Archive for May 15th, 2009

My church is closing at the end of next month.

And in a very real way, marketing is to blame.

Let me explain…about a year and a half ago, my family joined a (very) small Reformed Episcopal (a.k.a. “Anglican”) church here in Amarillo. I grew up in the Episcopal church, with the 1928 prayer book, the 1940 hymnal, and all the ritual and liturgy that the Church of England bequeathed to the Colonies back in the day. We found our church in kind of an odd way. When we first relocated to Amarillo, I wanted to find an Episcopal church. I found two – one that was pursuing the post-modern, cherry-picked theological, anything goes style worship favored by the main body of the Episcopal church in the United States. The other struck me as kind of old and stodgy. Neither had any appeal to me. So we went elsewhere. We landed at a “mega-church” – one of the many across the country that features a “praise team” (read: “Christian rock group”) and a sermon as their service. Not exactly what I was used to from a liturgical point of view, but at least we were in the pews…um…seats, every Sunday. Then my wife was approached to create a strategic marketing plan for a small Episcopal church. We checked out the church, and found a traditional church, using the “old” prayer book, the “old” hymnal, with a firm grounding in traditional Anglican theology. No gay bishops, same-sex marriages, or any other “if it feels good it can’t be wrong” kind of nonsense. We’d found our church home. Read the rest of this entry »