May 27, 2008

Draft - I don't have the final version of this....Discernment questions from first committee

1.  How is your Southern Baptist background a resource to you?

Strange as it might seem, I think that the real strength it has given me is comfort with the technical language of faith. The SBC has not given over to the mid-century urge to translate the theology of Christianity into secular terminology.  Also, while I ultimately rejected dispensationalism as bad theology, I did not reject the language. If you change the words too much, you eventually change the message.

2.  Talk about feelings, experiences, loves, hates, etc. that you have around liturgy and sacraments.

What I love about liturgy is that I can go to any Episcopal church and find comfort in the routine. The language may be a little different from place to place and the rituals may be a little different, but the flow remains the same. The Eucharist itself remains the same.

On the other hand, what I hate about it is how it ties us to the physical. We have dedicated and blessed so many physical things that it becomes easy to forget how few physical needs we really have. We need bread, wine, water and each other. Everything else is just gravy, but we can get really wrapped up in the cups and plates and napkins and altars and candles and flowers. We don’t need those things to be Christian, to partake of the sacraments, and while they provided the background of sacred space, especially when we are indoors, it is easy to use the maintenance of the space as an excuse to avoid evangelism.

I grew up with the notion of personal sacraments, and the whole ideology of “personal relationship with jesus” which is something I just could never mesh with the actual gospel. Jesus wasn’t actually in the business of making personal relationships, and when Paul and Peter went off and built the church, they certainly weren’t building personal relationships. The only thing personal about the sacraments is that they don’t work without persons.

I love (and sometimes hate) that the Eucharist is there every week to reconnect me with the members of my community, and I love that confession is there too, to remind me that I may have screwed up, but can also fix, the broken relationships within the congregation.

3.  Talk more about your experience of a "break" at 21.  How do you interpret that experience?  Do you have any residual anxiety or depression?  If so, what do you make of that and how do you care for yourself in that?

I will talk about this at our next meeting.

4.  Talk more about your understanding of a priestly call and a diaconal call.

I have this great quote from Max DePree, which is “The leader is the servant who removes the obstacles that prevent people from doing their jobs.” That is the kind of leader I see as being the priestly call. Fr Kurt gave me a Maggie Ross book, and she calls essentially the same thing kenosis, self-emptying. Another way of looking at it is to say that the priest holds the vision of the community and keeps bringing that vision alive to the members of the community.

I think a shorthand way of speaking of my understanding of the diaconate is active contemplative, which is how some orders of monastics are described.

5.  Share some about your administrative and management experiences and your strengths and struggles in that area.

No one ever wanted me to be a manager in my secular employment and I was told more than once that I was not adequately concerned with the bottom line. For instance, when I sold clothes in college, I had the lowest volume in sales and the lowest number of returns. What that means is I didn’t sell very much, but people kept what they bought. This was why I did not get the management job when our boss finally got arrested for drugs, even though I was making schedules and filing the reports for the department. People are my bottom line and building strong, trusting relationships with them is more important that how much money I can get out of them before they won’t talk to me again.

I have been written up for personal phone calls because I would ask after the personal concerns of vendors, but while my accounts were the most best managed and I had the fewest scheduling errors of all the project managers (including other companies according to some of my vendors…) I was unsuited to the business because I was wasting time on unprofessional conduct.

6.  What are your strengths?  What are your weaknesses?

7.  Where do you encounter God in your everyday life?  Where do you encounter the devil in your everyday life?

I encounter both in people. In those moments of amazing grace when people spontaneously give from their hearts and have no return expectation. Conversely, I am most aware of the sin of the world when I see how we do for others and then expect them to do what we want.

8.  Where have you experienced defeats?  Share some of your victories.

9.  What kind of spiritual practices feed you?

I have taken up the Rosary in the last year. I like to use it to focus and since most of the prayers written for the Anglican Rosary are prosperity theology, I have been working on arranging the Psalter for Rosary Devotions and even hope to get them published perhaps.

I also like to read lives of saints, or not so saintly Christians. I like to practice Lectio in groups and to share meals with people. I like hearing how God moves in peoples lives, it helps me focus my own.

10.  You talked a lot about community being very important to you.  How do you see yourself building community?  What do you think are the most important things to building community?  What struggles do you have in building community?

Communities are built over time. They are built only through trust relationships. They require patience in the face of inconvenience. I find that most struggles with building community often occur when leadership does not adequately hold the vision of the community. Another difficult aspect of building community is that communities develop inertia and that can be fatal. My biggest problems building community happen in secular society. I have a very difficult time working with people who have no motivation for forgiveness. I have a very hard time working with people who are motivated totally by self-absorption, the “what’s in it for me” mentality.

11.  And, because you will be asked it about 300 times before you are done it is good to start thinking about - why ordination?  Why do you need to be ordained to live out the ministry that you have been called to?