Dean Andrew McGowan joins us to further unpack shifting dynamics, changing landscapes, and the future after addressing the topic at the Episcopal Parish Network (EPN) conference. McGowan describes his observations of Australian secularization and how he sees similar dynamics arising in the United States. We talk about why church attendance is changing, the difference between hope and optimism, and consumer capitalism’s effect on church dynamics. After a rich conversation, we play our signature game, Holy Cow!, and learn McGowan’s opinion on THE best bread for the Eucharist.
53: The Church's Future with Andrew McGowan
Hosts: Brandon Nappi and Hannah Black
Guest: Andrew McGowan
Production: Goodchild Media
Music: Wayfaring Stranger, Theodicy Jazz Collective
Art: E. Landino
Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast
berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast
Khubz arabi - pita (adapted from Claudia Roden)
4 cups flour (including up to one cup of whole wheat) [500g]
2 tsp dry yeast
1/4 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 Tbps olive oil
1 2/3 cups warm water [375g/ml]
Mix flours, salt, sugar, and yeast. Add oil and water - hold back a little of the water and add if the mixture remains dry. Knead for 5-10 minutes, until smooth and elastic. Let prove in an oiled bowl covered for 2 hours at room temperature or move to fridge after an hour if you are to take longer Preheat oven to 450 Punch dough down, and divide into twelve pieces (or as desired). Roll into balls and rest for a few minutes (this lets gluten relax), then pat or roll out into circles, fairly flat - 6 inches or so across. Use a floured rolling pin to avoid sticking, or shape with floured hands to ensure an even round shape. Prove circles another 20 mins, flouring the proofing surface (bench, or oven trays/cookie sheets) lightly first, while oven is heating. You can also do this proof directly on cookie sheets very lightly dusted with flour or with baking parchment, which then can go straight into the oven if there are enough, or else leave on the benchtop and transfer to sheets when ready to bake. Bake 5 minutes (suggested - but observe for puffing and slight color appearing) on cookie sheets do not crowd the sheets, so a few batches may be needed depending on quantity. Watch carefully for slight browning, and when color is evident remove to avoid crisping the loaves. Cool on racks, and refrigerate or freeze when completely cooked. 12 pieces
B: Hey, Hannah.
H: Hey, Brandon.
B: How’s it going?
H: Good. How are you?
B: Well, I am very excited because we have our favorite Australian with us today.
H: Indeed. Returning guest.
B: Not Hugh Jackman.
H: Dean and president of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
B: Nor Nicole Kidman.
H: It’s Andrew McGowan.
Andrew: I’m sure if either of those wanted to come on, they would quickly supplant me in your affections. But never mind. It’s good to be with you.
H: But would they have the theological rigor and … and strategic mind?
A: Well, you know, perhaps one of them has one and one has the other. You know?
H: The baking chops.
A: That’s right. The baking chops. Definitely. I feel I’m ahead on that front. I feel I feel reassured and affirmed there. Thank you.
B: I thought we’d begin with the great Berkeley Bake Off this morning. So, I think we’re all bakers in one way or another. But Dean McGowan, you may be way ahead of us on this. What’s been in the oven recently?
A: I just sort of cranked my starter up after a few weeks where the rigors of Holy Week and Easter had actually sort of kept me from regularly feeding and kneading and baking and so forth. So just a couple of regular sourdough loaves out of the baskets with some sunflower seeds, some black sesame, a little bit of teff, and some oat porridge, would you believe? Although this … if that sounds really sophisticated, part of it was that we actually had some teff and oat porridge left over from breakfast one day. And porridges are actually quite good to add to breads like this. They sort of they capture moisture. They, they’ll make a sort of a softer, moister kind of bread. But if oatmeal … I’m using the term porridge, which bread makers do use in this country, but where I come from, what you call oatmeal, we call porridge. Right. You know, that breakfast thing. But, so any leftover oatmeal from breakfast, don’t throw it away or give it to the dog or whatever. Save it for your baking.
H: Wow.
B: Do you have, a cut of oats that you that you prefer, whole or quick or Irish? We actually sort of vary a little bit. We … I, through sort of not looking carefully enough recently at a purchase, sort of found myself having bought quick steel cut oats.
B: Oh, I didn’t know there were …
A: I didn’t even know there were such a thing. But they’ve worked quite well, both for that bread purpose. And the other thing I baked the other day was not bread, but Anzac biscuits, which is an Australian …
H: I feel I saw those on Instagram.
A: You may have done. That’s right. They’re a sort of an oatmeal cookie that’s made with golden syrup, which some people might see as sort of an English and Commonwealth concoction. It’s a sugar syrup, but it has a kind of malty, caramel-y sort of flavor. So it’s sort of an oatmeal cookie that’s a bit more light brown and a bit sweeter than some. Worth a try.
H: The secret oats are reminding me of the other secret ingredient included in the nicest shortbread biscuits I’ve ever had, which were baked by the Dean.
A: And this was ground rice, which–and I learned …
B: Those were quite good if they’re the ones I’m thinking.
A: I didn’t … I learned that trick from another of my baking teachers who is in Denmark these days who sort of showed that the idea was to sort of get some rice, get your own rice, and toast it in a pan so that it became golden bread.
H: I’ve now tried this at home.
A: You have? And then grind it. You know, one of those spice grinders or whatever. So it’s my grandmother, in fact, who, you know, never did those things, nevertheless, did sometimes put rice flour in shortbread. And rice flour, because it doesn’t really grind down to a powder, it maintains this sort of slightly gritty sort of feel. And so that’s part of the reason it’s useful for, you know, lining baskins and pans and so forth because it helps things lift out. But the same property provides this really interesting little bit of a grit in the shortbread. And you know how that sandy thing is nice in shortbread. And then when the rice was toasted as well, something agreeable It really adds its flavor. Flavors. Yeah.
H: What have you been baking?
B: So I’m not much of a baker. However, I do all the cooking at home. I’m the cook. But, my, familial obligation to my wife’s family is to make my wife’s grandmother, Clara’s, Crescia , which is a northern Italian, yeasted, cheese bread, which almost has the texture … oh my gosh, her family is gonna roll in the grave, of a cheddar scone. So it’s egg, butter, yeast, a whole lot of, Romano and, Parmigiano Reggiano. It’s dense, it’s salty, and a healthy amount of pepper.
