A Volley from the Canon, Number 56--Formation

THE FORMATION IMPERATIVE

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of working with the vestry of Christ Church, Bluefield, as they hammered out an excellent mission statement together. We were all feeling pretty good about the accomplishment, and I looked at it contentedly and said, “What it says to me is that you are committed to being an academy and laboratory for Christian living.” They liked that summary and wound up with it as a bonus at no extra charge to use as a slogan for advertising and such. However, I’m not so sure that slogan singles them out so much as having a unique mission: in fact, I would hope that pretty nearly EVERY Episcopal congregation would have the idea of teaching and practicing a Christian discipline as part of their DNA, if not as their mission statement.

Here’s the rub: we Episcopalians THINK (because we’ve been told so) that we are all about worship. That’s because we have tended to think we do worship particularly well (often kind of like a symphony orchestra does music particularly well, with a handful in the audience). But worship is not our foundational activity. Christian Formation is, for worship is merely one, albeit a very important one, of several aspects of congregational life that build and support Christian lives.

When a congregation has the notion that Christian Ed is for children; that Confirmation means “graduation” from Church School; that Bible study and other forms of adult formation are for the handful of truly devout but somewhat weird members, not for oneself; that Inquirers’ Class is the full extent of education needed for full, life-long participation in the life of the church—that congregation is in a heap ‘o trouble. The Evangelical churches count on a sudden, cathartic, one-time experience of conversion to Christ. We don’t. We count on a life-style of living and practicing the life of conversion over a period of time. How ironic that they so often do a better job than we do with on-going Christian Formation.

It isn’t eccentric for adult Christians to participate regularly in some kind of instruction in scripture, tradition, and practice. It’s just the Episcopal way.