I grew up in the Episcopal Church. I was really involved as a teenager & young adult, became a lay professional in youth ministry & church finance, and was sponsored to attend seminary with the intention of being ordained an Episcopal priest. I loved the liturgy of the Sunday Eucharist, the weeknight Compline to close the day, the Morning Prayer to start. I brought many people to church, developed liturgies for youth communities to use, and worked with and for young people & children in many ways.
Within five years of my starting seminary, I had become an American Baptist Pastor and my entire church-based landscape had shifted. How that happened is an entirely different story. This is about an experience I had this Spring as Youth Ministry and Liturgy were juxtaposed, and my reactions to each. Unexpected feelings and longings were revealed, and my decision to be gone from that system altogether only strengthened.
The Easter Vigil is an ancient service, and one of my favorites. This service is held the Saturday evening or early Sunday morning of Easter weekend. It is the ‘first service of Easter’ and its liturgy, the readings and chants and songs and tradition are all beautiful. The liturgy begins with the stories of the Hebrew people, continues as the transition between Good Friday and Easter is marked, and concludes with the first Holy Communion (Lord’s Supper, Eucharist) of Easter. I have heard it said that some Episcopal liturgy, and this one especially, can transport you in time and space.
And while the Vigil that night was lovely, the sermon smart and the choir on point, I did not find it transcendent. I found I did not miss it in my life. It was a beautiful service, and I enjoyed myself. I knew and dearly love that evening’s presiding priest, as she’d been my supervisor at a youth ministry job many years ago. I knew many people in the congregation as well, and sat next to a couple at whose wedding I had preached. I even knew the Bishop a few rows behind me who’d been attempting to quietly attend a service he wasn’t expected to lead.
So familiar. Pleasant. And the evening did not stir melancholy, much less the grief I had expected. Nothing. I did not miss it at all, one tiny bit.
That was my recent run-in with liturgy, in which I went with trepidation, expecting desire and longing, and left glad to have been there but not eager to return.
So the other thing…
My friend is a former Mennonite who’s found himself the chaplain at an Episcopal Middle School. He needed at least one day that year of “Episcopal 101” and asked me to do it. I had 20+ years of Episcopal youth ministry. I’d sponsored scores of young people for baptism and confirmation, written Sunday school curricula, run camps and conferences for years. I knew this stuff. No problem.
I had a wonderful time. The three classes, 6th, 7th and 8th grades, were all very different. So varied were their responses and behavior, that I ended up doing three completely separate lesson plans. With the first group, we dove into symbol and expression and what it meant to be a thing. In the 7th grade class, we enacted a funeral. In the 8th grade class, we talked at length about action and faith and what it meant or didn’t mean to claim a thing. All three were tiny glimpses into what my life used to be like. And why I used to do nothing but nurture the lives of these young people.
This was the transportation through time and space. This was the ease-of-return I had thought I’d find in the liturgy but instead found here in the gathering of youth. This was the shocking feeling of loss when it was all over. As I asked which Episcopal Church certain kids attended, I found I knew the congregations. I could imagine what I know are accurate pictures of how Sunday morning goes, and what the next few years could look like. I know well the role the church could have for them, what good that community can bring.
Maybe it’s that anyone can pull off good liturgy with a solid team and training but not anyone can do youth ministry well. And perhaps I feel like I’ve left them, abandoned these youth to fend for themselves. They are so much of the reason why I stayed for so long in the Episcopal Church, and work with youth and children has always defined me in some way. And certainly the institutional church itself does not honor ministry with young people as it should. Funding is always terrible, staffing often problematic, and consistency a pipedream.
This is no longer my work. It is no longer my church. It is *not* what is before me to do. But walking away from it that morning shattered me. It brings me to tears to consider now.
What I’m left with is an overwhelming sense of both relief and loss. The relief comes from the knowledge that I truly feel no call to return to that work, that system. That work is for others to do or not do. And the loss? I’m not quite sure what to do with that other than what I always attempt to do with these times of grief, and the things that slip away.
Note them. Mark them. Honor them. Put them down. Give them to God.
Rev. Jessica Abell