Welcome to Christ Episcopal Church

This last weekend I was privileged to attend a diocesan-wide Confirmation at St. Mark’s Cathedral to present Annie Reinitz for Confirmation. It was an amazing event for any number of reasons – a cathedral that was practically bursting to the seams with confirmands, those being received into the Episcopal Church, and their families; the beautiful music, and the incredible diversity within the sanctuary.

One of my assumptions about God is that God delights in diversity. We see evidence for it in the natural world. Good care for our soil, for example, includes rotating the crops that are planted from year to year. We see it in places like Borneo’s ancient tropical rain forests, where species from orangutans to green sea turtles to sun bears have a home. And we even see it in Scripture. Look no further than the four Gospels that give four different perspectives – that simply can’t be harmonized – on the life and ministry of Jesus.

Some elements of diversity can be easy to see, like different animal species or human ethnicity and language. Other elements are harder to see – and some take a lot of work to get at. Things like economic status, or education, or gender, or opinions.

I’ve been wondering lately what diversity looks like for us at Christ Church. We already take opportunities to celebrate diversity in our common life, such as when we deliberately invite young people into our worship ministries, or when we invite guest musicians to play for us, or when we hear an overlooked translation read for us in worship. And all of that is good.

But I wonder if God isn’t prodding us to look more carefully for the diversity in our midst and invite more diversity into our life together. Not just so that we can more completely reflect the diversity of the community into which we’ve been planted, but so that we can be more welcoming to that community. Because people are always more likely to become part of a group when they can see themselves in it.

So the question is: what do we need to do to ensure that those who would make us more diverse will find Christ Church an inviting and safe place to be? The answer, as is so often the case, starts with our willingness to enter into a new conversation – a new relationship. Our challenge is to have the courage to start.

In Christ, Pastor Aaron Twait