News and Media

This past September I returned, as a part of the Fellow Program, to The Falls Church, where I had attended with my family from 1988 to 1991.  Then from 1991 to 1994, I had attended Truro Episcopal Church. Both churches, along with nine others, became involved approximately five years ago in a church property lawsuit with our denomination. On January 10, 2012, the Fairfax Circuit Court ruled, on remand from the Virginia Supreme Court last June, that the Falls Church and six other parishes that split from the Episcopal Church must relinquish their properties to the Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church. This is a particularly sensitive issue, especially in the case of the Falls Church, which has existed since 1732, and included such parishioners as George Washington and George Mason.  The Falls Church parishioners may be losing the building, but we remain steadfast that the Lord is using this opportunity to sharpen our witness and pronounce His good news in Northern Virginia.

At the 2000 New Wineskins Conference, Bishop Benjamin Kwashi, bishop of Jos, Nigeria, stated that “Moving in faith involves risks; if there is no risk there is no need for faith.” At the 2010 Lausanne Conference held in Capetown, South Africa, he posed a challenging question to the Church: “Do we love Christ enough to lose ourselves?” Certainly the Church we seek to emulate in Acts understood this from firsthand experience, suffering at the hands of their own countrymen (1 Thessalonians 2:14). But what does it mean for us to lose ourselves, as privileged as we are?

We are truly losing ourselves when we die to ourselves and die to the physical world. This means being willing to detach ourselves from the creature comforts we enjoy, the objects to which we ascribe value, and, all too often, the physical settings in which our memories inhabit. Certainly we have been very comfortable in our building on East Fairfax Street for several hundred years. Pope Benedict XVI said to German pilgrims shortly after his installation : “The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.” But what is that greatness for which we were made? Paul states in Philippians 3:8 that he counts “everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus [his] Lord,” so we can confidently assume that this surpassing worth (or excellent knowledge in some translations) is the very same greatness the Holy Father urges us to strive toward. The knowing of Christ is greatness, so greatness is knowing and proclaiming Truth. When comfort comes to blows with proclaiming the Truth, we must proclaim the truth. We may even be  called out of the comfort of our magnificent historical property and into the greatness of the good news.

We have it pretty easy in Northern Virginia. We are not faced with persecution on the level that many in other countries face. We enjoy a higher standard of living, better wages, and better schools than much of the world. We are not required to take up the cross in the same way that those in, say, Nigeria, the Middle East, or Myanmar must do on a daily basis. It is a predicament with which we are as yet thankfully unfamiliar. The comforts we enjoy have the potential to betray the reality that the Gospel can rouse agents of division, for Christ “did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”Rather, on account of the good news brought by Christ, we “will be hated by all for His name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Mt. 10:22).

The worldly forecast may seem  bleak, but there is a greater divine purpose. Jesus came to Simon Peter and Andrew, asked them to follow Him, and they promptly dropped their nets. In the same vein, Bp. Kwashi remarks that “Mission is giving away what you have been given…Mission involves risk…Mission is living by faith.” When Christ calls us to proclaim the Truth, we must drop our nets and pursue him with abandon. Just as Isaiah said, “Here I am; Send me,” we have found that being sent is inextricably linked to our dislocation. That very same Lord sent Abram out of Ur with the promise of an inheritance, and Abram went, “not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). He sent a reluctant Noah over the cataclysmic flood in a wooden ark without specifying a terminus. Similarly, The Falls Church has been incredibly attuned to the Word and will of God in its rejection of relativism and the proclamation of the Truth. We may not have any idea where we will be come March, but we know that the Lord has lavished a rich inheritance upon us in the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ! It then follows that wherever we are we will be with Jesus.

Here we are, Lord; send us.