A: And is that an Easter bread?
B: And it’s an Easter bread.
A: Okay. Because I’ve come across one or two other Italian Easter breads that were cheese inflected, savory, which surprised me, I think, when I first came across them. But there’s, you know, one or two places that will simply call something a bit like that, a Torta di Pasco or something like that.
B: Exactly. And this does not have all of the meats and large pieces of cheese that some of those tortas have. Now the great tradition in the family would have been, God rest her soul, to overbake this until it was a crumbly dry nightmare that that could have been perhaps dunked in wine.
H: I think you’re okay until “nightmare.”
B: But this has been told to me, and so everyone actually appreciates …
H: Common knowledge.
B: … my innovation on some moisture and moisture in the bake. Innovation. Yeah. What about you, Hannah?
H: Well, it’s not quite my full-fledged baking season. I’m the pie gal in my communities.
A: More the fall and the winter …
H: I get very intense, yeah, about my pate brisée and everything. But what I have in the pantry right now, if you will believe it, is a box of Funfetti mix because I had the intention of baking Funfetti cookies to bring in for your birthday.
B: This is a no judgment zone. In fact we welcome it.
H: I mean, it was gonna be for you. But, yeah, that’s that’s where we’re at.
A: I’m having to look up what funfetti is, so we’ll come back to that.
H: You haven’t been fully baptized to the United States until you’ve feasted on Funfetti.
A: I thought it was pretty good that I knew what a fluffanutter was, you know, even though they’re to be avoided. But you know, the weirdness still goes on. There’s much more for me to learn.
H: I think I mean, on our friend podcast And Also With You, they were just talking about how we have all these Lenten practices, but we don’t necessarily pump up the Easter practices. And I feel like baking would be a good kind of Easter practice.
B: Yeah. You’re drawing the line between the Funfetti…
H: Funfetti does not belong in Lent. I’m gonna say it right here, right now.
B: For sure. Does it belong anywhere?
H: Hey, now.
A: It sounds flippant, really, doesn’t it?
B: Hi. I’m Brandon Nappi.
H: Hi. I’m Hannah Black, and we’re your hosts on the Leaders Way podcast.
B: A Yale podcast empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology.
H: This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal Seminary at Yale.
H: We were all recently at EPN, the Episcopal Parish Network conference, where we heard from our dear Dean about shifting landscapes in the church, the future of the church. Do you remember the actual title off the dome?
A: The title was the one that the EPN director hopefully just provided when I when I procrastinated about giving him another one. But it was like shifting landscapes, changing dynamics in the future or something like that.
H: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
A: Which was perfectly adequate.
H: And I will say there was something like an outcry on social media when I posted from the Berkeley accounts that you were gonna be giving this talk and some people couldn’t make it. So we’re here now to talk about shifting landscapes in the church, the future of the church. And I think this is kind of … it’s a crunchy one. People are feeling this, particularly in church leadership spaces where they’re worried about their attendance and things like that. So we might as well talk about it.
B: Folks leaned in. And I’m really curious about the way you began the talk, and maybe speaking towards some toward earnest clergy’s temptation to blame themselves for just about everything that’s gone wrong in the world.
A: Which may be something that goes with the territory anyway. But when some of the things to blame oneself for are sort of huge demographic shifts and, you know, church attendance patterns changing in measurable historical terms, that becomes pretty tough, doesn’t it? Yeah.
I one of my lines was, I think, you know, it’s not your fault. That is to say, I think part of what we need to do to understand what’s going on is to realize that this is a historic moment that has to do with the way in which religious practice in North American society has changed and is changing still rapidly around us and has arrived so quickly that it’s given rise to that sense of this must be my fault because ten years ago, things were different, and now I did stuff and now you know?
But in fact, since these changes encompass not only different Christian denominations, but different tendencies within Christianity, we might come back to that because some people think, oh, well, you know, fundamentalist evangelicals aren’t experiencing this, but actually they are. It’s just that it’s on a different pace. But it’s also true of other religious traditions, at least once they’ve had a couple of generations of migrant experience, you know, that it’s really about how Americans in particular are thinking about the place of religion in their lives.
And that didn’t change because the Episcopal church messed with the liturgy fifty years ago. You know? And it didn’t change because you made a change in how the Christian education program was working in your parish. You know? So while there are things that may still be worth reflecting critically and appreciatively about with regard to ministry and its effectiveness, the bigger picture that we’re seeing about decline and change and rearranging assumptions has to be thought of in a much bigger context before we can then, I think, take creative and appropriate steps to ask what ministry means in the light of that changing context.
H: Yeah. We wanna know what’s going on in order to address …
A: And not just to sort of come up with excuses or explanations that either blame ourselves or as you went straight to that, Brandon, which I think is quite right. But there’s also the temptation to blame others. So I and I joked in the talk about how there’s a set of, you know, famous explanations for why everything went wrong. And we find these perhaps I’m seeing quite a bit of this in the Roman Catholic kind of social media world at the moment because of reflection about the late pope and his impact and so forth. But, you know, things didn’t happen just because we changed the liturgy at a particular point or because in the Episcopal world, women became ordained leaders or because we became, fully inclusive.
I think the closest thing to any connections with those is that, you know, one of the things that Episcopalians and other mainline Christians have not always done particularly well is working out the difference between engaging creatively and boldly with culture and just letting the culture dictate the terms. In other words, are we committed to full inclusion and to women’s leadership because they are gospel imperatives or because who cares?
H: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
A: And there’s a world of difference between the same outcome for the two different reasons in terms of what it suggests about the nature of religious practice and of worshiping communities and whether they’re really going to have a vibe that says to people, We’re here doing the things we are because it’s so important, as opposed to, we’re here doing the things we are and we’ll do whatever’s necessary to sort of work out what will be able to keep us in the flow. That second one, I think, is not really where it’s gonna be at for much longer if it is at all.
