Media and the Great Commission

At the ICCA, a series of sessions featured examined topics of specific interest to Anglo-Catholics. One is the church planting workshop that I helped support. Another was a session on how traditional Anglican must deal with (confront? ignore? respond to?) the 21st century mass and niche media.

The session featured perhaps the two best-known American Anglican journalists (in the decade since tmatt went Orthodox):

• David Virtue, the New Zealand-Canadian has been covering the Anglican communion from the US since 1995 — first as an email list, and today as a (lively) website.
• Kevin Kallsen, who since 2008 has been running AnglicanTV which today is implemented as a YouTube channel.

David Virtue
Photo by J. West

I have traded emails with Virtue off and on for the past decade. I had never met Kallsen before, but a friend (from my final TEC days) was a regular correspondent for AnglicanTV before “swimming the Tiber.”

I wasn’t able to attend the entire session because I was on a competing (and very informative) session on church music. However, I caught the end of Kallsen’s talk (and stayed for the Q&A), when he made some provocative points.

One is that churches need to learn from great consumer companies (notably Apple). While packaging counts — such as approachability — it’s also essential to be genuine.

The other was that technology has changed society “and there’s no going back”. He showed the famous photos of the crowd in St. Peter’s square for Benedict (in 2005) and Francis (2013) — in less than 10 years, the idea of a smartphone (with camera) has become ubiquitous. (There were lots of cellphone cameras during the ICCA sessions and services as well).

Conversely, Virtue said that

Technology is a tool — not God. Technology has been give a godlike status. We need to see through the lens of the Gospel.

At the same time, Luther’s success — in disseminating his critique of the Church and launching what became Lutheranism — depending on cutting edge technology: the printing press. (In other words, it’s hard to image his having such an impact if the 95 Theses had to be hand-copied for distribution to the peasants.)  Virtue also reminded everyone of the old saw: “there are no new heresies, just old heresies dressed up in new form.”

The two differ on the core marketing problem facing traditional Anglicans:

• Kallsen: many frustrated with TEC (and other Protestant revisionists) don’t know about traditional Anglican alternatives and so are going to Rome and the Ordinariate; we need to do a better job of getting our visibility and message out there.
• Virtue: “People don’t want to know” because they want their existing routines, facilities, the familiar. They are deluding themselves that because their rector is traditional, they won’t be affected by the changes in the national church. (To this I would add that some dioceses — such as Dallas 30 miles east of here — are pretending that they can stand up to the national church while that option became moot almost a decade ago.)

Clearly reaching the Millennials will require using modern technology and messages. But my interpretation of both men (plus my recent travels regarding church planting) suggest it is essential to preserve the substance and sincerity of what we believe and are offering to future (or returning) Christians.

PS: At the Congress I met blogger Mark Marshall, who was also blogging the conference.

Discipleship in perspective

This has been a depressing summer here in California for us Continuing Anglicans, and not just because of the abnormally cool summer. At least one parish has given up its court fight (to save its sanctuary) rather than spend more money on lawyers, and another conservative parish has been wracked by artificial controversy intended to tear the parish from its roots.

At times I find that following the Schism II news — whether from friends or via websites — drains all my energies from thinking about other church activities, whether it be researching hymns, reading the Bible, inspirational books, or anything else that I might productively do.

And then there was this morning’s (RCL) Gospel reading, which reads in part:

[Jesus said] “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’”

Tied to this reading, the sermon recounted the autobiography of Lucette, a French girl who was raised by atheists Communists who hated the church with passion: when she committed her life to Christ, her father struck her and her parents disowned her. The memoir, A Memory for Wonders, talks about how Veronica Namoyo Le Goulard became a Clare nun in Algeria and eventually founded two monasteries in North Africa.

The moral of the story: no price is too high to pay for our Christian beliefs.

It would be easy to be cynical about the messenger: the speaker was a somewhat conservative Episcopal priest who either sees nothing wrong with the current direction of TEC or is unwilling to sacrifice his appointment or his pension or his status to join the Continuing Anglicans.

But then that’s the real point. Who benefits by cynicism over clerical hypocrisy, petty infighting among lay leaders, gossiping, court fights, misrepresentation of one’s true theological beliefs? It’s not the faithful, the seekers or Christ’s Church: it’s those that seek to destroy the Church, which is the work of the Devil himself.

Let’s put things into perspective. Yes, we have lost a few buildings, plaques, organs and books. Yes, we have to meet in industrial parks, do church-in-a-box, or sublet from sympathetic established churches.

But we are not going to lose our lives if we follow Christ, or even (except in unusual cases) our livelihoods. This is not Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan or any of the dozens of other countries where Christians are openly persecuted.

It’s past time to move past being anti-revisionist, anti-heretic, anti-apostasy. The people who have walked away from TEC and their buildings had the right idea: spend the time and money on saving souls — particularly inculcating the faith in the next generation — just as we were told to do almost 2000 years ago.

So yes, we do need to understand our mistakes — whether theological, personal or tactical. As cultural Catholic George Santayana said a century ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But our own salvation, and that of the generations to come, depends on how we use that learning to be better disciples of Christ.

Anglicans need doctrine AND outreach

I’ve been catching up on my Issues Etc. podcasts. I don’t listen to all of them, but try to pick the meatier ones plus those from guests that I generally enjoy (such as GetReligionistas Mollie Hemingway and Terry Mattingly).

One podcast I listened to over the weekend was called, “The Future of American Evangelicalism,” an interview with Michael Spencer of InternetMonk.Com. The main focus was to play off his Christian Science Monitor column called “The Coming Evangelical Collapse” and also his (more detailed) blog postings on the same theme.

Whether or not one agrees with his predictions, I would commend the interview (if not the written words) to any thinking Christian.

I was particularly struck by his dissection of the pros and cons of the megachurch movement:

• Some churches are going to be better than others at leveraging new media opportunities, and many of the megachurches have done an admirable job of adapting to the new media.
• Many evangelical churches have grown by being good at welcoming and outreach (i.e. evangelism), at the expense of doctrine.
• Often, standing firm for a specific doctrine inherently requires making choices at odds with church growth.

All of these points seem applicable to 21st century Christians beyond the evangelical movement. My sense is that the Schism II Anglican evangelicals (such as the new St. James San Jose) are trying to engage contemporary technology, welcoming and reaching out to new members — but, by leaving TEC, have made it clear that doctrine still matters.

Spencer noted that Pope Benedict XVI has said that he expects the 21st century to bring a smaller but more faithful Catholic church. (I have not found the exact quote, but it is alluded to by a 2005 New York Times story and an Australian blog.) The early Christian church was a small minority of society, but was quite clear about its beliefs, and Benedict is not the only theologian who sees parallels between today’s post-Christian Western society and the early pre-Christian Roman times.

Still, I think there is a clear lesson here for Anglo-Catholics. All of the Schism I and Schism II Anglo-Catholic parishes that I’ve visited are solid on doctrine. However, they generally seem quite set in their ways, not reaching out or integrating new members into the fold. While the Bob Duncan-style Schism II Rite II Anglicans see such outreach and welcoming as an integral responsibility of laity, the Anglo-Catholics seem to delegate (elevate) the task to the priest and don’t even follow through systematically when a new parishioner walks through the door.

So we need to be less smug in our doctrine and more evangelical (small e) in our view of the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations.”