A New Beginning

I’ve been writing these reflections off and on (mostly off) for the past few years. My first venue was a blog associated with Trinity Episcopal Church in Greeley where I served for over 15 years until my retirement at the end of 2018. Since that time we’ve moved from Greeley to our former home in Evergreen, Colorado and most of my time and energy has been devoted to unpacking, consolidating two households and donating quite a bit of stuff we’ve accumulated over the years. That is still going on and will be over the next several months. I planned to resume my reflections in April, so this is more an introduction/reintroduction to my work. With that in mind, I offer a few remarks on this blog itself.

Who am I writing for?

All sorts and conditions of people, but particularly Christians, ordained and lay, who are hungry to grow in their relationship with God. I’m writing for people who love the Church, the Body of Christ, but are frustrated and even disheartened by the constant failure of Christian religious culture to produce what is envisioned by the writings in the New Testament. The late Fr. Terry Fullam once observed that “the Church has been subnormal for so long that if it ever became normal it would look abnormal.” Which leads me to my next question.

What will this be about?

There will be a hodgepodge of topics ranging from ecclesiastical structure to biblical anthropology to spiritual disciplines to general theology.  A great deal of this springs from years of preparing sermons and newsletter articles and teachings and reading many books that cause me to reflect anew on things I had thought were settled.

Why Apprentice Priest?

I was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1978. I’ve served seven congregations in three diocese in Kentucky, Delaware and Colorado. One might think I should have moved beyond being apprentice by now. Yet I’ve never stopped learning what it meant to be a parish priest and was still learning the day I walked out of my last parish.

The two words that make up the name of this blog have deeper meanings that just that. The late Dallas Willard, trying to convey a better grasp of the meaning of being a disciple of Jesus, suggested that the term “apprentice” came closer to the meaning of the term as it is used in the New Testament. Some time after I had adopted Willard’s terminology it occurred to me that there was another good reason to adopt the term apprentice instead of disciple. One can be a disciple of anyone living or dead. All one needs is access to the master’s teaching. But one can only apprentice oneself to a living person. To be an apprentice of Jesus means that one’s relationship with Jesus is dynamic and ongoing, rooted in the Gospels but fleshed out in a life of prayer and community.

The use of the word “priest” does not, in fact, refer to Holy Orders. It does refer to the role and activity of priest or shaman in most religious cultures. A wonderful, if somewhat dated book by Robert Farrar Capon, first put me on that track with his assertion that the original purpose of humankind was to be the priests of creation. In that sense, all human activity is priestly activity. Capon’s thesis included the observation that human priesthood, at some point in history, went wrong (the Fall of Adam & Eve) and in Jesus a new priesthood was created in which those who are “in Christ” participate.

Well, that’s it for starters. If you decide to follow along with these reflections please be warned that there is little organization to my postings. They will jump from topic to topic with little warning. Some reflections will stop mid-stream and not resume until several posts later. When I retired I needed to produce new business cards and gave some thought about how I would describe myself. My quirks in preaching and teaching gave me the answer…

The Rev’d Jack Stapleton, retired
Professional Follower of Rabbit Trails