H: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting because I feel like from other communities I’ve been a part of, that’s the perception of mainline protestants or just more kind of progressive Christian groups is that they’re wishy washy, lukewarm, going with the flow, just trying to be relevant or something like that. And, it’s extremely different from holding with conviction that women ought to lead or something like that.
A: And, of course, there’s I think there are real there’s real evidence for both those approaches having been at work in the mainline in particular. I mean, I think there are times when I, you know, sort of roll my eyes and sort of shake my head and so forth because it seems that the things that people want to regard as the most burning issues, for instance, of justice and truth and so forth, are not driven by the imperatives of the gospel, but simply by the fact that, well, of course, that’s the way things are. And, you know, the gospel and the nature of religious truth is sort of held to be a bounded set that shouldn’t actually either be affected by or affecting the ways in which we think about those other issues. And I I think that’s part of what the … that’s the hand that the current form of secularization that we’re dealing with wants to deal us. You know, people are quite happy for religion to exist as long as it doesn’t make a difference to anyone.
And, of course, there will be some institutions and some communities that survive by taking that line, but that’s not where I think the most creative and appropriate possibilities are mostly because I think that’s theologically inadequate. And I think that part of what we have seen about the communities that are more successful and more likely to be resilient and to grow is that they have the capacity to articulate a clear view of what their theological commitments are and to engage others in in joining in the project that that they’re trying to build in local worship and but also in forms of service and outreach.
B: In your talk, you referenced your experience as an Australian and your ministry there as a kind of precursor to what eventually would happen here in in American culture and in the American church. And I wonder if you can reflect a little bit, maybe so folks can know a bit more about your journey. But, also, what is it that you saw there that you then encountered here maybe a generation later? And, you know, how did that how did that provide some context for your interpreting what was going on around you?
A: Yeah. Thank you for that. So the short version of this was that it it felt to me as I arrived in the United States for the first time as a graduate student, over thirty years ago, that I’d stepped into a different world religiously and socially even though we’re … there are so many ways in which The United States and Australia are similar and, you know, people find it easy to engage with one another. But the Australia that I’d grown up in was already highly secularized, and that’s partly some specifically Australian stuff. We’ve never been a particularly religious sort of part of the Western world because so many of us were people who were sort of the dregs of other people’s social realities. And, you know, earnest religiosity was not something that stuck particularly well when you were put on a boat either as a convict or you, you know, were scrimping and saving to try and find gold and then failing to do so with great prominence as my forebears did. So Australia was already quite secular. I think some other listeners and viewers will be familiar with at least the European version of that story. Because while, of course, Europe has its great religious monuments and cultural institutions, there’s still a sense in which it’s like, who cares? You know, churches are empty except for certain civic occasions and for Easter and Christmas and so forth. But once again, huge generalization, but I hope people will hear the core of that.
So the Australian version of it, you know, is a bit like the European one, but I think perhaps a bit more hardcore in in some ways. And, now I nevertheless, you know, grew up in a in a Christian family. My father was a priest, and, and yet I was conscious even going to an Anglican private school that, you know, I was pretty much a small minority among those that actually had any active religious practice in their own households and so forth. So my own formation as a Christian and a priest was really that of being in an environment where that was kind of weird, and probably becoming weirder because the secularization processes were not static even in Australia even though I think we started from a, depending on your perspective, a higher or a lower base. You know? A lower religious base or higher secularization base.
So coming to The United States and finding in the early 1990’s that it still felt like everybody had a religious practice and it was just a question of, you know, which denomination or which religion it was, was striking, and I must say rather appealing. You know, the going to, you know, a local parish in South Bend, which …
H: Wow. People are here!
A: Brandon and I both remember South Bend in the nineties. And, yes, there were lots of people there, and they were, you know, really interested in the sort of preaching and teaching, and they had great liturgy. And it was it was very heartening. It was it was sustaining, you know, for me in a way, even though it was sort of like a bit like having, you know, more dessert than I was used to having sort of. But of course, I’ve gone back and forth between The United States and Australia multiple times across those few decades, and so I’ve kept track of both those realities. And the striking thing was that even though I didn’t know it, it was too early to be tracking that it was really just at the end of the eighties and early nineties that the US patterns were starting to change, that people who were from adolescence through to young adults at that point very quickly stopped deciding that religious practice was part of their normal existence.
It really took, I think, a lot of us a decade or two to wake up to the fact that that sort of thing was happening. In the meantime, we had things like 9/11, which, of course, was a very public moment of cultural and intellectual conversation about the place of religion, but which was being fueled, I think, by social forces that were already well underway even though people weren’t very conscious of them. And sometimes … sometimes these things are like, you know, climate rather than weather. They’re happening to us, but we’re not really sure why. And yet we nevertheless experience them and we still perspire. We still change our clothes. But it’s not as if we can do much about them.
So I’ve gone back and forth between this highly secular country of my birth and this country that has moved with an extraordinary rapidity towards a kind of secular reckoning, which we’re still trying to work out. And one of the factors it feels to me is if that that people in the United States are very understandably experiencing a kind of chaos and cognitive dissonance because this has been happening so quickly. And so one of the things that happens in those circumstances is that we reach around grasping at straws. We try and find reasons to explain the things that have gone on. And that brings us back to Brandon’s sort of opening questions, I think.
Why has this been happening? Is it my fault? Is it your fault?
H: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
A: And that’s usually a more attractive second video. Alright. And and, of course, you know, If only you’d done the thing that I wanted you to then becomes the next thing. And while the it all went wrong because arguments tend to be sort of stuck-in-the-mud, conservative ones, to be, unkind about it, the if only you did the thing that I’d wanted you to version can often be something that progressives try and wield as well. If only we were even more inclusive. Right. If only we were even more just. If only we were even more anti-racist and so forth. Now all of those things has their theological cases to be made, and I would, I think, affirm each of the things I just said. But that’s not the thing that’s gonna get people back into church, to be honest. Now if we can do those things as well as do the things that will sort of help sustain, create viable worshiping communities well and good. But, again, going back to something we talked about ten minutes ago, will we do them because that’s the nature of the gospel, or will we do them because that’s simply the way in which a particular kind of political and cultural tide has been moving?
