Author: Kyle

Fireworks for New Year's

Resolving to be changed—by religious change

Kyle

I’ve been doing the “year in review” thing over the last few days. As I look back on my year in media, the item that jumps out to me as the most surprising is a little video I made.

Y’all and others shared it enough when I posted it to Facebook in April that I felt the need to unpack it a bit in a subsequent blog post. I’ve been thinking about why it so caught people’s attention. Let me share two thoughts.

“U.S. Religious Affiliation, 1948-2017” by Kyle Oliver at prayr.cc/relig-affil (CC BY 2.0)

For one thing, visualizations are cool. You don’t have to be Edward Tufte to appreciate a beautiful graphic, and amcharts makes it relatively easy to create one. (Here’s my most recent amcharts handiwork.)

But as I think more about this graphic in particular, I’m guessing it’s the time series nature of the data that made it compelling. We have a name for what happens when you choose and share meaningful occurrences that unfold over time. We call it a story.

People cared about the graphic because it tells a story. It tells the story of religious change and a growing group who feel un-pressured to claim formal religious affiliation, or who actively renounce it.

This is a story that people of faith have a hard time not getting defensive about, even though plenty of research suggests it’s not (all) about us. It’s a story that religious leaders, in particular, find challenging—what with its potential implications for our livelihoods and all.

But I increasingly believe the defensiveness and fear only make matters worse. So as I write this on January 2, I’m adding a second New Year’s Resolution to my list. (Number One is dissertation related.)

In place of fear and regret about religious change, I want to cultivate curiosity.

Searching with others at flea market - a metaphor for religious change?
Photo by Phad Pichetbovornkul on Unsplash

In her landmark study of the religiously unaffiliated, Elizabeth Drescher writes the following, using her intentionally provocative term “Somes” to refer to the religiously affiliated (i.e., non-Nones):

my interviews with Nones as well as my conversations with many Somes make clear that most of us, regardless of how we see ourselves in terms of affiliation and unaffiliation, are actively attentive to and curious about each other’s spiritual or religious practices … For many Americans, the resources this curiosity brings to consciousness will find their way, directly or perhaps more obliquely, into their own spiritualities (p. 8, emphasis mine)

Our nation and the world are becoming more spiritually and religiously diverse. I want to treat religious change as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to grow in my own faith and in my appreciation for the whole human family.

I’ve always been curious about others’ spiritual lives, but too often I’ve tempered that curiosity with shyness and fear. In some ways that’s been more true since I got ordained, wary as I am about how some religious leaders use apparent curiosity as a beachhead for coercion.

Heaven make me free of it. I want to learn to trust that my spark of curiosity is holy. I want to trust that I can interact with others in ways they will know to be genuine and respectful.

I want to read, hear, and see more about how people practice faith or make meaning. I want to be challenged to reflect on how it works for me and my communities as I encounter similar and different practices among my neighbors and their communities.

I suspect my new city will be a good place to let this curiosity do its beautiful thing, though Drescher shows (not altogether surprisingly) that the percentage of Nones is growing fastest in places we think of as very religious.

So if your hometown doesn’t yet feel like a likely place to be both challenged and nurtured by religious change – just give it a couple years.

Cover photo: Thomas Evans on Unsplash

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.

kids and screens

Beyond alarmism about kids and screens

Kyle 6 Comments

If there’s one thing I learned in my history of communication class, it’s that the introduction of new technologies is usually met with a strange cultural cocktail of utopianism and alarmism.

It’s at once hilarious and disturbing to hear people responding to the social disruption ushered in by the telephone* or even the chalkboard. Reading accounts like these has made me as suspicious of moral panic as of moral triumphalism or moral indifference.

It was with that formation and a whole lot of eye-rolling that I read (some of) the recent package of “kids and screens” stories from the New York Times claiming, as Pamela Paul put it, “the people who know the most about tech are the ones who want the least tech for their kids.”

(Incidentally, the preview text for the article in question is “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones,” from a former administrator at Facebook. If quotes like that aren’t a warning sign of lazy thinking all around, I don’t know what is.)

In a tightly argued piece in Columbia Journalism Review, education reporter Anya Kamenetz called the stories “howling missed opportunities,” which seems generous given her subsequent characterization: “They were lacking relevant research, they drew misleading conclusions, and some of the anecdotal evidence they cited contradicted the central hooks of the stories.”

If you know about Kamenetz’s recent book, The Art of Screentime*, you’d be right to want to interrogate her possible biases and blind spots. Doesn’t she have a vested interest in devices’ possible redemption?

