Our Focus
Jesus said, "Teach my disciples to do what I have commanded you to do." So, our focus is to help you (and all of us!) learn how to do what Jesus told us to do.

For example, if you find that, like most of us, you cannot by direct effort bless those who curse you, or pray without ceasing, or put aside your anger, or stop envying or lusting, it is your responsibility to find out how to train yourself to do so (under God's guidance and grace). It is our responsibility to provide you that training and walk together with you in that training.

That training is only to a very small extent training in "how to love your enemy". To a much greater extent, it is training in changing your internal landscape so that loving your enemy becomes automatic, the natural outflow of who you are inside, rather than an act of your will. It is the training the Spiritual Disciplines provide.

Why We Do This Boring Liturgy

An "Ancient/Future" Faith

A good musician constantly goes back to practice scales. Authors re-write and re-write. Engineers put their designs through iteration after iteration. The process of becoming a good musician, a good author, a good engineer - in fact, of becoming good at anything requires constant practice of the fundamentals.

The process of becoming like Jesus - of cooperating with the Holy Spirit as He forms Jesus in you - requires constant attention to the fundamentals. The church has 2000 years of experience and experimentation in helping people in that process. We have tried almost everything. As a result, we know that becoming like Jesus requires five fundamental personal practices: silence and solitude, prayer, service, fasting, and lectio divina (meditating on Scripture).

We also know that the kind of worship that helps the process along needs to remind us of our sin - and thus our need for a savior; to tell us (or remind us) of how God has met that need through Jesus, and to encourage and strengthen us to keep working on becoming like Christ. The liturgy is the distilled experience of all that experimentation.

What Does "Subcongregation" Mean?
We are not an independent church, but are a smaller subgroup of Christ's Church of Amherst. (Our priest, Richard Griffin, is also an elder at CCA.) Our intent is to offer an appealing alternative to three groups of people:

• Those who find that faith is mysterious, and would like to explore faith in a setting that acknowledges that mystery
• Individuals within Christ's Church who desire a more liturgical worship experience
• Individuals with backgrounds in liturgical churches who are looking for a Jesus-centered church home

As a subcongregaton of CCA, we hold CCA's five Core Values. Like all of our other groups, we emphasize one of those values more than others; in our case, Scripture/Spiritual Formation.

What Does "Southern Episcopal Church" Mean?
The Southern Episcopal Church broke off from the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (the mainline body) in 1959. It's one of the many small Episcopal groups that use the older (1928) prayer book. The denomination has its headquarters in Nashville, thus the "Southern" Episcopal Church.

Our group is a Southern Episcopal subcongregation because the priest, Richard Griffin, was ordained in the summer of 2007 by the presiding bishop of the denomination, Huron Manning.