Why Should You Be an Episcopalian?
A word for seekers, skeptics, and curious neighbors, as we continue celebrating our Easter season.
Something strange happens every spring in churches like ours. People who haven’t thought much about God in years find themselves standing in church wondering if there’s something here for them. Maybe it’s a conversation with a neighbor that went a little deeper than expected. Maybe it’s the ache that comes at Easter when the whole world seems to be celebrating something they can’t quite name.
If that’s you, I want to speak directly to you. It’s about being honest about what we believe, how we practice it, and why. It might be worth your time to walk through our doors.
I’m the priest at Church of the Good Shepherd. We’re a small Episcopal congregation with a long history in Sapulpa. What follows is my best attempt to explain what we are and why it might matter to you.
We are a place where questions are welcome. Many people left church, or never entered it, because they were told that faith requires checking your mind at the door. That’s not the our tradition or my experiences of the Episcopal Church.
Our church stands in a long line of Christian thinkers who believed that reason is a gift from God. Reason is not an obstacle to belief. We are shaped by theologians and poets, scientists and mystics. Questions are not signs of weakness. They are often signs that faith is alive and working.
At Good Shepherd, you will not find easy answers to hard questions. You will be invited into a conversation that has been going on for two thousand years. You are allowed to bring your doubts and your skepticism.
The Episcopal Church is an ancient faith with a living tradition. When you walk into our church service, you are participating in something that reaches back through the centuries, through the English Reformation, through the early church councils, through the prayers of ordinary Christians who lived and died long before any of us were born.
First published in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer gives shape to our worship. The rhythms of Scripture and church season brings us together in prayers that have been prayed in cathedrals and small wooden churches alike, in hospitals and on battlefields.
Tradition is not nostalgia. Our tradition is the accumulated wisdom of people who have already wrestled with the things you may be wrestling with now. We don’t abandon it; we receive and acknowledge it. We let it speak into the present.
The Episcopal Church takes the Bible seriously, not literally. As we read the Bible, Scripture moves through our worship across a three-year cycle of readings. But we do not believe that taking the Bible seriously requires reading every passage as a flat, literal transcript of historical events.
The Bible is not a single book, rather it is a library. It contains poetry, law, prophecy, letters, history, and apocalyptic vision. Reading it well means understanding what kind of writing you are encountering, and what its authors were trying to say to their original audience, and to us.
We welcome the insights of biblical scholarship. We take historical and literary context seriously. And we find that when Scripture is read this carefully, it is more challenging, more beautiful, and more alive than a surface reading ever allows.
The Episcopal Church is very diverse. Our diversity is in theology, in politics, in background, in the ways people understand God. That diversity is not always comfortable. But we believe it reflects something true about the Body of Christ.
We welcome people of all backgrounds, all orientations, all questions. We do not ask you to become someone your not. We have the creeds, sacraments, an ordered ministry, and a commitment to historic Christian faith. Inclusivity, for us, does not mean doctrinal emptiness. It means that the table is wider than any one of us would draw it on our own.
The via media, the “middle way”, has always described the Anglican spirit. We hold things in tension rather than forcing resolution. That takes patience, and sometimes courage. We think it’s worth it. Not everyone comes to God through argument. Many of us come through the beauty of God’s creation.
Our tradition has always understood that architecture, music, poetry, and ritual are not decorations layered over worship, they are forms of worship in themselves. When we sing, or candles are lit, or the ancient words of the Eucharistic prayer rise and fall in a familiar cadence, something happens that is not easily explained but is very real.
We take beauty seriously because we believe it is one of the languages God speaks. If you have ever been moved by music in a way that felt like more than music, or stood in a sacred space and felt the silence pressing back on you, you already know something about what we are trying to do in worship.
Much of modern religion, if we’re honest, has become a transaction. You attend a service, receive inspiration, then go home. The Episcopal tradition asks for something different through formation.
The sacraments of baptism, or the Eucharist, are not symbols pointing at invisible spiritual realities. They are means of grace, acts that participate in what they signify. When we receive bread and wine at the altar, we believe Christ is genuinely present. When a child is baptized, something real happens.
This sacramental life forms us slowly, over years and decades. It shapes the way we see our neighbors, the way we handle suffering, the way we sit with uncertainty. It is less about what you know and more about who you are becoming.
The heart of our faith, we are a resurrection people through the Easter celebration. We live in the long season after the resurrection. The church calendar marks the whole of Christian life. We believe that death is not the final word, that despair does not get the last say, that the same power that rolled the stone away is still at work in the world.
Our faith sends us outward. It means feeding people who are hungry. It means sitting with the lonely, advocating for the forgotten. It means showing up to the ordinary day of someone’s life and refusing to believe that it is without meaning.
Easter optimism looks at the evidence and expects things to improve. Hope looks at the evidence and insists on something that goes beyond it.
If you have read this far, I suspect you are looking for something. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you looking for. Maybe you’ve been burned by religion. Maybe you’re not sure you believe. Maybe you’re worried you won’t fit in. I understand all of that. I have heard those worries. I love Robin Williams statement, gather ten Episcopalians together and you might find one you agree with. It’s really about being in a faith community. Come and see.
The Easter season, the fifty days between the resurrection and Pentecost is, I think, the best possible time to walk through a church door. This season is about new beginnings. It is about people who are willing to discover faith through an ancient tradition.
We gather each Sunday at Church of the Good Shepherd in Sapulpa. The coffee is hot, the welcome is genuine, and questions are allowed. Come as you are. You might be surprised by what you find.
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The Rev. Keith Fallis, Vicar
Church of the Good Shepherd