Ross Douthat in a recent op-ed The Secularization of America noted the latest Gallup poll showing that for the first time in its decades of polling, fewer than half of Americans claim membership in a church, synagogue or mosque. The fall has been swift: From 70% in 1999 to 47% in 2020.

Of course, there is no single explanation for this phenomenon. Generational shift – with many millennials and those following rejecting the value system espoused in the Christianity of their parents. The post boomer generations have come to associate Christianity with the Southern Baptist -Evangelical kind of Christianity which they see as simply a religious handmaid for a paranoid, nationalist, political agenda. The polarizing language of them and us that accompanies this paranoid worldview – repels more spiritual seekers than it attracts. One might argue that this may be a case of tossing the evangelical baby out with the otherwise Christian bathwater. However, such argument is neither here-nor-there when we consider that non-Evangelical Christianity is now seen as only so much bathwater.

Douthat notes that the American educated class is deeply committed to a moral vision that regards emancipated, self-directed choice as essential to human freedom and the good life. The members of this section of the population – to which you and I actually belong, do not take kindly to any external judgements being made on the virtues or not of individual choice – delivered from on high by some remote authority. Like the rich young man in Mark’s gospel we seek the answer of salvation only in as much as it does not challenge our own moral self-sufficiency.

Two influences transformed the experience of the followers of Jesus. The first was pneumatic inflation with the Holy Spirit. According to John’s account, Jesus puffed the Holy Spirit into the band of dispirited followers in the upper room, banishing their fear with his peace. The second was material need. A members of a community of relatively poor individuals, living in a hostile religious and political environment, they realized that a radical sharing of resources was the only way they could survive. They clearly found this approach to a common life supported by their memory of Jesus’ command to love and serve one another.

Both these influences led to the transformation of the followers of Jesus from a disconsolate, grieving band into a dynamic and confident community. Their radical approach to living in a new and inspirited way equipped them to use their limited resources to avoid the pitfalls of what usually happens in situations of scarcity – the tendency to division into haves and have-nots. Willie James Jennings, the current professor of Theology and Africana Studies at Yale, sums this all up: We see money being used to destroy what money is usually used to create: distance and boundaries between people. Jennings here articulates the heart of the millennial critique of privatized – capitalist inspired – religion.

Luke also records the post resurrection encounters between Jesus and his disciples. The settings and incidental details change but the essential reports of the kind of experience between Jesus and his disciples remain consistent. Yet, Luke hints at a third aspect of the early Christian transformative experience. He tells us that they were overtaken by joy while still in the midst of doubting and questioning.

So, what is joy? In our society we are dedicated  to the pursuit and achievement – if we can – of happiness. After all, doesn’t the constitution guarantee us Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

In common parlance joy and happiness are used interchangeably. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines happiness as: a state of well-being and contentment: joy. It’s my contention that this near universal conflation of happiness and joy causes us endless emotional and spiritual confusion.

Happiness is an emotion – a transitory emotional state – often no sooner felt then lost. Happiness is the fruit of an experience of fortuitous events – something goes well, and we feel happy in response. When the wheel of good fortune turns, happiness is replaced by a multiplicity of opposites: despondency, disaffection, sadness, even depression.

Despite the dictionary definitions – joy is not an emotion or transitory emotional state like happiness. Joy is a spiritual virtue – a persisting spiritual state of mind – an orientation of the heart. Joy is also motivational – propelling – compelling us to choices we might otherwise not risk taking. Joy – persists in the face of the chances and changes – old Prayerbook language for the ups and downs of this mortal life. Joy persists despite the ups and downs in life – because – it’s not a transitory emotional state. Once it enters our lives, along with the companion spiritual virtues of hope and love – joy motivates our future direction of travel.

In trying to tie joy down all I can do is point to an experience of the persistence of joy in my life. Looking back I can trace joy not in the feelings I felt but in the choices I felt compelled to make. It is joy that has sustained someone like me – always doubting, second guessing, questioning – in the Christian faith. But if I can point to one single instance – On the feast of the Falling Asleep of Blessed Mary, the Mother of Jesus, August 15^th, 2005 our granddaughter Claire Elise was born. This event became a central organizing experience of joy in the middle years of my life.

