Presiding Bishop's Address from the Chair to Executive Council in Hartford
Episcopal News Service. November 23, 1993 [93212]
With Water and the Holy Spirit -- Making All things New. Inspired by the baptismal covenant, this was the theme for our General Convention in Detroit in 1988. Detroit was my first Convention as Presiding Bishop. Even then -- and I've learned a whole lot since then -- even then I had a sense that the theme was providentially given, What I sensed then, and know now, is that when we talked six years ago about God making all things new we weren't simply referring to our openness to some kind of programmatic innovation. We weren't talking about some minor rearrangement in the way we do business. We were reflecting our understanding of how God acts. We were naming our awareness that God is constantly renewing us, making us all new people. We were, in some sense, being prepared, though perhaps we didn't know it, for the events that have since unfolded, and continue to unfold. In that context I speak to you this morning.
I have been wondering of late to what we might attribute the current fascination with dinosaurs. Our interest is not new, but formerly was confined for the most part to scientists and pre-adolescents, including three of my own grandsons, Jacob, Zachary and Matthew. Now we have Jurassic Park, featuring the cloned descendants, if you will, of the disappeared giants. We also have Barney, a prehistoric purple beast who has captured the affection and imagination of children, and then himself been cloned into Barney lunch boxes, barrettes, toys, candy, sweatshirts and you-name-it, filling the shelves with purple dinosaur Barey-a-bilia. Our grandson, Joshua, I understand, just loves his Barney raincoat and boots, sent to him for his birthday by his grandmother.
This has been an incredibly busy fall -- the House of Bishops meeting in Panama in September, a visit to the dioceses of Mexico, three other diocesan visitations, the installations of two seminary deans, six consecrations -- including three in as many days, a board meeting of the National Council of Churches, numerous conferences, meetings and appointments -- rich and full months indeed, and productive and stimulating as well I am happy to say, so... it will not surprise you to know that I have not given the dinosaur craze a great deal of philosophical reflection. However, I do have a theory. Dinosaurs fascinate because they are an example, a very large-size example, of evolution that wasn't. Caught in time, they were trapped where they stood, leaving behind only bones and fossilized impressions. Coming down through the millennia, their story touches on something deep within us that is asking: "What if? What if?" Creatures of "time was," they once were, and are no more.
A theory put forth at the recent annual meeting of the Geological Society of America is that the dinosaurs suffocated. Oxygen-level changes occurred and their respiratory systems simply couldn't cope. If this theory is correct, it means that the evolution, the renewing change that might have saved them, didn't happen. And so, they ceased to be.
I don't have any prognostications about life might look like on this planet in the next million or so years. I don't know how we might evolve, or what might disappear from our created order. I'm not expecting the return of dinosaurs, but who knows. I don't even think there is much clarity about where we will be when we say goodbye to this century, or even, for that matter, when we say goodbye to each other at the end of the week. This I do know: we are evolving. We, as a church, are changing. We are looking at ourselves in new ways, and we are called to keep looking. The reason for this? We are being made new. In God's hands we are becoming all new people. Our newness is the fruit of God's grace. I repeat: in that context I speak to you this morning.
At our meeting last June I said we must listen to our lives. I believe faithfulness demands obedient attention to the everyday events. Our lives, after all, are mostly made up of strings of ordinary happenings, which are not ordinary at all, but suffused with grace. I commend you for affirming -- through your commitment to long range planning and the listening process -- your own belief that God is acting in our midst, and that we must pay attention.
We are all acutely aware that what we do over the next days and months, what the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance does, then how Convention responds, all of that is foundational to what The Episcopal Church is becoming and will be for some time to come. We have reached an open door. We can either slam it shut, or walk bravely through. We, presiding bishop and council, served by a dedicated and experienced staff, have the opportunity to move in new ways to carry out our mission. We have listened. Now we are called to make hard and courageous decisions. Some will be extremely painful. Others will be very exciting. All will be renewing. Our decisions will come in the form of program and budget proposals and recommendations that will, after additional work on our part over the next months, go to the General Convention in Indianapolis.