One, of course, in which in the last, you know, few years we’re starting to realize is actually itself, you know, swirling with other tides that are thinking very, very differently. And that requires another kind of reflection and reckoning that I don’t think we’re particularly good at yet partly because in … if I may, you know, step into the political realm for a minute, the current moment politically is one in which there’s so much chaos and change that it’s very, very difficult to people get a grasp on what’s really going on in the political realm. And one doesn’t have to sort of get into the value judgment too far to understand that there’s at least a social and political phenomenon there that it will be better for us to reflect on in ways other than “it’s your fault” or “you’re bad” or “you hold terrible opinions,” all of which may also be true, but which don’t necessarily help at the end of the day when you’re sitting at the dinner table with your MAGA family members, you know, because they’re not gonna be argued out of those positions by the fact that you’re right, let alone let alone that you’re well educated or even that you’re compassionate or even that you’re a person of faith, but the issues are still there.
H: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about hope, which is something we talk about quite a bit on this podcast and something that sometimes we get pushback about. And I think there are a few different things at play. When Brandon and I talk about hope, we’re usually talking about a deep theological hope that transcends things like average Sunday attendance or who’s in office. But even that hope sometimes is viewed as naive or uninformed or something like that. I wonder if you could help us posture ourselves shifting ecclesial landscape in The United States. Should we be hopeful? If so, in what? Should we be optimistic? That might be a better question.
A: Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, you’re having you foregrounded something that that was sort of I was wondering about here, you know, the difference between hope and optimism, which is often spoken about and, you know, can just be a bit of a cliche, but I think it is fundamentally important here.
H: It’s helpful language for sure.
A: I think so. I mean, I would tend to say that, and I think I may have said this in the talk that I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful. And by that, of course, each of those needs to be nuanced a bit. I’m not optimistic in this sense; that people will not simply by listening to the wisdom of the three of us on this podcast, discover the elixir of ecclesial success that they’ll be able to take back to the next level.
H: If only we had an elixir to sell, then we’d have the money to do whatever we want.
B: It’s sourdough.
A: Is it available on Amazon, or aren’t we allowed to buy from them anymore? But, what I mean is that the indications are that there will be, you know, many more worshiping communities, many more parishes of the Episcopal Church and other mainline churches that will be closing over the next few decades. And, even if and interestingly, by the way, you may recall that from another talk that was given to us before mine at EPN, there are some interesting blips on the radar of the demography. And some of you listening may have had, you know, increased church attendance at Easter. There are other interesting questions and asides like that.
But even if we were at a moment where the sort of downturn was about to be reversed, that isn’t actually gonna happen fast enough for us not to be closing those churches over the next twenty or thirty years because we’ve got two missing generations. So I’m not optimistic if what we mean is are we gonna maintain the current numbers of Episcopalians or the current numbers of parishes or the current number of diocese or whatever it would be. But, I’m I’m hopeful, you might even say that that I’m optimistic sort of with an asterisk, in the sense that I don’t believe that that’s the last word on the Episcopal Church or the Anglican communion or anything else. Because as a historian, I know and you do too, that the church has been in tough corners like this before. And the fact that we’re actually experiencing decline and crisis, I sort of need to sort of stop and take a breath and say …
H: Hang on.
A: What else would we expect every century or so from one from one cause or another? Because the, you know, the ancient church with which I’m best acquainted …
H: Yeah. I was thinking of this church history.
A: … has its own crisis and the early medieval church has both a bounce back, you know, and the crisis and then further crisis and so forth. So … but the hope thing that to really come back to your opening thought, Hannah, you know, hope is a theological virtue, and hope is not based upon empirical data. I mean, it is based on real things, but not based on the kind of what what we all too often hear, I think, in the academy today as, you know, evidence-based approaches. I whenever I hear evidence based, I wanna reach for my bible and throw it across the table, but … that’s evidence. But, I don’t mean to be completely flip about that. But say the kind of evidence that for us the resurrection constitutes. You know, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t gonna be crucifixions. It means that the power of God is deeper, greater, and more persistent and has the last word. So, hope as a theological virtue and its difference from optimism have to do with the fact that hope is not perturbed by things not going well.
H: And I think to what’s important for me is that my hope isn’t really in the institution of the Episcopal Church Right. Even though I think it’s cool. I’ve hitched my wagon to it in some significant ways. But my hope is really in Jesus Christ. And the Episcopal Church is one way, I think, to be part of the body of Yes. Christ.
A: That’s right. And, you know, if we take it back to the level of the human community, our former presiding Bishop Michael Curry often spoke about, you know, the Jesus movement, so to speak. And that that was a useful way of reminding people that it isn’t necessarily about the canons of constitutions or about the bylaws of the parish. It’s really about the fact that there is a community of people who are followers of Jesus. I still think, even though like you, I don’t really feel that the, you know, the Anglican communion is a beautiful historical accident for me. It’s not the purpose of the exercise. It’s part of who I am and in inevitably, and I don’t think I could be otherwise. But I do believe, for instance, that the Jesus movement is characterized by the celebration of the sacraments.
I do believe that it’s guided by scripture. And, you know, and there’s therefore, there are some other things there other than just sort of thinking that Jesus is cool. But that doesn’t necessarily map on to the way any particular institution matters. Right.
H: Or any particular, like, parish building. Yeah.
A: Yeah. Yeah. That’s well, that’s an interesting one, isn’t it? The built buildings, if we take that for a minute. I mean, we’ve been saying or people have been saying it’s become almost become a sort of sore, you know, that the church isn’t the building, it’s the people, which is absolutely correct. It doesn’t … that position shouldn’t be challenged, but it could be added to. Because the buildings that we have, like the other concrete institutional capital that we have, still need to be thought of as part of what we bring to this exercise. So, the fact that the church is the people, not the buildings might lead you to take the buildings very seriously. Not because they’re the church, but …
H: Because of their function for the people of God.
