President of the House of Deputies' Address from the Vice-Chair to Executive Council, Birmingham, Alabama, October 31, 1995
Episcopal News Service. November 9, 1995 [95-1303]
Pamela Chinnis, President of the House of Deputies
When I spoke to you last June, the Joint Interim Body Meeting in Minneapolis was in the planning stages. Now it has come and gone, as those of you who were among the 240 participants know very well. We had never done anything quite like it before, and were anxious about whether it would prove useful, especially since its success depended on the cooperation of so many people.
Now that it's over, I can say with relief and satisfaction that I believe it was a very successful gathering. The evaluations received so far have been positive, feedback from interim body chairs the last morning expressed surprised delight, and the Structure Commission reported that they were invigorated rather than exhausted at the end of their round of interviews.
In reflecting on that experience with you this morning, I'd like to highlight several aspects I think are significant for the Church, and for us as members of Executive Council.
First, the Minneapolis conference gave me a tremendous feeling of optimism about our church, and immense gratitude to God for letting me be a part of this vital time in our history. During the meeting, Bishop Browning and I were able to visit more than half the 24 groups holding individual meetings during the conference. I was awed by the breadth and depth of the ministries God has given us to perform, and the extraordinary talent and dedication of people throughout the church engaged in those ministries.
It was a wonderful tonic, after months of dealing with the aftermath of the embezzlement and other internal concerns that pre-occupy us as designated leaders of the institution. I rejoice in this reminder that the primary energies and attention of the committees, commissions and other agencies of the General Convention which comprise "the national church" are directed, like that of our dioceses and parishes, toward the real work of the Gospel: proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ, ministering to the suffering, seeking peace and justice in the human family, exercising stewardship over God's creation.
Second, I was struck by the widespread willingness to explore new approaches to our work together, and the energy and enthusiasm that comes with that freedom. The frustration that followed the last Convention's inability to agree on how to approach reforming our institutional structures seems to be melting away and we are moving forward with a refreshing openness about possibilities and a willingness to experiment.
The participation of so many in the Minneapolis meeting was itself an example of that willingness to experiment. There had never been such a mid-triennium gathering. The Presiding Bishop and I had invited interim bodies to meet together this fall in part to facilitate the work of the Structure Commission, which was charged by the 1994 Convention to identify areas of overlap among the interim bodies with an eye to better stewardship of church resources. But Structure's task was only one part of the conference.
We were also experimenting with a new way of doing business: a more collaborative style of ministry based on personal contacts, networking, and a non-hierarchical, cooperative approach to policy development and program planning. By bringing people together physically, in one place, for several days of interaction, we hoped to stimulate a stronger sense of unity and coordination in our work, through awareness of links between tasks and better communication among groups in the future now that they have had a chance to meet face to face.
The role of technology in networking was also apparent, as people exchanged QUEST inbox names and electronic mail addresses, and those who are not yet on-line heard pep talks and reassurance from those already at home in cyberspace.
Staff were efficiently deployed in Minneapolis too. Program people were available to many more groups than if they'd been meeting separately. The Convention office coordinated all the arrangements, and every group had access to computers, copy machines and staff support far beyond what is available when they meet alone. Although the schedule was intense and we were all tired by the end of it, most also indicated that the cross-fertilization of ideas was invigorating and their work got done in spite of the time-pressures.
I review all this, not just so we can feel good about what happened in Minneapolis, but because what happened there holds so much promise. By organizing our common time around worship and fellowship over meals -- including some wonderful singing led by Canon Sue Ried of Indianapolis and the Music Commission -- we bore witness to ourselves and to others that our work on behalf of the institution is rooted in our life as a community of faith, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that through our common life God channels energy and creativity far beyond what we can generate individually.
In this era of apparently declining material resources, this reminder of God's ability to multiply our offerings is very timely. Minneapolis provides evidence of the importance of pooling resources through networking, to offset the increasing isolation and inefficiency fostered by old top-down models of organization.
