Born in the Gold Rush, Diocese of California Celebrates its 150th Anniversary
Episcopal News Service. August 4, 1999 [99-119]
Dennis Delman, Dennis Delman is the editor of the Diocese of California's Pacific Church News.
(ENS) With prayers, psalms, a parade and a picnic, the Diocese of California began a year-long anniversary celebration on July 17, some 150 years after the Rev. Flavel Scott Mines conducted the first Service of Morning Prayer that launched Episcopal ministry in the early days of California's gold rush.
Opening the celebration with that same service, nearly 500 people gathered in Trinity Parish, San Francisco, the first Episcopal church west of the Rocky Mountains. In his welcoming comments, the Rev. Robert Warren Cromey, Trinity's current rector, noted that the congregation was seated where hundreds of thousands had worshipped over the years, including 72 funerals in the past two decades for Trinity parishioners who died of AIDS.
The Rt. Rev. William Swing, seventh bishop of the diocese, welcomed Presiding Bishop and Mrs. Frank T. Griswold, together with several visiting bishops, ecumenical and interfaith guests, and reminded the congregation that in the founding of Episcopal ministry in California, "before bishops, before any priest, there were lay people." It was a call in late 1848 by prominent lay people to the Board of Missions in New York that brought Mines, then the Rev. John Ver Mehr, first rector of Grace Church (now Grace Cathedral), to San Francisco.
Following the service, crucifer Michael Hilty led an ever-expanding procession from Trinity to Grace Cathedral. Halting San Francisco's famed cable cars, the procession climbed the California Street hill, fed continually at each intersection by members of the diocese's 86 churches and its social institutions, joining the procession in the order of their founding.
Joining Swing and Griswold in the procession were Bishops G. Richard Millard (retired suffragan of California) Mark MacDonald (Alaska), Jerry Lamb (Northern California) Samir Kafity (Jerusalem, retired) and Otis Charles (Utah, retired)
Approaching Grace Cathedral, behind its banner proclaiming the sesquicentennial theme: Let It Shine, the procession, which included Chinese dragons, bagpipers and a sea of church banners, numbered more than 2,500 and stretched nearly four blocks. As marchers arrived, they gathered on the cathedral stairs to pose for a family photograph. Members of the Church of Our Saviour, in Oakland's Chinatown, presented Swing a framed reproduction of the Let It Shine theme done in Chinese characters, using exactly 150 pennies.
An overflow crowd jammed the cathedral and close to conclude the morning's worship with the Eucharist, which featured a 300-member choir under the direction of John Fenstermaker, Grace Cathedral's organist and choirmaster, and drawn from nearly half of the diocese's churches. In keeping with the diocese's ethnic diversity, the Gospel was read in nine languages, from American Sign to Fijian and Hindi.
In his sermon, Griswold recounted a recent visit to Russia during which he learned that the Diocese of California's first bishop, William Ingraham Kip, convinced an 1860's General Convention to establish a relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church. "As a result of Bishop Kip's efforts," said Griswold, "the Russian Church has long regarded the Episcopal Church as a friend," and called upon it to help "rebuild the structures of the church in the wake of the Soviet years."
Saying he was personally grateful to the first bishop of California, Griswold noted that "determined farsightedness is a characteristic I particularly associate with this diocese and many of its bishops across the years...as well as your present bishop's vision of the potential force of the world's religions to bind up and bring together, rather than divide and turn the people of the earth against one another."
Following Renewal of the Baptismal Covenant, the choir led in singing the offertory anthem, Jesus Christ is Our Story, based on the 150th Psalm (text by Brian Wren and music by Conrad Susa) and composed specifically for the diocesan anniversary celebration. In the course of the anthem, people, as instructed, began to chant in monotone Psalm 150 in one of the nine languages used in the Gospel reading.
After the Eucharist and capping the day's festivities, people picnicked on the cathedral close and in Huntington Park across the street, accompanied by live entertainment that showcased the diocese's ethnic diversity.
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