Praying to God to make you a good activist

  • The Epis­co­pal Church in Amer­ica (ECUSA) is look­ing for the next bishop of the Chicago dio­cese, and their com­mit­tee has nom­i­nated a sexually-active les­bian priest as one of the final­ists. Orthodixie has a fine round-up along with excel­lent com­ments. One blog­ger that Fr. Joseph linked to men­tioned the ECUSA committee’s “Bishop Search Prayer,” (link HERE) which I find unfor­tu­nately revealing:

    Almighty God, pros­per with your bless­ing the mis­sion and min­istry of our dio­cese. You have blessed us with the min­istry of the Rt. Rev. William Persell. We thank you for his min­istry to us as chief pas­tor and leader in the Church. Stir up in us the grace and power of your Spirit, as we begin the search for our next Bishop. Give to our search com­mit­tee inquir­ing and dis­cern­ing hearts, that they may clearly see your will. Give us all the courage to dream and the will to per­se­vere to make those dreams a real­ity. Fill us with your Holy Spirit and ground us in the knowl­edge and love of you. Empower us with the gifts of joy and won­der as we seek out the spe­cial min­istry you have for us together in our dio­cese; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

    Mind you, in some ways, it’s a dandy prayer. If the Main­stream Media see fit to cover this at all, they’d be bound to think that it offered all that we reli­gious types could pos­si­bly want. “Grace and power of your Spirit”…”inquiring and dis­cern­ing hearts” … excel­lent, excel­lent. But then comes that one sen­tence, and you feel like it had to be there. They didn’t pray that God would lead them in the path of right­eous­ness, or that He would give them courage to make the RIGHT deci­sion. They prayed for the courage to DREAM.

    Since when is it an ambi­tion to pick the next bishop? Can you imag­ine our bish­ops pray­ing that God would enable them to live the dream of appoint­ing Fr. So-and-so to the bish­opric? It’s non­sense apart from the con­text of an agenda that needs to be pushed through. And, more sin­is­ter, since when does a com­mit­tee pray to God for the will to perser­vere in that deci­sion? As this blog­ger puts it, it sounds to me like the com­mit­tee is “not so much beseech­ing the Lord for a favor as obliquely chid­ing his more cau­tious brethren to accept the pro­gres­sive vision of the future as God’s will.”

    So God help the ECUSA and any (lower-case o) ortho­dox Chris­tians left therein. It’s not for cer­tain that “Rev. Tracey” (sorry, but … yuck!) will be appointed, but if she is, will we start to see Epis­co­palians knock­ing on the Big East­ern Church door? Oth­ers like this com­menter have made the switch, but Fr. Joseph agreed with this com­menter that it’s prob­a­bly too late for that.

    Which prompts me to remem­ber the impor­tance of hav­ing truly pious clergy shep­herd­ing the flock. The ECUSA didn’t just wake up last week and decide to be this morally impaired — it must’ve hap­pened over the course of many small deci­sions that seemed like noth­ing at the time. God help our Ortho­dox priests and bish­ops to truly have courage and dis­cern­ment. As the daily prayers say, “Save and have mercy upon all right-teaching clergy of Thy Church, which Thou hast pur­chased with Thy pre­cious blood, and by their prayers, save me, a sinner.”


    Related posts:

    1. On Ques­tion­ing God
    2. C. S. Lewis on the love of God
    3. “Pas­tor with 666 tat­too claims to be divine”
    5. God as silversmith

    August 31st, 2007 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 08.31.2007

    Thank God He didn’t grant me all of my dreams, even the ones I per­se­vered pur­su­ing. New Age spir­i­tu­al­ity meets Chris­tian­ity in the ECUSA.
    sp, for­mer ECUSA

  • Grace

    And isn’t that get­ting a bit tired, even for those who were all for it 10 or 20 years ago? That’s a total guess, since I have no first-hand knowl­edge, but it seems to me that the expected returns on the big New Age promise have failed to appear and pro­po­nents are left a lit­tle empty-handed.

    So I would think that the enthu­si­asm for tak­ing things in this direc­tion must have died down, but then I don’t know if I’m just engag­ing in some wish­ful think­ing. I sup­pose, given this recent nom­i­na­tion by the ECUSA, I must be.

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