All grandparents will know what I am talking about here -parents too – but the joy of grandparenthood far surpasses the joys of parental responsibility. I can only say that Claire’s birth marked a serious invasion of joy that in my experience has little comparison.

Claire’s birth set a chain of events in motion -the end result being a major life change. After 30 years of productive professional and fulfilling personal life in London, joy compelled Al and I to risk a major relocation from the UK to the US at a midpoint in our lives. Joy – a spiritual orientation of the heart – a longing for the connections of love in the life of our granddaughter compelled us to leave the familiar and secure and journey into the unknown of a future with no fixed certainties. Joy – the orientation of the heart became the compass setting – pointing towards the future.

The process of migration – a complex process of leaving, arriving, and the ups and downs of settling involved many emotional and material challenges. Al and I came without jobs and few assurances for the future. The risk for me also included the uncertainties of immigrant status. Moments of happiness came – and – just as quickly went.

Douthat laments: My anthropological understanding of my secular neighbors particularly fails when it comes to the indifference with which some of them respond to religious possibilities, or for that matter to mystical experiences they themselves have had.

Coming out of the experience of the pandemic during which our world has shifted on its axis is in some senses comparable to the changes facing the early Christian community. Both situations involve a challenge of transformation. How will joy motivate – propel – compel us to be the active agents in the changes we want to see in the world around us? I think this is a question that lies at the heart of the persistence of joy among us.  In this moment of time new directions open up before us – new opportunities which hitherto we considered unrealistic become imaginable possibilities. However, as with hope and love, joy motivates but also compels us to take a risk.

The presence of joy in Christian communities – the source of which lies in the continued presence of the power of the risen Christ among us – makes us magnetic. To be magnetic is to be a community of attraction. I’m not sure many in the 1^st-century flocked to the fledgling Christian communities for rational, worldly sensible reasons. I think they were attracted by the joy manifested by these communities.

We face some enormous challenges concerning the future of Christian communities in an ever-secularizing society. As we face the urgent imperative for renewal, we have to stop asking where is our renewal to come from? The source of renewal lies within us – in our ability to show how the faith within us makes a difference in our lives.

The early Church grew by leaps and bounds because people wanted what the first Christians seemed to have had. In a joyless world they became compelled by joy to join risk-taking communities. No one explained joy to them, they just became infected by it.

Douthat notes it is a mistake to focus too much on overt obstacles to people finding what they desperately seek in the Church. There are many barriers for them to overcome first – an important one being the way the Church currently is. Many barriers to active participation in organized communities of faith could as Douthat notes – be partially removed, rolled back a little way. But the rub is something else will still be needed – which he articulates as the impulse, the push, that makes people seek and knock and ask.

What’s required today as the church faces increasingly rapid institutional decline? I’m convinced that the answers – whatever they may be – lie within us as communities inflated with the Holy Spirit and motivated by joy – continually moving beyond happiness into joy – moving through sadness into joy – joy a persisting spiritual state of mind – an orientation of the heart – a motivational – propelling – compelling force that enables us to persist in taking risks despite our endless doubts and fears. How attractive – how infectious might that be for a world hungry for belonging?

Contrary to popular assumption and in many cases widespread belief, vibrant and healthy Christian communities have two key characteristics. Healthy Christian communities have a tolerance for doubt. – being communities that recognise that the seeds of faith are most often sown in the fields of doubt. Healthy Christian communities also prioritize human pastoral needs over doctrinal beliefs – communities where belonging comes before believing. To paraphrase Dietrich Bonhoeffer being Christian adds nothing to being human, being Christian puts being human into practice.

The American religious landscape is dominated by church traditions where doubt is seen as the enemy of faith and where correct believing opens the doors to belonging – where to admit to honest doubt closes the doors to membership.