Sure, but there are good reasons to be frustrated with writer Nellie Bowles’ reporting of these pieces and to trust Kamenetz’s rejoinder. For my part, I’m convinced by Kamenetz’s conclusions in large part because I’m familiar with a lot of the rigorous research she cites. She reached out to one of my scholarly heroes in this core statement of her argument:

[S]trict approaches aimed only at limiting screen time aren’t the most effective. You have to be a role model and engage alongside your kids, a notion that the Times stories largely skirted. As Mimi Ito, a foundational scholar of teens’ online lives, tells me, “With anxiety stoked by fear-inducing media stories, and shamed by their peers, parents grasp for simple authoritarian solutions often against their kids’ interests. But when parents take the time to appreciate and connect with their kids’ digital interests, it can be a site of connection and shared joy”—and a way to mentor kids to discover their own creativity.

If piling up researcher pull quotes or citations isn’t your preferred approach to convincing others or yourself, consider more closely the complex path of critical engagement rather than faux-critical prohibition.

The former—advocated by Ito (see HOMAGO online or in print*), boyd (see It’s Complicated online or in print*), Kamenetz and others—passes a kind of smell test that my college calculus professor called “conservation of effort”:

If an approach to solving a problem seems to too easy, it probably is.

It’s just as easy to let nannies be the phone police (if you can afford them, of course) as it is to over-rely on techno-wizardry for keeping kids entertained. (Though let’s cut it out with the shaming that happens on the kids and screens front. Actually, let’s cut it out with shaming.)

We shouldn’t be surprised that the most effective approaches to teaching and learning, to forming strong values and good habits, to growing relationships and community, are the ones that take the most time and effort to practice.

That’s true in the fraught world of kids and screens, and just about everywhere else.

Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash

*Disclosure: Affiliate links.

Image credit: "Masters of the Universe" by Margot Wood via Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0) - listening and sharing

Listening and sharing for humanity’s sake

Kyle

I just moved to my seventh state. Still, I can’t stop thinking about number three.

I don’t know if it’s the palm trees, the general upheaval from moving, or something else I can’t yet put my finger on, but my childhood years in Florida (ages 4–8) have been much on my mind as we’ve been starting our new chapter in California.

I just returned from a StoryCenter intensive facilitators’ training, where as part of my practicum I helped a deeply wise Iraqi refugee bring to life a powerful story from his past. Earlier in the week, I sat in another very tender story circle with seven other educator participants, all of us finding, sharing, and refining accounts of important moments from our own lives. Listening and sharing.

I went in to the workshop planning to tell an early ministry story, about my first big mistake as digital missioner and the redemptive arc it eventually initiated. As is apparently quite common, it turned out that something inside me had other plans.

“Childhood stories are in deep,” one facilitator said. And we can never fully understand the ways they’ve shaped us since.

It’s probably no coincidence that in an unsettled time in my adult life, I found my way to an unsettling childhood story that focused my attention on how easy it is to believe that other people have everything figured out.

As I sit with this surprise story of home and family, with refugee stories so generously shared with novice facilitators, and with the stories of war, violence, and dislocation that reach us faster than we can process them, I am more convinced than ever that our greatest tools for healing and for human connection in this world are deep listening and sharing.

I couldn’t have learned what I learned about myself in that bright and welcoming Denver writers’ workshop without the critical insight of a supportive community. I couldn’t have faced it with courage and curiosity without the inexorable pull of an audience I knew I could trust with my final patchwork of words and pictures.

As we head toward All Saints Day and Election Day, toward Thanksgiving and Advent, toward a future that can feel hopeless and uncertain, I invite you to listen for and share real human stories.

If you can, whenever you can: Ask the questions that matter and commit to listening for answers together. Even when the stories get tough.

Image credit: “Masters of the Universe” by Margot Wood via Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

Curating resources - curation guidelines

Guidelines for curating religious resources

Kyle

Note: I created these guidelines for curating religious resources while on the staff of the Center for the Ministry of Teaching (now Lifelong Learning) at Virginia Theological Seminary, in collaboration with Robbin Brent Whittington and the Center for Spiritual Resources. Since the CSR is no longer in operation, I have obtained permission to republish them here under a Creative Commons license.

Suggested attribution: “Guidelines for curating religious resources” by Kyle Oliver (CC BY 4.0)

**

There are so many free and low-cost resources online for people who teach religion and theology or are responsible for faith formation in religious communities. How do you decide what to share?

Curating resource collections is now a big part of the job description in a wide variety of spiritual and religious vocations. Here are some sample criteria for making sure you pass along the good stuff.

You’ll notice that the values implicitly and explicitly represented in these guidelines correspond to a Mainline Protestant sensibility and my particular groundedness in the Episcopal/Anglican tradition. Feel free to adapt as appropriate for your context.

