In church growth and vitality circles, you can often hear the adage that the AA meetings that happen in our church buildings do church better than many churches do. Oftentimes, I’ve heard that framed in terms of welcome. It’s true that everyone who walks through the doors of a 12-step meeting is welcomed, quickly connected to the group, and given a role from setting out chairs to making coffee.
But there’s more than welcome going on here. 12-step groups aren’t filled with people whose lives are going pretty well, people who want to reach a hand out (and perhaps also down) to include people out of a sense of magnanimity. Instead, it’s about people gathering around the shared recognition that their lives are completely unmanageable without God, and that people who have turned their lives and their wills over to the care of God are always in the process of repeating the steps of surrender, self-examination, repentance, and making amends. It’s about people gathering around a shared honesty about our human weakness — and yes, about our capacity for sin — and saying to each other “yes, me too. You aren’t alone in your struggles.” In doing so, there is always a return to the beginning. Self-offering to God isn’t a one-and-done act, it’s a continuous process. When we say the confession each week before communion, we say to each other as well as to God, “yes, me too.”
In a little essay called The Return to Baptism, Robert Jenson reminds us that “What we do between baptism and the kingdom… is not to march forward from baptism into something else but rather again and again to return to baptism — indeed, to creep back into it. Once it has been said, it is clear that this is the only answer that Christianity can give” about the character of the Christian life.
At Trinity, we’re blessed to have far more baptisms than the average Episcopal parish. Every time we do, we all are given the opportunity to return to our own baptism, to give ourselves to God all over again. One of the questions asked at baptism, and which we all answer as we reaffirm our baptismal covenant, is:
“Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”
When we say as a congregation, “I will with God’s help,” that’s another way of saying “yes, me too.” And when we do so, I pray that we are all reminded that we aren’t alone in our struggles.
Yours in Christ,
The Rev. Cn. Dr. Kara N. Slade, Associate Rector