Tangier Island
“‘The margins, Nathan,’ he said when he resumed speaking. ‘That’s what we’re losing. We’re losing the churches on the margins. We aren’t doing enough for them.’”—Loren Mead to Nathan Kirkpatrick at faithandleadership.com.
Tangier Island is a disappearing island in the Chesapeake Bay, located twelve miles equidistant from the Maryland and Virginia coasts. It is losing up to sixteen feet of its coastline annually due to rising sea levels from global warming and soil erosion. The government believes the island will become uninhabitable for the more than 500 people living there within twenty to thirty years. In fifty years, the island will be completely underwater.
The local islanders speak a unique dialect that blends elements of Elizabethan British and a southern drawl. They are primarily oyster and crab fishers year-round and tourist guides in the summer. The 1.2-square-mile island is steeped in religious tradition and shuts down completely on Sunday mornings.
Nathan Kirkpatrick, writing in the Duke Divinity School Leadership Education Center’s Alban Weekly (June 26, 2018), recalls a conversation with Loren Mead, the founding director of the Alban Institute, who compared the Church to Tangier Island. What does Dr. Mead mean by saying the Church is “losing its margins?”
Is he telling us the Church is shrinking because it is not paying attention to people on the fringes of society—the poor, the weak, the hungry, the homeless, the tired, the sick, those most different from ourselves? In the larger scheme, is he referring to our neighbors who border us, whom we do not care about? Our call to service comes from these margins. Through our prayer life, we hear that call.
I remember one of my favorite quotes from Bishop Barbara Harris: “The Church is like an oriental rug. Its fringes are what make it most beautiful.” This is our call to bring the world’s needs to the church.
In spiritual direction, I also ask people how the story of Tangier Island might relate to the care of their soul. There are so many possible answers.
One question is, “Do you ever feel your soul shrinking? Do you feel you are losing the margins, the borders, the uniqueness, the most inspiring and possibly the most interesting parts of your soul, the God, the Christ within you?” Many factors contribute to this: a lack of time for silence or prayer, becoming too busy, a loss of priorities, or straying from our rule of life. My experience is that this also happens when we serve only the fringes without being led by the Spirit in prayer, or when we lose connection with community.
Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/