Thank you again for making your pledge.

If you have not experienced the Cardinal Virtues of FORTITUDE, FAITH, and PRUDENCE recently, you can still can by signing a pledge card for the year 2001. Pledge cards are available in the Narthex of the church, by calling the parish office at 205-553-7282, or by email at matthias@dbtech.net.

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Deep Church is an ATTITUDE!

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, June, 2000

I am more aware than ever, especially since returning from CREDO (Clergy Reflection Education Discernment Opportunity) that we at Saint Matthias are developing a gift for the use of the larger Church: namely our understanding of ourselves as "Deep Church."

Over the next year, with your help and support, I intend to write a book that returns a unifying principle to our basic understanding of why we come together as a community of faith around the term "Deep Church." As I have already written in this space, "Deep Church" is an expression of the Greek word koinonia which has its roots in the Hebrew word shalom. Simply put, our community is, hopefully, living out and sharing the fullness of all that God intends for us. As such, the term "Deep Church" becomes a unifying principle that expresses an essential attitude of the members to be "a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God." Such an attitude can help put in perspective all that is commonly held about church size and help church members recall that relationships among people are more important than the dynamics of a parish organizational chart.

For Saint Matthias this attitude is being expressed over the next month by members of the vestry as they seek out your thoughts about parish goals, physical plant needs, and opportunities for ministry before the July 12th Vestry meeting. Please email the church at matthias@dbtech.net and make known how you see our "Deep Church" living into the fullness of all that God intends for us.

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Deep Church: Koinonia that has its roots in Shalom

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, January, 2000

You may recall that I first wrote of "Deep Church" as a reflection of some experiences I had around Pentecost, 1998. At that time I defined "Deep Church" as "a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God." In late November of this year, I began to think about how we, as a Deep Church committed to caring for one another, could organize. One model shares pastoral oversight of small parish groupings with perhaps twelve lay members of the parish. My wife, Edna, suggested I call each small grouping a "koinonia" which, in New Testament usage, literally means "sharing in partnership" or "fellowship." Her suggestion led me to a significant book by James C. Fenhagen, once the Dean of The General Theological Seminary in New York and now associated with The Cornerstone Project, called Mutual Ministry: New Vitality for the Local Church.

In Mutual Ministry I discovered two very important things. The first affirms for me my Pentecost experience of the "Deep Church" concept. Fenhagen writes on page28, "We are concerned with deepening (my bolding) human community because we are the people of the Pentecost, and Pentecost is about the Spirit taking separated human beings and overcoming their estrangement." The second showed me that the Hebrew word shalom is foundational to the word koinonia. Fenhagen, using Colossians 1:15-17, 20 in which Christ is clearly the reconciler to God, writes that: the image (of such reconciliation) is one of profound harmony and systemic interconnectedness emerging out of a sense of meaning and obedience. When this interconnectedness is experienced in the human sphere, we have what we call "community." The biblical word that best expresses this theological understanding of community is shalom, sometimes translated from the Hebrew as "peace." Shalom is an all encompassing word covering all the many relationships of life and expressing a vision of what the Israelites conceived of as the ideal of what life was intended by God to be. (page 62).

When we at Saint Matthias proclaim ourselves a "community of faith built on the sure foundation that is Jesus Christ" we declare ourselves to be a koinonia that seeks to share shalom. According to Fenhagen, "In describing shalom, commentators use such words as ‘wholeness," "totality," "well-being," "the absence of violence or misfortune," "the untrammeled, free growth of the soul in conjunction with others," or "harmonious community" (page 62).

May you experience and share shalom: the fullness of all God has intended your life, my life and, indeed, all lives to be. Again, I say shalom!

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Feeding the Hungry Heart: an underlying conviction of a Deep Church

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, August, 1999

When we close the Holy Eucharist, we say one of the following prayers:

Eternal God, heavenly Father, you have graciously accepted us as living members of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and you have fed us with spiritual food in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart; through Christ our Lord. Amen. Or: Almighty and everliving God, we thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom. And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord. To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

I have put in bold the parts of each prayer that note being fed. Obviously, a person who is hungry is one who seeks to be fed. "The Episcopal Church Welcomes the Hungry Heart" is the theme of an advertising campaign prepared by the national office of The Episcopal Church. Just what is a hungry heart? I, for one, see the hungry heart as a metaphor that expresses the desire to know and feel the love of God. And just as the word "hunger" expresses one thing for one person and altogether something else for another person (such a growing teenager whose body needs to be continually fed), the depth of each person's desire to know and feel the love of God is different. Feeding any hungry heart, no matter what the depth or longing or desire to be fed, must be an underlying conviction of a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to share the love of God.