The Episcopal Church and its Anglican Tradition stand in vital opposition to the prevailing expressions of both conservative and populist Christianity in America. Anglican Tradition and experience has always prioritized belonging over believing. Our experience – in tolerating doubt and prioritizing belonging – reflects the Scriptural accounts of life in the first Christian communities – depictions coming to us through the earliest N.T. accounts of early Christian community.

John the Evangelist gives us the earliest account of Christian community in his description of events taking place over two consecutive Sunday evenings following the death of the man Jesus and his resurrection as the Messiah or the Christ. He begins:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Temple police, Jesus came and stood among them – he showed them his hand and side and said ‘Peace be with you’. Then he puffed into them saying ‘Receive the Holy Spirit”.

It’s not doors with metal locks, but hearts barricaded by fear that Jesus penetrates. In showing them his wounds, Jesus demonstrates to them – look it’s me, Jesus, and I’m real – I’m not an apparition. Despite the obvious facts that his post resurrection body seems not to be constrained by the normal material limitations – his wounded and scarred human flesh remains the primary identifier of his resurrection body. His wounds show the continuity between before and after – joining his crucified human body with his resurrected body.

Jesus then breathes on them. John uses the Greek pneuma for which a better translation in this context is puff. Jesus puffs the Spirit into them. From pneuma we derive the English adjective pneumatic to describe the action of puffing up or inflating with breath. In Genesis, God puffed breath-wind-spirit into Adam’s nostrils. Jesus puffs the Holy Spirit – the breath-wind of God into his deflated disciples – inflating them into a pneumatic and dynamic community.

John goes on to depict Jesus’ return visit to the disciples one week later – a visit seemingly to encounter Thomas who had earlier announced his doubt – a need for physical proof before he could believe. The epithet doubting Thomas is unfair. He wasn’t the only one to doubt human hearsay. Remember the male disciples had only earlier in the day refused to take Mary and the women’s word that they had seen the risen Lord.

It seems that for Jesus doubt is no barrier to membership in him. What excludes is not honest doubt but anxious fear. We might conclude from John 20 that faith’s opposite is not doubt but fear and the seeds of faith are sown in the fields of doubt.

But it is the pneumatic inflation of the disciples into a dynamic community that is the remarkable discovery from John 20.

In Chapter 4 in Luke’s Acts we have Luke’s second vivid portrait of the community of the first followers of Jesus.

We are surprised to find that within a short space of time a community has sprung up from the band of followers which displays the signs of an incredible pneumatic vitality. We are further surprised to note their shared heartbeat -a bold generosity and willingness to risk departing from conventional ways of living – a community where belonging is an important as believing.

Many preachers have been quick to deduce from Luke’s description of the Jerusalem community – an early blueprint for Christian socialism. The question that is hard to answer is given what we know about human nature did the Jerusalem community really live this way? The next portion of the chapter tells us of Ananias and Sapphira – who sold property but secretly squirrelled away some of the proceeds for their exclusive use – giving us a glimpse that not everyone was able to rise to demand to hold all in common.

But there is no reason to seriously doubt Luke’s overall depiction. For how else could a fledgling community of mostly poor folk survive in the midst of a wider hostile context? It’s also clear that their encounter with the risen Christ’s pneumatic inflation of the Holy Spirit into them was an every moment experience that accounts for their radical transformation of perspective. For them – as Paul’s fledgling communities continually attest – the power of the risen Christ has turned every normal expectation on its head and they are living in a radically new way.

Taking these two factors together leads us to reasonably deduce that koinonia – the common life – where each gives according to their ability and each receives according to their need – resulted from both material necessity and pneumatic empowerment.

That is then, but what about now? Despite the model of early Christian community presenting a continued challenge to us which we ignore at our peril – the point for us lies not in the simplistic demand to adopt early Christian or even later Christian socialist koinonia as a blueprint for our communal life. The question is more how might this power for transformation inherent in gospel-shaped lives bear witness among us?

Matt Skinner notes that something greater than charity and mission was operating in the community Luke depicts; believers are living out a commitment to belong to one another by addressing the impediments that get in the way of doing so.

