What?
Hey, look! earth and all stars, all things bright and beautiful, especially the clouds as I walked out of TAFB Exchange yesterday,
yesterday's sunrise with raining off to my southeast in The Cove,
and the sunset from 7H last evening - -
I hesitate to admit it, but the most magnificent views of enormous Florida Gulf Coast cloud banks are looking behind me while I'm refueling the car at the Tyndall gas station. I just didn't have my phone camera on me while I was pumping gas yesterday.
Anyway, as long as I've gotten this far into a contentless blogpost I might as well think of something to nonsense about besides my next sermon, eh? I'm thinking about the event that most jarred my faith and then brought me to a comfortable state of faith that I can live with as a Christian of Anglican ilk where faith and theology are based in Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, with a greatly enhanced appreciation of REASON as key, at least for me, in the formula.
The Reason factor has been perceived variously, my favorite being that by Reason we mean that the Holy Spirit guides us in interpreting and understanding Scripture (and in "placing" Tradition). Such that, as one of our little sayings says, I don't have to check my brain at the door before entering the church.
At the invitation, encouragement, and urging of a friend, I enrolled in Education for Ministry while we were in Apalachicola sometime in, I think, the late 1980s. Soon became a mentor, and served as an EfM mentor off and on for over thirty years. EfM is a four year program of education by extension offered by the School of Theology at Sewanee. Progressing year by year, participants studied Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and theology. Participants met/meet once a week, we met Tuesday mornings in the parish house, most groups probably meet one evening a week, as my classes did later for years, during the school year (not summers), for four years. Here's a link to the EfM webpage:
And here's their current outline of objectives:
Core Practices in EfM
The terms “education” and “ministry” in Education for Ministry frequently need unpacking to better understand both the content and the purpose of the program. At its heart EfM is a program in practical theology, a program based in a set of five core practices that form and support us in the various ministries to which we are called.
- Living in Community
- Regular Prayer and Worship
- Theological Reflection
- Study of the Christian Tradition
- Vocational Discernment
My experience of EfM was First that in its four year curriculum, and my long years as a mentor, I learned far, far more about Scripture than I learned during my years at theological seminary, and that my interest and enthusiasm for studying the Bible, especially in small groups, was marvelously heightened.
Second, that it was tremendously disillusioning. I was disillusioned, robbed of my kindergarten Sunday school faith and understanding of God, religion, and the church. It was painful at first. In fact, I have a memory, an example:
Years later, in the early 2000s, I was mentoring a brand new class for Holy Nativity members, meeting one night a week in my classroom at Holy Nativity Episcopal School. Everyone was First Year, to study Old Testament. At the first class session we introduced ourselves and talked about what to expect, and I made the reading assignment (EfM has reading requirements that can be overwhelming, and that require faithful dedication and commitment to the other members of the class) for the second session. The assignment was an introduction, the first week's reading in Genesis, and the EfM chapter ABOUT the two Genesis creation stories.
The following week evening, after our devotional, when I started the class session inviting comments, the first comment was a woman who said, absolutely aghast, "I WAS OFFENDED". It was not the voice of some simpleton, but a highly intelligent person, a devoted and serious, lifelong Christian (though not Episcopalian), who loved the Lord. She was appalled to read the "mainline" Christian seminary-level discussion of the Bible material, in this case the "creation myths". I was proud that she stuck with the class notwithstanding her ongoing experience of having her loving but fundamentalist, more or less literalist-inerrantist faith shattered. She was in a military family that moved on PCS orders the following summer, but my observation of her was that, though everything changed for her, her knowledge was greatly enhanced and her faith wonderfully enriched.
For one thing, to oversimplify, the difference in comfortable certainty and ongoing challenge. I knew and understood her well, because it had been my exact experience of theological seminary. In yesterday's blogpost I remembered the Native America holy stories, Indian folk tales, that Margo, my long ago parish helper, used to fascinate me with. We all have our campfire stories, and some of us get to love them for all that they come to mean, uniting us with the community and its deity, as opposed to what we learn in other parts of life.
So, I'm propounding EfM as a way to enrich one's Christian faith. Expect and Be Prepared to be disillusioned. To shed illusions and to Seek the Truth, Come whence it May, Cost what it Will, because the cost can be dear.
It was costly for me. Not unlike when Bill Guy next door made fun of my belief in Santa Claus, and when it suddenly came to me how the Easter Bunny managed all those baskets of candy. Yet both Easter and Christmas are infinitely more to me now than presents and sweets.
I guess that's it for now. I'm not going to go back to age 55 and recruit a weekly EfM class, and start EfM mentoring again, but I do hope someone will want to do just that for and with our folks at church.
RSF&PTL
T+