This coming week we will welcome the Rev. Donna McNeil to our pulpit. Rev. Donna is a dear friend, and the director of Canterbury MSU.
Canterbury is the Episcopal church’s national campus ministry movement, with missions planted all over the United States. Rev. Donna will be joining us to speak very briefly on how we can be the very best neighbors we can be to the college students at MSU, what their current mission looks like, and their plans for the immediate and distant futures.
St. David’s is in a unique position among our neighboring Episcopal churches as it relates to campus ministry at Michigan State University. We lack the centralized location of All Saints Episcopal Church but offer a very different liturgical style that I believe is actually surprisingly attractive to broad swaths of young people. There is, at least colloquially, a generational rediscovery of liturgical traditions among Gen Z and Generation Alpha folk looking for a church home.
Which is to say that our youngest people aren’t necessarily looking for a church that reinvents the wheel, but rather has a solid, well catechized, well structured, ancient and purposeful wheel as its foundation. In the Catholic church this demographic is calling themselves TradCaths, and in the broader umbrella of the Episcopal church this generational movement towards traditional liturgy is called the Inclusive Orthodoxy movement.
Young people are rediscovering the Episcopal church, and not just because they feel obligated to attend, but rather because they are experiencing its beauty, liturgy, and traditions for the very first time.
21st century theology, ancient and transcendent practice – it’s what makes us what we are, and it’s an absolutely beautiful thing. Please extend to Rev. Donna our warmest welcome and come loaded with questions.
– Joe+
P.S.
The Theological “Ask me Anything ” (AMA) has been postponed for the purpose of making myself fully available to Rev. Donna during her visit with us.
Please stay posted for a follow up date – continue percolating your curiosity!