Our Agenda: Equal Rites

This past Sunday it was time once again for the Christopher Street West Gay Pride Parade and Festival in West Hollywood. Here's the family album as it's accumulated so far.

The Episcopal Café

Many of us blogaholics are already familiar with Jim Naughton’s Daily Episcopalian. Recently it morphed into (or more accurately, became a subset of) the Episcopal Café – a collection of four blogs, published by the Diocese of Washington (D.C.). It was reviewed the other day by Pat McCaughan in Episcopal Life Online in her article Episcopal Café serves up nourishing spiritual food online. I encourage you to read that article because it goes beyond hyping the Episcopal Café and reaches into cyber-possibilities for the church. Here’s one quote:

"Unfortunately, there's not yet developed a strong consensus among the elected and ordained leadership that the cyber voice of the Church is important," said Knisely, chair of the Standing Commission on Episcopal Church Communication. "But I think we're starting to have the tools in place, and there's beginning to be the recognition that doing work in the cyber world brings great challenges, but also brings great rewards, allowing us to reach out to people who we normally wouldn't be able to reach."

And another from Jim Naughton:

Although the café is still "in its early days," Naughton foresees eventual inclusion of podcasts, video, and other multimedia to appeal to both tech-savvy youthful and more traditional audiences. "We are in very earnest conversations with a potential video partner," he added.

"We're trying to hold one audience while reaching out to the second one," Naughton said. "We want people who are interested in fighting the fight on behalf of the inclusive church to feel this is a place they can find aid and comfort and, at the same time, we're trying to reach out to a younger tech-savvy audience that might not yet be willing to step through the door of a church but is more than willing to explore the world of religion on the internet. So, it's a bit of a trick, trying to reach the insider and outsider audiences at the same time."

But I think my favorite part of the Café is the Art Blog. There’s always something wonderful to see there. My favorites right now are “Transfiguration: Dwellings” and “Our Lady of Good Counsel Interior.”

Check out the Café. You'll be glad you stopped by.

So What is this Edendale Farms?

No, it’s not really about a farm (let alone “farms”). It’s just me and my house in Los Angeles with an avocado and an orange tree. And we’re in Edendale - somewhere between Silver Lake and Echo Park. The post office and the library down the street are both the Edendale branches. Edendale was famous in the 1920’s as the home of some of the first movie studios in Los Angeles. But very few people refer to the neighborhood these days as Edendale, so that’s one of the reasons why I like using it.

And I’m not sure about the Farms part. I love my avocado tree and the incredible fruit it produces - everyone says my av’s are the best. I’m not so wild about the orange tree. It’s pretty, but I’ve never really liked oranges - too acidic for my taste. But I love the idea of the place being a farm. I’ve always thought that if I marketed my avocados (or anything else, for that matter), I’d call the company Edendale Farms.

I actually own a farm - or a couple of farms, really - in Oklahoma. Near a little town called Apache (between Anadarko and Lawton, if you know southwestern Oklahoma at all). One was my great-grandfather Blair’s. All we really own these days is the mineral rights. The other is my grandparents (the White’s) farm and we still own the whole kit and caboodle there. It’s a long story - for another post another day - but there’s a family who farms it and pays my sister and me some percentage of the wheat crop as rent.

OK, I’m rambling. Back to Edendale Farms. So I guess I’m just romantic enough to have decided to use this name to catalog my thoughts about where I am and what I’m doing as a nearly sixty year-old gay man in Los Angeles in the early 21st Century. I guess I think I’m going to plant some seeds and see if any wisdom comes up among the weeds.

Young Vocations - To Cure or Not to Cure

There's an interesting discussion going on right now over at Daily Episcopalian. Liz Zivanov posted Revs & Drs in which she compares the education and training that priests and medical doctors receive before being allowed to "practice." Andrew Gerns then responded with Formed by the Church, in which he tells his own story of having been ordained at age 25 and how he was fortunate to be in a diocese that had a good training program in place. Both of these articles - and the comments that have been posted in response to them - raise valuable questions about how we should be looking at "maturity" in terms of readiness to respond to a vocation.

Personally I support young vocations, although I have to admit I get a little queasy when I consider a newly ordained 25-year old being put in charge of a congregation. As Liz spells out in her piece:

So we have a 25-year-old with a seminary degree, maybe 10 weeks of basic Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), and some part-time field education work who is now faced with many levels of parish dynamics, deaths, marriage difficulties, drug problems, local politics, unruly children and adults, hidden agendas, triangulation, skeletons in the closets, the onset of terminal illnesses, and all the other problems that arise in parish communities. Can a 25-year-old with no practical life experience and no in-depth supervised training adequately handle being the person to whom Christians turn for their emotional, psychological, and spiritual health? Do three years of seminary provide adequate preparation?

But Micah Jackson of Seabury-Western responds:

This is one of those rare "big problems" that cannot be solved by asking institutions to throw money and programming at them. This problem will only be solved by experienced priests intentionally seeking out mentorship opportunities and sharing their wisdom with the newly ordained. A relationship with a mentor (whether issued by the diocese or found on their own) is among the most important indicators of effectiveness of clergy of any age, according to some fascinating research done recently by the Rev. Drs. David Gortner and John Dreibelbis (of CDSP and Seabury, respectively).

Seminary training is about giving up oneself to the process of clerical formation, and having your worldview changed from that of whatever you were before, to that of an ordained leader in the Church. It has been my experience that younger seminarians often have less invested in their previous identities, and are sometimes able to make that shift more easily. Though it's also been my experience that older seminarians who are willing to trust the process are also formed into incredibly strong clerics.

Yes, Liz, you're right that there are problems with the way that clergy are trained in our church. But let's stop blaming the victims. It isn't the youth of the seminarians that is the problem. It's the oldness of our thinking.

In the Diocese of Los Angeles we are fortunate in that the Bishop has been blessed with the funds to help support a two-year curacy for the newly ordained. And he the Canon for Formation and Deployment take good care to make sure those new priests are placed in congregations where both the Rector and the congregation will do a good job of helping form that new priest before they move on to work on their own.

We are also blessed with the Episcopal Urban Intern Program based at Holy Faith parish in Inglewood. This is the perfect place for a young person just graduating from college to spend a year living in community and serving those in need in the greater Los Angeles community while getting some "life experience" under their belt and further discerning what God might be calling them to do.

Thanks be to God!