**

Audience appropriateness — Resource demonstrates obvious utility to one or more core audiences: individual seekers; participants in Christian formation programming at home, at church, at camp, or online; group leaders; and school or congregational leaders.

Theological sensitivity — Resource creator(s) share a commitment to a broad and generous Mainline Protestant/Roman Catholic perspective. Resource shares the good news of God in Christ while “respecting the dignity of every human being.” Mainline Anglican/Episcopal resources are especially appropriate.

Biblical groundedness — Resource demonstrates an explicit or implicit engagement in the Bible and other significant Christian texts. Resource creators model a hermeneutic that allows for a variety of interpretations based on recognized and transparent methods of Biblical scholarship.

Lifelong faith formation — Resource affirms, explicitly whenever possible, a commitment to lifelong growth in the knowledge, service, and love of God in the context of intentional Christian communities shaped, often but not always, by baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Holy Eucharist/Communion).

Social justice — Resource strives to represent humanity in its full diversity, including of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical and mental abilities, socioeconomic status, and place of residence—recognizing that gospel values make no accommodation to oppression. Resource seeks to transcend or at least acknowledge the necessarily limited perspective of its creator(s).

Liturgical awareness — Resource includes strategies for incorporation in or inclusion alongside the liturgies/worship traditions of the church, or includes standalone prayers or liturgies/worship services. Not all users will be concerned with this criterion, but Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics in particular tend to approach formation through the lens of worship (lex orandi, lex credendi–praying shapes believing) and the context of liturgical seasons.

Editorial responsibility — Resource creators and curators value attention to the details of usage and grammar, web design, and copyright compliance. Curators (and creators when the creator submits an original resource) are committed to “signing” their posts with initials linking each contribution to the appropriate collaborator’s bio.

Practical value — Resource encourages users to be “doers of the word, and not merely hearers” (James 1:22) and engages the “how” of mission and ministry and not just the why. Use of action-reflection models of practical theology is especially appropriate.

Non-expert accessibility — Resource avoids unnecessary religious, pedagogical, and technological jargon and can be used by expert and novice practitioners.

Image credit: Valentin Antonini via Unsplash.

Woman bundled up - whole armor of God

The “whole armor of God” and the gospel of peace

Kyle

A sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost:

1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

**

This week I repeatedly re-lived a memory from, I think, my junior year of college.

I was walking down Regent St. in Madison, WI. I was talking to my mother on my brand new cell phone: my first, in fact.

My mother was concerned. It was below zero outside, with nasty wind, and I was on my way to go jump in a lake.

It was January 1st, and our intrepid campus ministry group had signed up to do the Polar Plunge. That’s crazy Wisconsinites and crazier out-of-staters jumping through a hole in the ice on New Year’s Day.

Now before you get too worried on my behalf, know that the morning ended sooner and more warmly than we expected. It was *so* cold that organizers were having trouble keeping the hole in the ice clear of refreezing slush. They had to cancel.

But as I was saying, the memory is from before I knew all this. I had dialed my mom in Milwaukee, nonchalantly I was sure, to engage in that act of understated showboating that we now have a word for: the humble brag.

“Hey, Mom. Ooph, yeah, it’s freezing. Yeah, I bet you’ve got a fire going in the den at 9 am, it’s nasty out. What am I up to? Why is it so windy? Well, I’m on my way to St. Francis House to meet the gang and then go do the Polar Plunge.”

You know, I’m gonna go willingly subject my body to brief but serious trauma. No big deal.

Now, stoicism is a major Midwestern value, so my mom took the news in stride. But worrying is a major Oliver family pastime, so I still had to stand for interrogation.

Above all, I had to assure her that I was wearing enough warm clothing.

And I was: Moisture wicking socks under the heavy wool ones, serious winter boots with thick liners of their own, long underwear, flannel-lined blue jeans, who knows how many layers of thermal shirts and sweaters, a parka with hood, gloves fit for a day of ice fishing, a scarf covering my face and lower neck, and yes, I kid you not, ski goggles.

I’m honestly not sure how I could get the phone to my ear.

**

Getting dressed on a day like that is preparing to contend with the elements. There’s a ritual to getting bundled up, really bundled up, a sequence of moves attentive to the body but also evoking a certain mindset.

I want to propose to you that dressing responsibly for a long, cold day out is an apt replacement metaphor for what I think the author of Ephesians is getting at in this famous passage about putting on “the whole armor of God.”

It’s a faithful stand-in because, while the language of Ephesians 6 sounds militaristic, notice that the objective in this passage isn’t victory or conquest.