I was also delighted to learn from Charles Crump -- who serves as the corporate memory for my Council of Advice -- that a proposal for just this sort of a mid-triennium gathering of Interim Bodies had been made by the Structure Commission to the General Convention, in 1970 -- and the Convention voted it down! I'm glad it didn't occur to us this time to ask permission! Let me review some of what I said in Minneapolis, to suggest what led us to try it in 1995 -- twenty-five years after someone else first thought of it.
The interim bodies, together with Executive Council, are the national leadership of the Episcopal Church between General Conventions. However, our structures encouraged operating as leadership in diaspora, scattered, with little communication or coordination. Work meshes only insofar as the top-down directives from Convention are consistent and coherent, and the Holy Spirit overrides individual tendencies toward competition, empire-building and the like.
The results have been uneven, and increasingly uncoordinated. So we called the diaspora together, to see and experience the interim leadership of the Episcopal Church in one place, and work together for better structures to support our life as the people of God.
The various committees, commissions, boards and agencies that function "in the interim" between Conventions are a motley lot. Some are enshrined in the canons. Some were authorized by Resolutions. Some report directly to the Convention, while others report to Executive Council. Some have been charged with short-term tasks; others focus on matters that deserve attention for a number of years; and a very few are virtually permanent units dealing with perennial aspects of our life as a church.
The canonically mandated Standing Commissions are the primary study arm of the church, authorized to explore emerging issues and recommend policy to the Convention and, in urgent matters, to Executive Council. As Council we oversee implementation of Convention policies, through budgetary oversight of the programs coordinated by staff. Recently, new groups reporting to Council have appeared, with combined policy and program responsibilities but no clear mechanisms for funding their work.
As this suggests, Episcopal Church structures have grown willy-nilly, for two centuries. To study our organizational charts is to marvel at the convoluted relationships between some of our units, and their history puts current efforts to remodel church structures in healthy perspective.
- The Committee on the State of the Church of the House of Deputies is the oldest by far, having been established at the second full meeting of the Convention, in 1792!
- Next in seniority is the Standing Liturgical Commission, set up in its present form in 1913 to produce the 1928 Prayer Book but continued as a Standing Commission thereafter. The Church Music Commission came along in the midst of that earlier prayer book revision process, in 1919; but the other groups we know today are much more recent.
- Today's Human Affairs Commission was formed in 1958, a reconfiguration of what had been called in the post-Depression era "Social Reconstruction," which followed an earlier Social Service Commission, which succeeded the Committee on Capital and Labor at the turn of the century.
- The Structure Commission was formed in 1961, combining earlier committees of both Houses. Through its work, and that of its predecessor bodies, new groups have been formed and others discontinued throughout our history. More than half of today's Standing Commissions took canonical form only in the 1970's and 1980's.
Thus there are historical reasons for the anomalies in our current structures -- but they are explanations rather than justifications for any permanent status quo. We have always gone through cycles of organizational sprawl to meet changing situations and needs, followed by reorganization of responsibilities and pruning obsolete functions.
This is part of our on-going task as stewards of the institutional church, to make the best possible use of our time and talents in carrying out Christ's mission, and to maximize the use of material and financial resources in support of that mission. The specific tools used in each generation -- the patterns of organization, the communication technologies, the concepts and theological vocabulary we use in carrying out the church's mission -- all necessarily change with the times.
As a wag has said, "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape." Living with change is unsettling, but it is tolerable so long as we remember that the Good News of Christ Jesus, and our duty to give glory to God through the power of the Holy Spirit, do not change.
I thank God that the Episcopal Church is facing boldly into the challenges of structural renewal in anticipation of a new millennium, despite the fears and resistances such a process inevitably elicits. Our Anglican sisters and brothers around the world are engaged in similar processes. In Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, the Church of England, and many other provinces, Anglicans are remodeling institutions to make them fit instruments of the Gospel for 2000 and beyond.
