Address from the Vice Chair to the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church meeting in Toronto, Ontario, November 9, 1996
Episcopal News Service. December 5, 1996 [96-1650]
Pamela P. Chinnis, President, House of Deputies
It is good to be with you again after missing the June meeting in Charleston. In the 17 years I've been attending Executive Council meetings -- six years as an elected member, six years as Vice President and five years so far as President of the House of Deputies -- I've only missed two meetings. One was for the death of a close family member and the other when I was in Capetown, South Africa, for an Anglican Consultative Council meeting.
This community has become very important to me. By now I must have spent several months of my life in your company! I missed you in June, and was deeply touched that so many of you called or sent cards, letters and even e-mail messages. Thank you.
It reminded me again of the importance and value of community within the life of this Executive Council, and it seems especially fitting to share the experience this week so near to where Henri Nouwen had his community. I still carry powerful images of his presentation to us during General Convention in Indianapolis, and am grateful for his inspiring message about openness, listening, and caring for one another within the fellowship of Christ. Nouwen's community of choice, L'Arche, with its model of genuine partnership between the differently-abled, has much to teach us about mutuality, respect and interdependence in the church.
We have experienced this increasingly in our long association and close partnership with the Anglican Church of Canada. I treasure the personal connections that signal the growing relationship of our two churches. For several years Patricia Bays and I served together on the Standing Committee of the Anglican Consultative Council. Enroute to an ACC meeting in London, Ontario, in 1979, I first met Jerry Hames, whom we have since "borrowed" from the Canadian church to edit our national ECUSA newspaper, Episcopal Life. I came to know Diane Maybee through the Anglican Council of North America and the Caribbean (ACNAC), when we rode a helicopter together into the Valley of Peace Refugee camp in Belize in 1983.
The close friendship of our two Primates, Archbishop Peers and Bishop Browning, knits us closer in community, as does the working link begun by representatives attending each other's Executive Council meetings. Our Canadian partners have consistently given us wise and perceptive comments at the conclusion of each of our Council meetings, and now we are taking the next logical step by holding this joint meeting of both councils.
On the ecumenical front, our community is being enriched by the addition of Lutheran partners. Across the Atlantic, Anglicans have moved toward closer unity with Scandinavian Lutherans through the Porvoo Agreement. South of the border, the Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue process has brought us, over the past thirty years, to the proposed Concordat of Agreement which we in ECUSA and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will be voting on next summer. I had the privilege of attending the joint meeting of Episcopal and Lutheran bishops just last month, in the Poconos. There we had a powerful experience of how community can be enlarged and enriched through new partnerships rooted in shared worship and study, conversation and relaxation, work and play.
We are surrounded by opportunities to stretch beyond both national and denominational borders. At the same time, we are experiencing great turmoil within our structures. This is a time of tremendous potential, and it is also a time of great risk. Many say this period in the church's life is a time of change, realignment and redefinition as profound as that of the Reformation.
Such a comparison may or may not be helpful, but it does highlight the care with which we need to exercise our stewardship as leaders of the institutional church. What kind of a community are we -- as Episcopalians, as Anglicans, as Christians in an increasingly secular culture? What kind of community should we be? What can we learn from the personal, small-scale experiences of community we share here to guide our decisions about large-scale issues of partnership, cooperation and commitment? How shall we minimize the risk of losing something essential as we renew and reform the structures that support our faith community?
There is a very mixed bag of factors and motivations contributing to our present openness to new relationships. In our lifetimes, we have seen the steady growth of an interdependent consciousness and of cooperative structures that have transformed the Anglican Communion through a series of quite deliberate developments:
- Stephen Bayne's appointment as first Executive Officer of the Communion, in 1960;
- the powerful effect of the MRI principles -- Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ -- promulgated at the Anglican Congress right here in Toronto in 1963;
- the creation of the Anglican Consultative Council, which first gathered in 1971, in Limuru, Kenya, and has just concluded its ninth meeting, in Panama;
- the 1981 establishment of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, and the Eames Commission charged in 1988 with offering guidelines for maintaining unity as provinces ordain women to the episcopate;
- the never-ending Anglican Cycle of Prayer for and with each other around the clock and around the globe;
- the evolution of print and electronic communication networks among the provinces -- so that today Anglicans in Nebraska or New Zealand or Nova Scotia can read intercession requests and press releases from the Archbishop's office in Capetown or Canterbury minutes after they are issued;
All these tools and structures have nurtured the growth of those "bonds of affection" that unite Anglicans worldwide, even as the Book of Common Prayer multiplies and divides and adapts to local languages and cultures.
From a motley collection of remnants of the Church of England in former British colonies, we have become an international commonwealth of believers more and more aware of our need for each other.
In this same period, a powerful ecumenical spirit has been at work, pruning and redirecting and bringing together various strands of Christianity to strengthen our witness in a religiously-pluralistic world culture. The suspicions, stereotypes and condemnations that lingered from the conflicts of the Reformation are giving way to deepened awareness of the shame of our divisions and a resulting commitment to restore unity to Christ's Body, the Church.