No, the Christian soldier’s gear is almost entirely defensive: breastplates, shields, etc. The goal, it seems, merely to survive the skirmish.

Even when we hear about a sword, it’s mentioned along with a helmet, and it’s a sword “of the Spirit,” which in my mind tempers thoughts of honed edges and sharp steel. Together this helmet-sword pairing is described as “the word of God,” so the war we’re riding off to will apparently be won by proclamation and faithful action.

Actually, I want to move us away from thoughts of even metaphorical warfare per se. The operative word in this translation is “struggle.” The King James has “wrestle,” which in this case is probably the better choice. Remember Jacob wrestling with God.

If you don’t believe me, look at what all this armor is supposed to help us do:

  • “stand”
  • “withstand”
  • “stand firm”
  • “keep alert”
  • “persevere”

And here’s my favorite detail, translated in an urgent, pragmatic voice that returns us to an earlier theme from Ephesians:

“As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace.”

**

The armor of God is much more like warm clothing against the harsh winter than a brimming complement of weapons with which to subdue our foes. In fact, we don’t really even have foes, not exactly:

“For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

If that sounds a little subtle, a little systemic, a little abstract, well, that just goes to show why the struggle is long and hard, why we need perseverance as if for an interminable day out in the cold, why nothing less than the word of God will keep us focused and effective in our work.

I fear that too many Christians have misidentified this passage’s “powers and principalities,” assuming they are ominous Others set on conquering us rather than systems of already operating oppression constructed subtly and collectively by communities, governments, networks of influence, and yes religious institutions. These powers are set on further disempowering and exploiting the most vulnerable.

So let’s take the militarism out of our reading of this passage. The Christian response to coercive force is not to dish it back in turn.

This is not to say that righteousness must not prevail, that the struggle against oppression must not include the “winning out” of certain ideas and values.

Neither does this reading rule out accountability for wrongdoing, and the tearing down of unjust structures in order to make room for new ones that will better support the flourishing of the whole human family.

But to note that the armor of God is for persevering against systems of evil rather than “defeating evil people” does mean naming sin without vilifying others and without giving ourselves a pass for how we might be complicit in those systems.

It does mean holding fast to hope and mutual affection in the midst of so many reasons to despair. Make no mistake, the “powers and principalities” are real.

We hear of them in scathing church abuse reports, resurging environmental degradation, the scapegoating of immigrants and poor people, and the continued separation of more than 500 children from their parents due to what seems for all the world like deliberate and malignant government incompetence.

Being bolstered by the armor of God means continuing to believe that things can get better for people who are ready ready for better. It means believing we all have a part to play, with God’s help.

It may feel right now that compassion and fair-mindedness and even the aspiration to moral authority have been left standing out in the cold. But I believe people of good faith all over the world can and will continue to stand, continue to lace up and step out, continue to make a difference for the marginalized and forgotten.

So pray for whatever armor will help you persevere. The way won’t be easy, but our God is strong to save. And we are stronger than we know.

Image credit: “Ola de frío polar” by chicageek via Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

Robot with chatbot? (Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash)

Could a chatbot help get people praying?

Kyle

A good friend of mine developed a well-known chatbot for a faith-based organization. On a recent skills-exchange fun day, he showed me around the automation tool he uses.

Thus was born CCP Prayer Guide.

As I wrote on Facebook when introducing him to the world,

Please talk to my chatbot. He’s a really dumb spiritual director with a very limited library of multimedia prayer resources and some mostly wonky coaching moves.

He is only a prototype. Don’t send the link to your kid who hasn’t gone to church since high school.

(Yet.)

Seriously, I’m just playing around with this. But I also think it’s a good idea and I’m curious if you do too.

Sufficiently disclaimed? OK: prayr.cc/guide

There followed a generous flurry of engagement and good-natured feedback. Lots of people were curious, a few quite excited, a few understandably disappointed.

It’s been a fun project so far—I actually just uploaded a few behavioral changes in response to that first round of feedback. My favorite: the (very human) request that I code in a way to say goodbye. People felt creepy just leaving the conversation when they lost interest in the loop of options.

**

I’ve long been interested in how we can use the tools that otherwise govern our working or even waking hours to carve out a space for spiritual practice. These offerings don’t have have to be fancy (hi, Pray As You Go!), just something that can remind us to pray and provide some just-in-time resources—maybe a little bit of extra support for people who are new to prayer, or to certain types of it.

When I started my digital missioner job at VTS, one of the first things I did was go on a retreat to see if I could develop from a scratch a “Rule of Life” app.

(Spoiler: I couldn’t, at least not one I found very compelling.)

