Sent

The data referenced here can be found in more detail from Church Pension Group sources referenced by this ENS article, this Pew Research article, this PRRI article, this Pew Trust Magazine article, this ENS article, the 2020 Clergy Compensation Report, and this CPG Trends in Ministry presentation.

Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)

“The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few” is a weightier statement in our lifetime than it ever was for our parents and our parents’ parents. The percentage of American adults who identify as Christian has been dropping for the last three decades, and church attendance for people of faith has moved from a weekly priority to a once or twice monthly event in the life of many families and individuals. In our own denomination, membership and attendance are on a steady decline, and a looming precipitous drop in active clergy has changed the landscape. Right now, over half of active Episcopal clergy are within ten years of retirement, and the number of people we are sending to seminary will nowhere near fill the gap. As a priest under 30 and a woman, I am one of less than one hundred across the 110 dioceses in the Episcopal Church. I’m actually in a group message with a half dozen other Episcopal women clergy currently in our 20s, we’re a very small cohort. We are the rare few who will have careers longer than one or two decades before the mandatory retirement age of 72. The seminary classes are not big enough to replenish the retiring ranks, and the same thing is true of young adults in active lay ministry. The laborers are few, and many of us, lay and ordained, risk burnout in attempting to do things the way we have always done them.

Now you might feel anxious about those statistics, and you wouldn’t be alone. The media has been handwringing about the decline of the Church for longer than any of us have been alive. I’m hearing about the clergy shortage in all my circles, and my seminary education was shaped by the reality that Christianity is no longer the default identifier in the West. I know that is scary, especially for those among us who watched that change accelerate over the past half century. And, I’m not sure there’s been such a plentiful potential for harvest in living memory.

We are living and praying and laboring in a time and place that being a Christian is an active choice, not a family heirloom. To be a Christian, an Episcopalian Christian at that, is no longer a paved path to follow the same as going to your parents’ alma mater or rushing the same sorority as your grandmother. It is an identity we each choose for ourselves as we grow. It is something we choose whether to pursue and maintain in every new season of life. The theology of the Church is being revisited and revitalized, deconstructed and reclaimed, by a generation of people who have the daily choice not to give any of it a second thought. When your entire world is not built around the Sunday morning obligation, the choice to enter a place of worship is radical. What we are doing here together is radical.

I can tell you that in the last month, I have heard from three different friends of mine who for various reasons had walked away from the Church and are now feeling the call to return. They have questions, and doubts, and they have been given very good reasons to be hesitant to trust Christians. It will require great bravery on their part, and great love and care on the part of the Church, for these young adults to find what it is they seek. Their stories are not mine to share, but their story is not unique. The name of Jesus is used in vain every day to oppress, neglect, and abuse God’s beloved children. The Church has sat idle in moments of great division and conflict, and done too little too late to protect the vulnerable. For those who have left the Church, for those who never knew it in the first place, to choose the life of discipleship is a sign of the Holy Spirit’s power, and the power of Jesus’s Good News. It is a radical act of brave faith to become a Christian, when Christianity has failed you. There are a lot of radical, brave, faithful people looking for hope and belonging right now. We know that what they’re looking for is already here, that the kingdom of heaven has come near and that it is good news for all people. We know that the peace of God, which passes all understanding, is a gift freely given. We know that what we’re doing here is meaningful, even when brunch or sleeping in might be easier or more appealing. Waiting for those brave souls to find us here is not the calling Jesus placed on each of us in our baptism. Seeking and serving them is. Loving them loudly is. Building a better world, a better Church, for them is our calling.

The harvest is plentiful, friends. Once upon a time, growing a church meant getting people to choose your red doors over the red doors down the street or the big church across town with the nice gym. It meant counting down the days until the next wedding that represented potential for more tiny Christians to fill the Sunday school rooms and vacation Bible schools. Growing a church was measured by buildings getting bigger and more staff getting hired. Now, today, there are hundreds of thousands of people who have genuinely never heard the Gospel, never been inside the doors of a church aside from the occasional wedding or funeral. There are children who do not know Adam and Eve, or Abraham and Sarah, or Noah, or Moses, or Mary, or Jesus.  There are adults who have no concept of the promises that were made at their baptisms, and none of the tools to take on those promises for themselves. That reality could fill us with woe, with fear and trembling for the institution of the Church. Or it could remind us of who we are, where we come from and what kind of commission it is that we have been given.

The twelve disciples were given authority to cast away suffering and restore wholeness, with instructions to proclaim the good news of God’s nearness. It is in this moment that they become not just students, disciples, but apostles. Apostolos, the sent messengers. The laborers, sent out into the Lord’s harvest. This is what we become, every time we gather here. We gather as disciples, students of God’s Word and recipients of God’s Sacraments. And then we are sent, dismissed into the world as apostles, messengers carrying a message of hope and salvation. The harvest is plentiful, and we laborers are few. But God has promised us a bountiful harvest and an easy yoke. We are not called to be apostles to ourselves, safe and comfortable in our bubbles of like-minded believers. We are sent as laborers out into the Lord’s harvest. God provides the bounty, but we bring the hands and feet. Let’s get to work.