Mission Partners Find Vitality in Visit to Iowa Churches
Episcopal News Service. February 24, 1993 [93039]
Nan Cobbey, Features Editor of Episcopal Life.
The corn fields, brittle under their crust of snow, flashed by at 65miles-an-hour as four near strangers, drove back and forth across the grid that is Iowa.
For five days and 740 miles, the Partners in Mission (PIM) visitors -- Peg Anderson of Executive Council, Bishop Alfred Reid of Jamaica and two writers -- traveled the diocese asking questions. What they learned gave them both hope and pause.
They heard tales of woe and stories of devotion. They listened to praise and blame about "the national church." They witnessed heroic ministries in ambivalent environments and they came away impressed with the vitality of the church.
Visitors to Iowa didn't hear the complaints PIM visitors in 18 other dioceses did about sexism, racism and insensitivity to lay ministry -- but they heard the same worries about isolation, declining denominational loyalty and dwindling resources.
"I learned [much] from this visit that will enrich my own ministry," Reid told the Diocesan Council the day before he left. He praised the clergy, saying that on the return to his diocese, which "doesn't yet ordain women, one of the things I will share is the impact made on me by the women priests."
He also offered a none-too-subtle challenge. After noting "the absence of any black person anywhere I've been...with just one exception," he contended that racism and the injustice it brings remain issues for the church. In a voice soft with concern, Reid said that, "as Anglicans we have a responsibility to speak to power...just standing with the poor, by itself, is not always sufficient."
Reid, suffragan bishop of Montego Bay in the Church of the West Indies, had come to a climate and countryside as unlike the steamy, hibiscuscovered hills of Jamaica as his songlike speech was from the clipped cadences of the Midwest. His perspective on Native American ministry was revealing, coming as it did from one known as Jamaica's champion of church decolonization and indigenization.
The man who commissioned island artists to create Jamaican images of Christ, baptismal fonts patterned after clay yabbas (basins women use for washing food), and musical settings for the Eucharist in the island's famous reggae beat, delighted in seeing a corresponding effort in Iowa. He praised the adoption of Native American symbols and music in a Sioux City church.
Anderson brought an equally astute appreciation of the challenges facing the church in Iowa. Though now a resident of Tucson, Arizona, the former lobbyist earned her reputation as a "no-nonsense political pro" while leading Iowa's campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1980. She relished the visit to a church she'd loved and left behind six years before. As she renewed old acquaintances, Anderson marveled at changes wrought by "the new bishop," Christopher Epting, elected in 1988.
"Everybody really does respond to [his] leadership in a very positive way," she told Diocesan Council. "They feel real support, real collegiality and that's an important part of staying healthy." Anderson, too, was "terribly impressed" with the women clergy. "Iowa should be very proud of what they've done here with women's ministries."
Reid and Anderson traveled through Iowa's northeastern comer meeting clergy, vestries, ecumenical partners and diocesan staff. They saw mission churches sharing clergy, a Jubilee Center ministering to Native Americans, an urban parish providing space for AIDS ministry and a university chaplaincy just beginning outreach to the poor.
Their task was to observe and report on the health of the church. They were asked to listen to its voices, note its desires and petitions, discern its weaknesses and evaluate its witness.
From the mission priest who said his parishioners feel "the Episcopal Church is being shown as the too liberal voice" to the Santee Sioux church member lamenting "people making decisions for us who have no idea who we are," Iowa Episcopalians said their voices and needs often go unheard or unheeded by the national church and sometimes even by the diocese.
"Who speaks for rural, mission churches?" the Rev. Kathleen Milligan asked rhetorically during a gathering of mission clergy in Storm Lake. It is all but impossible, she said, for people from "tiny rural churches" to be elected to General Convention. (Diocesan administrator Pete Harris supported her concern later when, explaining that 36 of Iowa's 66 churches are missions supported by the diocese, said that "over 90 percent of our churches have fewer than 100 members.")
The Rev. Margaret Silk, who serves three mission congregations, one of them over the border in South Dakota, named another source of annoyance for parishioners: a national church agenda that does not reflect their thinking. Human sexuality was the example she gave. "For most parishioners that is not an issue. You have to teach them why it is an issue... They don't want to deal with it. They want to stay away from conflict. They think it doesn't affect anything in their worshiping community," she said.
In their written report to the diocese, Reid and Anderson responded to that concern, saying that they had tried to share with those gathered for the Partners in Mission Consultation "the need you [feel] for a clearer teaching authority of the church, a framework in which to make moral decisions."
Their report lists many of the concerns they heard: "the desire for better communication from the national level...the need for a clear affirmation of who we are as the Episcopal Church...concern about the effect on the church of changing demographics...the increasing secularization of society...the breakdown in denominational loyalties."
Yet despite the concerns, Reid and Anderson saw much to praise, starting with Bishop Epting's vision of church as a series of "ministering communities."
On their first day in Iowa, Epting told Reid and Anderson, "I think one of the biggest problems we face in the Episcopal Church is a kind of passive congregation...a community gathered around a minister." Epting's goal is to shift that mentality so that "instead of thinking the congregation is there to congregate and the minister...to minister, we all see ourselves as ministers of the Gospel."
Throughout their visit, Anderson and Reid found a church struggling but hopeful, a church dwarfed by Lutherans and Methodists, threatened by burgeoning congregations of evangelicals and "needing desperately to grow" as diocesan administrator Harris kept saying, yet open and optimistic.
In their final report, the two lauded the spirit they sensed everywhere they went: "Our overall impression is of a diocese blessed with strong, positive leadership from bright and enthusiastic clergy, dedicated lay people and...a very upbeat bishop."
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