Presiding Bishop Reflects On Term
Episcopal News Service. June 13, 1985 [85135]
Lee Hickling
RICHMOND, Va. (DPS, June 13) -- Presiding Bishop John M. Allin will retire this December, leaving his successor an Episcopal Church that Allin believes is recovered from its bitter disputes of the 1970's, vital and healthy again and ready to do the work prepared for it to walk in.
Reconciliation has been the keynote and aim of his administration, he told the national Executive council at the last meeting he will preside over before General Convention.
Reconciliation is really the whole mission of Christians, he said on a flying trip through here, on May 18. The Presiding Bishop is on a killing schedule of official visits in his last year in office.
"I'm having a little difficulty keeping up with the Presiding Bishop," he said during a sermon he preached for the 150th anniversary of the founding of St. James' Church, one of Richmond's oldest parishes.
"Our Lord's mission was to reconcile us with God and with each other," he told reporters who had asked him to reflect on his 12 years as head of the Episcopal Church.
In the confusion of the age, in the terrible turbulence of the 1960's, he feels the Church lost both coordination and comnunication.
"We had lost the sense of the comprehensive Christian mission," he said.
Now he thinks the Episcopal Church is ready to concentrate on its mission and stop arguing about theory and tactics.
"Our primary concern is to call to every brother and sister, both in and out of the Episcopal Church, to respond to the ministry of our Lord and meet these terrible human needs and deprivations that exist."
He pointed to signs that the Church is vigorous, solidly based and growing. In 1973, when he took office, the budget was $13.6 million.
11in did not say so, but that was a drop from the years just before. Giving to the Church fell in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The drop was widely blamed on rebellion in the pews against Presiding Bishop John E. Hines' special programs, particularly their financing minority non-church organizations with no requirement that the money be accounted for.
In 1986, the national General Church Budget is projected at nearly $27.5 million. "Doubled in 12 years," Allin said. "And from 1974 to 1983, the combined giving to congregations and dioceses went up from $375 million to more than $816 million, and that's more than double in nine years."
Furthermore, he said, diocesan support of the national Church is at an all-time high, with 98.6 percent of the total apportionments being paid.
"That's not a sick church," he said.
Membership declined during the 1970's, as it did in every other major main-line denomination. Opponents of women's ordination and revision of the Book of Common Prayer blamed the decline on wide-spread opposition to those changes.
The decline was less than in most comparable denominations, has been reversed and is now a steady growth. Allin said he doesn't think the loss was over the issues ascribed.
"I believe we've got three million Episcopalians walking around out there who didn't go anywhere else," he said. "It's not because they're mad, but because it didn't take, when they were confirmed."
Next to reconciliation, Allin may be proudest of the accomplishments of the Venture in Mission campaign, which set out to raise $100 million for special mission and ministry, and has raised $170 million so far. Another $6 to $8 million is likely to come in.
"That shows some health and vitality," he said.
Giving to the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief doubled from 1979 to 1984, to about $4 million. Giving to the United Thank Offering of the Women of the Episcopal Church doubled in his time, to $7.5 million. He has the figures at his fingertips.
Volunteers in Mission, a program new in Allin's term, has sent some 260 volunteers to work in mission in this country and overseas, and another 120 are waiting for assignments.
When the Rt. Rev. John M. Allin, Bishop of Mississippi, was elected Presiding Bishop, the liberal left-wing of the church felt it had been rejected, even written off by the House of Bishops that chose him.
He would move the Church back into conservatism, they foretold. Many of his critics, however, changed their minds as they heard Allin take strong public stands on nuclear disarmament and apartheid in South Africa, and open the Episcopal Church's first Washington office to make its stands known to national policy-makers.
Then he began to move the Church more vigorously into a field it once would never have touched -- what is called "social responsibility in investment." Translation: trying to persuade, or force, big businesses to pay attention to what you think are bad social effects of their corporate policies. Example: moving plants to Mexico where labor is cheap and regulation less aggressive, without showing any concern for the people made jobless in this country.
Although it has avoided making headlines about it, the Episcopal Church is now regarded as a leader in this effort. Predictably, the style has been quiet, often friendly, top-level discussion, with little to no use of press releases, nuisance suits and demonstrations.
"We learned the hard way" Allin recalled. Early on, he and the Executive Council decided to take on General Motors over some of its policies, and announced that to the New York Times.
A high General Motor's official and a faithful Episcopalian sent back word that the Presiding Bishop could have come to see top echelon people there quietly, and they would have been glad to deal with him. Now the publicity had not only irked them, it had given them less room to negotiate in.
"It's amazing how many Episcopalians there are in high positions," Allin said. "They're ready to talk to you. They just don't want to be blind-sided and embarrassed by their own church."
Pressure on major American banks to cut off loans to South Africa has been extremely effective. By late April, only Citibank among major institutions, had not agreed to refuse any new loans.
Bishop Allin has kept the pressure on the government constantly over the issue. At the Executive Council meeting in April, he read a fire-blasting statement that the United States policy of constructive engagement hasn't worked and that the Episcopal Church cannot "remain silent in the face of oppression," but will do whatever it can to put an end to "the evil policy of apartheid."