A: The people need things. The people need a roof over their heads and the people need a visible sign to the community that says we are here, we’re doing something, and so forth. So, of course, we will be closing buildings, and I I’ve actually, just even in my social media over the last week, seen a few instances of churches being closed. And I look at these beautiful places, and I think with great sadness about the efforts that were made to worship in in the beauty of those places over a long period of history. But it’s also possible for us to be thankful about the fact that those places were witnesses. I mean, we ourselves are here for a limited period of time as physical historic human beings. It doesn’t mean that our lives are inherently tragic just because they’re limited. Every human institution and every cultural artifact has a lifespan. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be signs of hope even at the end as well as at the beginning.
B: Well, and I think if if we learned one thing in the midst of the pandemic, or maybe I’ll speak personally, for me is that space matters. Being with people in a particular moment, in a particular space means a great deal to me, and, certainly, sacred space really matters. And, I mean, I think of the number of people that I know who might not attend church regularly on a Sunday might still regularly walk into that church on a Wednesday afternoon to pray. Or just the very witness public witness of that space as they drive by it is sacramental.
A: Mhmm. Yep. Yep. And we need to give people encouragement to allow that possibility to take place and credit for allowing it to take place. And, you know, some of the efforts that the church has been making institutionally to sort of quantify its successes and so forth make it hard to leave room for those things. You know, there’s there’s nothing in the in the annual pro quo report to send in that says 17 people came and sat for five minutes in the church across, you know, the last month. But that’s got more to do with the fact that while we have to maintain our institutional accountabilities, there are other accountabilities that we have to also create and enculturate for ourselves in in local worshiping communities and in seminaries and wherever else.
B: What we’ve learned over the year, is that we have a lot of potential seminarians listening to the show and folks who are in various stages of discerning a call to priesthood and lay ministry and maybe even thinking about, applying to Berkeley and Yale Divinity School. And I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on … as an educator of priests and future ministers within the church, what do you like to keep front and center as you negotiate these crisis moments as perhaps un-unique as they are, but sort of, at the same time, unique to this moment? Right? Crisis is not unique, but the kind of rise of Christian nationalism, the constriction of churches unique to this moment. Are there a few things that you keep as your, if not North Star, your constellation that helps to navigate your work as teacher, professor, and as leader of other teachers.
A: Thank you. Well, you know, a couple of the things we’ve been talking about in the past ten minutes are relevant here and, you know, are probably the most important ones, but we don’t need to repeat them. I mean, I’m doing this because I believe it, and that, you know, hope abounds. I’m … but to bring it a bit back to the concrete and the institutional, and I’m thinking also here, for instance, of conversations I have with potential students.
The place perhaps where that sort of the theological vision and the historical consciousness come together is the fact that, look, there is a lot of change and decay and decline going on in the institution, and that’s not the only thing that’s going on, even institutionally, even in terms of numbers, that there are plenty of stories of congregations that are growing. And many more where congregations are engaging effectively in faithful witness of different kinds and working out ways in which to have sustainable futures for themselves. One of the things that I’ve noted, and I think it’s another part of this sort of cognitive dissonance experience for the Episcopal church, is that as you look at some of the numbers and sort of declines, people, rather than breaking those back out into places that are really nose-diving and places that are not, they just sort of tend to see this average. You know, they’ve got the line on the graph and you think and I’ve even seen this in print. You know, there won’t be any Episcopalians left by 2050 or something. Well, you know, there are Episcopalians who are alive now who are still gonna be alive in 2050, so it gets kind of silly at that point. The statistics don’t actually help us at that level of generality to understand what’s really going on. There are many worshiping communities, perhaps not a majority. Let’s be, you know, open about that. But plenty of worshiping communities that are thinking thoughtfully, creatively, and hopefully about the futures of their work and that will still be doing that, when none of us is here.
And that becomes a very practical question for the potential seminarian because sometimes they’re saying, you know, you want me to come, to move to Yale to undertake three years of study And, okay, you’re paying me a full tuition scholarship, but it’s still going to sort of be three years of lost income for me and, you know, will my spouse have to support– you know, it’s a very practical question. And they, in the end, may need to ask or else I’ll prompt them to ask, Is there gonna be a job for me? And the answer is yes. And that’s more on the, perhaps, the optimistic side than the hopeful side because, you know, I think jobs are very practical things. But I’ve never had a bad conscience about encouraging anyone who, you know, had the chops to come and study with us on the basis that that would, in the most concrete way …
H: Yeah. You’ll have a paycheck at least.
A: be a rational choice. Now, of course, there are also good, ministry moments that are irrational and that involve, you know, like Francis taking off his clothes and giving them back to his father and off he goes. So, I’m open to sort of working with those people too, even though they’re a bit scary, of course. I’m sure Francis was deeply scary. You know?
B: I’ll bring the cloaks.
A: That’s right. But, you know, whatever the spirit is going to do to get people to work, you know, outside the rails as it were, nevertheless, the fate of the Episcopal church is not such that there won’t be many significant parishes, institutions, and other worshiping communities doing that work in fifty years’ time and more. And so we just need to be able to be more thoughtful and analytical. It’s … this isn’t purely about my theological affirmations. This is simply about observing the truth that, you know, there are places closing their doors, and there are places who are having baptisms and confirmations at Easter in surprising numbers. Both those things, both those stories are happening at the same time.
And I think part of what that suggests is that there is still a hunger for the gospel and an openness to the work of the spirit, but it’s going to be fostered in places that are saying, We have the gospel and we’re open to the spirit, rather than places that are saying, Well, you know, religiosity is part of your life and now let’s try and hook it up with …
H: Or just We must keep existing.
A: … with cultural liberalism. Or yeah. I mean, this is one of the funny things about so called progressive Christianity, to be to be honest, is that it’s actually so institutionally and culturally conservative.
H: Right. Right. Right. Right.
H: Its premise is a kind of ongoing religiosity that we don’t have to think so much about the cross, we can drape it with the flags of our various causes and so forth. But we sort of imagine that that religiosity will be the vehicle that keeps people going while we inculcate the other causes of our time.
And this goes back to the point we were making earlier, I think, that I tend to support the causes that I’ve just made a bleak reference to. But, you know, the plight of immigrants is important because of the gospel. Full inclusion is important because of the gospel.
H: As an outpouring of the main thing.
