The Bible is a storybook.  Basically, it is a love story between God and humanity; a story of a covenant made, broken, and renewed, again and again. [...] We need to enlarge our grasp of this love story–to learn it more completely, to understand it more deeply, to possess it more personally, and to live it more fully.  This is a lifelong task.

This is one of my favorite passages from the book Living Faithfully as a Prayer Book People by Episcopal priest and Christian educator John H. Westerhoff.  It gets at both how I read the Bible and how I approach Christian formation and education.  I think that the stories of the Bible as stories are more important than any propositional statements we can make about them, and are both more compelling and more necessary than any lesson or  “moral” we can draw from them.

Image courtesy of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Menlo…

Photo of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, courtesy of Episcopal News Service

I got that question a lot this summer from friends and family who aren’t Episcopalians and who are bemused by the stuff they read about my church in the national press.  So here is my brief, idiosyncratic, and much too general take on “what’s happening.”

Every three years the Episcopal Church gathers for General Convention.  General Convention is our governing body; we don’t have an archbishop or pope who decides things for us, but instead work in a complicated, messy, democratic way to get the business of the church done, and even to decide what our business really is.  Our bicameral legislative body is noticeably similar in structure to the U.S. Congress, which is no surprise because it developed alongside it, under the guidance of some of the same “founding fathers.”  It’s big, though, with over 800 people (lay and…

What is your earliest memory?

A retreat leader once told me that if I dug back into my earliest memories I might be able to uncover the source for at least some of my images of God. The theory is that most of us form an idea or image of God at a very young age, regardless of our exposure to formal religious instruction or lack thereof, and often those early images remain embedded in our psyches. While most of us develop more intellectually sophisticated ideas about God as we age, and some of us even mature in our relationships to God, nonetheless those early images continue to shape both our theology (the ideas) and our spirituality (the relationship).

Test it out and see what you think. The very earliest memory I can recover is one of being comforted: I was sitting on my mother’s lap in a favorite rocking chair. We were…