On paper, the Rev. Canon Linda Strohmeier, the new evangelism officer for the Episcopal Church, is an appealing choice: She has been a social worker and a college teacher; she is a single mother with a multiple-handicapped daughter; she is a priest with a doctorate from Princeton; she has served a rural cluster ministry and a downtown cathedral; she is sympathetic to the concerns of gays, and she talks about Jesus like the evangelical she grew up as. Almost every potential challenge in the life of the church she knows through some personal experience.

She's been on the job at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City since January, and already she's in trouble. Her first problem, before she came into her current position formally, occurred while she was canon pastor of St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. She and the Very Rev. Frederick Northup, dean, agreed to officiate at the blessing of a committed relationship between two men. The planned service was cancelled after the Rt. Rev. Vincent W. Warner, Jr., Bishop of Olympia, said the service should not take place because the church at large had not settled on the issue of blessing such relationships.

Her latest controversy actually predates the proposed same-sex couple blessing service, and is far more complicated and open to more varied kinds of interpretation. Last November, in Chicago, she delivered a paper to the convention of the Association of Diocesan Liturgy and Music Commissions (ADLMC). Her title was, "So Control Our Wills ... A Semiotic Deconstruction of the Cultic Ritual Patterns of the Waspe." The title is probably obscure to many people. Semiotics? Deconstruction? And what does this have to do with the church?

Canon Strohmeier admits that maybe her strategy wasn't the best. On the other hand, given the context, what she was trying to do may be valid. But some history is in order.

It begins in 1988, with a small, but for her significant, document called For the Sake of the Kingdom. It was prepared for the 1988 Lambeth Conference to look at cultural issues facing the Anglican Communion, and one of its concerns is how Anglicans are influenced and shaped by our cultures, and what happens when there are theological differences within the Anglican Communion.

In a recent interview at the church center, she summarized the document: "God and Christ we understand to be present in every culture that claims Christ. Not all of us agree about everything, so how do we deal with our disagreements? For one thing, God has given us all each other to listen to and to learn from." What the document was struggling toward was something called inculturation.

Inculturation is the key word of much international ecumenism these days. Inculturation assumes that once we have absorbed the central elements of the Christian kerygma, the ways in which we manifest those may be best undertaken in the symbols and language of the local culture. "The presence of God and a sense of the divine are present in all kinds of cultural settings, so good liturgy that is going to engage people emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, wholistically if you will, needs to work with the knowledge and experience of the divine, and the symbols of that, in a given culture," Canon Strohmeier said.

Different cultures appreciate elements of biblical Christianity differently. As an example of this, she mentioned the experience of the desert. "Those of us who live in cities in the Northeast don't have a sense of the biblical understanding of the desert," she explained. "People who live in Arizona read that material differently from us, while we have to undergo a couple of process levels to begin to get it."

Operating from this idea that varied understandings of the Christian witness might be displayed in varied cultural settings, ADLMC decided to undertake a five-year study project of issues related to inculturation and began the project at its yearly conference in 1993. From that meeting, the organizers felt its members assumed that Anglican worship is somehow culture-neutral. "To make a Spanish service, you translate into Spanish and sing a Spanish hymn and that's how they viewed inculturation," she said.

Canon Strohmeier was asked to speak at the 1994 conference and address some of the issues of culture and worship as they influence one another. "I thought about it and prayed about it, and every time the same thing came back to me," she said. "One of the things I was struck with in graduate school was that we always talked about other cultures. Anthropologists never write about 'us,' they always write about 'them,' and it's very distancing and cool. I wondered if we could get some perspective on Anglican worship by stepping back and looking at it in those kinds of terms, like an anthropologist, like an outsider."

So, she said, "I wrote what amounted to a 30-minute satire of an academic paper, an ethnography of this tribe called the Waspe. And I suppose it looks terrible if you see it out of context. But everyone in that room knew exactly what was happening.

"I decided to set it up like exactly the same techniques that I have read for years. I wanted to take (the participants) outside, to talk about this material in the way that an outside observer who doesn't quite understand it would talk about it."

