Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
One year ago I told you my plans for meeting with groups of laypeople and clergy, separately, to share a meal and to have leisurely conversation about the dreams and possibilities for our diocesan community. These conversations provided a structured yet informal context for you to hear from me and, more importantly, for me to hear from you. There have been fourteen such conversations to date, involving more than two hundred diocesan leaders. The work goes on, but I can report three themes in what I have heard.
God is the giver of More. More than we can ask or imagine. More than we deserve, even when life turns as ugly as it did for Reynolds Price, who discovered in that turning that life is full of grace. Dear friends, this is what I have heard you say that you want: more, deeper, prayer, and learning. More is what you want and more is available to you, as available as beautiful adornment is to the lilies of the field. The book of the Scriptures are at hand, the traditions are known, the Spirit moves, the community is there, and human being is hard-wired for the practice of prayer and spiritual awareness. Joy and grace are right there, even through the changes and chances of life. I ask the clergy to focus their teaching ministry toward this gift of More—and toward that irreducible partner of More, which is mission. Spirituality and knowledge without mission lapse into the ancient heresy of gnosticism, the realm of cloud-cuckoo land and nothingness; mission without a spiritual life and formation lapses into do-gooderism and boosterism. There is a necessary synergy among mission, spirituality, and learning for us to recognize.
Second, and closely related, I have heard you say in our conversations that you yearn for authentic community. You have made it clear to me that pseudo-community, to use Scott Peck’s term, will not do. This is a legitimate desire, and nothing less than the sort of Church described in Romans, and Colossians, and Ephesians will do. People deserve a place to belong, a place to stand and to matter. Healthy communities support their people and challenge them, call them on failings and missteps without ever shaming them, and give them a safe place to weep. A healthy community has the gumption to say to the elephant: no, you may not dance in the chicken yard. But on the other hand, such a community will know that people do have feet of clay, and authentic communities know not to hammer clay feet into dust. People with clay feet (and that would be all of us) crave a safe, but very real, place to belong. We have it in us to be such a place.
Third, I have spoken personally in these conversations about the importance of mission in my own life, the transformative power of participating in what God is doing in the world. Mission is not at the periphery of Christian practice; it goes to the heart. A most ancient memory of the people of God, the very first historical recollection, is the missional life God gave to our ancestors Abram and Sarai: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.’ So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan” (from Genesis 12).
Abram and Sarai left the settled life in a vibrant city situated at the crossroads of trading routes. They went to an unknown place in response to God, and for the sake of blessing. Seven hundred miles away, these two old people, to be rootless henceforth, are promised heirs but cannot have children. The only property they would ever own was their tomb near Hebron. Dear friends, these are our people.
During our conversations, whenever I would talk about my own encounters in mission, those words would resonate. And for some there was a yearning for such a missional life for themselves and for their Church, even if they had a hard time imagining what that would look like. There is a counter-intuitive recognition that it is God’s mission in the world and our participation in it which will be life-giving. I want us to take steps to set our imagination free.
Sunday I leave with seven other Missourians to travel to Lui Diocese in Sudan—not my idea of a good time, by the way, traveling on such an arduous journey right after Diocesan Convention. But I do love being there. There are many good reasons for us being in a partnership with Lui, the sharing in the gospel, the material difference we can help bring about, the encounter with a vastly different culture, the responsibilities Westerners have in supporting the Millennium Development Goals. Sudan is so far away, so different, so physically and emotionally demanding that it may help awaken the imagination for mission among all of us. Where is Sudan right here in Missouri? St. Louis City, the Bootheel, the Ozarks, downtown Cape Girardeau, the neighborhoods where we live and where we worship? Sudan is here, if we can but have eyes to see.
From our position of affluence, relative or otherwise, we bear a missional responsibility toward the poorest of the poor, both for those who are far off and those who are near. The apostle Paul scoured the Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean world to collect a gift for the poorest of the poor, who were the Church in Jerusalem. He did it for the sake of Jesus. Such a collection was Paul’s duty, his joy, and his obsession. And this was despite Jerusalem having colluded in opposition to Paul, either modestly and irenically, according to Acts 15, or cynically and underhandedly, according to Paul’s own account in Galatians 2. No matter, because Paul was single-minded in collecting this gift for the poor, who are God’s own. It remains the duty and joy of any Church daring to call itself apostolic.
