A year ago today, I was ordained in The Episcopal Church. This was not a detour from my ordination 23 years prior but a continuation, a deepening. In a time when the American church seems in disarray, when we’re captured by many idols, when much of the zeitgeist is in the opposite direction (“spiritual but not religious”), I’m redoubling my yes. I’m committed to this battered, bruised church, this community where we are so often in need of repentance and mercy.

I’m with the church because I seek to be a disciple of Jesus, and Jesus said the Church is his body. And I want to be as close to Jesus’ body as I can possibly be.

I find Dorothy Day both sobering and hopeful. “I think the Church is the only thing that is going to make a terrible world we are coming to endurable, the only thing that makes the church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the church as for it….”

I’ve been around the ecclesial block far too many times to have glistening illusions about the church as a paradigm of perfection. Rather, we are a community who proclaims that in Jesus Christ, God has acted to save the world. And we, the Church, are the first in line in need of rescue.

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