Dear Epiphany,
“The Learning Church” is one of many expressions we have in our common vocabulary as a parish, but have you ever wondered where it comes from, or what it really means? Whether you’ve asked yourself this question or not, tracing the journey that this aphorism has taken can tell us a lot about how we do things here at Epiphany.
Like most big ideas in this parish, the Learning Church emerged in community: through the sharing of insights among leadership and staff, as we considered our role and mission in a rapidly changing world. That’s part of why we talk about teaching and preaching at Epiphany as an ongoing conversation: one class or sermon in dialogue with another, sometimes years apart. It’s something you’ll notice over time. For example, in a sermon from January 2022 that Doyt preached on the visible and invisible realms of our existence, he mentioned how he’d last touched on that theme all the way back in July 2019—the very same sermon that first introduced me to Epiphany and the Epiphany way. It’s this kind of throughline—this threading of ideas that become more tightly woven over years—that makes “doing church” at Epiphany so vibrant and generative. It’s something many of you recognized instantly, as I did all those years ago.
The Learning Church is another example of that weaving: the first recorded use of the phrase was in a sermon by Doyt on November 21, 2021, where he said: “We are a learning church, after all, which means we confidently, if not enthusiastically, grapple with the ambiguity found in Scripture.” It was the first time we used it publicly, and yet, Doyt knew that the parish was following the thread. (Incidentally, that sermon was part of a series on “Kingdom of God Intelligence”—a set of sermons on AI, and a topic we’ve returned to more than once since.)
Soon after, the phrase moved from pulpit to print: as a bulletin letter, then as the title of a Fall brochure, before becoming one of Epiphany’s canonical aphorisms. And with that, you have the full lifecycle of Epiphany’s brand of theology:
community conversations ↔ preaching ↔ interpretive frameworks ↔ applied theology
That is how “the Learning Church” came to be, and what the Learning Church actually means: a simple image that does the work of many metaphors—schools, gyms, labs—that attempt to describe how we’re formed and transformed in community and communion with God.
In Christ,
Jad Baaklini
Director of Communications