Millennials Back in the Church

One Rachel Held Evans, writing in the Washington Post, concludes that millennials are tired of the "church as entertainment" shtick (schlock?), concluding that:

What finally brought me back, after years of running away, wasn’t lattes or skinny jeans; it was the sacraments. Baptism, confession, Communion, preaching the Word, anointing the sick — you know, those strange rituals and traditions Christians have been practicing for the past 2,000 years.

Bravo, Ms. Evans. Absolutely. These "strange rituals" have been practiced for the past 2,000 years, and God willing, for the next 2,000 years as well. (See, e.g., "on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.").

Now, Ms. Evans has found her way to the Episcopal Church, established by Henry VIII (the big hairy king) in the 1530s or thereabouts. She sought a new church because her evangelical community was entertainment-focused, but also because:

I was looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity: I didn’t like how gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were being treated by my evangelical faith community. I had questions about science and faith, biblical interpretation and theology. 

Ms. Evans reiterates the importance of the "basic" (so to speak) Sacraments in the life of the faithful ("They don’t need to be repackaged or rebranded"), and quotes a friend of hers for the proposition that "I want to be asked to participate in the life of an ancient-future community.”

She states that if a church is "judgmental and exclusive, if it fails to show the love of Jesus to all, millennials will sniff it out" and that the sacraments " just need to be practiced, offered and explained in the context of a loving, authentic and inclusive community." This is why Ms. Evans has been, in her own words:

[L]ed...to the Episcopal Church, where every week I find myself, at age 33, kneeling next to a gray-haired lady to my left and a gay couple to my right as I confess my sins and recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Because, after all, in addition to the sacraments and to the authenticity, what lead her to the Episcopal church is:

[T]he inclusivity so many millennials long for in their churches...the Episcopal Church, whose big red doors are open to all — conservatives, liberals, rich, poor, gay, straight and even perpetual doubters like me.

She gives hints of this conclusion earlier, when she argues that millennials have "an increasing aversion to exclusive, closed-minded religious communities masquerading as the hip new places in town."

So, if we are to understand Ms. Evans, what many millennials want (or at least, those like-minded to Ms. Evans and her friends) is a church that is authentic, historical, open to all / inclusive, not pandering (at least in terms of attempting to be "relevant"), and sacramental.

I agree with Ms. Evans on all of those points, but I think that, perhaps, we mean different things when we say them.

In finishing Ms. Evans opinion, I was immediately struck by the questions, "But, what are these sacraments to you? What do they mean? Why are they so named?" She states that the sacraments are at their most powerful when "they are extended not simply to the religious and the privileged, but to the poor, the marginalized, the lonely and the left out."  Ms. Evans seems to view the sacraments as marks of inclusion in a community; as outward symbolic manifestations of unity. I think this is confirmed in her statements noted thus far, but also with the following claim:

Even in Christian communities that don’t use sacramental language to describe their activities, you see people baptizing sinners, sharing meals, confessing sins and helping one another through difficult times. Those services with big screens and professional bands can offer the sacraments, too.

So, then, for Ms. Evans, the sacraments are evidence of a shared belief in Christ (whatever the nature of that belief may be) and a marker that the community is truly inclusive.  In short, Ms. Evans is not interested in the historical understanding of the Sacraments (or for that matter, the understanding of the Episcopal Church); such an understanding must lead to exclusivity; must lead to restriction of Sacrament to certain people, and not to others.

The Thirty-Nine Articles, state that "Sacraments ordained of God be not only badges or tokens of Christian men's profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses and effectual signs of grace and God's good will towards us by which He doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken but strengthen and confirm our faith in Him." Or, in other words, the Sacraments are surely evidence of Christian belief, but they are also signs of Grace.

The Catholic belief is that Sacraments "are outward signs of inward grace, instituted by Christ for our sanctification." There are seven Sacraments, defined as such since Trent, and each of them define one or more conditions of reception to be licitly received by an individual. Therefore:

If all conditions required for the essential rite are observed, on the part of the minister, the recipient, the matter and form, but some non-essential condition is not complied with by the recipient, the sacrament is received validly but not licitly; and if the condition wilfully neglected be grave, grace is not then conferred by the ceremony. Thus baptized persons contracting Matrimony whilst they are in the state of mortal sin would be validly (i.e. really) married, but would not then receive sanctifying grace.

Therefore, the Sacraments are necessarily exclusive - they are restricted in many ways both to people outside the Church and inside, by their very nature; by the very name "Sacrament." From the first, it was so. Witness St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord." 1. Cor. 11:27. Or the following, from the Didache, likely composed between 50 and 120 AD:

But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said, "Give not that which is holy to the dogs."

I do not think that Ms. Evans and like-minded millennials can have a church which is both historical and all-inclusive and sacramental. Such an organization must necessarily dispose of the idea of sin inherent in "unworthy manner," and dispose of the idea of Grace inherent in the sacraments, and must reduce Sacrament to sacramental (at best) or simply a ritual of shared interaction showing membership in a group. The ideas that Christ instituted the Sacraments as a visible means of conferring invisible Grace, and the interior disposition that makes receptions a Grace-filling occurrence, are lost.

And so, in the end, I suppose I would ask Ms. Evans the following:

What do you believe is a sacrament? Do you believe that one must believe in any particular characteristic of a sacrament in order to receive its benefit? Must one be in any particular disposition in order to receive a sacrament, even if one believes in certain characteristics? Is there any such thing in your church as sin? And what is Grace? How would a person in your church find themselves in a position to not receive a sacrament? And why?