Address from the Vice-Chair Pamela P. Chinnis, President, House of Deputies to Executive Council in Seattle, Washington, June 13, 1995
Episcopal News Service. June 21, 1995 [95-1162]
Pamela P. Chinnis, President, House of Deputies and Vice-Chair, Executive Council of the Episcopal Church
First, I want to thank each one of you for your prayers, and for the calls and faxes and letters of support and encouragement that have given me strength during these past, rather strenuous, few months. Some of you know that I tend to take things very much to heart, and I have spent many a sleepless hour in dismay, anxiety and distress over the series of revelations and developments that have kept us so much in the newspapers this spring. Throughout this time, your love and prayers have sustained me and nurtured my commitment to the task we share as leaders of our beloved Church.
Three times a year, we come together as the Executive Council of the General Convention of this Church, to carry out the program and policies adopted by the General Convention. The canon creating the Council was first adopted in 1919, and its key provisions were that the Council is to have charge of the unification, development and prosecution of the Missionary, Educational, and Social Work of the Church, and to serve as Board of Directors of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society with power to direct the disposition of the moneys and other property of the Society Canon 1.4.1(a) & (g).
In thinking about these responsibilities, I find it helpful to recall the context in which the Church decided to create the Council. Prior to 1919, the General Convention itself, meeting once every three years, was the primary element of what we now call the national church. There was no centralized institution functioning as the church between Conventions.
The Domestic & Foreign Missionary Society employed a small staff to support the work of missionaries in various parts of the world. Working alongside the Secretaries of Domestic and Foreign Missions were Julia Chester Emery and her staff of the Womans Auxiliary of the Society.
There was also a General Board of Religious Education, a completely separate entity providing resources for Sunday Schools and other Christian education programs. Joining these independent agencies in the old Bible House on Fourth Avenue in Lower Manhattan was the Social Service Commission, which Convention created to coordinate programs in labor relations, health and welfare, and related social ministries. But although these three programs shared space, their small administrative staffs, their budgets, their governing bodies, their purposes and goals were all separate and uncoordinated.
The Council was created to replace the separate governing boards for those programs, to provide coordinated oversight and administrative consolidation. As Chair of the Council, the Presiding Bishop had ultimate executive authority, but until 1943 the Presiding Bishop was also a diocesan bishop whose ability to direct day-to-day operations was quite limited. Similarly, the President of the House of Deputies, Vice-Chair of Council, was usually engaged in full-time ministry elsewhere.
Program staff were accountable to the Council, but during the Councils 75-year history there have been many different arrangements for daily management and executive oversight of the missionary, educational and social programs of the Church for which we -- as the Council -- are responsible.
I rehearse a little of this history because I find it reassuring. As a church we have always been engaged in modifying our administrative structures to meet changing needs, to adapt to the gifts of the particular individuals God calls as our leaders at different times, and to respond to the weaknesses of structures or people as they become apparent.
We are in the midst of another cycle of adaptation now. It is not very comfortable. In fact its downright uncomfortable -- unsettling, disorienting, challenging, frightening the way being called into an unknown future is always frightening. But God has gathered us to serve as members of the Council at this particular moment, and we can trust God to provide the wisdom and courage to respond to our challenge as our predecessors responded to theirs.
It is in this context that I try to view the situation resulting from the management review last fall that led to the resignation of Ellen Cooke, the subsequent discovery of the embezzlement, and the sequence of legal, administrative and financial steps being taken in response.
Problems have been uncovered that need to be set right. Administrative functions need to be teased apart to restore balance with program responsibilities. Financial controls must be restored. Council must provide appropriate guidance and responsible oversight for staff who have -- for years -- been buffeted, demoralized, downsized, and often criticized from the field for carrying out the programs which Convention has authorized.
It is essential that we give attention to these financial and administrative matters, but lets not allow them to crowd out our primary commitment to the church's programs of mission, education and social service. Financial and administrative structures are only the means through which we exercise our ministry -- to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ, to educate ourselves and our children in the faith which our ancestors passed on to us, to minister to the poor, the sick, the prisoners, the outcast.
As Council members we must attend with care to many administrative and financial details. However, we do not seek to be good stewards merely for the sake of being good stewards. We do it to make possible the mission of the Church by creating and adapting the institutional structures that support individuals and congregations in their ministries.
The Church has a number of structures for mission in addition to the Executive Council and staff of the Church Center. For some years now, awareness has been growing of the need to adapt, prune, modify, and generally renew many of those structures.
The various committees, commissions, boards and agencies we refer to as interim bodies, along with a relatively new category of committees reporting to Executive Council, have proliferated over the years, as new issues have arisen in the life of the church which seemed not to fit within the scope of existing groups. Provinces and dioceses have waxed and waned in their ability to support Christian proclamation and service as populations have shifted, the economy has fluctuated, and leadership has changed. The General Convention itself became cumbersome as its size increased and procedures which worked well for a smaller convention in the manual age required substantial modification and streamlining. During the last triennium the Presiding Bishop and I coordinated the work of several groups charged by the 1991 Convention with aspects of structural review and streamlining. In Indianapolis we enjoyed the results of some of that work, with a much-improved legislative process and a significant reduction in the number of resolutions. These improvements gave us more time for theological reflection and consideration of issues outside the parliamentary framework, so our legislative tasks were -- for the most part -- conducted more efficiently.
