Introducing The Rev. Dr. Maggie Izutsu

The first entry on this new blog for Diocesan Chaplains "News You Can Use" is from The Rev. Dr. Maggie Izutsu who Bishop Packard has brought in as a Consultant for Chaplaincy. She will be exploring resources for chaplains as part of our office's Chaplaincy Training Project. Dr. Izutsu will be visiting chaplaincy programs around the country and will blog on her trips.


February 22, 2007

On Sunday evening, I will travel to Springfield, Missouri to take part in a weeklong course on “Ministry in Trauma, Crisis and Grief Context” offered at the Assemblies of God flagship seminary by their chaplain credentialler, Manny Cordero. This will be the first of a series of visits I will make to various institutions offering instruction in chaplaincy. I am hoping that this is a course I will be able to recommend to chaplains currently serving the Episcopal Church in the Midwest who are looking for ongoing educational opportunities.

I am excited about the prospects for this trip. I met Manny Cordero, the instructor, at the Yale Workplace Chaplaincy Conference this past November, where he told me about his work in training and credentialing chaplains. I met the Dean and President of the seminary, Joe Castleberry, at a conference on the topic of teaching world religions in the seminary context to which we had both been invited by Auburn Theological Seminary in Manhattan in June of last year. Princeton and Columbia University educated, having spent formative time in South America, what caught my attention most about the Dean was his personal story which amply illustrated his concluding evocative remark: that one must be willing to give up one’s life for one’s faith. I had been looking forward to following up on this enigmatic remark in further conversation, but the conference ended before an ample opportunity arose. I look forward to having dinner with him and his wife during my stay in Springfield and learning more at close hand what it means in his experience to live by that dictum. His story so far is one of hard-working, faithful risk-taking. It seems an antidote to extremist or militarist decisions and a rich story out of our own tradition to rival terrorist exclusivist claims to noble deaths on the one hand and the entitlement orientations to life on the other that plague our culture in our day.

As further background to this visit, I took an excursion to the Lakewood Church in Houston. My husband and I, visiting friends in Houston over New Years’, decided to make the most of our being in town to check out the megachurch which we had seen profiled on TV. As an ethnographer by training, I appreciate first-hand “immersion” experience and the chance to challenge my own faculties and powers of observation. My conversation in June with Joe Castleberry made me think that there might be something of merit to the Pentecostal and other forms of evangelical missions that I had not previously perceived and deserving of a second look.

I found the experience of the megachurch quite overwhelming. In a vast former basketball stadium, I would estimate there were some 20,000 congregants. We sat in one of the uppermost levels, on the left-hand side facing the front, high above the platform on which the singers pranced and the preacher stood. We were so far forward that the view we had of the people on the stage was from the side and often from behind.

I went to Lakewood equipped to cultivate what Krister Stendahl, Bishop of Stockholm taught me to think of as a “holy envy” for the qualities they exhibit that are lacking in my own tradition. Among them are an easy ability to praise God, a ready spirit of prayer, the highly organized, Billy Graham-style personal prayer partners, and rock-concert quality music. I smiled when I remembered an earlier ambition I’d had to engage Pat Methany in producing a jazz communion when I was working in his home town, Boston. I have something in common with these folks, after all, I mused.

What I did not envy, holy or otherwise, and found myself in fact fearing, was the (no surprise here) simplicity and misleading qualities of the central message. It was the “prosperity gospel” through and through. I became concerned that the investment that congregants make to the message of their church might prove an obstacle to processing claims upon them that call for a more complex response. In particular, the third song of the day, with the jingoistic refrain of “How Great is Our God” made me fearful of the short step between this and militant “Othering” tactics that have historically imperiled human societies. As an educator, I aim to help my students build hefty brain synapses to handle contradictory input, to take responsibility for their actions, and to suffer for what they believe. Do folks at Lakewood aim for the same? Another time, I might return to interview congregants about the satisfactoriness of their experience at Lakewood. I am sure I would learn more from such conversations. Or perhaps I would have something to offer them. A place to register their more complex feelings, for one. This would not be in the spirit of undermining the work of Lakewood, but of a peaceable complimentarity. After all, I want to learn, but am concerned I will never have the spirit of enthusiasm they can muster. This they can do for me. For the time being, I remain concerned that, as Bishop Packard helpfully reflected with me when I reported on my findings from this venture, the Christian faith is built on the blood of martyrs, and entitlement messages hardly do that justice.

So I am hoping for a better experience and the chance for complex and compelling conversation with my friend, Joe. To learn how to turn my “holy envy” into “helpful environments” for our mutual collaboration in the education of chaplains. And I am grateful to Bishop Packard and the Assemblies of God seminary for this opportunity to explore our options.


The Rev. Dr. Margaret W. Izutsu