A: That’s right. And if that isn’t something that we can ground in the sense of the life of Jesus given for the world and Jesus raised from the dead by God at Easter, then, you know, I’ve got better things to do on Sunday morning, to be honest.
H: Totally. Totally.
A: Firstly, sleep and secondly, make bread. You know?
H: The itinerary is set.
A: But, and that’s gonna be part of the experience of the United States over the next decades that there will be more people for whom, you know, the brunch special beckons at ten rather than at one. But that’s okay. You know, one of the things about that reality of religious change is that it’s a refiner’s fire. I mean, the people who are gonna be in churches in twenty years’ time are gonna be the ones who are really looking for something or the ones who are really committed to following. And that’s the sort of thing that will then again give rise to a further outflow of missional substance, I think.
It’s, what I can’t remember; I don’t think I gave this example in that talk, but I do often think that we’re in the situation of–and I use this more in the Australian context, by the way. But we’re like the Irish monasteries of the fifth and sixth and seventh centuries, you know. When they’re burning their candles, you know, and writing these manuscripts, they’re keeping half the learning of the Western world alive by copying these things. And then they send these people out to the rest of Europe and they evangelize it. You know, not everything that looks like hunkering down and holding together and the world outside being gloomy and dangerous, not every moment like that is a bad moment. Only history can show that or perhaps only through God’s perspective of history, which we don’t have. But yeah.
H: I wanna ask about another dynamic that I’ve thought about a lot coming from my nondenominational soup of Southern California, which is the late-stage-capitalism piece. And to kind of share where I’m coming from with this question, the churches I grew up in, it felt like everyone I knew was, like, a nondenominational evangelical. And everyone was evangelizing to one another.
A: Oh, yeah.
H: It was a wild– The true gospel isn’t at x Bible church, it’s at my church, so come along! Yeah. So I’ve thought about the way that American capitalism affects church attendance and even dynamics in the evangelical world, but I think it also affects us in Episcopal land. And I wonder whether you could speak to that a little bit. Is that part of the sort of people joining social groups less, or are those two separate questions? What’s what’s going on?
A: Yes. One of the … you just alluded at the end there to another theme in that talk, which to sort of give it the twenty second version was that it’s not just churches or religious groups that are declining. It’s a whole range of institutions and associations that were based upon the idea of joining up. And this has been well demonstrated, you know, in sociology of of recent decades that, you know, if you think your church looks gray, go and have a look at a Rotary Club meeting. Right? Yeah. And, you know, uniformed sorts of children’s groups and all these sorts of things have been struggling. So, yes, as you say, the dominant way of connecting isn’t so much by belonging or may … or it’s a different kind of belonging. I don’t mean to be pejorative about this necessarily, but it’s got more to do with, you know, how does my taste work, how do my needs get served, those sorts of things. And we can’t completely remove ourselves from this because if I think about my, you know, wonderful group of seminarians whom you also work with, you know, I haven’t done a hands up recently to see how many of them were actually in the Episcopal church, you know, when they were five or six years old. But …
H: Not many. Not many, I think. I think in my class I’ve been teaching this semester, which is all Berkeley folks Yeah. It’s like, my guess would be five out of the eighteen. If that.
A: Yeah. If that. So we can’t say in a sort of precious way, Well, we’re sort of exempt from that, because many of them have actually made a kind of choice about their religious affiliation and found that the liturgy or the theology or whatever it is they’ve experienced in Anglicanism is, you know, something to which they’re amenable.
But I do think, nevertheless, that we can say that perhaps we can be a place where you get off that merry-go-round and at least display a bit of resistance to the notion that associations are simply transactions.
H: A product to … Yeah.
A: And that, you know, all we’re doing is just offering that thing. Because, of course, you know, you go beyond the sort of nondenominational settings you were mentioning, and it’s basically sort of the yoga mat, isn’t it? Because, you know, $5 for a yoga session is a much more low impact way of having a spiritual practice that doesn’t really mess with your head. You know?
I think that, this perhaps sort of connects with my Irish monasteries comment. I do think that if the future of the church is what I imagine– thankfully, it will be what God imagines rather than what I do, but let’s just say–then, you know, we’ll be smaller and we’ll be weirder.
H: Say a lot more about that.
B: You heard it here first.
H: Particularly that second bit.
A: Yeah. But I think it’s true. I mean, to be a liturgically-minded Christian is it in itself weird. And, you know, we see that in terms of the folk who are also being drawn to the Roman Catholic church and to Orthodox churches and so forth. Some of that, especially some of the folk who are joining some strands of Orthodoxy, gets a little bit worrisome because that’s also connecting with Christian nationalism in some ways. Because there is a narrative in Christian nationalism that is also, at least in certain respects, anti-capitalist. Because, of course, it tends towards fascism.
But, you know, that’s always complicated.
Nevertheless, my hope for Anglicanism in that regard would be that even if people have to consume Anglicanism in a sense, that they do so more as people who have, you know, laid down the burden of constant consumption as a sort of a choice every week, but rather have decided that to belong to a community is an alternative way of consuming religious truth and producing religious truth. That the sacraments themselves, for instance, have a kind of logic a kind of economic logic which is different from that which capitalism evinces in other respects.
Again, I don’t think we can sort of pretend or even seek to become a sort of a separate island of such completely alternative practice that we could be purist about those things. But I do think that the ways in which the church has to be countercultural are still being determined. I do … it’s easier to hear that kind of countercultural language on parts of a very conservative end of a religious spectrum because people will say that, you know, not being fully inclusive or, you know, affirming very old gender roles is countercultural. It’s not really. It’s just maintaining the culture of a century ago or trying to maintain an imagined culture of a century ago. But the church isn’t the world in which it lives. The church exists in that world, and the church has to understand and will always struggle with this question about how to be authentic as a community of people following Jesus while still acknowledging that they live in the world and that it’s still God’s world as well.
H: Yeah. I mean, even if the church isn’t by nature part of consumer capitalism, we as individuals are. And I wonder whether part of the task of spiritual leaders now is to joyfully invite through the doors people who are coming expecting to receive a product. And I think that is part of what’s happening in the Episcopal church in general as a destination denomination. A lot of us who grew up in different traditions or lack thereof are seeing what this church is like and saying, Oh, yeah. I’ll buy into that. But then welcoming people into church maybe needs to involve a bit of an education in the fact that belonging in a community is different from the dynamics of consumer capitalism. And, actually, we’re offering you something that would be a category error.
