Anglican Church in North America

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What did a Boomer priest learn from a year leading a flock of Millennials?

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What did a Boomer priest learn from a year leading a flock of Millennials?

As a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, Father Stephen Noll felt a sense of loss when he learned he would need a smartphone app to attend baseball games.

Noll calls himself a "digital dinosaur, perhaps from the Jurassic period." What he didn't expect, after 50 years of priesthood, was for this digital divide to affect his ministry.

"I am fundamentally app-horrent," he wrote in "Millennial People, Boomer Priest," a book of lessons from his year as a young parish's interim pastor. The big problem was staying in contact with members of Redeemer Anglican Church, in north Pittsburgh. It was even harder to reach potential converts who kept walking through the doors.

"Caving to the need to reach my Millennial parishioners," he wrote, "I learned to text with the help of the voice input mic, which is a good thing since it seems no one answers voice messages -- or even answers the phone at all!"

Noll was 74 when he became interim pastor on May 1, 2021, after the traumas -- in pews and pulpits -- of the coronavirus pandemic. He decided that many young adults were wrestling with anxiety, loneliness and other painful realities that were both modern and ancient.

According to the 2022 American Religious Benchmark Survey, many people stopped attending worship during the pandemic. Surveys before 2020 found that 25% of Americans never attended services. It was 33% in 2022.

But something else was happening during those years. Surveys found that 19% of Americans changed from one religious affiliation to another, including 6% of those who were religiously unaffiliated before COVID-19.

Noll said some of the young adults in his pews were asking hard questions about the brokenness around them, including in their own lives and the homes in which they were raised.

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Global South Anglican leaders try to push past LGBTQ wars and into future (Part II)

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Global South Anglican leaders try to push past LGBTQ wars and into future (Part II)

Want to know how to cause a church split?

The deepest fault lines -- sex, money and pride -- have been obvious for centuries, said Archbishop Kanishka Raffel of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia.

"We use nationality or age or gender or wealth or clothing or accent or profession or politics -- to show off and communicate who we are and what sort of person we will or will not engage with," said Raffel, who was born in London, of Sri Lankan descent, and raised Buddhist.

"God's people are frail and very human. We bear the marks of weakness and humiliation. We can be loveless, faithless, tolerant of the intolerable and wretchedly self-satisfied. … God is angry about the abuse of people that comes through sexual immorality, greed and hateful, deceitful and cruel speech. We are not surprised."

For decades, he acknowledged, the 42 churches in the Anglican Communion have been rocked by divisions over biblical authority and colonial-era ecclesiastical structures -- with LGBTQ disputes grabbing headlines.

During the recent Global Anglican Future Conference, held in Kigali, Rwanda, Raffel was one of several bishops -- 315 attended, from 52 nations -- who stressed that traditionalists now need to look forward. It's time to focus on life in their rapidly growing churches, while dedicating less time and energy to clashes with declining churches in England, America, Canada and elsewhere.

This will, Raffel stressed, require looking in the mirror.

"We have been engaged in decades long conversation about sexual immorality. But we have often focused on one form of sexual sin, to the neglect of sexual sins which perhaps are more common among us and just as displeasing to God," he said. "How many women ... have shed rivers of tears over the way their sexuality has been misused by others? I suppose it would be millions. There is a self-serving blind spot of which we must repent, a log in our own eyes with which we are yet to deal. Lord, have mercy."

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Apostasy? That word led Bishop FitzSimons Allison out of the Episcopal Church

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Apostasy? That word led Bishop FitzSimons Allison out of the Episcopal Church

It has been three decades since the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison took his first step away from his life as one of the Episcopal Church's strongest evangelical voices.

That tentative move took place in a small-group discussion during an Episcopal House of Bishops meeting in Kanuga, N.C., during his final year serving as the 12th bishop of the historic Diocese of South Carolina. The topic that day was, "Why are we dysfunctional?"

Allison attacked Episcopal priests and seminary professors who were openly proclaiming their faith in an ancient, erotic, divine spirit "older and greater" than the God of the Bible. There was, Allison said, a clear, ancient word for that -- "apostasy."

Other bishops said they had no problem accepting clergy who were testing the boundaries of ancient Christian doctrines.

After that clash, Allison remained in his pew and declined to share the consecrated bread and wine during a Holy Eucharist with the entire House of Bishops. He didn't publicly discuss this act of broken Communion for several years, but his silent protest was a poignant symbol of early cracks forming in the global Anglican Communion.

Now the 95-year-old bishop has officially resigned his status as an Episcopal bishop, making his departure official. Two weeks ago, he wrote U.S. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry to clarify that he had been received into the Anglican Church in North America -- a body recognized as valid by many Anglican bishops in Africa, Asia and the Global South, but not by the Archbishop of Canterbury or leaders in the U.S. Episcopal Church.

"Some people said that I didn't need to do this, because everyone knows where I stand," said Allison, reached by telephone. "But I felt, the way things have been going, that I still needed to make things official. That's just the way I am."

Allison was ordained as a priest in 1953 and then received a doctorate from Oxford University.

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Pain, hope and schisms in the long Anglican wars

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Anglicans seem to be hopeful about their flocks in the United States, even if the warring factions in their Communion keep moving further and further apart.

That was a common theme in two upbeat recent sermons preached by leaders in the progressive and orthodox Anglican bodies now competing in the marketplace of American religion.

In the first sermon, Father Cameron Partridge became the first openly transgender priest to preach at Washington National Cathedral. The June 22 liturgy was part of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride month.

"To dream that one day this Episcopal Church family, in which I grew up, might join other traditions, and inspire still others, by embracing our gifts and leadership at all levels of its life. I am so grateful and proud to be in a church that is now living into this charge," said Partridge, who was born a woman, but now identifies as a "trans" man.

"As we behold one another in these days of celebration, may ... we give thanks for the unfolding mystery of our humanity and may we revel in our participation in God's ongoing project of revelation."

"Revelation" was the word for the day, said Partridge, a Harvard Divinity School faculty member and the Episcopal chaplain at Boston University. Modern churches must embrace the "project of revelation" that shapes an evolving faith, he said.

Partridge recalled a "circle of oppression" rite during an Episcopal retreat he attended 13 years ago, when the leader asked oppressed women to step forward.