One of the greatest trials Bishop Allin had during his term as Presiding Bishop must have been the dispute over ordaining women to the priesthood. He stopped talking about his view on the subject publicly several years ago, and talks about it in private only guardedly.
"I had to get out of that argument," he said. "My role was to keep the two sides in conversation and to have the Church do what she said she would do." In other words, ordain women priests.
One of his last public statements was in 1977, when he said he was "unable to accept women in the role of priests."
He gives every indication that this is still his view -- that he does not believe a woman can validly perform the two unique priestly functions, offering sacrifice and making intercession.
He has ordained two women deacons, no priests. But he has clearly restrained himself from using the weight and prestige of his office to advocate what he believes against what the General Convention of 1976 decided the Episcopal Church would do.
A General Convention, he has said, can tell the Presiding Bishop what to do, but not what to believe. He backed the 1977 "conscience clause" passed at a House of Bishops meeting in Port St. Lucie, Fla., giving bishops who do not believe women's orders to be valid a right to refuse to ordain them.
But he has helped women be ordained. Several times, when a qualified postulant could not be ordained by her own bishop, who had invoked the conscience clause, Allin has helped her find another bishop who will perform the rite.
Nor does he discriminate against hiring women in orders for the Church Center staff.
More than financial stability and comparative peace in the family, Allin believes he is leaving the Episcopal Church an important legacy in his Next Step in Mission program.
He hopes this fall's General Convention will, as he told the Executive Council, issue a clear and "inclusive" call to Episcopalians "to participate in the five functions of Christ's mission and our stewardship: Service, Worship, Evangelism, Education and Pastoral Care."
Those five kinds of Christian service, arranged to form the acronym SWEEP, are the framework of Allin's Next Step, which is not a program, but a method, as its backers always say.
Every congregation, every diocese and every organization is bidden to examine what it is doing, what it ought to do and what it could do in each of the five areas.
Next Step was approved by the 1982 General Convention. A congregational guide was issued in 1983, and, within a year, half the dioceses reported parishes were using the self-evaluation method. Since then, it has been used in every diocese and more than half have built it into their planning processes.
In New Orleans, there was an apparent conflict between the Next Step and the Jubilee Ministry program advocated by the Episcopal Urban Caucus, APSO and other groups -- a system of model programs, or "centers," for innovative ministries to particular human need.
One of Allin's die-hard critics, president Byron Rushing of the Urban Caucus, claims he "sabotaged" the program by delaying in spending the authorized $200,000 and spreading responsibility out among existing staff.
A staff officer has been hired now, and about $65,000 allotted to the Coalition for Human Needs for Jubilee Ministries, outside the budget. Allin and Church Center people give every evidence of enthusiasm for the program, and have "affirmed" -- not financed -- 37 Jubilee programs.
Allin believes the General Church Budget should never become the Church's major means of carrying on mission and ministry in the name of the Church's Lord. This year, he took a strong stand against a perennial tendency of central church organizations to make each new field of ministry a program office on the staff.
"The tendency is to talk of the national program budget as the reservoir from which we do all missions," he said. He ordered the Church Center staff to resharpen their pencils, rework their askings and get the 1986 budget proposal down inside the prediction of income from the diocese' giving -- which, he pointed out, is 98.6 percent of what they are asked for.
"To expect the Episcopal Church" -- his voice capitalized the E and C -- "to meet all the needs is bad stewardship," he said.
"Our role is to coordinate and to enable."
Allin thinks that a major part of the Church's mission of reconciliation, of people with each other and with God, is to meet every legitimate human need. He stressed the word legitimate.
To him it seems plain that no innovations, no clever programs are needed to carry on the Christian mission.
"No new call to some new activity is needed now," he said. The Church knows what it is called to do -- to serve suffering humanity and bring it to Christ. What he thinks is needed is to stop arguing and get on with the work.
"The General Convention ought to be a great session for strategy on how to get about mission," he said. "We ought not to sit around and talk about resolutions."
"Experience teaches," he told the Executive Council, "that we are drawn closer together with more incentive and means to resolve internal disagreements, regardless of how important, when we are cooperating in attempts to relieve human suffering and provide better living for all, than when we square off and demand immediate concession and conformity from one another."
He summed it up in homely figure. "The nose-to-nose posture is intended for kissing, not argument."
He said that's what he hears people saying on his busy schedule of farewell visits. "My travels through the Church reveal to me a Church-wide hunger and longing for a renewed call to the Christian mission, to share life with others."
In 12 years, he has visited every one of the Church's 121 jurisdictions except Ecuador. He expects to repair that omission by going there in July.
Allin intended to spend his month's vacation at Sewanee, his alma mater. He plans to live there after he retires.
Who does he like most among the four nominees to succeed him? There is no way the Presiding Bishop will answer that question in public, but he has a response already.
They are all such good choices, he said, that the Church might best resort to the method of decision the apostles used, reported the book of Acts -- cast lots.