A: That’s right.
H: And things are demanded of you, which is hard because we live in a world where all of us are overwhelmed and overworked, but this is just a different kind of thing.
A: Yes. No. That’s I I really agree with that. I think, I notice that again, some of, some of our students and other folk they connect with do even beyond the realm of their Christian identity and connection, there is, for instance, a culture among young, younger, you know, oppositional political folk of mutual aid, for instance. And I raise that because, you know, the idea of pledging to the parish of fifty years ago, I’m not quite sure how that’s gonna resonate for people who are walking to the church for the first time today. They might still expect to pay $5 to bring their yoga mat, you know, or something like that. But there are other discourses around economics which do exist among younger people.
H: Lots of GoFundMe’s for medical costs.
A: That’s right. That’s right. Now in fact, I think I think some of the language that the church got into for using for stewardship over the previous century may end up proving counterproductive in this regard. You know, like all the ways in which people talked about it as being about, you know, your offering to God and so forth. Well, I’m sorry. God doesn’t check out once you’ve written your pledge for the church. You know? I’m …
H: Yeah. A lot of us have reasons to be suspicious as well.
A: That’s right. But on the other hand, for a parish to say, here’s what we do. Here’s what our resource need is to do it. Can we do this together? Really? It’s an economic proposition that I think some younger folk can still resonate with even if the idea of paying their dues to the rotary club is not something that resonates with.
H: And to be fair, it sounds a little bit more like the church in the book of Acts who are sharing their assets.
A: It does, yes. That’s right. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
B: At the end of your talk, you ended on somewhat of a hopeful note or maybe a note of empowerment, a reminder to leaders. And so for those listeners, perhaps leaders, who are not scared away that the church might be small, and they might actually be, willing to sign up for a church that’s weird. And lead a church that’s weird.
H: We need a slogan like Portland. Keep Portland weird. We need, like … we’ll workshop that. Yeah. What is it that you want leaders to remember about what they’re being asked to do?
A: I want them to remember that they’re one follower of Jesus among another set of followers of Jesus. I mean … that may sound sort of a little too up in the air, but I think that the reason to do this, whether you’re someone leading or someone who is in the midst of the community, is the belief that, you know, we’re encountering Jesus. I’m in the–we’re recording this in the Easter season. There are all these stories about people meeting him again. And weird and wonderful stories. They don’t recognize him half the time.
H: It’s usually a surprise.
A: And then and then something has to happen. You know, someone doesn’t recognize him visually, but, you know, they speak or they don’t recognize him speaking, but they break bread together. I think that these Easter stories have been reminding me that we’re being told that He’s gonna keep showing up and that we may sometimes have to sort of really remind ourselves that that’s the case. Because it’s not as if it’s always gonna work, according to the kind of news cycle way in which gratification works. You know, that there’ll be a new thing or the or the way your phone trains you to think, you know, by having something interesting to show you every thirty seconds once you refresh it and so forth. I’m not sure that we can quite refresh the Easter Jesus like this, but he will show up. He will show up, and he won’t necessarily show up in the places we’re expecting or say the things that we’re expecting, but he will show up, and He will be Jesus, and that will be true.
H: Yeah. Go forth and have ears to hear, I suppose.
B: We have the Leaders Way Five. Right. This is where we learn interesting things about you that we might not otherwise learn.
A: Alright. Let’s see.
B: Favorite snack?
A: Oh, you know, Easter, there’s sort of this chocolate theme that’s dominating here. But I’m actually more of a savory than a sweet person most of the time. So I’m more likely to reach for peanuts or potato chips than I am for a very sweet cookie or a piece of cake.
H: You can relate to that.
B: There is no shortage of the crisp around the quad.
A: The crisp. That’s right. Very … that’s very Anglo, obviously.
H: Crisp.
B: See what I was doing there?
H: I was thinking of your car snacks.
B: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
H: Which listeners are unaware of.
B: Oh, there are car snacks. There are car cashews.
H: That’s what I was thinking.
A: Surely only in Easter? You know what I mean? You have to sort of …
H: That would be indulgent otherwise.
B: All cashews all the time.
A: Or macadamias.
B: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
A: An Australian native, by the way. Did you know?
B: Oh, I did not know that.
A: People think that they’re Hawaiian, but they’re an Australian native.
B: Oh, wow. Well, prepare with tariffs to pay, you know, $25 an ounce.
H: Okay. Okay. Next question!
B: We digress. Sorry, sorry. Next question. Most random thing in your refrigerator?
A: Oh, it’s bound to be one of the weird hot sauces. So, like, is it the Korean gochujang, or is it the Middle Eastern, zhoog? It’s with a z.
H: Yes. I love zhoog.
A: Or, maybe less random than it used to be because I know you’re a devotee now, but, Laogan Ma’s chili crisp.
B: Chili crisp.
A: Yeah. So that hardly counts as random as mainstream these days. You know? It’s probably the sheer fact that there are about 15 of these and that they’re all …
H: Oh my.
A: They’re all specific to a particular cuisine. You know?
H: I think Lynn Tonstad had a sauce as well. Maybe we need, like, a sauce tasting element of the show.
A: Oh, yes. Which sauce?
H: That’s right. That would be a whole thing.
B: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
H: It would be like Hot Ones, but theological.
B: I feel like I wish I had wings to …
H: Right. Right. Right. Right.
B: A strange job from your former life before you were theologian and dean.
A: When I was a student, like many of my comrades, I worked in the summers on, what are called in Western Australia the wheat bins, which are these big, like, silo receivable points for farmers who would truck in their crop and then dump it onto a grid so that it could be stored in silos and then put on railway trucks. So I was the … I was the grain sampler one year, which meant that I had to …
H: Have you ever woven that into a sermon that feels very … is sermonic an adjective?
