Daring to be a Different Church
03/12/2007
By Patrick Gahan

“Do you want to burn out or rust out?” she asked without a hint of humor. I was visiting a septuagenarian friend one afternoon several years ago, when she asked how my work was going. A catalog of my trials, woes, and disappointments issued from my lips until she cut me off mid-sentence with her scathing query.

The prospect of “rusting out” has again crossed my mind these last months, and not just for myself. The clergy and lay leaders of The Episcopal Church have been dodging bullets fired along the battle lines of our raging culture wars, waving a white flag of truce between the mordant parties of our increasingly polarized national church, stoking fires amidst the sizeable army of the self-satisfied and complacent, and have, no doubt, felt the waters rising up to their neck and the rust setting in. Some days the prospect of leaving the ministry to become a local bread deliverer or an exotic dancer on the senior circuit does not seem so bad. the rest