The work of mission becomes all the more crucial for a Church like the Episcopal Church, which continues its numerical decline. Over the last decade, our Church has lost 16 percent in Sunday worshipers. In the one year from 2007-8 average Sunday attendance declined 3.1% among domestic dioceses. These are not happy numbers. In that same one-year period the Diocese of Missouri showed a .4 % increase in Sunday worship, which continues the same pattern of radical stability this Diocese has seen for the past decade.
I think it is important to say numbers like these out loud, and to do so without blame or scorn. Finding fault is not my purpose; telling the truth is. There are underlying reasons for the decline and they may be other than the supposed reasons—for example less to do with a gay bishop and more to do with the increasingly rapid secularization of American culture. More to do with the small number of babies Episcopalian parents tend to have. But I find that telling the truth about our Church’s decline takes away anxiety.
For a Church in decline mission is not a option. It becomes all the more important to know that the heartbeat of the Episcopal Church is mission, mission, mission, to use the Presiding Bishop’s metaphor. The temptation, the danger of decline, lies in its seducing us to turn inward even more. “We must tend to internal matters,” says the tempter, “and we have to tend to these bad numbers before we can begin to look outside.” Such internal tending seems intuitive; but it is in the counter-intuitive movement in mission where we find life. It is where Christians have always found life.
Or, alternatively, we might excuse ourselves from mission by arguing that we are too small for such a thing. Or have to little to offer. We forget those crucial pieces of the gospel with Jesus telling about God’s delight in what is small and unlikely: the mustard seed capable of turning a world; the little bit of yeast leavening the whole mass; a widow who gives two small coins, each the size of the nail on your pinky; Paul’s vivid description of the power coming in weakness.
Mission is life-giving. A congregation of twenty is capable of it and so is a congregation of five hundred. I have heard of excuses from congregations of every size, “we are too small to do that” and also “we are too large to do that.” No. Mission is our joy and our duty.
Another matter of numbers must be named, and that is the financial reality affecting people throughout this diocese. Clergy and laity tell me about lay-offs and underemployment, job transfers and job losses. These are pastoral and fiscal realities everywhere in this diocese. Parishes suffer economically whenever people lose jobs and parishes with investment income have seen that income diminish dramatically. Such has been the case for the Diocese of Missouri and our investments. Parish giving has mostly been meeting the anticipated marks—which is not to say that every parish has met the full assessment. But giving this year at least has been close to historic trends. The drop in investment income, however, has taken its toll. And in light of these realities Council has drafted a responsible budget to propose to you. I do not call it a balanced budget for two reasons. On the revenue side there is the realistic projection that the income from parish assessments will be underfunded, and on the expense side there are obligations and possibilities that will not be met—including the the fact of not funding a senior position on my staff. And so I balk at calling this a balanced budget. But even with all the pain involved, it is at least a responsible budget. I remain convinced that we have all the resources, human and financial, to do what God calls us to do. We will have to arrange our work differently than we have in recent years—but the greatest wealth of this diocese lies in the 14,000 Episcopalians living in the eastern half of the state. As we move ahead we will need to tap this human resource more closely.
The spirit of the General Convention was by far the most pacific of the three I have attended. Most of the the bishops and deputies tried finding ways to move toward one another, despite ongoing disagreement. The tensions around the counter-balancing issues of the Anglican Communion and human sexuality did not resolve, nor is such resolution likely in the near term. Even so, my sense was of most people trying to move toward one another. You should know that I remain committed to the Church’s full inclusion of the faithful gay men and lesbians among us, maintaining all the while the greatest degree of communion possible. It is no easy matter. And timing is everything, as far as I can tell. These issues do not always want to balance. I know that for many in the Diocese of Missouri the tension around these matters becomes too painful at times; it does also for me. I am, however, now mostly at peace with this tension, trusting that the Church remains in God’s hands.
