Anglican Aerobics

From John Derbyshire at The Corner on National Review Online [boldface mine]:

If you have tired of Episcopopoly, here's a new game you can play: Creedal Gymnastics. It is described in the February 2008 issue of Episcopal Life. (No, I haven't returned to the bosom of the church. I am, though, still on the mailing list for EL, and read it assiduously, I have no idea why.)

The Rev. Tom Woodward of Santa Fe, N.M., once devised a startling way to show a congregation its belief, unbelief, and the value of community. He calls it "an experience with the Nicene Creed."

After explaining that they would be reading through the creed phrase by phrase, Woodward would give the charge: "When the phrase is something you understand on one level or another, and believe, stand up or remain standing. When the phrase is something that makes no sense to you, or is something you do not believe, sit down or remain sitting."

The resulting dance, he said, appeared to be something akin "to a rebellious exercise class," with folks popping up, sitting down and squirming to watch their neighbors as they stood and sat and stood again.

At the end, Woodward would ask what they had observed. "The answers were always the same: No one stood all the way through the creed, and no one stayed seated all the way through, and there was always someone standing for every phrase."

[Me] So should it happen that next time you pass your local Episcopalian church, you see through the stained-glass windows rows of heads bobbing up and disappearing apparently at random, to the sound of a sort of muffled and hesitant chanting, don't be alarmed. It's just Creedal Gymnastics. . .

H/t to Inside Catholic.