Willie James Jennings, the current professor of theology and Africana Studies at Yale, knocks the proverbial nail on the head when speaking of Luke’s depiction of the Jerusalem community he notes that

Coming out of the experience of the pandemic during which our world has shifted on its axis in a way that is in some sense comparable to the early Christian experience of the post resurrection Christ – we are in a moment of time when new directions open up – directions hitherto considered as only unrealistic possibilities.

The long-term learning from the pandemic – galvanized by our current experience of imposed isolation and social distancing – offers us a renewed vision of Christian belonging – We have an urgent opportunity to creatively process our guilt as those relatively unscathed who nevertheless cannot sit unchanged in the face of nakedly exposed fault lines that maintain injustice and gross inequality.

The community Luke depicts may not be exactly a workable blueprint for us, but it might be a visionary encouragement for new directions of travel as we commit to using our resources and privilege to destroy what resources and privilege usually create – impediments to belonging and believing together.

Cover picture: The Way of the Cross, Sadao Watanabe

Love hurts and our hearts have an all too familiar affinity with suffering. Yet, if we dwell on suffering, we are in danger of being little more than mere bystanders – spectators of Jesus’ suffering on his way to the Cross.

It’s so easy to stand and watch from a safe distance – comforted by an image of Jesus as the noble hero valiantly travelling the route God has set for him – seemingly heedless of the costs because after all – he has the comfort of knowing ahead of time how things will end – or that’s the way we like to view him.

But we must go deeper than this if we are to move from spectators to participants with Jesus in his Passion. This requires us to choose a different focus – viewing him through a different lens.

We need Jesus to be more like us than not. We are not noble heroes passing through the drama of our lives unscathed. Walking with Jesus on the Via Dolorosa – his road of sorrows – we need to reconnect with the pain of our own losses and sorrows. When we do so – we do not imagine ourselves to be heroes, somehow valiantly marching on – unscathed. We do not imagine our own suffering to be heroic. Suffering is only heroic when it is viewed from outside – through the lens of the onlooker.

Our commonality with Jesus – is that like him – we too know sorrow and are acquainted with grief. He treads his road, a road he nevertheless chooses to accept – and like us, he knows little more than what is revealed as he takes each step putting one foot in front of the other, one breath at a time.

As onlookers of his Passion – what do we feel? Maybe admiration for someone who has more courage than we; maybe gratitude – as if his suffering has relieved us of the necessity of ours. If this is all, then we fail to see that the way of the Cross is God’s invitation to become transformed not by suffering, but by the power of love. Jesus is no noble victim – coerced into sacrificing his life for the sins of the world. Jesus chooses to tread not the road of suffering but the road of God’s transforming love.

The Way of the Cross requires of us nothing short of a transformation in our whole (moral, emotional, and spiritual) way of being. In Jesus, God’s hands get dirty as Jesus takes the initiative and leads us through example. Our acceptance, our entry into the way of love involves risking as Jesus risked. Risk is the raw material for transformation, for:

Entering into the way of love leads us to more than a new perspective on our own suffering. Entering into the way of love leads us to a new perspective on the world’s suffering. When we enter into solidarity with the suffering of others – those near us – our neighbors, our family and friends; when we feel a connection with the suffering of those far from us – unseen by us except through the screens of our TV’s or online – we cannot remain unmoved by the necessity of love. For us as a community, the way of love means uncovering and facing-down the cosmic forces of dehumanization woven into the very DNA of our culture and our collective memory. It means risking loving and taking hurt’s risk.

Entering upon the way of love – above all else means accepting an invitation to become transformed into a new way of seeing – transformed by a new way of being, one step at a time –  transformed from timid and grateful onlookers – into willing collaborators with God in the vision of putting the world to rights.

From mere spectators to active participants with Jesus on the road to the cross is a movement through belonging-into-believing; a movement from fear-into-loving – from protected isolation into being loved.

This is not a hero’s path.  Jesus shows us that it is a very human path. On the  Friday we call Good, God shows us the way of love, motivated not by an abhorrence of sin, but by the necessity to love – for God – the impossibility is of not loving enough!