There are less noble factors, too. We must admit that grinding economic forces drive us to give up our isolation and illusions of self-sufficiency. I would even go so far as to say that it has been the relentless financial squeeze of the last quarter-century that has finally got our attention, compelling us toward cooperation in mission and ministry. In the face of burgeoning needs -- both physical and spiritual -- throughout the world, the pressure of diminished resources requires that we give up some of our autonomy, our turf, our preferred "way we've always done it."
This is good, if it punctures our parochial pride and encourages mutual responsibility and accountability. It is not good if we turn to each other only out of desperation and fear, if we join together merely to pool our poverty. Rather we need to work very deliberately to share our faith and hope, to live out of the abundance of God's love, not the scarcity of our own declining coffers.
The steadily shifting balance of spiritual authority within the Anglican Communion -- from the North Atlantic to the Global South, from the declining churches of the industrialized first world to the mushrooming congregations of the third world -- is all a part of this reallocation of resources. Those of us who for so long could take for granted the availability of material resources are discovering how much we have let them substitute for spiritual riches within our common life. Who are the truly disadvantaged?
In Henri Nouwen's L'Arche community, able-bodied so-called "normal" people lived together with physically and mentally-disabled people. The "able" cared for the "disabled." Yet the profound lesson Nouwen learned and shared with us is that those categories are ultimately meaningless. Each ministered to every other out of his or her own spiritual riches, quite independent of physical or intellectual abilities. Assumptions about status and position, responsibility and authority, privilege and need, poverty and wealth, were turned on their heads as members lived into the deepest meaning of community.
I expect we will find a lot of our assumptions turned on their heads as we live into new forms of community across political and ecclesiastical borders. We may have to give up some cherished aspects of our institutional self-image. We may have to modify, or even give up completely, some elements of our organization and some treasured traditions. But I also suspect -- in fact, I firmly believe -- that every treasure we relinquish in faith will be transformed and returned to us many times over. To live out of God's abundance is to be free of the limits of our own poverty.
I am reminded of a brief but powerful homily Barnum McCarty shared with my Council of Advice at just about this time in the last triennium. His text was the feeding of the multitude, and he drew a dramatic contrast between the responses of the disciples and the responses of Jesus to the situation. From the disciples came a triple negative:
- 1) it's not our problem,
- 2) we don't have the resources to address it, and
- 3) the resources of others are woefully inadequate.
Jesus, by contrast, accepted responsibility for responding to the problem, instructed the disciples to inventory all available resources, and offered the meager results to God for a blessing. That faithful act of accountability and thanksgiving was all that was needed for God to perform the miracle.
That is surely an apt analogy for our responsibilities as leaders in the Church. Will we acknowledge the hunger of those around us? Do we trust each other enough to expose the meagerness of our own resources? Do we trust God to turn our scarcity into abundance?
Some aspects of our present institutional structures will probably turn out to be bread that must be broken in order to multiply. I don't know what that will look like in organizational terms -- within ECUSA or the Anglican Communion, or with our ecumenical partners. Twentieth century bureaucracies which reflected the hierarchical structures of sky scrapers and office towers will be superseded by new patterns reflecting the horizontal networks of mutual ministry and electronic communications.
How that will evolve is still unclear. We need to be wary of projecting present models onto larger and larger international and ecumenical constellations of program and governance. We must also resist the temptation simply to dismantle current, centralized bureaucracies in a nostalgic search for some mythical simpler time. Living into the future is necessarily unnerving, because by definition we have to make it up as we go along. But as people of God, we have the assurance of clouds by day and pillars of fire by night. God does not leave us to stumble in darkness, and God will work the miracle if we are humble enough to offer thanks for the few loaves and fishes we can identify amidst a world of need.
This I firmly believe, and so I remain essentially an optimist, full of what I trust is hope in God's promises rather than foolish naivete. But I cannot close without reminding us that as Christians we are called to live out our baptismal promises day by day -- and that includes, day after day: resisting evil, renouncing "Satan and the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, renouncing "the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God."
Anyone who doubts the reality of those evil powers and their ability to corrupt God's children hasn't been paying much attention to what is going on in the world, or in the church. With sickening frequency we have witnessed spectacular sins involving money, sex, and the abuse of privilege and power. The widow's mite has been stolen; priests and bishops have violated trust and desecrated sanctuaries; this group and that arrogantly condemn each other as destroyers of the communion we know God wills for us.
None of us is as innocent as we might like to believe, and none of us is as guilty as others might like to believe. The desire to scapegoat is primitive and powerful. Who wouldn't like to load all the evil that sullies the community of the church onto some spectacular villain we can drive from our midst to restore purity and peace.
But we are followers of Jesus Christ. He has already borne our sins, all of them. To scapegoat feminists or homosexuals, or those who read the Bible differently than we do, or those who are afraid of changing roles or language or new modes of worship, or those who are blind to the riches of tradition, or those who think they own the Truth, or those who think there is no "Truth" -- all that blaming simply distracts us from the task of the Church in every age: to be a community that stands on the far side of the Cross, never doubting its evil power but always proclaiming the far greater power of the Resurrection.
That is our high calling, and I rejoice to share it with you, sisters and brothers, old friends and new, beloved in Christ. Pray for me, as I shall pray for you, that we may respond faithfully to that call in our time, so all may know the power and glory of God. Thank you.
Pamela P. Chinnis
President, House of Deputies