I was privileged to serve as the House of Bishops’ chair for the Joint Legislative Committee on Prayer Book, Liturgy, and Church Music. The very best news that I can give you from that Committee and from the General Convention is that there are no current plans for a new Prayer Book. But I can also commend to you two liturgical resources: Holy Women, Holy Men: The Lives of the Saints and Rachel’s Tears, Hannah’s Hopes. The first resource is the companion to the greatly expanded Calendar of the Prayer Book holy days. These optional observances tell the lives of a great crowd of witnesses who, together, look more like the wildly interesting diversity given us in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, and the whole Body of Christ. It includes the witness of lay men and women, and people not necessarily of European descent; witnesses from other Churches in the Anglican Communion; witnesses from the ecumenical horizons of the whole of Christ’s Church.
Rachel’s Tears, Hannah’s Hopes is a volume of pastoral, liturgical, and devotional materials addressing matters of reproductive loss—miscarriage, stillbirth, infertility, abortion, and related matters. I commend it to you. Both volumes should be in print by next spring.
Canons oblige me to report in this address any new parishes or newly organized mission congregation. And so it is my duty and my joy to tell you what you already know: the Church of the Transfiguration in Lake St. Louis has become a parish. This is a rare moment in the recent history of this diocese. Exactly three parishes have been admitted since 1977, the most recent of which was in 1991. Let us welcome again the Church of the Transfiguration, and Jason Samuel, their rector.
And the canons tell me that I must recognize the newest organized mission, Columbia Hope. This church plant has been in diocesan awareness for two years; the church began public worship last winter and formally organized this summer. Columbia Hope is our newest mission and Heather McCain Morgan is their vicar. Let us acknowledge them.
There is more good news to report about congregations, and the canons do not even require me to mention this. With the advice of the Standing Committee and at the urging of the Design Team, I have asked six congregations and their clergy to engage in an experiment of missional living. Advent, Crestwood; Christ Church, here in Cape Girardeau; Grace, Kirkwood; St. Matthew’s, Warson Woods; St. Paul’s, Ironton; and Trinity, St. Charles are congregations of various sizes, in various locales, and representative of the breadth of this diocese. I have asked them to refocus their life around God’s mission and to make it an organizing principle in their common life –not an afterthought or the thing to do after everything else is in order. I have made resources available for their work and I have offered my own personal availability to them. What would it look like for a real flesh-and-blood congregation to live this way? What are the possibilities and the pitfalls? What can I learn from them and with them? What can other parishes and missions learn? I hope this is one mustard seed to take root.
Which brings me back to where I began, the three broad-stroke learnings for me from the Conversations: deeper spirituality and knowledge of the faith; a more robust expression of community; and the engagement with mission. These three remain available to all of us, and not just in the six congregations. I believe that in precisely what many of you have told me about your dreams for this Church lie the seeds for the very life that will sustain us. More. Community. Mission.
Hard finances, secularization, tensions and conflict—so many other matters conspire to make this a difficult time for the Church. It is at least an interesting time. There was a period during which I felt I could do with something a little less ‘interesting,’ maybe even grow accustomed to ‘boring.’ But I think not. This is the only season given to you and to me to be alive, and it is a pretty good season at that. I have learned that I like the landscape all around and straight ahead. It is at least interesting and often it is an outright adventure. There are possibilities available to us as never before, alongside the challenges. The overweening secularization provides its challenges. But against the backdrop of a secular culture, the outlines of belief in the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God, find some contrast. So does belief in Christ Jesus, the Word made Flesh, whose birth, life, acts of healing, teachings, death, glorious resurrection and ascension—all amount to God’s definitive action in restoring a broken universe, and broken lives, yours and mine. It is a great time to be the Church, and I am glad to be a bishop in this Church and in this diocese.
In his time among the Masai people of what is now Tanzania, Vincent Donovan became a critic of the prevailing—and false—myth of individualism in the West. He wrote that during his time there in the 1960s, he “found out that change, deep meaningful change, like the acceptance of a hopeful, expectant world vision, does not take place in one individual at a time. Groups adopt changes as groups, or they do not adopt them at all.” That sounds right. I am asking you, the clergy and representative laypeople of this diocese, to change for the sake of a hopeful, expectant vision of what God is doing in the world.
Tags: Bishop's message, Convention, Conversations with the Bishop, Diocesan Governance, Economy, Official