Deep Church, the term I employ to describe such a group of people, not only welcomes the hungry heart but is committed to feeding the hungry heart. We, who "thank God for feeding us with the spiritual food of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ: and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son," become that food for others who are hungry. In a strange way, as the living members of the Body of Christ, we feed each other as we share the hunger in our own hearts.

As the summer ends, I hope you will take advantage of the opportunities to feed your hungry heart and the hungry hearts of others through outward ministries that touch the lives of strangers (such as blood donation, teaching others to read, Hannah Home) and inward settings (such as Sunday School, LOBC, ECW) that deepen your commitment and willingness to intimately share the love of God.

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Being formed by the Deep Church experiences of my past

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, July, 1999

It was just about this time nineteen years ago when Edna and I ventured into St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Westboro, Massachusetts. Our visit was prompted by the birth of Melinda about three months earlier. Up to that point, neither Edna nor I had been to any church on a regular, semi-regular, or infrequent basis. Now was the time to shop for the next important item for our new child: a church for a baptism. To our surprise, we found a loving community of faith that welcomed us and gave us the necessary encouragement to discover that our visit was about our spiritual needfulness. Without knowing it, we had stumbled upon what I now call a "Deep Church."

By the time Adam was born we were living in Portland, Maine and found a church family in St. Bartholomew's that had weathered its birth some ten years earlier in a former gas station. The style of committed lay leadership and ministry was strongly augmented by a newly called full-time priest. Somehow, we had fallen into another "Deep Church."

Some six years later right after seminary, I began my ordained ministry as the associate rector at St. Ann's, Sayville, New York. The loving care given by this parish family to a newly ordained person and his family was intentional and very much in Christ . This energetic parish, large enough to have two priests on staff, proved to be a group that could be called "Deep Church."

I am convinced that it is no accident or coincidence that I have been nurtured and prepared for pastoral leadership among groups of people who gather with a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God. Priests such as Jack Lawton, Gil Birney, Kell Morton, Patrick Douthitt, and Bob Schwarz modeled a style of leadership that empowered lay persons to be the church. I thank God for them and the many lay persons who showed me the way to God's love by being "Deep Church."

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The Ministry of a Deep Church calls for prayerful acts of service

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, June, 1999

Not everybody can give blood. Of those who can give blood fewer than 5 percent of eligible Americans donate blood each year, according to the American Association of Blood Banks. Not everybody has a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God when gathering with a group of people. It seems that the difficulties faced with the outward action of giving blood are similar to the inward difficulties faced when attempting to live as "Deep Church."

In the Episcopal Church we use the saying, "All May, Some Should, and None Must," quite often to help people come to grips with serious choices. Usually this saying refers to private auricular confession with a priest. It applies equally to the call for a "willing expectation of intimacy" that I believe is at the heart of what it means to be "Deep Church." When Jesus said, "come and see," he was giving permission to decide whether or not to join him on a deeper level with the total love that is God. Recognizing that we who follow Jesus are on a journey to seek and experience the total love that is God is the first step in being a part of sharing that total love with others.

Jesus came not to sit at the head of the table and be served but to serve. We who follow Jesus are, indeed, called to a life of service. Is there one manner in which we can we serve that will help us to more deeply experience the love of God? No! It's a trick question. Any manner of service, with proper reflection, will draw us more deeply into feeling and knowing the total love that is God. I would, however, like to propose a service our parish can perform with a little organization and a great deal of willing determination.

Those of us who are over age 17 and are at least 105 pounds can give blood. Blood is a self-renewing part of us that is necessary for life. As a result of prayer during Lent, I decided to give blood as often as I can, about once every two months. I propose that we begin a parish ministry of encouragement to give blood. Such encouragement would include a mailed reminder to the participant that he or she could give blood again and where opportunities to give blood are located. This parish ministry would need a coordinator. I ask you to seek God's guidance in the Holy Spirit through prayer that you might be called to be the coordinator of this ministry or a committed donor.