What did not happen in Indianapolis, however, was agreement on any major changes in the Convention itself, including its interim bodies. After considerable effort, the House of Bishops was not able to agree with an approach initially approved by the House of Deputies and the measure died.
We were loathe to lose the momentum, however, so the Presiding Bishop and I asked the Structure Commission -- which did have a special mandate to look at interim bodies -- to carry out that task in a broad context, building on the discussions of the previous triennium. We also asked most of the interim bodies to hold their fall 1995 meetings at the same time and place, to provide some common conversations about structural matters and to facilitate interviews by teams from the Structure Commission with each interim body.
As a result, planning is now well underway for a joint interim body conference in Minneapolis, in October. Chairs and vice chairs will gather with Bishop Browning and me on the morning of the first day.
The opening conference session for all interim body members with us and the Structure Commission will begin at 1:30 Thursday afternoon, October 12. Interim bodies will begin their individual sessions Thursday evening, and on Friday teams from the Structure Commission will visit each group to gather data for their review. The joint conference itself will conclude by 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, October 14th, with some interim bodies continuing through Sunday October 15 as needed to complete their own work.
I look forward to seeing most of you in Minneapolis for that important event. It ought to have many implications for us as a Council, as well as for the Structure Commissions task, and I encourage your active participation. The institution of the Church must continually adapt if it is to sustain the life of the Body of Christ in an always changing world.
Let me say a little about the round of diocesan visitations Bishop Browning, Diane Porter and I have been making. You'll recall that we had made the first visit to Nevada just before the February Council meeting. Since then we have also been to Mississippi, Connecticut and -- this past week -- the Diocese of Olympia here. In the fall we will visit the Diocese of Quincy.
These visits have differed from the Council visits some of you made in the last triennium in several significant ways. First, they are longer. We are typically in a diocese from Thursday evening through Sunday mid-day, which allows time to get acquainted with people and gain a broader sense of diocesan life. One day is devoted to visiting as many different ministries within the diocese as geography and stamina allow. Each of us preaches and visits with members of a local church.
We also have extended conversations with the bishop and staff, and with other groupings of diocesan leaders. culminating in a session at which we try to develop a covenant for a specific ministry partnership between the Church Center and the diocese. In the Diocese of Nevada, for example, the covenant involved earmarking some of the funds authorized by the Indianapolis Convention for electronic communications to promote diocesan use of QUEST -- both to improve local communication in support of ministry in an area where people are separated by vast distances, and to provide easy access to the people and the resources from the Church Center that can support their local ministries.
I have been struck during these visits by the amazing variety of local ministry happening around our church, and by the fact that much is supported -- directly and indirectly -- by the human and material resources authorized by the General Convention and provided by Church Center staff. In many cases, however, the local beneficiaries simply do not realize that connection. There is a discontinuity between their perceptions of the church beyond their own locality and the reality of their connections with it. Somehow, many people seem to have put the national church into a separate category in their minds, unrelated to the use they make of, for example the services of the Youth Ministry Office or the Evangelism network the broad array of congregational development and stewardship materials training for children's ministry, lay leadership, clergy deployment grants for refugee resettlement or economic justice liturgical materials and bible study guides resources on everything from AIDS to a map of the church in Zaire, from models for small churches to violence against women.
The services available to the whole church from the existing network of volunteers and diocesan, provincial and national staff are amazing in their breadth and value. We don't have to invent a lot of new things so much as we need to spread the word so more local ministries can take advantage of them. We need to turn around the rhetoric that perceives decisions and programs being handed down from on high, imposed by the national church on hapless congregations.
The former Treasurer has done enormous damage to our beloved Church. Her actions have jeopardized our mission and undermined the credibility of our leadership as well as demoralizing our people both in the Church Center and in the Dioceses.
Despite ten years of devoted leadership and dedicated service on the part of our Presiding Bishop, we are now hearing calls from a vocal minority for his resignation. I have been in partnership with him since December 6th when he asked for Mrs. Cooke's resignation and I have seen first hand his struggle through all of this. I know that he is no more culpable than all the rest of us -- Executive Council, the Program Budget & Finance, the Audit Committee, the Committee on Trust Funds. The question for me is whether we are going to cede the final victory to Ellen Cooke and permit bickering and squabbling among our membership paralyze our leadership and mission for the next two and a half years or whether we are going to rededicate ourselves as the servant-leaders of this Church to the job before us.
The Presiding Bishop and I, the Executive Council and members of interim bodies, the staff of the Episcopal Church Center -- we are all called to serve God through service to the people of this Church: Let us do this in a spirit of trust and faith, resisting the pressures to careen from crisis to crisis without thought of our larger duty.
The Episcopal Church has been around for a couple of centuries; the followers of Jesus Christ have been organizing themselves for evangelism and service for almost two millennia. The shape of this church for the next few years is in our hands, but the life of the Body of Christ, past, present and to come, is safely in the hands of God. With that assurance, we can keep the present crisis in perspective, tend efficiently to the administrative and financial necessities, and reserve our best energies for the mission and ministry of the Church. With God's help, we will.