Vestry Papers • November/December 2007 • Sharing Spiritual Leadership

A Theology of Entitlement (full text version)

by Rev Caroline Fairless

A young woman who has asked for a spot on a vestry agenda and comes right to the point. "I speak for those of us who don’t like the changes in the worship service."

A discussion follows, lengthy enough for the woman to become impatient. She then tosses out the zinger that is sure to knot the stomachs of all clergy and vestries. "These people have been here a long time. They are old and some are sick. Don’t they deserve to have the kind of worship they want?"

Before a vestry can begin to address its response to the question, which has, by the very quality of its being spoken aloud, placed it on the horns of a familiar dilemma, two things are of critical importance:

No congregation is exempt from the struggle between (for the sake of brevity) what I will call "traditional" and "emergent" worship.* Congregational resistance to change is as familiar a "pew sitter" as your great Aunt Jane or Mrs. Mabel Thompson or Mr. Wilmot down the street. We name it in other ways – fear, a clinging to the old ways and the old days, even a longing for our children and grandchildren to know the church we grew up in.

But look again at the question posed to the vestry. "Doesn’t she deserve to have the kind of worship she wants?" It’s a question that crosses the bounds of mere fear and resistance and longing. It’s a question that falls within the embrace of a theology of entitlement.

The focus need not be worship. A new ministry that is "inconvenient" because it takes up otherwise designated space; a building addition; the focus of entitlement can be anything.

Someone(s) in this congregation is entitled to what she wants, how she wants it, and when she wants it. Maybe she’s sick, maybe she’s been here a long time, maybe she’s old, maybe she’s wealthy. Whatever the reason, someone or other is entitled to have things the way she wants.

That’s the underlying assumption which challenges our vestries, and in our desire to honor age, longevity, fragility and a traditional way of doing things, our vestries are often swayed by the needs and desires or money of the individual(s), to the detriment and often spiritual disabling of the community.

When entitlement is operative, for the entitled few to have their way requires by definition that others be disenfranchised. When entitlement is operative, the body of Christ is unable to function according to the precepts of Jesus. I fact, entitlement is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

As to the second question, the role of vestries. Picture me, a second year seminarian, attending a session at the former College of Preachers in Washington D. C., and meeting, for the first time, a seminarian from the Diocese of Iowa who, clearly (and with pride) had done his homework in the area of constitution and canons.

"In our diocese," he told me, "the first and most significant obligation of a vestry, is to attend to the spiritual welfare of the parish."**

Apparently it impressed me, because in the more than twenty years that have followed, I’ve not forgotten it.

How would our various vestry experiences, for lay and ordained alike, differ from current practice, if the spiritual health of the congregation were its primary obligation? And what bearing might that have on the question of entitlement raised earlier in this article?

This is worth repeating: entitlement is antithetical to the Good News of Jesus. Period! The irony is, you can scratch the surface theology of any congregation anywhere, and you can expect agreement with that assertion, even as the behavior gives lie to it and undermines it.

So, how does it happen that so many of our congregational decisions, particularly a small congregation’s decisions, are based on a theology of entitlement, where those entitled are clearly the monied, the ones with longevity, the founding matriarchs and patriarchs, usually Anglo, never the children, never the teenagers, never the educators, never the imaginative, never the newcomers? How does that happen; what does it cost? And how do our vestries collude?

Vestries collude with the best of intentions, the operative criteria being those such as honor and respect and a sense of the way things are supposed to be. I would add to that list a desire to keep peace, and would hold it up as a potential stumbling block to a congregation’s spiritual health.

Keeping peace can be the better face on "making nice", and "making nice" is pretty much always dangerous to the vision and mission of a faith community.

Yet "making nice" as a vestry response to an assertion of entitlement, whether it’s about worship, or a food pantry, or sanctuary or whatever the issue, cannot be said to serve the spiritual well-being of a congregation.

Are the role and duties of most vestries ordered and prioritized in the way of the Diocese of Iowa and those other dioceses which have caught this particular vision? No. Could they be, and ought they to be? I would say yes.

It would require significant re-imagining and re-visioning of vestry handbooks and the canons of the dioceses of our Church. It would require a different focus for education and formation.

But, for better and worse, in this schismatic time of division and litigation and seemingly unabated turmoil, what better role could the vestries of our denomination embrace but that of the spiritual health and well-being of the congregations they serve?

Caroline Fairless is an Episcopal priest and director of Children at Worship ~ Congregations in Bloom. She is the author of several books and educational resources. For more information, www.childrenatworship.org.