Tried & true tradition

Everyday Father Steve Wilson of Grace Episcopal Church wakes up and puts on a black shirt with a white collar. For his Sunday services he’ll don full-length robes in the style of the 4th century; and that’s his idea of contemporary.

“If you discount that it’s in English, someone from medieval times could walk right in and follow our service,” Wilson said of the Episcopalian style that has remained mostly unchanged for centuries.

Though he grew up in a religious family, Wilson left the church when he went to college and found his way to the Episcopalian Faith when a local church was advertising their need for a tenor in the choir.

“I went and auditioned, got it and I never left,” Wilson said. “The thing that attracted me was the sense of being part of something older than I was.

The belief that I had to find my own meaning through scripture was very attractive.”

Wilson has now spent 15 years as an ordained member of the clergy teaching the religion’s centuries old customs to others.

With many churches updating their style of service, Wilson said the heavy value placed on tradition is one of the things that attract people to the Episcopalian faith.

“It’s very comforting, because you know what to expect, even if the sermon’s awful, you still get that dose of scripture,” he said. “

“You can’t fall asleep in and Episcopal service, because I’ll know if you’re not sitting, standing, kneeling, sitting, standing, kneeling, sitting, standing, sitting.”

Even with the popularity of contemporary religion Wilson said his congregation has not expressed any desire to deviate from their roots.

“We don’t tend to get excited by the new theories because we’ve seen the new theories come and go,” he said.

While the style of service hasn’t changed, Wilson said Episcopalians and his congregation have opened up the debate about modern issues like human sexuality and immigration.

“We tend to put most of our contemporary baskets into contemporary issues, not into worship,” Wilson said.

Grace Episcopal is one of the area churches trying to cater to the immigrant community by delivering a weekly service in Spanish.

Wilson said the all-Spanish service has an average of 40 attendants depending on the local economy and immigration status.

“Even for folks who are completely legal, it’s daunting,” he said. “One year INS parked their van in the parking lot on Ash Wednesday and went knocking on doors in the neighborhood.

“We were expecting 100 people that day, I think we maybe had one.”

Though Grace Episcopal doesn’t maintain missionaries in other countries Wilson said Episcopalian is a global religion with a presence all over the world that allows him to take his family and members of the church on pilgrimage trips that he calls “part lovely vacations with a religious component.”

Wilson has traveled the world visiting both Israel and Turkey at least a dozen times each along with other countries along the way.

“There have been cities that were off limits, we’ve been in countries where there were bombs going off, it can be kind of daunting but it can also be kind of liberating,” he said. “I often say America is a very lonely culture, when you see a group of men sitting together playing bat gammon gossiping about the same things they’ve gossiped about for 30 years, you don’t see that here, I think this [church] is one of the only places where people interact anymore.”

On those occasions that he has time to spare Wilson is an avid gardener, spending this planting season working on a church garden, and a cook.

“I think my wife would say we have an obsessively large cook book collection,” he said.

Beyond the style of Father Wilson’s dress, and the tradition of his sermon, Grace Episcopal still holds to another age-old custom.

“We always leave the door unlocked,” he said. “If you need some place to pray in the middle of the night, then you need someplace to pray. You probably need it more in the middle of the night than you do at noon. That’s a part of our identity here.”