We welcome all in the celebration.

            As an infant I was baptized into an Episcopal church that was both high and low, a Church that included an aristocratic old guard and a new wave of post WW II expansion. The church of the late 60’s and early 70’s polarized over how we would respond to civil rights and to the Viet Nam war. The 70’s and 80’s brought us the charismatic movement, women clergy, and a Prayerbook change.

Looking back many of these issues do not seem to be that big a deal but people had strong feelings on each of these issues and on all sides of these issues. And people left churches and left the Episcopal Church over these issues. Yet time and again we found that the Episcopal Church was big enough to contain all these views and all these people. We have learned how to survive with diversity. We learned to respect and to trust people who believe differently than we do. We learned to forgive the church for not being all that we thought it ought to be. And we learned to forgive one another. And we learned to ask for forgiveness when we were not all we could be. And we learned that the church’s mission that unites us is more important than the issues that divide us.

We are again faced with issues that challenge the church and the society. I believe our church is big enough to hold all of us within its circle while we discuss these issues. For this to remain true we must listen to one another, trust one another and respect one another. 

Stuart