interview us
Could All Souls' be your church? We submit to a job interview:
Q: What does it mean to be a Christian?
Christians are followers of Jesus Christ. They seek to follow his teachings and model their lives on His example. More importantly, Christians believe that Jesus is God, having become a human being, come to rescue and restore us and all of His broken creation. This restoration isn't just in some future afterlife, but begins right here, right now. As we place our trust in Him, God begins to restore us to a right relationship with Him, fixing the broken things within us that we can't fix for ourselves, giving us the ability to begin making the world a better place. If this is true, then it's certainly good news for us all. In fact, that's what the word "gospel" means. At All Souls' Church we want to tell this good news to anyone who will listen. Because God is restoring His entire creation, not just our immortal souls, the material stuff of this world is important to us. We care about alleviating poverty, hunger, and disease all over the world. We care about being good stewards of the environment. We love art, architecture, music, dance, and literature, among other things, because our ability to produce these things from the stuff of this material world is a great gift from God. That's why when we gather to worship God, we strive for all the beauty and reverence that our meager resources and the riches of our tradition can produce.
Q: What does All Souls' Church think of other religions?
A: We respect people of other religions and believe that their traditions have much to teach us. At the same time, our own Christian beliefs are strongly held. We actually believe that Jesus is God incarnate, and that He died to save us from our own sinfulness and to redeem all of His broken creation. We believe that He really did come back from the dead, and that He is the only way by which humanity can be reconciled to God. For us, these points are not just matters of personal preference. We have to believe them because they're true, whether we like them or not. Is that disrespectful of other religions? Not at all. Because we have deeply-held beliefs of our own, we understand it when other people do, too. While we can't all be right, we can certainly agree to disagree, and still love and respect each other. We could always tell people that anything they care to believe is just fine because, after all, it doesn't really matter what they believe, and under different language we all really mean the same thing and worship the same God, and so forth. But that would be truly disrespectful.
Q: Many churches shun people who embrace alternative lifestyles, while others have recently become quite open and accepting. What does All Souls' Church think of gay people?
A: We love them. God loves them, so how can we do any less? The more important question, though, is what does God think of any of us. The Bible has alot of tough things to say, prohibitions on homosexual activity being but one of them. It doesn't go easy on straight people either. It holds all of us to some awfully high standards of conduct in every area of life. From the Bible we learn, for example, that greed, pride, envy, excessive judgmentalism, and lust are sins that we need to turn away from. As Christians, we have to take the Bible very seriously as an authoritative word from God himself, and be willing to place our whole selves under its scrutiny. Whatever our sexual orientation, in his Word God calls us to be generous, humble, forgiving, and loving. When we realize the full implications of this, we understand just how difficult it would be to even attempt answering God's call. To make matters worse, we've yet to find an intellectually honest way of reading the whole of holy scripture that could somehow explain away its demands on us. So maybe in the interests of accepting people and getting along, we should just take scripture less seriously. The problem with that is that then we could shrug off any and all demands that God makes of us, including the ones that make for true tolerance. The Bible instructs us not to hate, and to love everyone just as much as God loves them. How much is that? So much that we'd give up our own lives for them, just like Jesus did. This isn't just a nice thing we might do because we're nice people. This is such a difficult thing to do that we can only do it because God demands it of us and promises to help us to do the right thing. We could, of course, not take the Bible so seriously, but all of the sudden that doesn't look so gay-friendly anymore. Who would you rather have in your corner? A nice person or a Christian?
Q: Do you seriously mean that everyone is welcome at All Souls'? Shouldn't they be afraid you'll try to get them to change?
Yes, everyone is welcome at All Souls' Church. There's no standard of propriety you have to meet before you can come in. God takes each of us where we are and starts moving us to where we should be. We don't change people. God does that. We provide the loving Christian community in which people can begin to hear God's claim on their lives and discover the adventure He has in store for them. But if we're serious about following Jesus, God will certainly call on each of us to change, and provide us the means to do so in a way that we never could for ourselves.
Q: Aren't religious beliefs just private matters of personal preference? If you want to believe in God, that's not really something you can or should convince anyone else of, is it?
Atheism's become trendy again lately in the popular press, but theism (belief in God) has continued to hold its own among the philosophers who study and discuss such questions. Believing in God is more than just intellectually defensible. Many respected intellectuals would tell you it's actually your best bet. So far from being private matters of personal opinion, questions about the existence of God, where the universe came from, and the objective basis for morality are all things that reasonable people can and should debate rationally. Now, people come to belief in God and become followers of Jesus for all kinds of good reasons, not all of them intellectual. But at All Souls' Church, we're willing to look at the tough questions and try not to settle for simplistic answers.
Q: What does it mean to be an Anglican Christian?
Christianity has been around for about two thousand years. During that time, it has produced many movements and schools of thought, and left a vast treasure-trove of wisdom for today's Christian to explore. At its simplest, being an Anglican Christian is to be a part of the Anglican Communion, a collection of churches all over the world (with about 70 million members) that are each descended from the Church of England. The reason, though, that we are Anglicans is that we believe it's a great way to practice the Christian faith. Anglicanism appropriates the very best of the vast Christian tradition while avoiding its excesses and errors.
Q: For those of us who already know some theology and church history, what does this Anglican synthesis look like?
We are heirs of CATHOLIC tradition: we draw for our sustenance upon teaching and practices that go back to the Apostles but flowered fully in the Church's first several centuries. The foundation laid for us, and for all subsequent generations of thoughtful Christians, by the Early Church Fathers is a rich legacy. From those early times we inherit our Creed, our sacramental worship, and our sacramental theology; these we share with Christ's true Church wherever it may be found. We see that kinship in powerful ways when we look upon our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Orthodox world. In that sense we claim, and rejoice in, catholicity.
But we also acknowledge that that Church has not always faithfully preserved its theological and spiritual inheritance, and that, in His love and care, in the sixteenth century God raised up great men of faith to REFORM the church, to call us back to the Bible as the ever-living Word of God, the reliable testimony to his grace and favor towards us in the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. In that Word we see clearly that we are saved by God's boundless grace, and we appropriate that grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It is this message -- which we share with all the churches that trace their lineage to the Reformation -- that we proclaim in our preaching and enact in our worship.
We strive to be a church that is fully catholic and fully reformed; and this is what we think it means to be ANGLICANS.
