The Very Rev. C. Dean Taylor currently serves as the Rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Dalton, Georgia.
He has also served parishes in Kentucky and Tennessee.

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Essay Responses

1. What are you passionate about in your ministry, in your personal life, and in the world around you?

The following question came to me from an eighth grader in Confirmation class: “Um, there’s this kid in my class that says that if I, like, believe in evolution, then I’m going to hell. Am I?”   What a gift God has given me to be in a place of ministry where I can teach an Anglican way of knowing Jesus Christ in which the “cruelties of fundamentalism” are absent.  

In my teaching, my preaching, my pastoral care, and my leading of a congregation, these moments of “Gospel clarity” do more than simply answer a theological question. The best answers give pastoral assurance of God’s grace, forgiveness, and love. The very best answers invite the questioner—and teacher—into the drama of an ongoing, lifetime conversation between a child of God and the God who created him. It is in this graceful interplay of human spirit, Holy Spirit, and community that I still continue to find passion for my ministry.  

In my ordained ministry as rector of a diverse parish, this teaching is necessarily done in the midst of incredible diversity, not simply in this town and region of the country, but among ourselves.  In many issues, we have had to hammer out a way to be together, yet hold up the things we believe individually to be right. As I often say to the congregation or to the vestry, “Remember in a conflict that most often, each side has a piece of the truth.” The challenge of community is not only to be faithful to one’s own piece of the truth, but also to have the humility to imagine the sheer possibility that the other has a piece of the truth unseen to you. 

To do this takes leaders who, as Rabbi Edwin Friedman puts it, “define themselves non-anxiously” and chart a clear course forward.  When I played cello in the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, I was acutely aware of the many differences of opinion, and even childish sniping and passive-aggressive “acting out” at the leadership at that time.  The conductor, however, was a skilled leader who knew how to hold up the final vision of the music, and focus on the detailed, specific steps necessary to get there.  And then, even though he listened carefully to differing opinions and honored all sides as much as possible, when the time came, he led them somewhere.  

With God’s people, the “music” is God’s Kingdom. There are detailed, specific steps to get there as well, including prayer, humility, forgiveness, kindness, and a compassion for the least among us and a concern for justice.  Ideally, the leader models two dynamic forces in his or her own life—the hunger for the Kingdom, and the passion for the ways in which we are called to get there together.

In my personal life, I am passionate about my friends, my family, my music and any excuse to get outdoors and exercise!  My childhood hunting expeditions with my father in the farming culture of South Georgia and Alabama have been translated into hiking, canoeing, and biking. To me it is more than simply “time off” from work; it is Sabbath time that refreshes and renews me, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And it reminds me that God is a God of all creation. I identify closely with that moment in St. Francis’ early life when he looked up at the stars and said, “If this be the creation, then what must the Creator be like?”  

2. Please elaborate on an occasion or experience, during your ministry, of significant personal growth or change.

On the surface, everything on my “Abraham Walk” was going as planned. The Lilly-funded hike on the Benton-McKay Trail began in good spirits with hikers Shiraz Hamir, of the Dalton Islamic Center, Rob Cowan, president of Temple Beth-El in Dalton, and Tom Minor, former Senior Warden of St. Mark’s. The plan: to backpack through the wilderness area of the North Georgia mountains, and, at the “high places,” worship in our own traditions, and maintain a “respectful observance” of one another’s prayer time. 

I had observed such inter-faith exchanges before and had found them most interesting. This time, however, something happened that I am not certain I will ever be able to explain or even describe. I can only say that, as things began to fall apart for us “older than we realized” hikers—rain, pulled muscles, even running into a backwoods general store called the “Confederate-owned” Dixie Depot—we were drawn closer together in a way that I can only call “mystical.”

That first night, when we realized that everyone had forgotten something important, forcing us to share food, flashlights, and “mole skin” bandages, we each said our prayers, each in his own tradition and even language.  We talked about what these meant to us, and then, eventually, how each of us had grown up with these prayer traditions soaked into our souls from our earliest memories.

As evening drew to a close and the campfire turned from flame to coals, a most unusual thing happened, at least for a group of religiously serious folks who loved to talk.  We became silent. Simply, silent.  I have never in my life experienced a silence quite like it.  Was it the Muslim Salaama (Sura 11:69), or the Jewish sound of sheer silence, (I Kings19:12), or Jesus’ Peace I leave with you (John 14:27)?  I believe that it was “all of the above.”  It was a moment that sheered away all that came between us, and left, simply, three children of God.  