We do our work knowing that the Program, Budget and Finance Committee will meet in early January to wrestle with various alternatives to our current method of funding our budget. Given the financial difficulties in the dioceses, I cannot conceive of any recommendations that would mean additional funds on the income side of the ledger. The reverse is to be expected.
August 1994 is just nine short months away. The way time flies, those months will go by in the twinkling of an eye. We have much to do. If ever a council was empowered, this is the moment. With the spade work of staff, council members themselves, with my personal involvement, will need to develop the recommendations over the next months in preparation for further refinements at our February meeting. The recommendations will be offered to the Program, Budget and Finance Committee at the General Convention, and then acted on by General Convention. What convention votes will be the best thinking of all of us.
Our program and budget decisions will be based on our work of the last years and, more particularly, on what we have heard from the dioceses. They will be based on realism with regard to our resources, and on the faith and hope that is in us.
Having said that, I want to emphasize that our recommendations, the response to them by Program, Budget and Finance, and the actions of convention ultimately must be determined by what we as Episcopalians believe-- what we believe about mission and about what church is. That is to say, our praxis must be congruent with our theology. Our decisions must come out of our theological understandings, out of our ecclesiology. If they are thus rooted, and then informed by our best sense of the needs and of the resources in dollars and energy, our efforts will bear good fruit. If our decisions are based on expedience, or the wish to please, or fear, or anything else, the whole enterprise will simply unravel.
We must be crystal clear about our task over these next days and months. I refer not to the process, of which we have some outline, but to the substance, to the point of it all. Let me tell you my sense about that. We have been given a special trust. We have been called to lead. And, over these next days and months, knowing that leadership is a ministry of servanthood, we must provide direction for our beloved church.
I want to name two key aspects in the leadership we are called to provide. First, leadership means being sensitive to the gifts, to the yearnings, to the passions, to the burdens, to the commitments of those we lead. If we are not, we will be leaders without followers. We recognized this aspect of leadership in Mundelein last February and that was the catalyst for our listening exercise.
Second, as leaders we are called to offer a vision based on an understanding of the common good that encompasses the diverse aspirations of the body. And, we must offer it in such a way that others share the vision. Leaders inspire those on the journey to become their best selves, to put forth their best efforts. Leadership means doing all we can to empower and to prepare the way for institutional transformation that begins with, and then sustains, personal transformation.
Leadership begins with listening. That is only the beginning. We are called to do more than just listen to what everyone says and feed it back to them in some homogenized form, hoping they will recognize their bit in the mix. We can't look at our sisters and brothers as "consumers" of some sort of national program, and then court the consumers. The same is true in the life of dioceses and congregations. Congregations must be rooted in a sense of the mission of the church and call people together to respond to the imperatives of the gospel. Yes, you can make a mega-church by giving people what they want, but that isn't what the Gospel is about. That isn't the message of the cross. That isn't what we are here for.
All of us on council have the responsibility and the opportunity to lead the way in offering a vision. As I said, our vision must first be grounded in our theology of mission and discipleship, and in what we understand of the nature of God's church. Our vision must be nurtured and informed by what we have seen in the dioceses and congregations and in the hearts of each of us. Our vision must then be offered to the church in the grateful and solemn understanding that our vision, and ourselves, are constantly being made new by the God who made us and who is with us, even now.
Yesterday in subcommittees you discussed the diocesan visits and the findings to date as distilled by the Planning and Development Committee in preparation for this meeting. Though we won't all have the same view of this, some things seem very clear to me. I will name them for your reflection.
First, the people of our church hunger (and I don't think that word is too strong) hunger to know more about the faith and develop the inner life of the spirit. We want to know about God. We want to understand the problem of evil. We want to open our hearts so Jesus can come in and guide us. We need help in making the connection between the life of faith and the demands it places on us for service.
