A broken church is the kind of church where I am most at home. The Episcopal Church is such a church and it is the heir of a long line of broken churches.
Within the lifetime of many
present members of Trinity there has been brokenness over matters of
churchmanship, liturgical reform, the ordination of women to the priesthood and
the issues of same-sex relationships. Even greater brokenness was experienced
as a result of the American Revolution, the British political and religious
upheavals of the 17th century and the watershed events of the
Reformation. Before that there was the great breaking apart of the Eastern and
Western churches that occurred in the 11th and 12th
centuries.
A very great and tragic brokenness
came about as the result of decisions by an early church council in Jerusalem
(described in the 15th chapter of Acts) to accept gentile converts
without requiring them to become Jews. It freed the young church to be as
inclusive as possible as it set out to evangelize the gentile world. But it
flew in the face of the most deeply believed and scripturally based convictions
of many church members and was the beginning of a process in which the Jewish
Christian church withered and died.
For those who wish clear and
simple answers to questions of faith and practice there are Christian bodies
that seem to have no doubts about their wholeness. But for many of us who
recognize our own brokenness, who live with the brokenness of the ones we love and
are willing to confront and give ourselves to a broken world, this broken
church is home.
Here we are nourished and
strengthened by God’s Word and fed, week by week, with broken bread and poured
out wine that are for us the sacrament of our Lord’s body and blood. Here we
ourselves become broken bread and poured out wine for the sake of others. Here
we rejoice in the certain knowledge that God will make the Church, and each one
of us, whole.