The Birth, Death, & Resurrection of St. Nicholas Church

      It is said that the ancient Chinese proverb, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” is both a blessing and a curse. Clearly, with all the talk of schism between the conservative and liberal wings of most Christian denominations, most would agree that the Church has entered a period of interesting times.  And one thing that can be said about St. Nicholas Church is that the entirety of our brief history to date has been live in these interesting times.

      We certainly have experienced both the curse and the blessing of these times: a premature and painful death, followed by a resurrection. The first St. Nicholas Church (Version 1.0), planted in the early 1990s, experienced the curse.  It was started by a leadership team representing two congregations – Christ Episcopal Church in Rockville and the Community of the Holy Angels – who shared a vision for a church in the Darnestown-North Potomac area with a special focus on children’s ministries. Somewhat conservative in its orientation, it grew quickly at first but within two years had “crashed and burned.” It is often said that the conflict was over human sexuality issues, but as is almost always the case in such conflagrations, the underlying issues were power and control. Yet all thought they were acting with the best of intentions. What was their undoing?  In a word: human nature.

      Two years later, blessing followed curse. Version 2.0 of St. Nick’s rose from the ashes of 1.0.  And as is often the case, Version 2.0 was a bit more stable.  With a newly-ordained leader (me) and composed largely of “survivors” of the first plant. Determined to learn from painful experience, we dedicated ourselves to discerning and living into a new way of being church, in which conservative and liberal Christians could live together in love, and that conservative-liberal theological differences could not kill. We have been engaged in this journey of exploration for more than a decade.

      We tried to be good interpreters of the spiritual signs of the times (see Matthew 16:1–3), looking critically at ourselves, our church, and the church at large. We discovered that neither we, nor our denomination, nor its parent body, were transiting these turbulent times alone. Churches everywhere are wracked by these conflicts. It’s just that we Anglicans tend to be more public in our disagreements than others. (A healthy sign, we thought).

      In time, it dawned on us: this conflict was not your average, everyday schism, but a paradigm shift—and not just one paradigm was shifting, but several. Realizing that we live in—and what we should expect in—an age of collapsing paradigms has helped our congregation respond to changes around us with less anxiety and more compassion. Realizing that what we had thought was a field of battle between unalterably opposed sides was really an emerging landscape, helped us understand that we needed each other’s eyes to find our way safely through.

      We learned that major paradigm shifts are almost always accompanied by turmoil and disorder. Take science, for example. The primary mission of science is the discovery and integration of new knowledge. Yet studies have shown that, when confronted with data that conflict with the dominant paradigm, scientists reacted anxiously. Warring camps developed: “liberal” camps prematurely proposed new paradigms based on insufficient data; “conservative” camps defended the old paradigm by attacking the new data and the proposed paradigms. Eventually, the old paradigm fell, yet neither camp really won. Some aspects of the liberal camp’s proposals found their way into the new paradigm, many did not. Some aspects of the old paradigm, that the conservative camps were protecting, remained standing, many did not. Because their vision was still limited by the old paradigm, both camps were blindsided.

       Major paradigm shifts have been even more traumatic for the church, provoking anxiety, anger, and reactivity in the form of conflict and even violence. Yet somehow, with God’s help, the church has always found a way to survive the fall of old paradigms and eventually to adapt to new ones.

      Coming to terms with our natural anxiety has helped the members of my congregation develop a sense of humility about what they know to be true, and to exercise a greater degree of tolerance toward those with whom they disagreed than they had previously. Conservatives learned to ask: “Are we truly acting to protect God’s will (as if God needs our protection) or merely protecting the status quo?” Liberals learned to ask: “How do we know we are prophetically promoting God’s will (as if God needs our promotion) or merely our own innovations?” Understanding our own propensity for reactivity has tended to give us pause about attributing evil intent to those who oppose our point of view. Recognizing that the dominant paradigm has created blind spots in our vision helps us realize how much we need the insights of those who disagree with us.

      We began to realize that our paradigms are really our finite, human attempts to domesticate God. Because we cannot handle our reality raw and unfiltered, humanity creates paradigms in order to impose meaning, stability, and predictability upon wild and untamed reality. As long as we realize that our theological concepts must be provisional in nature, and are only our best attempts at expressing what we know about God and reality, this is okay. The problem comes when we begin to believe that our concepts are the full expression of God’s reality, and then refuse to modify them. There is a word for trying to domesticate God. It is called idolatry. Yet over and over again throughout their histories church after church has found itself doing precisely that.

      We have come to view changing paradigms as God’s way of telling us, There you go again: trying to put me in a box. We have come to understand that the dis-ease we feel when we experience such change is God’s way of showing us that we have become so attached to our paradigms that we have rendered them impervious to change; so brittle and inflexible that the tiniest new breath of God’s Spirit crumbles them to dust. We have come to recognize that when a familiar paradigm begins to fall, we have an opportunity to release God to the wild of mystery and paradox (actually God never left it) so that God can un-domesticate our faith.

      This involves curbing our dogma.  Back in my seminary days, one of my theology professors said the functional definition of the word dogma was “let’s stop talking about this and move on.” The core dogmas of the church, as described in the great creeds—the overflowing love and grace of the Triune God, and Christ's human-divine essence as the conduit for that love and grace—were the best that humanity could do to describe the infinite essence of God after almost 400 years of grappling with the issue. It wasn’t going to get any better than that. After all, the essence of the infinite (God) is that it is beyond the finite (humanity). It was time to stop trying to refine the dogmas and to instead get on with living them out “with God’s help,” as the baptismal formula goes.

      We have learned that, as much as our concepts of orthodoxy are intended to express truth, they are not themselves truth, and they certainly are not The Truth. They are human constructs, subject to the influences, understandings, and assumptions of culture, as well as the limitations of the finite human mind, and to the extent that they contain such imperfections they are less than sufficient as organizing principles of Christian community.

      We are not advocating dispensing with dogma, but limiting its use to where it’s constructive to Christian community, rather than destructive. In other words, we would do well to distinguish more clearly between our dogma—those primary doctrines that form the core of our common Christian faith—and what some have called our doctrinal distinctives—doctrines that are secondary—and not to allow what is merely distinctive to separate us. This is not to say these distinctives are without value. The doctrinal distinctives of a particular denomination or group might best be understood as part of its unique calling. As such, they may have great value as a witness to the whole church. However, the more of these distinctives we raise to dogmatic significance (i.e., make accepting them mandatory for membership in the body of Christ), the more we splinter our churches. Our congregation has been trying to learn the difference between essentials (things that truly matter) and non-essentials (what Augustine called adiaphora) and to be very, very cautious about what we put in the first category.

An Invitation to a Journey of Exploration

      So interesting times come with a blessing as well as a curse. The curse of a paradigm shift is the loss of a familiar way of organizing life. Like any death, it gives rise to feelings of uncertainty and anxiety about what the future may hold. Yet while the death of a way of life is not to be pursued for its own sake, when it does occur it always brings with it the possibility of the birth of a new way: the rising of a new paradigm more complete and encompassing of the fullness of reality than the one we lost.

      We believe that there is a new paradigm emerging: one that will transcend our current us/them attitudes; one that will bridge the increasing chasm between the “right” and “left” arms of the church; one that will reconcile the parties in this divorce between truth and love. And we want to be a part of this new paradigm.  But there’s one big problem with this paradigm: it is still emerging. Because our eyes have been trained by the old, we cannot yet see clearly what the new will look like. But we have begun to explore its outlines.

      And we invite you to join us on our journey…