Every year or so, a group of us rallies around an idea like this: as an app, or maybe a podcast. Here’s the most recent such convening.

There are major challenges. Attractive, full-featured apps are still incredibly expensive to develop. My intel says $80-100K if you don’t want it to look like it was obviously built from a drag-and-drop, third-party kit.

Should the Episcopal Church have done it by now? Maybe.

But I’ve talked to some pretty savvy publishers who think it’s a good way to waste a lot of money. Granted, those publishers are usually trying to run content-sales businesses, whereas for denominations it might just be the cost of doing business. Still, some of the pushback I’ve heard over the years at least gives me pause.

A screen capture from a chatbot convo

So I gotta say, I’m pretty intrigued by the idea that a chatbot could do much of what I’ve always wanted an app to do: remind me to pray and provide some resources. Among the arguments in favor of the approach are the following:

(1) Most people have messenger apps on their phones. And those apps pretty much have to have notifications set up, since messaging is kind of useless without them.

(2) Chatbot software is really easy to learn. A programming background helps but is definitely not required. You do have to be able to think like a programmer/designer (e.g., “How will users interact with my tool?”), but you don’t have to be able to write code. I think a good chatbot is probably much cheaper to develop than a good app.

(3) Part of what’s fun about interacting with a chatbot is the choose-your-own-adventure feeling. Using a bot as a kind of “interface layer” between users and a library of spiritual resources is that users get to make some choices, but they don’t get overwhelmed.

(4) A chatbot still gives developers access to most of the affordances of a smartphone. You can show someone a picture, play them some audio or video, or chime/vibrate when their two (or five or …) minutes of quiet prayer time are finished.

(5) Writing for a chatbot (unlike for a sermon or blog post) forces you to get right to the point. Ever since a fateful post-confession chat with beloved spiritual teacher Mark Dyer,* my thinking has been that less is more when you’re trying to inspire prayer.

A beautiful image, a short poem, a few verses of scripture, a simple melody repeated like a mantra. In my opinion, we don’t actually need much more than that to point our souls in the right direction.

I don’t know what the next year has in store for me (more from the life changes department very soon), but I hope some more development time on this (playful) proof of (prayerful) concept is in my future.

If you want to hear about the bot’s expanding library and vocabulary, watch the blog and the newsletter—or send literally any message to the CCP Prayer Guide (v. 1.1).

Image credit: rawpixel on Unsplash

* Disclosure: Affiliate link. But I really hope you will read this lovely biography by Tom Linthicum.

Gathering looking up (Ephesians 1)

Destined for Adoption (Baptism & Ephesians 1)

Kyle

A sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost:

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

**

“If … you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility … you will acquire many exotic new facts.”

Thus begins my favorite passage in David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest. It’s almost seven pages long, and it’s composed of a series of observations about life, about being human. Here’s a sampling:

“[1] there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness … [2] everybody’s sneeze sounds different … [3] the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened … [4] the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché … [5] 100% of the things [compulsive thinkers] spend … their time and energy … trying to prepare for … are never good …* [6] ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

You get the idea. Seven pages of the stuff we don’t notice, or don’t want to admit, or that we always assumed was uniquely bad about us. Reading it for the first time, I still remember wondering how long Wallace could go on with this list, and how much more of it I could take.

There’s so much to celebrate about being human, and so much to mourn. Reality touches us so deeply that sometimes it does just come pouring out of us, heaving out of us, as it does in those pages. It comes with tears and laughter and the occasional long pause to gather our strength.

And then at some point we’ve said our piece and the narrative of our life continues, which is what happens in the book. Lying there in an upstairs flat on Old University Avenue, I continued reading as seven beautiful, heart-rending pages just sort of give way to a digression about the permanence of tattoos. The spell was broken, but I never forgot the passage.

**

The verses we heard this morning from the Letter to the Ephesians are a little like that passage from Infinite Jest.

The grammar is similar, for one thing. To make it easier to read, the translators have split these verses up into six sentences, but in the original Greek it’s just one long run-on, going and going and going.  

Like Wallace, the author of Ephesians uses this approach to … unspool a series of profound truths. It’s as if the message is too important for more traditional phrasing. “Just let me get this down and then I’ll worry about readable sentences. I just have too much to say about God’s blessing.”

There is a lot to say about God’s blessing. In this passage, we hear about the blessings of spiritual gifts, forgiveness and redemption, wisdom and insight, divine guidance, the scriptures, the gospel, belief, joyful praise, and the seal of the Holy Spirit. I’m sure I missed some.

