PROCLAIM!
SHARING WORDS, LIVING EXAMPLES, CHANGING LIVES
Marcus George Halley
Copyright © 2020 by Marcus George Halley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Church Publishing
19 East 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
Cover design by Paul Soupiset
Typeset by Rose Design
A record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-1-64065-242-2 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-64065-243-9 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Chapter One: The Mission of God
Chapter Two: What Are We Doing Here?
Chapter Three: Come, Let Us Go
Chapter Four: Gather in the Lord’s Name
Chapter Five: Proclaim and Respond to the Word of God
Chapter Six: Pray for the World and the Church
Chapter Seven: Exchange the Peace
Chapter Eight: Prepare the Table
Chapter Nine: Make Eucharist
Chapter Ten: Break the Bread
Chapter Eleven: Share the Gifts of God
Conclusion: Go Forth
I GREW UP IN CHURCH.
My fondest childhood memories are associated with church if for no other reason than that church occupied such a prominent place in my life that most of my childhood memories, good or bad, bear some association. Not only were Sundays strictly for church (and I mean all day—two services in the morning with Sunday school in between, followed by lunch at church, and often some other service at a neighboring congregation in the evening), but church also seeped into the other days as well. Wednesdays were for Bible study, Saturdays were for intercessory prayer and probably choir rehearsal. By the time I reached young adulthood, I was thoroughly churched but spiritually starving.
Some of my worst childhood memories are also connected to church. In many ways, it feels like I crawled into my adulthood, desperately seeking the spiritual nourishment that I had been denied as I came into the awareness of my sexuality. For reasons that continue to elude me, there are those who think God so fragile or grace so miniscule and scarce that it is their job to hoard it and protect it rather than lavish it upon all they meet. I knew I wasn’t welcomed in the church of my childhood, but even though I left, the rhythm of Sunday-keeping was so strong, so naturally engrained in the rhythm of my life that I kept going to church. For years I visited church after church, never really finding a place to land for long.
All of that began to change the moment I walked into an Episcopal church in Charlotte, North Carolina. For this Southern-raised National Baptist, the words of the liturgy were expansive and pointed to a whole new world, one where mere mortals dared to approach the mystery of God holding confidence and humility, where the full witness of Holy Scripture was heard, where we embraced a connection to an ancient church that was charging headlong into the uncertain future, where simple creatures of bread and wine were deemed worthy enough to bear the actual presence of an infinite God. That first experience at the Eucharist broke my world open in ways I am still working through.
As I sit down to write this book, I am a decade into my journey with God through the Episcopal Church. I’ve worshiped with and served the church in the South, Midwest, and Northeast. I’ve raised my hands in a charismatic atmosphere, genuflected during a service of Eucharistic Adoration, sung Taize hymns around a campfire, and everything in between the matrix of wonder, love, and praise. After years of ministry and worship in the Episcopal Church, ministry that involves teaching and preaching, creating and presiding over communal worship, writing and thinking deeply about the intersection of evangelism and mission, I have come to see that what initially drew me to the worship of the Episcopal Church was something more than expansive words and beautiful ritual. What I hungered for then, and hunger for now, is an engagement with the Risen Christ that is more than an isolated moment of personal piety. I yearn for an experience of Christ that has the capacity to change me and to change the world. I want an encounter with Christ that actively participates in the continued work of Christ in the world—reconciliation, peacemaking, justice, and mercy—as we await the fullness of God’s reign on earth. True, authentic Christian worship is more than a refuge from the woes of the world. It is an active engagement in the new-making of the world. It is an episode of the crashing-in of God’s reign of love, a community called together by God’s grace despite the tilt toward estrangement and division that plagues our broader world. It is a moment where the Church can name and claim that the Christ that has come to us, and who promises to come to us again, continues to come to us in Word and sacrament.
As a practitioner of liturgy, I have also seen that we cannot take certain assumptions for granted anymore. In a culture that transmits less and less memory of Christian practice from one generation to another, and with that practice coming under understandable scrutiny for the ways in which it has either ignored (or in some cases perpetuated) oppression and injustice, we must reclaim the importance of public liturgy as our collective worship of God that participates in the mission of God by inviting us to share in dynamic love that exists within God. For too many, the liturgy has become a hermetically sealed moment of personal piety, a one-hour experience on Sunday morning that has little to nothing to do with living into the kind of movement Jesus started. It has become too small to have anything of value to proclaim to a world in desperate need of God’s saving presence.
In my view, the work that Episcopal Church has engaged under the leadership of the presiding bishop, the Most Rev. Michael Curry, has been to reclaim the value of proclamation. Our challenge in this moment seems to be responding to an initiation to go deeper in every way—deeper in discipleship, deeper in love, deeper in relationship with others. Tools like “The Way of Love” offer individuals and faith communities the tools necessary to plumb the depths of our baptismal vocation to follow Christ by inviting us to live a life that is shaped by practices such as turning toward Christ, learning about the life and way of Jesus, engaging in public worship and private prayer, and other practices. Presiding Bishop Curry has said that these practices can “train up the spirit to follow in the way of Jesus and to look something like Jesus” (Way of Love Video, Youtube). This invitation to Christian discipleship invites us to do more than simply show up on Sundays and give money. This is an invitation to believe that if this Jesus stuff matters at all, we have to get serious about practicing it. If we desire a fuller experience of the reign of God, we must enact it in our lives: we have to