(NOTE: Saint Matthias Episcopal Church conducted an on-site Blood Drive on Sunday, October 22, 2000 that raised 27 pints of blood in a five hour period!)

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The Ministry of a Deep Church begins with Holy Baptism

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, May, 1999

In June of 1998 I defined Deep Church as "a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God." I believe that Saint Matthias Episcopal Church is becoming an example of what Deep Church can offer as we discover our gifts and seek to share those gifts in humility and service.

Deep Church, as opposed to "high church," "low church," or "broad church," is my way of expressing the possibilities of a church that organizes on an "organic" model rather than a "hierarchical" model. James Monroe Barnett, in The Diaconate: A Full and Equal Order, argues at length that the nature of the Church is truly organic and from within that concept comes the understanding of how to renew the Church in what is now being called the post-Christian era. The organic model of the first three centuries saw the laos (the people of God) as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people" (1 Peter 2:9). The clerical hierarchy that came after the formal recognition of the Church by the Emperor Constantine (marked as beginning with the Council that wrote the Nicene Creed in 325 A.D.), and which evolved in the Middle Ages, supported the notion that ordination was how one became a minister not baptism. Barnett writes on page 3 of the pre-Nicene church:

"Baptism, replacing and standing in marked contrast to circumcision, created laos, the people of God, in a new and exciting way. In Baptism the Holy Spirit came anew to each, bestowing as he willed gifts for ministry, that together Christians might extend the presence of the living Lord and the fullness of his ministry throughout the world. From this empowerment and from these gifts to the laos all ministry flowed."

While I believe that I am an exponent of Holy Baptism as the entrance into the life of service that is Christian ministry, Barnett helped me see that I have not completely shed my hierarchical ways. To the right is a copy of my Certificate of Baptism. Until now, it has been kept in a drawer while my certificates of ordination as deacon and as priest have maintained prominent places on the wall in my church study. Newly framed and hung in my study, this Certificate of Baptism serves to remind me that it was, indeed, by the Grace of God with the people consenting (the words at the beginning of my ordination invitations), that the grace of ordination acknowledged and supported the gifts made know in my call to be priest and pastor.

The past year has proven that we are "a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God." In the months to come I will explore and celebrate on this page what it means to be Deep Church within the organic church model that is evolving at Saint Matthias Episcopal Church. Remember, it is through Holy Baptism you and I are ministers of the living Lord, extending the fullness of his ministry through the world.

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Sharing Love as the New Year begins

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, January, 1999

I love my wife. This is something that maybe 100, perhaps 200, hopefully as many as 1000 people know. Now with this column a few more are added. This love for Edna is something that began over 28 years ago, was celebrated publicly just over 25 years ago at our wedding, and is more fulfilling than ever as we strive to deepen our relationship as our children move out and move on. Yes, indeed, I am grateful for Edna and I love her deeply.

I love my parish. This is something that may or may not be as apparent as is my love for my wife to the maybe 100, perhaps 200, hopefully as many as 1000 people who know about my life in Tuscaloosa. I'm entering my fifth year as priest and pastor at Saint Matthias Episcopal Church. A wise priest once told me that you don't really get to know your parish until you've been there for five years. I look forward to this year, then, as the year we deepen our relationship as our community of faith grows and changes. Yes, indeed, I am grateful to God for bringing me to Tuscaloosa and I love my role as priest and pastor deeply.

I love Jesus Christ. This is something that better be apparent to the maybe 100, perhaps 200, and hopefully as many as 1000 people who have spent time with me over the years. At first glance, this doesn't seem as if I have done much when it comes to sharing the love of Jesus Christ. Given our "production oriented society" I struggle with accepting the notion that it's not quantity but quality that is important. Deep sharing comes from a willingness to be vulnerable and intimate. This is something that is hard to do in large quantities. Yet Jesus did that for me and for the whole world and I am grateful for my savior and I love him deeply.

