Public Christianity: New Dean Shares Vision and Insights

edited by Amy Babcock

The Rev. Dr. Samuel T. Lloyd III preached his first sermon as the ninth dean of Washington National Cathedral on February 20, 2005. He was formally installed as dean in a service at the Cathedral on April 23. Dean Lloyd met with Cathedral Age in January; this interview appeared in the Spring 2005 issue.
 

How did you respond—intellectually, spiritually—to the invitation to serve as dean of the Cathedral?

I was captivated by the opportunity this place has to make a real difference in the public life of this city, the country, and the Episcopal Church. The Cathedral is a powerful symbol of public Christianity in a time when Christianity is often a frightening or troubling word to people. A lot of my prayer was about trying to help the Cathedral give a fresh and generous-spirited face to Christian faith.

As I prayed, the word that kept coming to me was reconciliation, as something so essential in these badly divided times. If my ministry could help the Cathedral to embody a sense of a love that holds all of us—to enable people to come together across their differences, listen to each other, worship together, and experience God’s love for one another—that would be a powerful thing.

How do you see the Cathedral as a community?

I imagine it now as a set of overlapping, sometimes concentric, circles. At the core are the staff, members of Cathedral Chapter, and the Board of Trustees of the Foundation. They’re the custodians of the Cathedral’s life. I care very much that those at the core experience their life as being part of a community of prayer.

There are also other circles of relationship and engagement. The Cathedral is the chief mission church of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington; the largest church on the landscape of the city of Washington; symbolic home of the Episcopal Church; and an essential cathedral in the Anglican Communion. The National Cathedral Association is the Cathedral’s community across this country. Regular worshipers come here. Others come here once and never come again but are connected somehow.

The circles of relationship are varied and shifting. The very amorphousness seems to me a significant opportunity. Part of the challenge of our work is to build bridges of relationship with all these communities in ways that have a coherence at the center about who we are and what we stand for.

What are your thoughts about the Cathedral’s national mission?

Certainly we will continue this vital symbolic role of being a national church. When the president is inaugurated, this is the natural place to come for the prayer service for the inauguration. In a crisis such as 9/11, this is the place the nation turns. Those events are a vital part of the mission of this place, that the spiritual life of the nation can turn here in times of major moment, whether it’s crisis or celebration.

The other piece is for the Cathedral to develop a more consistent public voice. I don’t mean necessarily speaking on every issue of the day, though that is part of the mission—but to be a clear articulator of generous-spirited Christian faith, using everything from publications, to conferences at the Cathedral College, to the website, video streaming, perhaps television.

How do you envision the role of preaching at the Cathedral?

I want to give a lot of my energy to preaching here from this pulpit. The hope in doing that is to be able to develop a fairly consistent voice for the Cathedral. That’s harder to do when it’s a pretty steady smorgasbord of preachers almost every week coming in from elsewhere.

I certainly support having guest preachers—to bring in the great preachers of the day, to have variety and representation of all kinds. But if we’re primarily a venue and not a voice, we’re missing something important.

How do you anticipate helping the Episcopal Church move through current controversies?

My hope is that the Cathedral can have its own place where it stands and be able to articulate its own convictions, worked out in the context of the leadership core of this community and in the context of the diocese and the larger church.

More specifically, how have you approached dealing with one of the most difficult issues of our time, that of the role of gay and lesbian people in the church’s life?

In my ministry I have been committed to welcoming gay and lesbian people into the church’s life, affirming them as vital parts of the community’s life, and favoring the church’s finding ways to bless and support them in their relationships—but to do that in a way that acknowledges that the church itself hasn’t fully arrived there, and that we have to be able to honor our differences, and be more than respectful. We have to love each other, listen to each other, and believe in the integrity of the other’s point of view.

The church has been too busy writing one another off in this last phase, and I think it breaks Jesus’ heart when we do that.

A retired dean of Canterbury Cathedral has said that secularism poses a greater threat to the church than does any controversy within the church. Would you agree?

I think I would. That’s part of the tragedy of this one arena of our life becoming so divisive. I’m not sorry the church has tackled the issue. The issue presented itself. It raises questions of faithfulness to the Gospel that it is right for us to be wrestling with, as messy and painful as it is. But to the degree that it is impeding our larger witness to God’s love in an increasingly secular time, it’s tragic.

A lot of what draws me here is an evangelical zeal to speak the Christian faith in a secular culture. In America our culture’s becoming both more fundamentalist and more secular at the same time. I think the Episcopal Church is losing far more people to the New York Times on Sunday morning than to conservative churches.

Our mission needs to be to help people grow in faith, prayer, and awareness of God’s presence in their lives, quite a counter-cultural enterprise in these times. This Cathedral can invite people to rediscover an awareness of God, to come to a place with grandeur and beauty that can invite them to step out of their small and often pinched little worldviews, and have a sense of the majesty and mystery of God already present in their lives.

How would you define evangelism?

Evangelism is a set of ways that those of us who have caught some glimpse of God’s love for the whole world seek to communicate that and invite people to discover it for themselves. As co-chair of the mission strategy process for the Diocese of Massachusetts, I tried to get a very progressive-thinking diocese that was rapidly losing members to see that, in many ways, the most radical thing you can do is to tell people about Jesus. The danger for much of the main line is that we’ve thought that we could skip over talking about faith, and instead love our liturgy, or music, or our work in the community.

Would you have any advice for people who hesitate to talk about Jesus with friends?

It’s not easy for any of us. But we have to find ways—even distinctly Anglican ways, such as evangelism primarily through the life of the community—to bring people into the life. We need to show people that something here is alive and real.

We should be as natural in telling people about our faith as we would be telling them about a wonderful school, or a great book or restaurant. Can’t we be just as excited about saying, “Let me tell you the difference that Jesus has made in my life in the last year”?

Amid cries for religious diversity, where does Christianity fit?

The world of the future must be interfaith, or it will be an increasingly terrifying world. My hope and dream is that each of the traditions will go deeper and discover in its own heritage its own roots of generosity, compassion and hospitality. Out of that, as they work together, religions can be part of breaking down barriers.

The danger is that fundamentalists in all the traditions end up seizing power and doing a great deal of damage. This Cathedral and the Christian faith need to remain deeply and distinctly Christian, but through a welcoming and open Christianity that is open to dialogue, to learning new things, and to be taken in new directions.

How can Christians or people of any one faith participate in interfaith dialogue?

I, as a Christian, believe that Jesus is the unique Son of God. Once in history God became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. But that doesn’t lead me to believe that Christianity is all right and the others are all wrong. Quite the opposite. I as a follower of Jesus need to be willing to learn some things about obedience and faithfulness from Muslims, some things about God’s presence in all that exists from Hindus, some things about following Torah and the Law from Jews, that can inform and deepen what it means for me to be a disciple of Jesus.

Is there a Biblical passage that you have found useful in recent prayers?

One that I work with a lot is John 15:5, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” The image is of Christ flowing through everyone. We’re all bound to each other in this one vine together.