Bishop Ihloff's Convention Address 2004

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Impact 2004- A huge Success

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Now Parents can join in Godly Play

The Complete Guide to Godly Play, which features Jerome W. Berryman’s imaginative method for presenting scripture stories to children, has added Parent Pages to share the experience with the whole family.

Based on Berryman’s work in the Montessori tradition, Godly Play uses a careful telling of scripture stories, engaging story figures, and activities to encourage children to seek and find their own answers to their faith questions. The series respects the innate spirituality of children and encourages curiosity and imagination in experiencing the mystery and joy of God.

As children enthusiastically discover more about God and the Bible from Godly Play, they are sent home each week with interactive pages to share the fun learning experience with the whole family. Each season includes 14 send-along papers that give a brief overview of the day’s presentation, an illustrated retelling of the biblical story and information to help parents better understand Godly Play. Each paper also includes “wondering questions” to draw family members into conversations of everyday life and faith.

The Godly Play Parent Pages are sold by season for $2.95 each. They can be ordered by calling 1-800-824-1813, faxing orders to 717-541-8128, or visiting the website at www.livingthegoodnews.com.

The Godly Play book series from Living the Good News includes “How to Lead Godly Play Lessons,” three volumes of presentations for the seasons, and “Practical Helps from Godly Play Trainers.” Also available are videos that accompany volumes two, three, and four, guiding teachers through actual sessions.

Berryman, who founded Godly Play, has wide experience working with children ages 2-18. He has written numerous articles and books, and he presents lectures and workshops throughout the world. He is director of the Center for the Theology of Childhood in Houston,Texas.

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The Episcopalians,

by David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr.

(Praeger Publishers) Review by P. KINGSLEY SMITH, HISTORIOGRAPHER, THE DIOCESE OF MARYLAND

Do we really need another history of the Episcopal Church so soon after David Holmes’ in 1993 and Robert Pritchard’s in 1999? Emphatically, we do. Fine as those were, they are already “so 20th Century,” and a lot has happened lately, not only in the events that have pulled the Church out of the cloisters and into the headline news, but also in the very way we describe and evaluate these events, what may be called “post-modern historiography.” We are facing a new kind of world and we have to do that in new ways.

This volume was commissioned as number 11 of a series called “Denominations in America” edited by Henry Warner Bowden of Rutgers for Praeger Press with the imprint of the Greenwood Publishing Company. Being in a series has the advantages of interacting with other American Christian traditions and of efficiency in production and marketing. It also imposes some limits, for example there are no pictures (except on the cover), and, most remarkably,“a strong biographical focus”: exactly half of the text is devoted to one or two page profiles “using the real-life experiences of men and women.”

These 82 biographies of the famous or notorious, the obscure or peripheral, the obvious or puzzling, are what give “The Episcopalians” its special flavor.Here we have a cloud of witnesses much broader than usual in such histories, because the authors have made the effort to include many women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans, the very ones quite absent from, for example, E. Clowes Chorley’s “Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church” in 1946.

This shows a church that has come of age, is culturally diverse and politically sensitive at last. With roots in the tensions between the priestly and prophetic trajectories of the Hebrew Bible and between the Petrine and Pauline ideologies of the New Testament, our own Protestant Catholic Anglicanism testifies to a continuing process of increased multiformity. Even while the Tudors enacted uniformity codes, Richard Hooker championed “harmonious dissimilitude” as the Christian ideal for the English. When the Stuarts forgot this, equating loyal citizenship with orthodox belief and behavior, one lost his head and the other his crown.

When these mixed principles crossed the Atlantic into a land of open frontiers, freedom from authority was easy to come by. In time, the Stamp Tax and the Divine Right of Kings and the enforced use of the Book of Common Prayer gave way to an open society, and the colonial Anglican churches, both the ones that had been established by law and the ones esteemed as socially prestigious, had to survive by finding a new demographic niche. The leaders of the Episcopal Church in the 19th Century, from William White and John Henry Hobart to James DeKoven and Phillips Brooks, did this brilliantly. By the time Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the National Cathedral in 1907, the Episcopal Church could be thought of a “the de facto ‘national church’ or ‘Church of America’” with “a critical role to play in shaping the country’s moral character” (p. 89). It had, as the catchphrase goes, “an influence out of proportion to its numbers.”

Hein and Shattuck document how the disestablishment progressed. The 1960s were in fact “a great awakening” from what Gibson Winter called “the suburban captivity of the church,” thanks to those who pushed the boundaries. These included James Pike and John Spong in theology, John Hines and the General Convention Special Program for racial equality, the Philadelphia 11 for women’s ordination, and Integrity and V. Gene Robinson for recognition of gays and lesbians. Parallel changes occurred in the liberalizing of canons permitting remarriage after divorce, contemporary language and music in the liturgy, and recognition of Lutheran ministries.

This history is carefully and fully footnoted. Sixteen pages are devoted to a “Bibliographic Essay”- not just lists of books and articles but evaluations of them. The text is blessedly free of typos and the prose is clear and direct (though we could have done without the demon “arguably” on pp. 177, 255 and 258). Dr. David Hein, professor of religion at Hood College, Frederick, Maryland, and the Rev. Gardiner Shattuck of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts have both been active in NEHA.

Given their limited scope they did not try to produce an encyclopedia; those doing special studies will find the index “full of omissions,” as the Irish bull puts it. But Google can fill in the details while this volume informs our minds and reforms out assumptions. If anyone asks,“How did our dear old Church get to where it is today?” this is the book to read.

These 82 biographies of the famous or notorious, the obscure or peripheral, the obvious or puzzling, are what give “The Episcopalians” its special flavor.

(c) 2004 The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland
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