W
henever we try to describe saint benedict’s table, terms like “alternative,” “post-modern” and “emergent church” manage to creep in to the conversation. The problem with these sorts of terms is two-fold: either people have no idea what we are talking about, or they jump to a whole series of conclusions based on what they assume such catch-words mean. Either way we manage to communicate little of what we are actually about, so in the interest of saying something useful here, this page is officially declared free of that particular jargon.
So what are we? Lifting quite happily from the English writer Kenneth Leech, the following list of descriptors should give a sense of what we are about.
- saint benedict’s table is first and foremost a eucharistic worshipping community. Not only do we share each Sunday night in the bread and wine of communion, we are eucharistic in the sense that we are defined by our common life in the Body of Christ.
- saint benedict’s table strives to be a baptismal community, meaning that not only do we practice baptism but also that we understand ourselves to be called to live out the life of a transformed and alternative people.
- saint benedict’s table understands itself to be a biblical community, in which scripture is prayed and digested.
- saint benedict’s table is a community of rational inquiry; a zone in which truth is sought and heard, and in which dissent and dialogue are embraced as part of the process of discernment.
- saint benedict’s table is going to need to find ways to rise to the challenge to be an inclusive community, always asking ourselves, “who is left out?”
saint benedict’s table is discerning a call to becoming a community of expectation, restlessness, and vision – of “messy spirituality,” as Mike Yaconelli phrased it. We experience ourselves as community of Advent spirituality: always on the hinge between the old and the new, the known and the unknown to which God is drawing us.
We are positioned within the Anglican tradition, which for us is less about denominational labels or institutional jurisdiction – though we do exist as a part of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land – and more about being rooted in rich spiritual, liturgical and theological soil. This is the same soil that nurtured C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, John Donne and George Herbert, Dorothy Sayers and Madeleine L’Engle and Desmond Tutu and countless others. Theologians and poets, musicians and novelists, reformers and rebels… all somehow linked through a tradition of breadth and depth and search and even the occasional controversy. It is good soil; the kind that gets embedded right into the skin on your hands as you work in it.