Thus, the gospel message is central to the life of our community of faith. I don't just mean we are giving lip service to the Bible. We are trying to be week in week out Christians and need support. Our national program is being called upon to offer this support for every person through local congregations and dioceses.
We take our baptismal vows seriously. We want to respond to them in ways as personal as visiting a sick neighbor or tutoring in a program for disadvantaged children. This heartening finding confirms what I already knew from the privilege of eight and one-half years witnessing the life of this church: from Ecuador to Vermont, from Taiwan to the Central Gulf Coast, and from Haiti to West Missouri.
At the same time, my reading of the visitation reports leads me to conclude that ministry is better understood than mission. I will explain how I am using the terms and their general definition. Ministry is understood as actions of individuals -- either alone or in company with others -- around an activity. We talk about the "ministry of the laity," meaning what individuals do. Mission, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive, encompassing term involving the vocation of the entire community. The community is on mission and we are each part of that because we are members of the community, though you or I may have no individual involvement. Our common mission is the sum of varied activities which together add up to a unique proclamation.
My second reflection is that the data from the visitations shows that we are dismayed and anxious at the problems of our hurting world. We know that working with others both gives us courage and increases our effectiveness. Consequently, the need for networking at every level of our institutional life was a theme heard over and over.
Third, the church-as-institution, the "structure," if you will, be it the diocesan structure, the provincial structure, or the national structure, is not, appropriately enough, what we mean when we talk about the Body of Christ. Structures too often feel distant, isolated rather than enabling. We don't relate to "the national church." We relate to individual persons and we all need help in understanding that Jesus intended us to be unified in him.
Please pay close attention to this particular finding. Our structures at all levels should symbolize our unity in Christ and mediate community in such a way that we are more aware of our various and diverse ministries. The visits clearly showed that people who are actively involved in parish life, and even diocesan life, do not know about the ministry and mission supported by the General Convention program budget. They don't know how it relates to them. Ministry happens at the local level and connections to diocese, province or the national church are too frequently not made. In some sense, this explains the strong plea for more communication.
Fourth, everyone is worried about money, and lack of same. We know in Jesus we have life abundantly. This is the life of the spirit. Because we live in the world as well, we can become fearful when staring at what looks like scarcity. There are very real economic reasons and global realities that account for the shrinking dollars. We aren't imagining it. I believe the pressure toward what is labeled "decentralization" comes from a lack of awareness of the need for participation in the church's wider mission, combined with a knowledge that doing things away from home takes away the money you would prefer to use closer to home. This is a little oversimplified. Only a little. We are now, painfully, living in the tension between parochialism and local empowerment.
As part of this, we, other denominations, other institutional forms, even nations, move toward "decentralization." We talk about decentralizing the church and reinventing government. This is inside-baseball talk. I personally think it is jargon by which we are not well served. It implies that we are now "centralized," as if centralization comes from having a staff working at a Church Center. Christ is our center. We are parts of a body, each important, united in our common Lord.
The drive toward local autonomy, and the lack of trust that can be an element of that drive, is affecting all of our institutions. However, we in the church need to look at it carefully, balancing it with to God's vision of our deeper unity.
We are looking at new ways to do what we do more effectively. We are talking about money being used in parishes to do ministry locally. We are talking about money staying within dioceses to do ministry there. We are talking about new partnerships that honor the particular gifts of each of our structural entities. We want each level of our structure doing what it does best; that is good common sense. The work being done in response to the 1991 General Convention resolution (D163s) on the "delivery of ministry" will offer us a clearer way of working through what we all do best. At the same time, let us not embrace decentralization as an answer to structural frustrations. Just a hair across the line from decentralization lies fragmentation. One step too far and we are in danger of crossing that line.
