Kathy Staudt on Resurrection at Episcopal Cafe

Beautiful piece today on Resurrection by my friend and former professor, Kathy Staudt, over at Episcopal Cafe...check it out HERE...


An excerpt:

In his book on Resurrection, Rowan Williams points to the strangeness of the Risen Christ. Though we have stories of Resurrection encounters, the risen Jesus is always at first unrecognized. Some fundamental transformation has happened, and that transformation testifies to an altogether new relationship between humanity and God. Everything has changed.

This is something that I think is not widely understood about Christian spirituality: People know, we know, that we are called to “follow Jesus,” to try to live as he lived, and we are often judged by the degree to which we fall short of his example and his teaching – and that is fair enough. We ask “What would Jesus do?” to guide our ethical thinking. But in fact, when Christians reflect on our relationship to “Jesus,” it isn’t really the historical Jesus we’re talking about, or even, completely, the Jesus we meet in the gospels. It is, more mysteriously, the Risen Christ, who belongs at once to our flesh-and-blood experience and to the transcendent mystery of God – who brings together, once and for all, our humanity and the God who reaches out to us, loves us, desires the restoration of our lives and our world.

This is a tough thing to get our minds around ...

click HERE for more

Discerning God's Delight, Rev. Dr. Mark McIntosh at VTS

I was at VTS the last couple of days and heard two wonderful lectures and two wonderful discussions on the topic of "Discerning God's Delight," given by the Rev. Dr. Mark McIntosh, professor at Loyola University, Chicago and former chaplain to the House of Bishops. His lectures laid out some of his project which includes delving deeply into the patristic and medieval traditions in order to glean a way or a process by which we might discern God's will, and discern God's delight. It was an extremely rich discussion, and I am taking some time to read my notes, and reflect upon it. I am thankful for the opportunity to hear his lecture, to have my imagination and mind stretched by it, as well as by the responses by the Rev. Dr. Kate Sonderegger and Dr. Kathy Staudt, two of my favorite teachers and mentors. I will write more, soon, on this wonderful topic, "Discerning God's Delight," but in the meanwhile, I am so grateful for the time at VTS, and for these great teachers of theology.

What would our days look like if we spent time each day just reflecting on what it is that God's will might be for us each day? What might our days look like if we could embrace the sense that God delights in us!?


~ The Rev. Peter M. Carey

The Call to Discipleship, Dr. Kathy Staudt

One of my mentors, Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt, has a wonderful piece posted a few days ago over at the Episcopal Cafe about the Call to Discipleship and discernment and trying to figure out what we're supposed to be and do in our lives. I think the questions she poses about vocation and its relation to "making a living" and "ordained ministry" are very helpful, and the route she takes through some possible approaches is really helpful and leaves me wanting more (she does say she will be posting more on these subjects - which is great!)

If you've ever wondered "what you should do when you grow up," you should check out her post (excerpt below, the rest HERE at the Episcopal Cafe)....

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The Call to Discipleship

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

I have been trying to create ways to talk about vocation WITHOUT moving immediately to questions about “how am I supposed to make my living,” and especially without moving immediately to the question: “Is God calling me to the ordained ministry?”

It is almost impossible to disentangle these questions these days in our culture, where identity and worth are so tied to our role in the consumer economy, let alone in the Church, where vocation and discernment so strongly tied in people’s minds to questions about ordained ministry. But I insist on disentangling them. I believe it is essential for us as a church to be focusing, not so much on roles and résumés as on the original call of each of us to “follow” Jesus , to practice ever more faithful and intentional discipleship....

Read the rest HERE.

What is the Church for?

...a wonderful entry from my mentor, blogger and friend Kathy Staudt on the Episcopal Cafe blog...

read the entire article here...

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

What is the church for? In a 1938 lecture series on the BBC, collected in her book The Spiritual Life, the British writer and retreat leader Evelyn Underhill answered the question in a way that has challenged the church for the past century:

The Church is in the world to save the world. It is a tool of God for that purpose; not a comfortable religious club established in fine historical premises. Every one of its members is required, in one way or another, to cooperate with the Spirit in working for that great end: and much of this work will be done in secret and invisible ways. We are transmitters as well as receivers. Our contemplation and our action, our humble self-opening to God, keeping ourselves sensitive to his music and light, and our generous self-opening to our fellow creatures, keeping ourselves sensitive to their needs, ought to form one life, mediating between God and His world, and bringing the saving power of the Eternal into time.

Underhill appropriately focuses on the church’s mission in and for the world; to her mostly Church of England audience, she is challenging the image of the Church that became comfortable during the long centuries of what Loren Mead has labeled the “Christendom” paradigm, when most people were nominal Christians, even churchgoers, and the mission of the Church was seen as being overseas, far away and directed toward people distinctly “other” than the people in the pews. Mission was done by the institution; for the people in the pews, church attendance was a regular social obligation, to be taken with more or less seriousness depending on one’s particular spiritual needs and dispositions: to be part of a church was to support “a comfortable religious club.”

But Underhill recognizes that the institutional model, the “comfortable religious club,” is not a true embodiment of what the Church is called to be. Read the rest HERE.