Dear Pope Benedict

Dear Pope Benedict,
This thank you note is long overdue, but the recent news that your church will be easing the way for disaffected Anglicans prompted me to finally say what I’ve been meaning to for years: thank you for all the wonderful Christians you have sent to my Episcopal Church. Its been happening for years of course, Roman Catholics marrying Methodists, and finding the Episcopal church the place that fits them both. And of course all the people who’ve been divorced and don’t want to try to prove that their first marriage didn’t happen who’ve found a home here. Can you believe the faith of people, who after the pain of divorce actually experience the gift of God, through the love of another person? It is a beautiful thing to see.

But recently the flow has been different, not so much a flood of gay and lesbian Roman Catholics “switching,” no, we have GLBT folks in our pews like everyone else, because they were born here, married in, still found Christ here even after being condemned, marginalized, ignored. No my new members come for exactly the same reason as disaffected Anglicans are looking to Rome. The Sunday after your election a young couple came to worship with a nine-month old boy. “We just couldn’t stay in the Roman Catholic church anymore. The election of the pope opened our eyes to the way it is going. We just can’t raise our boy in a church that condemns others.” Then there is the couple with daughters, who after their first communion started wondering why they couldn’t be priests; then came the Sunday when a pastoral letter about the sexual abuse in the church was read. The mother walked out and never went back, she just couldn’t be part of the cover-up and denial anymore. In my recent Inquirer’s class I had a young man who had grown up in a wonderful Roman Catholic parish (not in pre-Vatican II horrors people write musicals about). He was active in church even in college but moving here he found in our little parish the Christian community he had been taught to look for, a community that welcomes everyone and lives what they believe as best they can.

Not all of these people will even officially become Episcopalians/Anglicans, because I mean it when I say that Jesus doesn’t care much about brand names. They are welcome to be part as long as they are fed and challenged here. We’ve been a separate structure allowing Roman Catholics to keep their traditions but think for themselves for almost 500 years. We certainly don’t have all the right answers, but we try to glorify God and live the good news despite the murky nature of real life. It seems to be working o.k., at least in my little parish, because the strange thing is, at a time when mainline Protestant churches are dying, and 80% of Americans have something better to do on Sunday morning, our little church is growing. And I have you, partially, to thank for that.

So thank you for sending me so many wonderful people who have expanded my understanding of what it means to be the body of Christ in this world. And thank you for opening your church to all the Anglicans who feel angry and unhappy. I am glad they will have somewhere to go because in my experience it is when we are most hurt and unloved that Jesus opens his arms the widest.

God’s Blessings,
The Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer, Rector, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Chicago, IL.