Beating new bounds
by Julie A. Wortman

Every day I receive about 50 email messages aimed at keeping me informed of the latest breaking national and global news. I dread each download. Persistent word of economic, social and political outrage on a global scale only seems to feed my sense of impotence over the injustices perpetrated by the world’s powers-that-be. I long to "delete all" and occupy myself with some appealing, apolitical diversion.

And yet I’m suspicious of my own yearning for escape. Corporate capitalism seems too eager to reinforce the inclination. Fly away, drive away, seclude away, dream away. A recent (and reluctant) weekend stay at a climate-controlled luxury hotel (with all rooms overlooking the artificial environment of a vast interior atrium in an effort to downplay the bewildering, generic business/industrial suburban-sprawl environment outside) left me gasping for fresh air and confused as to where, specifically, on the planet this place might be. I hunger, I realize, not for escape, but magnetic North. A reliable, grounded, point of orientation.

Too often, congregations appear to forget this stabilizing – and energizing – need. So proud to be part of the church universal, they inadvertently eschew the church incarnational – the church local and specific. Their self-image betrays this. If there are any Episcopal congregations that still "beat the bounds" as part of annual rogation celebrations, the farthest most processions would venture, I’d bet, would be to the limits of the church’s property or the block on which it stands.

In this issue, we ask for more. We ask that church people get more intentional about claiming a wider acreage as the proper grounds of parish life and ministry. We ask that congregations think of themselves less as communities and more as community members. The world’s economic, social and political realities are playing out on all of our doorsteps, ready for blood-and-guts engagement. There is, in the end, no escape. But at least we can begin with knowing where we are.

Julie A. Wortman is The Witness’ editor/publisher.