Ultimately, the author speaks of the great blessing of a divine plan, but not in the simplistic way that assumes everything that happens to us as individuals is the direct result of God’s allow-powerful will. “God’s plan” is for the whole human community and indeed for the whole creation of which we are a part.

The plan is an ever-expanding circle of relationship and love. The plan is full inheritance of God’s good gifts, shared freely by all—no prerequisite, no litmus test, no questions asked.

At the center of the passage, at the center of this vision, is Christ. From the very beginning and for the fullness of time, Christ is the Holy One, the Chosen, the Beloved.

Christ who invites us to share in God’s abundance, Christ who frees us from shame and regret and whatever else holds us back from living with devotion and with joy. Christ who shows us God, models unselfish love, binds us together, and who—whether we notice it or not—is with us always unto the end of the age.

Our destiny, says the Letter to the Ephesians, is to be gathered up.

God longs to see creation flourishing and free and also one. And by God we are longing for it too. How could we not, whatever our political or cultural or other myriad identities and affiliations, how could we not long for an easing of the division and the strife and the struggle and the separation we experience?

Holy Baptism, the sacrament of Christian initiation we are honored to celebrate today, is at the center of the part the Church can play in accomplishing God’s mission of making whole. In baptism, we practice what it is like to be gathered up in Christ.

Baptism offers us a new beginning, and not just in the sense that today is a new beginning for Daniel Rosario, whom we will baptize today [at the 10 am service].

When we are baptized into Christ, we are invited into a lifelong process of ongoing renewal. We commit to the traditions of Christian living that invite us—week by week, season by season—to drink anew from the waters of God’s cleansing and energizing Spirit. Every day we are a new creation by God’s mercy.

Baptism reassures us that we are part of something bigger, a household of God that looks ever outward, ever onward. We’re a people that at our best get caught up in this divine mission: more listening, more caring, more serving. More love. More life.

Most importantly, baptism reminds us that it is not our actions alone that will bind all creation together in loving and just relationship. Yes, we make promises, vowing to grow in our faith, proclaim the Good News, love our neighbor, strive for justice. These are actions and responsibilities.

But we do it all with a need for grace and goodness that is beyond us. Each year we renew our covenant with a humble trust that God in Christ will make possible what we cannot accomplish by ourselves.

That reality, for me, is at the core the Church’s teaching on baptism. It is a declaration and a promise: You are not alone. We are not alone. No one, ultimately, is alone. No matter our foibles and brokenness.

We are destined for adoption. We are born for redemption and relationship. We wait, in hope, with Christ, to be finally and fully gathered up, drawn together in God’s everlasting arms.

My friends, pay close attention: We are about to witness—and participate—as God draws the circle wider. Let us rejoice and be glad.

Photo by Benny Jackson on Unsplash

Stock photo matters: Swings

In praise of improving stock photo libraries

Kyle 3 Comments

When I recently commended a particular online discussion tool in response to a query on the Forma Facebook Group, a friend noted “I wish it was a little prettier. But that’s the curmudgeon in me.”

I contend that you don’t have to be a curmudgeon to want learning tools to be beautiful. No less an educational authority than Maria Montessori put it this way:

“Another character of the objects is that they are attractive. Colour, brightness and harmony of form are sought after in everything which surrounds the child. Not only the sensorial material, but also the environment is so prepared that it will attract [them], as in Nature brilliant petals attract insects to drink the nectar which they conceal.

“‘Use me carefully,’ say the clean, polished tables; ‘Do not leave me idle,’ say the little brooms with their handles painted with tiny flowers; ‘Dip your little hands in here,’ say the wash basins, so clean and ready with their soap and bubbles.”

The Discovery of the Child

If you can read that bit about the broom handles without going a little watery … well, you might just need some more beauty in your life.

My work on Creative Commons Prayer has been largely motivated by the growing importance of art and music to my own spirituality. I suspect working at St. Michael’s Church has had something to do with that, but so has studying with so many gifted designers and media makers.

And the truth is, many of our educational resources, especially free ones, are drab at best, and downright alienating at worst.

Stock photo collections have been a mixed blessing in this regard. Sure, it’s easy to get photos, including free ones, that are individually gorgeous. But as many commentators have noted, together they have too often had an ugly side effect: reinforcing white supremacy by excluding the experience of people of color.

We can do better in this respect by searching for Creative Commons photos on a site like Flickr, but some projects do not lend themselves to required media attribution.

Pastor leading prayer
Photo by Haley Rivera on Unsplash

I thought about representation a lot as I was working on my Holy Eucharist Illuminated teaching cards. I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, but I think I did way better than I would have been able to even just a couple of years ago.