In 1999 Saint Matthias Episcopal Church will continue to grow. Sharing love is infectious. People crave such love and gravitate to where such love is authentic. We have struggled over much during the past four years. We have worked hard to discern a vision and live into that vision. For me, 1998 will be the year we decided to accept the vision because we shared it with others outside our immediate selves, namely our Bishops and key diocesan committees. Our vision is bound up in the statement of who we are: "Supporting God's Work in the World as We Proclaim a Community of Faith Built on the Sure Foundation that is Jesus Christ."

Sharing love means sharing of our selves, our souls, and our substance. 28 years with Edna has given me the opportunity to discover what a wonderful thing such sharing is with one special person. Four years at Saint Matthias has given me the opportunity to discover what a wonderful thing such sharing is within a group of God's people. Jesus said, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:10-12 NRSV). As Jesus so clearly demonstrated, sharing love brings pain but offers joy. On such a sure foundation, may we love one another as he loved us.

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Preparing for the Coming of Christ

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, December, 1998

There are a number of ways to care for someone or something. You can choose to fixate, obsess, ignore, or struggle to find the right balance. The punchline to an old joke about preachers speaks to this struggle for balance when a man stands up in the middle of a sermon and says, "Now you've done it, Pastor. You've gone from "preachin" to "meddlin." We've spent much of the last year worrying about money. Through that struggle we have become stronger in faith and willingness to hear and act upon God's call to us to truly be a community of faith. If we needed a "money affirmation" then the 25 increased pledges or the 12 new pledges would suffice.

I've been through my own struggle with money in the last year. Yet it was only when I began to reflect in late September on the vestry's acceptance of the need for a balanced budget that serves to support our common vision of being a medium size parish with staffing and support services, that I realized my struggle with money has mirrored that of the parish. As we became determined to put the parish's finances in order, with the help from the diocese that included not only money (almost $20,000 this year and next year) but guidance from the bishop's deputies for finance and parish development, I came to understand that God was preparing me to accept the opportunity to do the same in my own life.

I sought counsel from our Senior Warden who helped me see that I needed to talk with someone gifted in money management who was also a spiritual person. The Reverend Wells Warren, a priest and full-time banker in Fayette, is the person God intended for me to see if only I would look for help. In mid-October we talked about the hard choices Edna and I would have to make and that our situation was not as bad as our worries about bankruptcy had led us to believe. Wells let me discover, through a book he recommended I read (The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman), that I did not respect money in the same manner that I respect my wife, children, or those in my care in our parish. The simple question posed in the first of the nine steps, "How did you learn about money," made me realize that I reacted to my father's saying, "we don't have enough money" even though it was clear we did, by deciding to act as if I had enough money even when I clearly didn't. Rather than obsess about money I ignored the whole question of what money is and what it can and cannot do. Of course, my ignorance led to worry which led to obsession which led me to my choice to either confront the problem or continue to run away. When I finally asked for help I found that there were, indeed, solutions that began with my willingness to face the problem and its consequences. Not unlike the problem faced by the vestry and the parish this year.

I have learned that respect for someone or something brings about an energy that is positive and clearly a manifestation of God's power. I have learned that a budget is not a restriction that binds but rather a tool that serves to promote clear thinking about goals and objectives, dreams and visions. This is as true for my workplace which is the parish as it is for my family.

As we approach 1999, our respect for making tough leadership decisions has brought forth seven people to stand for four vestry positions. This is a first in my four year tenure at Saint Matthias and clear evidence of growing lay leadership energy. As this energy is released within the parish, I hope to spend more time being pastor and priest and not administrator. This means time spent in prayer, learning, and, especially in sharing our common life together as a community of faith. Imagine the energy that will be released if we respect each other as deeply as God respected us. God chose to show us total and unconditional love in that which is our sure foundation, Jesus Christ. What a marvelous way to prepare for the coming of Christ.

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Our website communicates who we are as a community of faith

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, August, 1998

"Website" is an interesting word that did not exist just three or four years ago. Now the World Wide Web (where one finds "websites") brings information and ideas to people in a manner that recalls the impact of the printing press. Before the invention of moveable type, books were laboriously copied by hand. As a consequence, few persons owned books and even fewer could read. Yet, when printed material became available, namely the Holy Bible, educating persons to read became a priority of those seeking to share new ideas.

