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2 The Soul You Save Might Be Your Own

A near-universal definition of evangelism is this: telling a story. Humans are storytelling people. If there is ever awkwardness with evangelism, let me suggest that it’s a problem with the story, not the ability to tell it. The reality is that many Christians do not believe they have a powerful personal and transformational story to tell about knowing God.

Many of these people go to church. Some weekly and others only on holidays or for weddings and funerals. Many of them have been involved in leadership in their churches. They give time, money, and energy to their parish. In many cases, these churchy people were raised in homes where their parents or grandparents also attended a local church and gave a lot of their time and treasure to it. Statistics and demographics tell us that these multi-generational churchgoing families are more and more rare, though they were the backbone of local churches for hundreds of years in this country.

Membership in churches across mainline denominations is shrinking every year, and few churches are replacing the baby boomers as they age with younger families or young children. Yet there are many small churches across the country that open their doors on Sunday morning to some of the most hardworking and faithful followers of Jesus that American Christianity has ever seen.

Many churches are struggling to find new ways and new energy to find new members. We know church is important in knowing God, but to too many visitors to our communities, we look almost desperate. It is hard in any relationship to hide anxiety, frustration, or the shame of shrinking capacity. Elaborate and energetic welcoming ministries try hard to bring in new people and shower them with love and affirmation upon arrival and into the weeks after their first visit, but few churches have vibrant and sturdy ongoing fellowship and formation offerings for every age group.

We are thinking and talking and praying to keep our faith communities alive. It is no wonder that there is little space and oxygen left in any faith community or ministry for joyful or contagious conversations about how Jesus Christ is transforming our lives through the word of God and through the sacraments. Our communities face unprecedented challenges to sustainability and growth. It seems there is more of a call to rescue the institution than to rest in the presence of Christ at any moment. The institutional experience of church has become more important in our words and ways of being than the actual passionate and life-changing experience of following Jesus with others through every minute of every day.

Our theology proclaims that everyone is connected to God, but that truthful story and its liberation that lives deep within the human heart appears to have fallen asleep in many people and in many faith communities. We were created to live joyfully and eternally in the triune life of God, in Christ through the sacraments, and by the grace and ministry of the Holy Spirit on earth and beyond. We need to be more comfortable sharing the testimony of what it is like to be dead and risen in Christ.

How Do We Wake Up Our Stories?

For many people, the church building is their only personal or shared experience of God. The good news is that God does meet us in church buildings, and the people gathered are, in fact, the Body of Christ. To enter or abide in a church building of believers is a real experience of God. But for many, this communal experience of God rarely transforms their life and practices outside the building and its assemblies. Episcopalians are most likely to invite someone to visit their church than to sit in a home or the office or the field and pray or read scripture together.

The church buildings suggest and define the holy with Christian symbols, colorful windows of saints and biblical stories, and the architecture that reaches toward the sky. Our buildings are bursting with sacred stories, but are we?

Followers of Jesus are experiencing a living and eternal God in every breath they take. Any moment in human life can be a transformative experience of knowing God, and those stories are the most powerful stories any creature or creation can share. A thousand windows, a million altars, and a billion bricks of churches are a shred of straw compared to the presence of God through the Holy Spirit at the core of your being that is available and eager right now to hold you, to heal you, and to have you living in the perfect love of the Trinity forever. Right now.

What’s It Like to Be a Christian?

When someone asks me what it’s like to be a Christian, I do not start talking about what church I attend or churches I used to attend. Instead, I usually smile and thank them for asking me about the most important thing in my life. I start talking about what it is like to know and feel the creator inside my heart and to watch the transformation of every part of my life that I give over to that divine power within. I say how hard it is to hold to the belief with gladness and singleness of heart, but that in church and out of church, I find others who are also trying and praying, finding and trusting, naming and sharing their stories of knowing the same God in Christ.

We begin to awaken the story of us and God tucked within our hearts when we dare to go and dive into it, when we believe that when we seek the kingdom within our own soul, we find not just the image of God, but also the voice and the presence of God. You are a building with an altar in your soul where God meets you in prayer and praise and rest. Any building on earth is meant only to teach us how to find and mine the presence of God in the temple that we are. The building is for practice; it is not the precious pearl.

