Sat in a dark church garden with drizzle coming down around her, Deacon Rebekah Sims is relaxed. She couldn’t open the door to the church, the lockbox stuck and fiddly. So she took up a seat in an extension of the church: the walled garden next door.
Coincidentally, an extension of the church is how Sims sees herself. Her role as a vocational deacon in the Episcopal Church is one that she fully embraces, running a young adult club and other initiatives in her local area.
“I think deacons have the most fun, because our call is to be on the borders between the church and the world,” Sims says. “We’re supposed to be the hands and feet of Christ, carrying the work of the church out into the world and bringing the concerns of the world into the church.”
Sims is a lecturer in education at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, where she is a chaplain while also serving at the Holy Trinity Episcopal church in Stirling. A native of New Mexico in the U.S.A, she moved to Indiana as a child where she was ordained as a deacon three weeks before defending her PhD thesis.
“Growing up my parents didn’t necessarily talk a lot about their belief, but they talked about the actions that we take,” Sims says with a smile. “Their faith is one very much of connection between prayer and action. One that says we don’t just sit around and pray but that we go out and do both charitable works like feeding the hungry but also advocating for social change. I think they kind of raised me up to be a deacon, whether I wanted to be or not.”
The Episcopal church is a part of the majority Protestant collection of churches called the Anglican Communion and has roughly 1.5 million members. Most members live in the United States as the Church formed after the American Revolution, where it split from the Church of England.
Creating space for a wide range of people and ideas is one of the central missions of the Episcopal Church, where same-sex marriages are supported and can be blessed by the church. This move is not universally accepted across all churches though, as individual bishops and clergies can refuse to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony.
“The Episcopal Church is founded on the idea that what brings us together is common prayer,” Sims says. “We have the Book of Common Prayer which sets the standards for our worship together. So, the idea is much more that we come together as a community to worship and pray. Not necessarily to share exactly the same beliefs on positions but that we’re strengthened for service by that communal prayer.”
Communal prayer is a central part of the Episcopalian tradition, where acts like a general confession, in which all members recite a verse acknowledging that they have sinned, takes place. A large focus is also placed on the Eucharist or Holy Communion, where Episcopalians believe that the wine and bread used truly become the blood and body of Christ.
“I think prayers are reflective activity, but more so they’re trying to be in the presence of God in some way,” Sims says. “Sometimes that’s a conversation and sometimes it’s just more about the act of being.”
That act of being can take place within the church walls for Episcopalians in Scotland, where they gather on Sundays to hear readings from the Scottish Prayer Book. The book is a collection of prayers, liturgies and other resources that govern worship for the church.
Episcopalians can also independently read the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Scottish Prayer Book. “That’s a big part of my own spirituality,” Sims says. “This idea that we have, even when we’re not together, these shared short liturgies of prayer that ideally shape the rhythms of the day.”
These prayers change daily and are often published on church websites. By the end of a three-year cycle, most of the Bible will have been read.
“It’s not so much that prayer changes things, but that prayer changes me and I change things,” Sims says, pausing to take in the silence of the walled garden. “I think it was Oswald Chambers who said that and it kind of captures my own theology on prayer.”
