Glen Robert Gill

Let me just say that it is an honor to be asked to say something on the subject of stewardship to the church. My wife Beth and I have only been members of the church for a few years now, and while we have been pledging members for all that time, I know that there are many longstanding members of the church that could be heard from. But, then again, maybe recent experiences are good ones to hear.

My experience of coming to this church, this kind of church, is probably a little different than most of you here. I grew up in Canada, in an area that never got past its colonial stage and was intensely proud of its British heritage. Where I grew up, your family was either Irish and you were Catholic, Scottish and you were Presbyterian, or English and you were Anglican; and if you were Irish and Scottish and bucking for promotion, you became Anglican. To say I was “raised” Anglican would be an understatement: I was baptized an Anglican at three months, and confirmed an Anglican at 12, in a church where they called the Doxology “the Old Hundreth,” where the Prayers of the People mentioned the Queen, and where you used phrases like “the hanging of the greens” or talked about “what Canterbury was doing,” and people knew what you were talking about. You wore your kilt for weddings and funerals, and maybe for Easter. At fifteen, I was sent off to an Anglican boarding school, and after that to an Anglican university college. When I went in for a doctorate in literature, I realized that being part of the church of Donne, Milton, Blake and T.S. Eliot meant that I must have been doing something right. Beyond that, I didn’t think about it much. Church was like air: as long as it allowed you to breathe freely and clearly see the things around you, you took it for granted. Naturally, that’s when the trouble usually starts.

It started for me when, mostly out of ignorance, I took a teaching job in a small town in the deep south. Without exaggeration, I can say it was the most isolating experience of my life; a total deprivation of any social or religious norms that I understood. Many people here, I know, have had the experience of finding their way to this church home after long periods on the margins. I can tell you that it is just as difficult to have a church home and lose it, leaving a gaping hole in your life through which find yourself hemorrhaging, spiritually and socially. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t subsist on the southern staples of country music and conformity. There was racism, mostly latent but some overt; and there was homophobia, mostly overt. But above all, there was no religious vision, no social vision, that made sense to me. I still remember what one of my students said when I asked about his faith background or denomination: “I’m a Baptist, ya’ll,” he declared. “But a southern Baptist. I ain’t one of these primitive Baptists. They all just crazy.” The distinction, however great, was of course lost on me. And as for me, I was worse than crazy: I was alone in that small town, a religion, apparently, of one. I did eventually make some connections: Methodist students liked to visit me, but they treated me like a quaint antique, a relic from some theological Jurassic period. The few Roman Catholics around tried to convince me that I was really one of them. It was very kind in a way, but there was no fellowship to it, and the longest two years of my life crept on at a miserable, glacial pace.

One day, an older lady I eventually came to see as a sort of fairy godmother, put a little card, with nothing but an address, in my mailbox. Having nothing better to do, I drove past it one Saturday, and saw a small brick church I hadn’t known existed among all the big, white, clapboard ones. In front was a sign with a shield on it, made up of the cross of St. Andrew and the cross of St. George. It was nice to see the former on something other than the confederate flag, but it was the latter that caught my eye. It was, of course, an Episcopal church. It belonged to this American Anglican province I had heard about. I had absent-mindedly looked up Anglican church in the phonebook, and found nothing. But it turned out that there was a community of about 40 Episcopalians in this little town, with a thriving little church, which almost no one knew about. The church was open that day, so I went in: there was a prayer book in the pew, not the 1927 one I was used to (it said 1982,) but all the stuff was the same. There was service bulletin, with our yea-verily-and-forsooth dialect, and all the sit-stand aerobics we Anglicans enjoy. For the first time in two years, I felt at home. They’d just got a new rector. When I came to church the next morning, he greeted me at the door: “Have you ever been to a church like this?” he asked. “I’m an Anglican,” I said. “Well!” he said, “The Lord be with you!” Needless to say, I joined that busy little church and they welcomed me like the prodigal. I’d found a tribe in the wilderness. Like Job, I’d been miraculously restored to abundance in a whirlwind. Although where Job got new daughters, I found a wife. But Mother Church had provided.

When Beth and I moved here to New Jersey, we worried it was another exile, and for a while it felt like one. There are many Episcopal churches around here, but not all of them make welcome a priority. Doors were often locked. Some just cited their parish hours when you called. Of all the rectors I called, Father Poppe was the only one who said “come by at this specific time and we’ll talk.” But what would I find? Would there be another restoration? Would Mother church provide again? I remember sitting and telling Bernie how I appreciate traditional liturgy. He leaned over with wry grin and said, “We’re doing Rite I in Lent.” “Do you have a Bible Study?” I asked. “I think we have two or three,” he said. I loved it; he wasn’t sure how many were going on. Wherever two or three were gathered, presumably. What we found when we joined St. George’s, of course, was the abundant resources and whirlwinds of activity that makes our service bulletins, on average, eighteen pages long (plus inserts). Mother Church had risen to the occasion again, and it was larger than the first time.

Beth and I have been pledging members of St. George’s since the first time we were asked. We pledge because we know what it’s like to not belong, to have no community. We know that a church can’t provide the abundant welcome and restoration that we enjoyed if it is merely subsisting and not thriving. Now our tithe is not always the steady stream we’d like it to be: we’ve had to cut back a bit this year, in fact, because we just bought our first house. But we say frankly what we can do and follow through. It is the least we can do. And if it makes me wince sometimes, I try to remember that there might be, maybe at this very moment, someone passing by this church – maybe an immigrant from some commonwealth country like Canada, or somewhere in Africa or the Caribbean where the Anglican church is more woven into the fabric of society, but who is now here, feeling bereft as I once did – or maybe someone who has always been here and is bereft – and needs the church to be that voice in the wilderness, that voice in the whirlwind, that it was to me. And so we pledge what we can afford, and let that be our voice. And quite frankly, it’s nice to be heard.