Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
Any seminarian who has gotten books from SPCK, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, will have reason to be thankful for Thomas Bray’s ministry. Yet what he was hoping to accomplish, what he was really hoping to propagate was really so much more.
The Gospel we read today is particularly appropriate for Bray. When he saw what was going on here in the church before we were anything other than “the Colonies”, Bray went about trying to make some changes. He wanted to make sure that the knowledge of our faith passed on. For Bray, this meant a well-trained and well-taught clergy as well as education for children and a look to the conditions of Native Americans and African Americans in the States.
Bray’s hope for clergy as they travelled the ocean to America was that each one “did constantly read prayers twice a day and catechize and preach on Sundays, which, notwithstanding the common excuses, I know can be done by a minister of any zeal for religion.”
How powerful would it be if all of us, lay or ordained, were able to speak out concerning our faith where ever we might be? It’s not even that Bray was calling on the clergy to be aggressively evangelistic. He was merely suggesting they be appropriately so. If we can find ways within the bounds of our lives and journeys to propagate the knowledge we have received as Christians, then the world will be better, and hopefully more glad, for it.