Province I Conference examines resurrection themes
by Anne Clarke Brown
Mountain Echo, April 2008

Themes of resurrection, resistance and renewal engaged and challenged participants throughout the eighth annual Province One Conference on Stewardship, Evangelism and Congregational Development, beginning with the opening session of song and story telling through plenary sessions and workshops and ending with the U2charist celebration.

Episcopalians from all seven dioceses of the Province of New England as well as Pennsylvania—137 in all—came together March 7-9, at the Doubletree Hotel in Westborough, Massachusetts to learn and share experiences. For the first time, this year’s conference welcomed all ages, with a special “discovery center” for the very young. Also for the first time, worship incorporated both English and Spanish.

Opening the event on Friday evening, musician Fran McKendree engaged participants in lively singing, and Valerie Tutson captivated all ages with stories. Tutson began with a Liberian “dilemma story” that results in the resurrection of a father who disappeared when hunting after the youngest child some years later asks, “Where is my father?” Lessons learned from their father enable each of the children to contribute to returning him to life and the family. Tutson concluded, “No one is ever dead unless, or until, he or she is forgotten.” Tutson also held her audience rapt as she retold the biblical stories of Mary and Martha (from Martha’s perspective) and the raising of Lazarus and Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet.

The Rev. Canon Charles LaFond, canon for stewardship in the Diocese of New Hampshire and priest-associate at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Nashua, offered plenary sessions on Saturday morning and afternoon and on Sunday morning in which he reflected in turn on the themes of resurrection, resistance and renewal. To focus his meditations, he used an icon (the Anastasis Icon originally written in the 11th century) in which Jesus is depicted pulling Adam and Eve from their sarcophagi, from the sleep of death into resurrected life. Each of his sessions included significant time for silent meditation, musical interludes by Fran McKendree, and time for small group conversation.

In the opening plenary, LaFond said, “We’ll be considering what it means to be lost and what it means to be found. What we will not be doing is commiserating,” which means, he noted, co-misery. Both the icon and the Easter resurrection are action-oriented, and, he said, “God’s call to us is to pull our churches out of death. The world we are called from,” said LaFond, “is the world of power, manipulation, excessive noise, over work, under-Sabbath, wealth, conspicuous consumption, and boredom.” The act of pulling ourselves and our churches out of boredom is, he said, “an act of violence, and it is upsetting.” He is looking for a revival in The Episcopal Church in which we “give up efficiency and take up adoration.” LaFond challenged his audience to ponder, first in silence, and then in table groups, “what it means to grab people by the wrist, to grab your parishes, and move them out of their fear.” And, he asked, “From what coffins is the resurrected Jesus pulling us?

LaFond’s second plenary session focused on the notion of resistance, the ways “we pull back from the dynamos of resurrection.” Resistance is closely linked to fear, which was, he said, removed by the church from the list of deadly sins because it “realized that this is the soup in which we live.” The condition that results from such fearfulness is best described by the early monastic term, accedie, a kind of dull spiritual boredom, “a form of resistance that is hard to deal with because of the limpness of it.” Accedie, said LaFond, is “a turning away from God’s gifts,” and it can come from being overwhelmed with too much, even too much good to do.
“With Westerners,” LaFond said, “Satan has chosen an incredibly effective strategy. ‘I will give them too much good to do. That will distract them from God, and there will be no paper trail—it doesn’t look evil.’” In silence and then among those at their tables, LaFond asked participants to consider accedie in their own lives and what might pull them out, and then to reflect on how fear or accedie might affect stewardship, evangelism and development efforts in their congregations. “What do we have to do,” he asked, “to bring resistance out into the open to be burst into flames in the sun, to be healed and changed?”

In his final meditation, LaFond said that we are ready for renewal, that we need Christ, the morning star. The church, he said, “is in a form of disaster,” a word that comes from dis-astron, without a star. “We forget that Christ on Easter morning is the eternal star guiding us to where we want to be.” He identified nostalgia (the lies of the past) and fantasy (the lies of the future) as obstacles in the way, both in the personal life and the corporate life, of following the guidance of the star that is Christ.

“Once we have recognized the star, recognized the disaster we are in, removed the nostalgia and fantasy, then what do we do?” LaFond asked. He suggested that people want simplicity, silence and space for adoration. “If adoration is not the foundation of service and mission,” he said, “the church becomes just one more dysfunctional group. Spiritually, we are what we adore.” He said, “Stopping the noise and entering into the silence is what launches the adoration of the heart,” and that leads to profound renewal. After asking the group to consider the roles of nostalgia in their lives and that of their congregations, LaFond challenged them to “go home and do some strategy.” And, he concluded, “What if we as churches held up Sabbath-making as a time of renewal and not as one of recovery to do more work?”

Workshops
Conference participants could choose among seven workshops, with four offered in the morning, and four (one repeated) offered in the afternoon. The Rev. Virginia Marie Rincon addressed issues of concern in Hispanic ministry. The Rev. Jane Bearden used her experience of post-Katrina recovery ministry to speak of how the church is at its best when engaged in mission partnerships. Craig Smith of Western Massachusetts offered a primer on stewardship as living with an assumption of abundance. Ruth-Ann Collins spoke about how working with children on the topic of stewardship runs against the grain of a marketing and advertising culture.

In afternoon workshops, Sarah Dylan Breuer addressed the emerging church of the post-modern generations; Merredythe Nadeau spoke about evangelism as connecting people to the power of God and some practical ways of doing that; the Rev. Mary Hitt led a discussion on environmental stewardship; and Virginia Rincon repeated her session on Hispanic ministry.

Rounding out the weekend were an evening of song with Fran McKendree and a concluding U2charist led by the Rev. Paige Blair of St. George’s Church in York Harbor, Maine. Blair described the evolution of the U2charist, which uses the music of the band, U2, in the context of a Rite II Eucharist. She said, “We often say that we celebrate the Eucharist. Today, we get to act like that’s true,” and she invited the congregation to dance to the music. Blair’s sermon addressed the Millennium Development Goals and how they had been a new way for the congregation at St. George’s to make incarnate the Good News.

The conference offering of $1,384 is being donated to an organization called Play Pumps International (www.playpumps.org), which constructs water systems powered by the energy of children using a merry-go-round to bring clean water to communities in developing countries.

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