That’s partly because I continue to get a better handle on the limitations of my particular experience as a white, ordained man, and partly because the libraries are getting better.

Free stock photo sites like Unsplash and Pixabay are slowly getting more diverse in their racial and cultural representation. I assume that’s partly because of small-but-growing collections like Nappy (and others), which are tackling the problem more head on and whose photos I’m starting to see show up on the bigger sites.

I also think questions of representation and equity are slowly starting to loom a little larger on (white) creators’ minds. (Emphasis on slowly—see, for example, Season 7 of Gimlet’s StartUp Podcast, which chronicles both the successes and the grueling struggles of Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton.)

I say all this with two explicit intentions in mind:

(1) To challenge us all to attend to the aesthetic dimensions of the work we do. I’m coming away from my most recent resource development experience more convinced than ever of this need. Beautiful learning tools and experiences help us learn better.

(2) To remind those of us likely to need reminding that with the great power of stock photo libraries and the like comes the great responsibility to be thoughtful and critical about how we select and deploy them. Our efforts to make media worthy of the best of our traditions will fall short if we don’t continually challenge ourselves to capture the full range of beauty represented in our whole human family.

Cover photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

People praying photo - eucharistic prayer

Teaching Sermon: The Eucharistic Prayer

Kyle 2 Comments

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter:

Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:24-30; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

This sermon was preached as part of an Eastertide series examining different parts of the Sunday liturgy. You can find the “Praying Cards” I mention near the end over on Creative Commons Prayer.

**

“Do this in remembrance of me.”

These words of Jesus are at the center of the remarkable prayer we offer each week as we celebrate the Eucharist. We think of this observance as a commandment and an invitation and a gift he gave on the night before he died.

What does Jesus want us to recall, to make present? That’s our investigation for this morning, as we continue our sermon series about the major pieces of our Sunday morning worship.

**

So imagine yourself as a participant in that very special meal some two thousand years ago.

Your teacher has arranged for your motley crew to eat the Passover meal in the upstairs room of a dwelling outside Jerusalem. The ritual itself and frankly the luxury of a quiet meal in private have you pretty excited.

On the other hand, Jesus has been acting weird lately, and you have the sense that something important is about to happen. He confirms your hunch as he begins:

“I’ve really been looking forward to sharing this meal with you before I suffer. I won’t eat again until after my work is done.”

Then he picks up a loaf of bread. Gives thanks. Breaks it into pieces. Raises his voice in that way he does when he really wants you to remember something: “This is my body, which is given for you.”

What does that mean? What can that mean?

You realize he’s trained you pretty well for this kind of reflection about holy symbolism. You rifle through some options in your head:

  • Our teacher and his teachings sustain us, like the mana in the desert sustained our ancestors.
  • Our teacher is a holy presence, like the bread the priests in the temple leave on the altar each week, as an offering.

As an offering. You get a pit-of-the-stomach feeling as you consider a third option:

  • Our teacher’s very life, his very body, is an offering, a sacrifice. Freely given, for our sake.

That he might be alluding to this last option doesn’t sound so crazy in light of what Jesus has been up to lately.

You realize he’s definitely serious when picks up the wine: “This cup that I am pouring out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

Your mind races when he says “new covenant.” It races immediately to that place in the scriptures where God promises to write the law on our very hearts.

It’s the next part of that scroll that always sticks out for you: “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” Hmmm.

Until the night is interrupted by more urgent matters, you ponder what this all could mean. And you return to this moment again and again in the years to come, as does your community.

**

OK, so please forgive my somewhat absurd telling of the story. Holy Eucharist means all this and more, of course: presence, sustenance, sacrifice, an intimate meal.

Also the chance to know and experience God with our bodies, to taste and see that the Lord is good. And the chance to remember that Christ’s death was not the end of this story of sacrifice.

But it’s not like all that could have gotten through to any single disciple in the moment it was happening. That’s not how meaning-making works.

It works by people working things out, together, slowly, guided by God through successive retellings of the story. We see that process happening in the scriptures, with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul passing on what they were told about what happened and what they think it all means. It’s a process we’re engaging still.

But what about John, and today’s gospel passage? Well, John takes a completely different tack on that momentous evening, focusing not on the meal but on Jesus pausing to wash the disciples feet. And then on a seemingly endless speech that Biblical scholars call the Farewell Discourse.

To my ears, that speech can be read as a meditation on what communion with God and other means. Listen again to a tiny part of it:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

Abide in me and I will abide in you, just as I abide in the Father and the Father in me. This basic idea sort of rolls through the Farewell Discourse, repeated and remixed in endless permutation.

