I am an Episcopal Priest serving at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison Wisconsin who is committed to telling the story of who we are and what we are about in the Episcopal Church.
It has become clear to me that if the only picture of Christianity available to you is the one that is offered by the mainstream media you are not likely to go anywhere near the church. What the nightly news and the mainstream media offer is a caricature of Christianity and the church. If the only thing you know about Christianity and the church comes from the media then judgmental, exclusionary, angry, alienating… those are the adjectives would come to mind when you drive past us on 1833 Regent Street. No wonder the church is losing ground. We have lost control of our message. We are not doing a good job of telling our story.
The Episcopal Church is a broad tent and I cannot pretend to speak for the whole church but I can, and will speak about my experiences in the church, my understanding of who we are and where we are going, and I have to say: judgmental, exclusionary, angry, alienating… I don’t believe that is who we are or where we are going.
I will be using this blog to post sermons, to tell stories, and to describe my experiences as a deputy to our upcoming General Convention in July of 2012.
I invite you to ask questions, to challenge and to argue with me. To tell your own story, and to shape the dialog that happens on these pages.
Peace,
Andy+
A Mad City Episcopalian 
This is great! Congratulations!
Great to see this! Going to be following this from down here and looking forward to reading more.
Maybe the message “the church” (all Christian churches, that is) is so varied, one from another and so trendy that it is difficult to ascertain truth.. As a result, we are all too often tossed upon stormy seas, not knowing what to believe and when to believe it. We must ask ourselves if, as you write, the church seems to project the angry, alienating, judgmental and exclusionary, then might there just be, as the psychologist and educator Gordon Allport once observed, “a kernel of truth.” Let us address the hard issues and not the impressionistic.