If you are Episcopalian and have moved to Saint Cloud and think of yourself as a member of this congregation, please let us know that, so we can record your name in our registry. Joining is simple enough to do. You can become a member by request. Simply let the parish administrator or the priest-in-charge know that you want to be entered into our registry as a member. You need to let us know when you were baptized and confirmed, so that the information we record for you is accurate.
If you have been confirmed (Roman Catholic or Lutheran) already, then the bishop would receive you into the Episcopal Church. If you are baptized, but have not been confirmed in another denomination, then the bishop would confirm you. When that is done under our auspices, you become a member of this congregation at that time. It is betst to take some time to reflect on this decision. Then, if you would like to be received or confirmed, let the parish administrator or the priest-in-charge know. You need to let us know when you were baptized (and when you were confirmed, if that has already occurred), so that the information we record for you is accurate.
The genius of the Episcopal Church is difficult to get some times. At the time of the Reformation, the Anglican Church, of which we are a branch, insisted on standing between the two extremes of Rome and Geneva. It affirmed and retained sacraments and bishops as authentic developments of the Church’s earliest days, but repudiated the superstition and backward-looking dogmatism and rigid clerical hierarchy that had infected the curia of Rome. It affirmed the direct study and understanding of Scripture by all the people in their own language with the most up-to-date scholarly methods, but repudiated the reduction of churches to congregations, the reduction of priests to preachers and pastors, and the reduction of corporate public faithfulness to personal private virtue that was insisted on by the presbyters of Calvinist Geneva. To this day, the Episcopal Church balances its way across this tightrope. This ability to be faithful to tradition while fearlessly embracing God’s ongoing revelation in our own day is the gift we bring to the church and to the world. That is what you might want to claim as your own also and to commit yourself to.
Whatever you decide, you are still enfolded in the affection and activity of our congregation. It will not change your share in our life. This is a bit like the decision some couples face when one day they realize that, having lived together, they are now ready to get married. It might not change their day-to-day arrangements at all. But it might make deep internal changes in terms of recognition within social structures and in terms of promises made to each other for the long haul.