The result is a humorous description of some Episcopal practices (the reluctance to make eye contact during worship, the kind of music preferred, the sparing use of water in ritual) but given in the language of academic anthropology. It makes use of the theories of semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) and deconstructionism (the study of how a text or discourse calls its own primary assertions into question), theoretical systems which have dominated academic disciplines like literature and anthropology for more than a decade and are in themselves controversial.

But it is not the use of these arcane academic theories that has caused comment. A recent issue of United Voice, the journal of Episcopalians United, carried an article entitled, "815's New Evangelism Officer Moonlights as a Stand-up Comic," which criticized Canon Strohmeier's presentation and concluded that she has crossed the "fine line that separates satire from bitter mockery." The article takes particular exception to her use of academic terminology, as in calling the priest a "shaman," and referring neutrally to God as "the god" or "the deity."

What is clear from United Voice's response to Canon Strohmeier's presentation is EU's disapproval of her in general. The article mentioned her approval of blessing same-sex unions and "her truncated understanding of inclusivity." The cancelled service at the cathedral in Seattle is clearly still at issue. "Perhaps part of what is going on is that I am asking questions that are unsettling," she said. Times of transition and change, she said, are also times of great anxiety, because the question always is, where are we going, and who is going to lead us there?

United Voice accurately deduced that Canon Strohmeier is concerned about power and control in the church, but her concerns are rather different than what is assumed: "Religion is always struggling with its relationship with power and money and control. People who would have power in the world want to connect with the enormous power that religion wields. And spiritual pride is seductive, the certainty that 'we know.' I want to be very sure that I don't climb onto my own spiritual pride bandwagon, seduced by temptations to power."

Community figures importantly in Canon Strohmeier's vision of evangelism. "If we are living as we should as a community of faith, we are forming people in the faith," she said. "That's central to our communal life, to be inviting people in, teaching them, baptizing them, and continuing to help them grow in the faith. That's our life in community.

"I sometimes think that if we abandon everything else in our churches except that, if we model the life of Jesus and invite people in, feed them, baptize them, and form them in the faith, then if you're genuinely formed in the faith, eventually you're excited enough that you just have to go tell other people."

She agrees with authors Loren Mead and Alasdair McIntyre that "we are in the middle of epochal change, we are moving out of a Constantinian model of the church and the Constantinian model of the relationship between the church and the culture. We are becoming a post-Constantinian church. Our ethics and our polity are not going to come out of the culture anymore. Let's face it, Beavis and Butthead is not Christian moral formation."

Her approach to the church and evangelism is influenced by her experience as a social worker with "failure-to-thrive babies" - children who might even be cared for, fed, not necessarily abused, but not loved, touched, given a sense of life wanting them. She compares them to the kind of people who come into our churches. "There's a reason for all that imagery about little children, being the children of God," she said. "Our job is to reach out to a world that is in 'failure to thrive'."

The way to that is through love and inclusivity, she argues. "You can read the New Testament in so many ways, about what we're supposed to be doing, but I do not think you can ever read the New Testament as, we are to browbeat people into doing what we want them to do. If I understand the Christian proclamation at all, we are supposed to live like Jesus. I say that, and people say to me, 'Oh, you mean we're supposed to model our lives on his,' and I say, 'No, we're supposed to live like him.' Then someone protests, 'But what you mean is, we're supposed to use him as a standard,' and I say, 'No, we're supposed to live like him.' You love everybody, you throw no one out, you feed people. Remember the disciples always wanted to send people home to eat dinner, and Jesus always said, no, we do that here. All of those Johannine speeches about love - I think that's where it begins."

Linda Strohmeier is not particularly happy about the latest mini-controversy she has sparked, but her attitude is more like, let's get these things out in the open and look at them. She reiterates: God has given us each other to listen to and learn from. "Like Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, I'm a cockeyed optimist. I have enough belief in the power of God to heal and save that I really believe that the whole world could become the reign of God, the kingdom of God. And what I'm called to do is live in faithful witness to that." o