However, there were few things to read (or the same book to read over and over again, namely the Holy Bible) until the last two hundred years or so. The cost of paper alone kept many books out of circulation. The technology to support mass inexpensive printing is relatively recent. Photocopying has only been commonplace since the middle of the 1970's. The key concept to understand is not what is printed but what is communicated. Printing, whether books, magazines, junk mail, or even this newsletter, is just one form of communication. Television and radio, billboards, simple signs on doors and street corners all vie for our attention. Somehow the communication of important ideas and information must happen amidst all this clutter. The important ideas and information that support the building of relationships among people that claim to be a community of faith must be intentionally communicated through direct education and indirect reinforcement.

Thomas Cahill in his book, The Gifts of the Jews, never mentions the World Wide Web, email, or the printing press. He describes the ancient world from which came the people we now call the Jews. This ancient world had so many Gods that people thought their lives were controlled by the whims of those Gods. Everything began and ended as it had always begun and ended: a wheel spinning but never moving, no past, no future. The people who became the Jews changed everything by hearing and accepting a relationship with one God. This radical change allowed for the discussion of new ideas and the desire for information: a road taken somewhere, life is a journey with a past and, more importantly, a future. And communicating this experience became important which is why it was remembered and written down.

In an odd sense, just as our whole world view has its roots in the experience of the people who became the Jews, so does our website at Saint Matthias. Our website is being intentionally developed to communicate that we are a people who remember and celebrate our past, care and share with one another in our present, and look with faith and hope to the opportunities of the future.

Our website is a proclamation of how we see our relationship with God and each other as we live as a community of faith built on the sure foundation that is Jesus Christ.

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Willing to be "Deep" Church

By The Reverend William Carl Thomas, June, 1998

Sometimes the clearest understanding of something comes at a moment when I least expect to engage the question. Yesterday, I visited a homebound member of our parish family, Delores Bowe, who has been slowly healing from a major operation that occurred over a year and half ago. "Just a few months to go," said Delores, "and I'll be able to come to church for communion" as I was preparing the sacrament that I had brought with me. Delores knew of Bishop Miller's Pentecost visit to the parish the previous Sunday and was delighted to receive a copy of that day's worship booklet. As I read the scripture from Acts about the day of Pentecost Delores' face brightened. Just as I finished reading the names of the many countries represented in the crowd that day, Delores said something about the Tower of Babel. Just as I was about to correct her that the scripture was about Pentecost I heard clearly what she was saying and understood on a new and deeper level the connection between the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel and Pentecost.

The Tower of Babel is a story of humanity's willfulness through personal effort to capture God and God's action in reminding humanity of God's place in the relationship. Pentecost is the day when God celebrated and blessed the willingness of a people to enter fully into a right and proper relationship with God in this world without worry about the next. In the Tower of Babel God makes language a barrier among a willful people with the hope that in the struggle to hear one another clearly, the people will find the right and proper relationship with God. On the Day of Pentecost, that hope is realized when a group of people, prepared by God in Jesus Christ, having waited in willing expectation, accept the Gift of God in the Holy Spirit and can hear others as language has been removed as a barrier. Their Pentecost experience shows us the necessity of having and maintaining a willing heart as we remember humanity's willfulness prior to Pentecost and after Pentecost (how well we know of the barriers erected today by those who should be brothers and sisters).

A willing heart is a way of describing what it means to desire true intimacy. Someone with a deeply developed willing heart, while afraid of the pain intimacy can bring, is expectant of the joy such intimacy can bring: both with God and with other people. It's not easy to be deeply willing as God has lovingly given us the freedom to be a willing people (obedient as Jesus was obedient) and a willful people (as shown by so many examples of sin in the Bible as well as in the news every day). It takes the same type of expectant discipline that the Apostles demonstrated as they waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit. When they received the gift of proclaiming God's love on the Day of Pentecost they changed the world.

Bishop Parsley has said that we should not worry about being high church or low church but should concentrate on being "deep" church. I thank Delores Bowe for helping me hear that, at its best, "deep" church is a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to intimately share the love of God. Such sharing will change the world.

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