A: I suppose people would think, you know, Oh, he’s talking about wheat again. You know? Perhaps it’s too on brand, if anything. But I was the sampler, you know, that … I had to sort of put this big probe into the truck and open it up so that it sort of took part of the weed out, and we could test to see how many weed seeds there were in it and stuff like that. This is very, very Australian. A lot of wheat.
H: Cool. Wow. Well, our Australian listeners may have a lot more idea what what’s going on right now than us.
B: Mhmm. Right. Right. I’m struggling to keep up. Bad habit that you’re willing to share.
A: Let’s see. It’s this Venn diagram, isn’t it, of the sort of … the things such …
B and H: Is it the chunky middle?
A: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m a desperately untidy person. You know? And I, those of you who, you know, know my desk realize that it has that sort of look that those of us with desks like that claim is one of high productivity.
H: Of course. Professorial.
A: Yes. But I’m afraid that both, you know, as in my work where both of you are people who walk around after me conceptually picking up pieces to sort of make sure that the place functions as it should, that at home, I’m just as bad and that, you know, while I will eventually try and go back to where I sort of dropped articles of clothing or items of debris of various kind, that my spouse, who is a much more fastidious and much more efficient person when it comes to these things has often dealt with the debris before I ever circle back to find it.
H: So In other words: Deans, they’re just like us.
B: And finally, the smallest hill you’ll die on.
A: Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is … this shouldn’t be so hard for somebody who works in liturgy, you know, because some I knew it was gonna be liturgical. Some of the things we care about, you know, are sort of things that other people would just sort of raise their eyebrows brows about and so forth. But it’s not always the things that people assume. Here’s a fun Episcopal one. It’s very much, you know, inside liturgy or inside baseball. I love the fact that the American prayer book, which, you know, I’ve spent half of my ministry working with rather than its Australian equivalent, specified that on the holy table when the Eucharist is to be celebrated, there should be one chalice and only … not any other flagon or vessels contains the rest of the wine so that that unity of the one cup and the one bread is maintained symbolically. And I’ll always sort of go around slapping people’s hands for not doing that. But it’s only because, of course, it’s actually specifically stated in the prayer book here that that’s the way it should be.
H: So in a situation like a diocesan convention, is your suggestion a super chalice?
A: I think it’s a …
H: A jug?
A: Firstly, I you know, despite having offered this quickly as a moment of self-satire, I’m probably gonna slide down the hill under certain circumstances and I’m not gonna stay on it and die. However, I think that there are a lot of people who don’t try nearly hard enough to work out how to accommodate that principle to a different set of circumstances. And the diocesan convention and so forth …
H: I’m imagining the Goblet of Fire, the liturgical goblet of fire.
A: That’s huge one. Well, I what I …
B: Is that a red flagon?
A: What it actually suggests, even thinking of, say, the larger parishes where they think this is too hard, is to have multiple flagons and one chalice. And then … and then the rest of the chalices are there in the woods.
H: The flagon loop hole.
A: The flagon loop hole. That’s right. And then the chalices, of course, have to be used because multiple chalices will be needed. But bring them bring them while the fraction anthem is being sung or played. Fill them then, and then be ready to invite the people to communion with all those things lined up. Now, you know, there are more important things to worry about. But as you as you know …
H: We did say the smallest hill.
A: Well, it connects with this question of we who are many are one body.
You know, the cup of blessing which we bless is an honor participation in the blood of Christ. So and
H: And to be fair, unity is a not fashionable principle these days.
A: Yep. That’s right. And there are other things, of course, that that we could come back at and complain about that, like the fact that, you know, we use little wafers and so forth, which don’t express the unity.
H: Wait. Wait. Wait. Okay. What in your estimation, Dean and baker, is the ideal Eucharistic host?
A: Yes. I have I have the answer to this.
H: The answer.
A: I’ll say I do. Absolutely. When … whenever this opportunity arises and I, by the way, it’s the kind of thing where I don’t lean in to tell my chapel ministers and my colleagues that they have to do things a particular way. But, what Americans would think of loosely as pita bread, which
H: Oh, this makes sense.
A: Right? But which I actually think I use more of an Arab recipe, which is effectively the same thing. Qubj, that kind of, you know, bread that you tear apart that has a pocket, right, in the middle, is ideal for Eucharistic celebration because it doesn’t crumble or tear. Oh–sorry. It tears, it doesn’t crumble. And so, the round aspect is visually really effective. Yeah. And then the tearing and the ways you can tear smaller and larger pieces and that you won’t send crumbs flying around the table is very pastoral and practical.
H: It is.
A: So my recommendation is always do that.And I was delighted that, I think it was just before Easter that one of my former students sent me a picture because now they’ve made it a practice that they bake the bread with the confirmation candidates, and they use this recipe while they’re doing it. So it’s also the kind of thing that you can make into a community activity because everyone can do that. And no, if anyone’s wondering about this, the pocket the pocket? No. You don’t have to make a pocket. The pocket happens by itself.
B: Unless you’re like me using a terrible recipe or just being a terrible baker, and there was the absence of the pocket.
H: No pocket could be found.
B: Do you have a recipe that you’re willing to share? Absolutely.
A: We can we can upload or, you know, put a slide on the podcast or whatever.
B: We’ll include that in the show notes, and we’ll link to the talk, your the full video of your talk from EPM. Thank you.
H: Could you bless or pray for our listeners?
A: Thank you. The Lord be with you.
B and H: And also with you.
A: God, we thank you for your abiding, hopeful, sustaining presence. We thank you for the Easter Jesus of whom we read at this time and who we believe we encounter even when we break the bread with one another today, understanding that through your promise, He is with us always to the end of the age. Give us hope. Sustain us in difficult times. Remind us that the shape of the world is not always in appearance the world you would give us, but that you, with us, are working for the world that you have promised. And so as we go from here and continue to celebrate this Eastertide, give us again, we pray, give us hope, give us courage, give us faith to encounter Jesus in whose name we pray. Amen.
H: Amen.
Thanks for listening to the Leaders Way podcast. You can learn more about this episode at berkleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast. Follow along with us on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast.
B: And you can rate and review us on your podcast app and be sure to hit follow so you never miss an episode. And if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend.
H: Until next time.
B: Peace be with you.