Generations of theologians have encouraged people with scripture and tradition that the church is not just a building, but also and more importantly the gathered people of God. Jesus taught that Judaism was more than the temple and that his followers were more than their upper rooms. This core message of the gospels is clear. Church is a people, not a place, and the church in your life is not the building down the street, but the place in your soul where you meet and know God.

Churches let people visit God. This is a gift. But the message that God is in churches is only the beginning of the Good News. If we are ever going to have a story of God and us that speaks to our whole lives, we must choose to enter a relationship with God that enters every minute of the seven days of the week. Christ offers himself to be the source, not a sporadic destination, of our joy. In Christ and through Christ, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

In a sacramental tradition, we certainly believe that material things matter and bring us into a relationship with God. We believe that candles and altars and fonts are portals to new life and sirens of eternal salvation. They both point us and draw us toward real moments with God.

But at a certain point, the idea of a church building as a destination to meet with God has become more important than its role as a threshold to eternal things. Remember the word nave, our word for the main space of the sanctuary. It is from the Latin word navus, meaning “ship.” The purpose of the sanctuary space was to take you on a journey, not to be an end point of travel or a visit to a museum. The nave is not the destination. It is the ship to somewhere else, through song and scripture and sacrament. It is also a way to somewhere deep within yourself and to somewhere deep within the lives of those around you. The nave brings you to a new place of mystery and vocation, where you can dive deeper into yourself and dive deeper into the world.

Everything we see will pass away in the new heaven and the new earth and what will remain will be Christ in you, the hope of glory. That story, the story of Christ in you every minute of every day, challenging and changing you, helping and healing you, restoring and redeeming you, is the story of our souls living to tell the story our world is dying to hear.

Jesus and the Book of Common Prayer

We have not been formed to think of walking with Jesus with or without buildings every hour of every day in every place we breathe. If you read through the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and certainly its predecessor of 1928, the name of “Jesus” as a stand-alone name is rarely used, if ever. More often we use the titles: Jesus Christ; Jesus, Son of man; Jesus, Son of God; Jesus of Nazareth. We are not, shall we say, on a first-name basis with Jesus in the Episcopal tradition. It is no wonder that talking then about “Jesus in your daily life” is not a way of talking or living that resonates with a lot of our people.

Prayer books by definition are not primarily descriptive manuals for being a disciple. They are, in the Episcopal Church, what we believe, but they often fail at describing how to come to believe. These lessons we need to write and speak and share with one another. Prayer books give us endless and beautiful words to say to God and about God and to express in our creeds and catechism what it is that we believe to be true. We have studied and taught much about our prayer books as holy transcripts to and about God. We now have to step up our game in teaching about how to see your life as a holy testimony of God’s power and love, and how to show and share your life with Christ with others.

Going and Growing

When I ask many Episcopalians about God, they often start telling me about their church, what it’s called, how old it is, how long that person has been a member. In fact, more than once as I’ve pressed people to tell me about God and less about their church, they have looked at me in the face and said that they don’t know how to talk about God without talking about their church. We are shy about sharing our faith, because we are uncertain that our faith is making any daily or hourly difference in our lives. Being a member of a church is not the same thing as having a transformative relationship with Christ, though of course they can happen at the same time. When it comes to church, there is a difference between going and growing.

For centuries many have been going to church, but the question is, have they been growing in their personal and collective relationship with God? We have stories about going to church, but do we have stories about growing at church? I visited a church in Ohio recently and met a man named Bill. He walked up to me after I delivered a sermon and wanted to tell me about his faith. “I am 82 years old,” he said proudly. He wanted me to know why he went to that church. “I learn something every week at this church, about God, and there aren’t many places that think I still can.” Bill doesn’t just go to church. He is learning at church. He is growing at church. It is where he is learning to have an intimate relationship with God in his daily life.

This is why we speak of sharing the gospel in the world as reconciling the world with God. No one is introduced to God for the first time by another person. We are all created by and for God, but we also believe this freedom was given to all creation. To ignore the presence of God within us or name it or treat it as anything we want separates us from what God intended us to be.

I believe one reason we are not helping people find and know a personal relationship with God is that we talk less and less about the soul and instead more about the details of joining or maintaining a church. Read the prayers in the prayer book or the words of our hymns that speak endlessly about the soul of the person. In the Roman Catholic Church’s Catechism, there is a definition of the soul that mirrors the Episcopal conviction that God is present and waiting to meet us in our soul at any time. This Catechism refers to the soul as one’s conscience.

For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in the depths.⁵