I reflect now that I began that hike with much “theological freight,” and much of it, I must say, quite current, intellectually interesting, and theologically valid. I could have told these new friends the newest theories of sacrifice and atonement by Rene Girard versus Bruce Chilton, or the current African perspective on the Trinity by A.O. Ogbonnaya, or even a wonderful vision of the theological “tria-logue” among the three Abrahamic religions by Hans Kung (all objects of my sabbatical study that Spring).  

It is my belief that the Holy One who transcends all our theologies showed up that night.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the Holy One gave us the grace to be still long enough to know that the Holy One had been there all along.  We did not cease to become Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. In fact, in some ways we became even more Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. 

It is paradox that has probably been at the center of my personality and ministry all along, but it takes on new emphasis in this phase of my life. There are profound differences among my fellow Christians, even my fellow Anglicans and Episcopalians.  Theological reflection and sharing are important and even vital, but in our lifetimes, there will always be that which divides us, those divisions that our human minds cannot overcome. Where theology falls short, however, our shared common humanity must lift us up.  What we have together, then, is a longing for peace and justice, a promise of hope, and our own way of prayer that, we believe, will somehow bring us to the Kingdom. And, for each of us in our own way, a profound and very real sense of the presence of God.

3. What are the touchstones in your faith that will guide your responses to the issues now facing—some would say threatening—the Episcopal Church and the world-wide Anglican Communion.

The most fundamental touchstone of my faith is the belief that every human being is a beloved child of God. Each of us is created in God’s image (Gen.1:27), and it is God’s desire for every human being to discover “who we really are” as God’s beloved child.  That journey for me involves following the person of Jesus Christ, in the Anglican tradition. 

The ethos of via media has been deep in my bones long before I gave it a name and assigned it to the theological philosophy of Richard Hooker.  My own family life was its own kind of via media, between and my father’s love of growing things on our farm, and my mother’s love of language and the arts from her teaching of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Conrad.  (Confession: If I were to slip into a coma, and the Eucharist administered to me, I would probably respond in the Thomas Cranmer words of Rite I. The Lord Be With You; and With Thy Spirit.)  As I began ministry as a six-year-old acolyte, then, the words of the Episcopal liturgy have been a powerful touchstone of faith.

What I love about the Anglican impulse in the following of Jesus Christ to the Kingdom is its insistence not just from being “in the middle,” but also of trying to hold on to both ends of the extremes. This ethos fits my personality very well. In God’s call to join in on the great banquet, we Anglicans simply want everyone to join in.  Just come to the table together, and we’ll work out differences along the way, and even grow from them as well. We are, after all, seeing “through a glass darkly,” (I Cor. 13:12).

It has been one of the heartbreaks of my ministry as rector to have those limits stretched past the breaking point for many.  In my parish, the time after the 2003 General Convention was one of much unrest and consternation. We lost several good families. However, we did not lose twenty families, as we surely could have (and almost did). Why? Because, I am convinced, we had, as a parish, already set our sights clearly on parish goals that we believed God was calling us to pursue. 

Moreover, we decided to use the controversy as a time for us as a parish to look deeper into our identity as American Episcopalians in the worldwide Anglican Communion. We carefully and prayerfully considered the questions posed by The Windsor Report: what things are adiaphora, (things that do not make a difference), and further, what things should follow the principle of  subsidiarity (matters which should be decided as close to the local level as possible)?  We meditated on Barbara Brown Taylor’s call to humility: “Is it more faithful to be right, or to be together?”

As a rector, I personally resonated with its call to “create the space necessary to enable the healing of the Communion” (p.54) Also, we recognized the call to “re-evaluate the ways in which we have read, heard, studied and digested scripture,” as something with which our parish has been engaged in this fundamentalist region of the country for a long time. Finally, it reconfirmed that we have our own calling to pursue as a local parish, even as we are legitimately challenged in our world view by the greater church. 

Perhaps, when all is said and done, my final touchstone of faith is modeled by my father. I am convinced that when he looked over a ploughed field in April, he actually saw, with visionary eyes, a full, complete crop of cotton, three bales to the acre!  No matter where we are, in the worldwide Anglican Communion or Episcopal Church, what we have in common finally is hope, the hope of the Kingdom. And I believe that, no matter what the configuration of the Anglican Communion ends up—no matter which of my parish families leave for now, or stays—that very real, visionary hope of the Kingdom is the common ministry for us all. And we will continue faithfully and even joyfully in its pursuit.