I believe our obedience to the baptismal covenant has made an enormous positive difference in our realization, however timid, that we are the disciples. This is all to the good. Wanting to do things close to home, and needing money to do them, makes sense. At the same time, our response has to take us beyond our own backyards to God's whole broken and needy world. At our peril do we define our neighbor based on geography rather than on a vision of the whole people of God dwelling in God's kingdom.
Related to this, I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see how little mention was made in the visitation reports of our ministry with our Anglican partners around the world or of our ecumenical activities. Also little mentioned were our justice initiatives or our peace efforts in response to gospel demands. When we fail to see ourselves called to make the needs of others as important as our own we are failing to be the church.
However, I am of a mind that the minimal attention paid to these things was less a function of priorities than of the wording of the questions. Let me say here, this was an excellent process, but certainly an imperfect process. And that's alright, as long as we acknowledge this and don't make an idol of the process itself.
We might have asked: "What is essential to our common ministry?" Instead we asked: "What are you excited about?" This evoked answers about wonderful things happening in the lives of the dioceses and parishes. We asked for concerns and we heard the yearning to involve young people in the life of the church. What has meant everything to the parents, they long for their children to have. We heard they want to reach out to neighbors in their communities of diverse cultures. We heard the need for faith development and a deepening of the life of the spirit. These are all wonderful reflections of a strong desire for empowerment for ministry -- for equipping the saints. Our decisions about how our common funds are spent must be a response to this mandate, and faithful as well to a broader understanding of the gospel.
My dear friends, isn't it the case that we both want change, and fear it? I hear this fear when one says that this church is an "issue driven" church. I think I understand the ramifications of this statement. But, we have dealt with our fears, and we have dealt with issues. Because we have dealt with issues, we have a lay woman serving as President of the House of Deputies. Because we have dealt with issues, we have three women ordained to the episcopacy and more than 2,000 women priests and deacons. Because we have dealt with issues, we have dealt openly with and challenged our own institutional racism. Because we have dealt with issues, we have begun to recognize the sin that gives rise to violence against women, and to the betrayal of trust of sexual misconduct. Because we have dealt with issues, we have wrestled with attitudes about human sexuality that have denied the dignity of personhood. Because we have dealt with issues, we have sought to combat the systemic causes of oppression of the poor and disenfranchised in South Africa, Palestine and Central America. Because we have dealt with issues, we have rededicated ourselves to the stewardship of this fragile earth, our island home.
Dealing with issues, facing change, makes us feel both free and anxious. No question: this is a time of enormous change in our families, in our nation, in our global village. People look to the church for stability. Stability means things are alright. We're going to be O.K. Well, we do have stability, built on the rock, but that doesn't mean we can't move, that we must be rigid. Tall buildings, we know, are constructed so they can sway in the wind rather than fracture from their very rigidity.
We need to be with each other, hold each other, in our fear so together we can embrace the changes that free us, so together we can experience the newness that God is making in our lives.
My final observation: people care. We are not a church of lukewarm, apathetic pushovers. Our sisters and brothers care desperately and are willing to be honest about their frustrations and aspirations. They want to make a difference, and they want, and should have, help in doing it. That's what we are here for and what our leadership of this national structure is all about. They want to feel Christ's presence in their lives. They want to share his love. They want to wake up in the morning with a sense of meaning and purpose, and go to bed at night with a sense of satisfaction. This is how I feel too. And I suspect you do as well.
I thank God for the people of the church, and for each and all of you. I thank God that we are in this together. Let us together celebrate what we, with God's help, have already done and then let us, through the strength of our community, be about the tasks we have been given.
I remember some 25 years ago, when for the first time because of some miraculous cameras placed in outer space we could see our earth hanging in an infinity of darkness. I remember thinking: we are all we have. We are in this together. We do, in God's heart, have a common destiny through the one who came vulnerable to all -- offered a oneness to both our creator and one another -- that if accepted and claimed truly has the power to make all things new. It is in this faith that I treasure my membership in this Body, my fellowship with you, and trust in the courage and grace we will be given by the God who does make all things new.
-- November 16, 1993