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Wooden carving of Bishop holding Gospel Book, Public Domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
There’s gonna be a new archbishop of the ACNA? How does that happen? Can they re-elect the current one? Who elects? Who’s eligible? Is this like the selection of the pope?
All good questions. This is a quick orientation —far more like a sketch made on a napkin in crayon than a detailed account in clean typeset.
Read moreBut if what matters is not “finding myself” as much as “being found and formed”, then prayer is the very place (perhaps with the exception of the Sacraments and the Word of God), in which that Finding and that Forming are of most importance.
Read more“How can we partner with your guys as you church plant?”
That, or something like it, is a question we are hearing with greater regularity. as we get closer to Ash Wednesday. In response we’ve tried to work out 3 ways of '“walking with us” that fulfill two requirements:
They must be ways of “walking with us” that are in unity with the kind of community we seek to form and plant in Honolulu. This is because, as we discussed in our previous post on this blog, as Marshall McLuhan suggests “the medium is the message.” This means that we cannot dislocate how we go about planting a church (the programs and strategies, the models of growth, the culture that is developed, etc.) from the message proclaimed by that church plant; or, as our bishop has wisely advised, how you begin is how you continue. And we want to begin in such a way that knits our hearts along the disciplines of the ancient faith because we believe that they endure beyond personalities and movements. We want to make sure that these forms of partnership are in unity with what we believe and value.
Secondly, while we long to see people gathered to this mission, and while we pray for and trust in God’s provision for it, we wanted to find ways of partnering that are available even for those whose church home is elsewhere and whose financial commitments are such that they will not be partnering with us in these ways.
Thus, and with no further ado, we invite you to walk with us in the following 3 ways:
First, we invite you to join us in praying/reading through the Psalter on a monthly basis. The Book of Common Prayer has broken the entirety of the Psalms into daily readings (30 days, morning and evening, click on the link above). We long to be a people whose language and imagination are saturated by the biblical patterns and through forms provided in the Psalms. Join us as we pray these, as we conform the experiences of our days (with all of the struggles, joys, and vicissitudes of the grind) to the richness of the Psalter. (For great resources on this discipline, look into N.T. Wright’s The Case for the Psalms, Bonhoeffer’s luminous The Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, or C.S. Lewis’ contemplative study Reflections on the Psalms).
Second, we invite you to join us in observing a fast on Fridays. This can be as simple as abstaining from meats and sweets, or giving-up one meal (like lunch or breakfast). Historically, Fridays (except those in Christmastide and Eastertide) have been days of particular reflection and remembrance of the Lord’s crucifixion in the Christian week. As we fast we are praying for that same obedience, that same love, to be active and apparent in our own lives as it was displayed upon the Cross, so many Friday ago. However, even as we invite you to join us in this, we urge you not to be vain or falsely grave about this fast. For the Christian, all fasting, even those which occur in Lent and on Good Friday, have the great ring of comedy. For neither hunger nor death are the end of the Christian story, but the expectation of it. Thus, even as the hunger of Fridays bids us ponder and confess our weaknesses, remember that Fridays also carry the paradox of the Gospel: it is the hungry who are fed, the confessed who are unashamed, the meek who inherit the earth, and the dead who are raised. Join us on happy, joyful, jubilant, Fridays where we declare that all our hope (both eternally and in terms of the church plant) is not about our strength, but about God’s strength displayed in our weakness. (For a great piece of writing on this we advise Shakespeare for Lent by Dr. Peter Leithart).
Thirdly, we invite you to pray for us daily, using the following collect from the Book of Common Prayer, modified to include All Saints by name. The idea here is that using the same prayers together serves to collect all of our disparate thoughts, prayers and sentiments together before God as a mighty, swelling, resounding chorus (that’s why we name them ‘collects’). It goes like this: “Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one: Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit; we pray in particular for the mission of All Saints Honolulu, that you would grant us unity in our common life; that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."
Now, this is not to say that there are not numerous other things that we could add to this list (things that are good and valuable and are in alignment with the mission of the Gospel), but that, the following three capture well the goal of our project .
As always feel free to contact us with any thoughts or questions. Just hop on over to our contact page. Look! Here’s a link to it!
Grace and Peace
