist Church of that size that could do that well.  Not only that, because I did not know most of the tunes to their hymns, I was of zero help in trying to lead any singing.

 

Because it was the first Sunday of the month, we celebrated holy communion.  The services are amazingly similar, but the customs that surround that familiarity can really throw one off  who is used to somewhat being in autopilot.

 

I have never really used much of public transportation except in NYC where it is a virtual necessity, but I rode one of those red double-decker buses in order to preside at worship at Pitshangar.

They were a delightful group.  I was glad to be there worshiping with them.

1st Class Church Fund Raiser

Last night we went to the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral Greek Festival.  Man, you talk about knowing how to do a fund raiser, it was phenomenal.  Here were just a few of the things that impressed me:

• It is held on 4 successive nights
• Lights were strung up outside attracting people like moths
• A pared down menu that included quality items with lots of meat cooking and the wonderful smells drifting through the air
• Big open-air white tents set up
• Big, portable see-through fencing set up close to the street so that you could see through and get activities closer to the traffic to attract people
• Select beers and wines (I've seen Methodist Churches in Iowa with beer at their church--but it was like one of those under the counter operations)
• Dancing
• Live shows with lots of people
• $5 entrance fee (they could have doubled that and I still would have gone)
• Quality, select, vendors
• They had to have made easily hundreds of thousands of dollars

I'll bet we spent over 2 hours there, and they got at least $70 out of us.  On top of that it was absolutely an impulse decision for us to go.  We were going to stay home and eat, but I had had my car in the J & T Automotive, and I gather that the people who run this place are Greek (the front desk woman's name means "wisdom" in Greek, the General Manager's last name means "God is with us" in the Greek form of the Hebrew, etc.)   Anyway, as I was peeling off the bills to pay for my car repairs, the young man said he couldn't wait to go to the Greek celebration.

I said, "What celebration?"

"It's like a festival."

"Where?"

"On Yoakum Street."

"Where is that?"

"It's a little difficult to explain."

"Yeah?  Well try."

Blank look.

"Is it connected with a church?

"Yes!"

"Which one?"

His mind was whirring, and then he blurted out, "Annunciation!"

"They're having it tonight?"

"Yes!"

I thought, Well that sounds like fun . . . but . . . I'll need to check in with the War Dept. first though to see if that is a possibility.

Catholicism

   One of the things with which I grew up was an instinctual, ingrained, anti-Catholic bias. Where did I get it? From my parents. I just simply accepted what they told me as being true. Even if it did not make a lot of sense, I just simply accepted it as part of the reality that surrounded me.

   My mother tells of an instance where she happened to pick up and look at Ann Wicker’s (who was Catholic) Bible, and was told in no uncertain terms that she should never look at a Catholic Bible.

   I also had come to understand that Catholics prayed to statues, and believed that they could not pray directly to God, but had to go through a priest in order to get to God’s thrones. So convinced was I of the correctness of my position, that I can remember trying to convert Nicholas Vrankovich of the error of his ways, and of the sagacity of my own.

   And don’t even get me started about the magic of transubstantiation. Talk about hocus pocus (which comes from the Latin part of the mass in the prayer of great thanksgiving where the priest lifting the bread says, "Hoc est meus corpus")! How could those Catholics be so dumb? (But then, I’ve also wondered how the devil could be so dumb . . . has he not learned after 2,000 years? Is the perception of who he is and what he does so locked away, and so frozen in time as a few places in Holy Writ suggests?)

   Besides, Catholics used a service you couldn’t understand, and they were primarily those darker, poorer Europeans. Who needs them?

   It wasn’t until I got to seminary that I began to discover the error of my ingrained ways. Nearly all of my prejudices about Catholicism came crashing down. I felt a little angry about it. That which I had believed had to be true, was false. The next time I went back home, I proceeded to instruct my mother about all these tales I had heard and believed about Catholics, refuting them all, and then asking her, "Why did you tell me these things? Where did you come up with all of this?"

   And after thinking for a moment she said, "That was how I was taught." I had fallen into the trap of blindly accepting what I had been taught—by an authority figure in my life to be sure—but taught wrong nonetheless.

   All of this is to say, that I think all too often we Protestants inherit and believe these religious molehills which we proudly build into mountains with landscaping and fencing and well manicured trails, and so many of them are so far from the truth. Our treasured domain from the past on this particular score has not served us well, and has continued controversy and division that just need not and ought not be there.

   For here is the truth: THERE IS FAR MORE IN WHICH WE ARE ALIKE THAN IN WHICH WE ARE DIFFERENT. Yet, so many love to accentuate the differences. And that does not serve Christ’s body well.

   The reality is that our beliefs are far more similar than they are unlike, and that probably the biggest problem is our semantics—talking about the same reality but using different words that are loaded with a religious meaning from days and wars of years past. Perhaps it even boils down to some epistemological (double click on the word) problems, that if it is left up to the academic community to parse out, will be decades if not centuries in the resolution. And all the while, the utter scandal of Christians excommunicating each other from the Lord’s Table provides a terribly defective witness of our stance that in Christ we are products of "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:5).

   Are there differences between Protestants and Catholics? Yes, and amazingly enough, they probably only boil down to four primary things: (1) the primacy of the bishop at Rome, (2) the dogma of papal infallibility, (3) the Mariology dogma, and (4) the understanding of apostolic succession.

   That is only four. The rest we have essential agreement on. And I do not believe that those four have to be impediments to a unified witness and a full acceptance and recognition of our membership, our orders, and of full participation at the Lord’s Table. We need to work together to see what can be done to increase understanding and not allow these four things to be stumbling blocks to Christ’s prayer in John 17