There is something reassuring about the fact that all around the globe Anglicans are wrestling with the same issues. This is not a unique American cultural phenomenon. Nor is it solely an Anglican concern: Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists and others are also dealing with structural issues. So are the National Council of Churches, and the World Council of Churches.
In September, I was privileged to represent Bishop Browning at the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. With the excellent support of our ecumenical officer, David Perry, I participated in ten days of discussions, a richly varied schedule of worship, and planning for the 1998 World Assembly.
You know how difficult it can be to develop consensus for a statement on social issues at our General Convention. Imagine what is involved in achieving agreement among 150 representatives of the 330 member churches of the World Council. But I was tremendously impressed by the power of the Gospel to bring unity to such a varied theological and political gathering.
En masse we marched to the United Nations building in Geneva protesting resumption of nuclear testing by China and France -- a powerful witness to Christian solidarity in choosing life over death. We appealed to religious and other leaders in the former Yugoslavia to exercise moral authority "to heal the deep wounds of history... and transform the climate of hatred and violence." We addressed the need for continuing access to the holy places in Jerusalem for all three major faiths -- Jews, Christians and Muslims -- whose histories are rooted in that city.
Disagreements that surfaced in planning for the next World Assembly illustrated that it is often easier for Christians to agree on such political issues than on religious ones. Should worship at the Assembly include the Eucharist or not? If so, the non-participation of those who do not recognize each other's sacraments will witness to the bleak reality that we are not in communion with each other. If not, what are we saying about the centrality of the Risen Christ who was made known to us in the breaking of the bread?
Also alarming was the fact that the president of Zimbabwe, the planned site of the next Assembly, has recently issued a harsh denunciation of homosexuals. It is not at all clear that the country or its religious leaders can guarantee the personal safety either of gay or lesbian church leaders who might attend the Assembly, or of homosexual Zimbabwe citizens themselves. Our theological conviction that homosexual persons are children of God deserving of the same protections as every other person clashes sharply with assertions that homosexuality is a sinful perversion deserving of death. I do not know how this problem will be resolved before the World Assembly. But the situation does illustrate that conflicts arising from opposing religious positions on sexuality are by no means limited to the Episcopal Church in the USA.
Along with liturgical disunity and moral conflict, the World Council of Churches is also wrestling with organizational questions, and plagued by financial difficulties. Everywhere, the troubles seem the same.
Sometimes it feels as though financial pressures are driving everybody's conversations about "structure" -- the need to "downsize" and eliminate programs just because we can't afford to do everything we once did. But finances are a symptom, not a cause. They point to the depression and anxiety that cloud our perceptions of everything in these waning years of the 20th century, around the globe, and summon us to re-center ourselves in Christ, to recommit ourselves to our life together, in a disciplined community, guided not by our own human hopes and dreams but by a vision of God's love and purpose.
Archbishop Brian Davies of New Zealand has said "church leaders need to see themselves as vision bearers, not problem solvers." We must be vision bearers, before we can do anything else. As leaders, as a Council, we must understand our first task as that of being open always to God's presence among us and to the discernment of God's will; and we can only do that if we suspend our own agendas and let the vision of God's agenda take shape in our hearts and minds. Then we can be problem solvers. Until then, we cannot even accurately recognize what the problems are.
Let me close by repeating a wonderful quotation from Archbishop Richard Holloway, Primus of Scotland, which appeared in the Anglican World magazine last Easter:
The large stone that closed the tomb where they laid the dead body of Jesus was easier to roll away than the tiny stones that effectively seal off our minds from the possibility of divine action. It's not sin or unbelief that keeps us entombed, it's lack of imagination. We just don't see how God can release us from our various graves...I deeply believe that if we can summon faith that it is God's will to give new life to our institutional structures, our imaginations will be enlivened, and the tiny stones that seal us off from each other and weigh down our corporate efforts can be rolled away. Something new is happening here. We are not doomed to our various graves forever. We have only to trust the Spirit, and give thanks that God calls us to love and service in our place and time.
Thank you for letting me share this ministry with you.
Pamela Chinnis
President of the House of Deputies