Even though the metaphor here is vine and branches, it’s connected to the metaphor of bread and wine. I will abide in you, says Christ. I am a part of you. You and I share one substance. We all share one substance. We are connected. We are intertwined. We are both many and one.

 

**

OK, but what about this Eucharistic prayer? How does all this actually work?

“Do this in remembrance of me.” The Eucharistic prayer is how we remember. We retell the story to make the events present today. We retell the story to claim our part in it.

Since we can’t hit every point in every prayer, there are many to choose from in a variety of sources, most obviously our Book of Common Prayer. So whenever you participate in the Eucharist in an Episcopal Church, you get some version of each of a predictable set of elements in a pretty consistent order.

We turn our hearts to God, joining our voices with the saints and angels. We recall the story of God’s relationship to creation and to us, and then of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and this ritual he gave us to celebrate it all. Finally, we ask the Holy Spirit to make Christ present in the bread and wine and among us as a community.

If you want that outline chopped into smaller pieces, or you want to learn the Greek and Latin words we use to label them, there’s a link in the bulletin to some illuminated notecards I created. 

**

Perhaps the only sure thing we can say after 2,000 years of reflection is that the Eucharist can and should mean many different things to us. We can and should experience a wide range of spiritual benefits from participating.

We might feel closer to God. We might feel closer to each other. We might feel hope that for for us, as for Christ, death is not the final word.

But in my opinion, the most important thing we should feel is empowered. My favorite line of any Eucharist prayer is this:

Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name.

We do what we do in here so we can do what is needed out there.

The fullness of this vision of communion is what we might call Eucharistic living. It turns our acts of seeking and serving into an integrated movement of worship and witness. You might even call it the Jesus Movement.

If you don’t believe me, recall once again what Jesus said on the night before he died for us:

“My Father is glorified by this: that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

Visualizing religious affiliation screenshot

Visualizing religious affiliation over time

Kyle

I’m currently working on a presentation about my research proposing that we more actively investigate alternatives to what I’ve been calling Sunday School As We Know It.

As a part of that work, I’m arguing that we need models that take more explicit account of religious diversity and work toward what Mary Hess calls a “community of communities” approach to faith identity (disclosure: affiliate link).

I wanted an easy visual way to capture the difference in diversity during that historical aberration known as the baby boom versus how things are today. I couldn’t find a graphic visualizing religious affiliation over time, so I made one:

Suggested attribution: “U.S. Religious Affiliation, 1948-2017”
by Kyle Oliver at prayr.cc/relig-affil (CC BY 2.0)

As I said on Facebook after this post really took off, the thing I believe we need to say anytime we look at affiliation data is they mirror pretty strongly the broader social picture that Putnam documented in Bowling Alone (disclosure: affiliate link). Dis-affiliation is a broad social story as much as, and probably more than, a religious story per se.

None of this means people of faith don’t have work to do, but it should shape for us the character of that work, in ways we’re obviously still figuring out. It also means it’s not “all about us,” which I take some comfort in.

If you’re interested in thinking more about all this, the best thing out there right now, in my view, is Elizabeth Drescher’s Choosing Our Religion (disclosure: affiliate link).

A few notes about reuse:

A few methodological notes:

  • I’m not a sociologist, of religion or any other kind. So take that for what you will in terms of my expertise for visualizing religious affiliation data.
  • The data comes from a Gallup survey covering these same years. I sampled every seven years except for 2017, which was the most recently available datapoint.
  • As I put in the little footnote, “Mormon” appears as an option in 1979. I don’t know how they coded that answer previously. I’m guessing as “Other”?
  • As I also put in the footnote, I recoded the “Christian (nonspecific)” category as “Protestant” when it appears in the data in 1999, just to simplify things. Obviously, this choice assumes that the vast majority of people selecting this category are Protestant and either don’t know it or don’t like the label. This seems supported by the fact that adding this category didn’t seem to introduce any discontinuity in the Catholic numbers. Complicating this, of course, is the likelihood that Orthodox Christians might prefer “Christian (nonspecific)” over “Other,” unless the interviewers make that choice for them. I don’t know if the Gallup codebook is available, but I didn’t investigate. To give you some sense of the scale of this latter issue: Pew currently puts Orthodox Christians at 0.5%.
  • I was as surprised as some of you that at least “Muslim” and perhaps also “Buddhist” and “Hindu” weren’t pulled out explicitly. My guess is that’s because each comes in at less than 1% (0.9%, 0.7%, 0.7%, respectively), again according to Pew.

Thanks for taking such an active interest in this graphic visualizing religious affiliation data! Let’s let this phenomenon spur us on to clear-eyed realism and action rather than anxious hand-wringing.