UPPER SOUTH CAROLINA: Diocese raises funds for healthy church initiatives
Episcopal News Service. May 25, 2007 [052507-04]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
During the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina's May 19 diocesan leadership conference it was announced that more than $18 million dollars in pledges had been raised in two years for the support of local growth initiatives.
The money will fund the new Healthy Church Foundation of Upper South Carolina, according to a diocesan media release.
The conference, titled "The Healthy Church Initiative, Nuts and Bolts of Church Health and Growth" and held at Christ Church, Greenville, served as a run-up to the diocese's annual convention October 26-27.
In his address to the conference, Bishop Dorsey Henderson said the diocese was recently "derailed, or, to use another metaphor, the wind was taken out of our sails when other issues grabbed headlines and sapped energy."
"Beloved, it is time to reclaim our mission -- and to get down to the nuts and bolts of mission," he told the conference.
Henderson, who is 69 and must resign not later than his 72nd birthday (Episcopal Church Constitution Article II, Section 9), outlined for the conference "where we need to be when the next diocesan bishop of Upper South Carolina is seated in the Cathedra."
They include the Healthy Church Initiative, planting new congregations, a plan for lifetime Christian formation and a commitment to helping achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
His complete address is available here.
The Rev. Canon Mark Clevenger led conference participants in a vision/action plan exercise to begin the development of a new diocesan long-range plan and to train participants to conduct the same process in their home congregations. In the last year and a half the diocese has restructured its Diocesan Executive Council for mission effectiveness, as well as re-designed the means by which the diocesan budget is generated "from the pew up," the media release said.