And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."-Matthew 9:35-8
It’s
a truism in business that your best new customers are your old customers—that it
is easier to capture existing consumers in a particular niche than to entice
new people into a particular market. It
is why we see so much business news on market share.
We
may have taken this a bit too much to heart in the Independent Sacramental
Movement. We often become so focused on
building our share in the existing market, that we may overlook the majority of
people around us who are waiting for the good news. We focus so intently upon how to improve our
share of progressive former Roman Catholics, Continuing Anglicans, Western
Orthodox, or a particular group marginalized in the religious mainstream—all-too-often
a group to which we ourselves also belong--that we forget there’s a big world
of people out there who have never experienced a relationship with Jesus Christ
or the grace of the sacraments. We often become so inwardly focused that we more closely resemble archaic
hobbyists than we do representatives of a kingdom that is not of this
world. This also leads to the ugliness
of recruiting clergy and laity from other bodies whose only fault is that they
are not our own group. At its worst,
this comes to look about as dignified as Scottish clans conducting cattle
raids, minus the blue body paint.
We
often pay a disproportionate amount of attention to those within the fold and too little to those outside of it. We
worry that there is some new cleric or community down the road that will be a
threat to our own group or some group halfway across the continent that is too similar to our own. However, if we
look beyond those who are already inside the fold and stretch ourselves beyond the assumptions of a fixed sum game, things may begin to look quite different.
