The Bishop Speaks of Finding Hope

Parsifal is the legendary knight who sought the Holy Grail. The Grail was the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper, and for Parsifal it symbolized a contact with the holy, with spiritual reality. His quest for the Grail was a quest for the truth about life and immortality.

Now, the secret of the Grail was held by an old king, but this king was suffering from a mysterious illness, and his whole kingdom was cast under this same spell. The palace and its gardens were in decay, the springs of the kingdom were drying up, trees would not bear fruit, and even the animals were no longer bearing young.

Knights from all over the realm arrived every day seeking news of the king's health. Then one day Parsifal arrived – poor and unknown. He paid no attention to courtly custom and politeness, but made straight for the king's chamber, and without greeting or inquiry about the king's health, said: “Where is the Grail?” As if to say, “Where do I find the Holy? . . . Where is the truth about the meaning of life?”

The king said: “It is here.”

In that instant, everything was transformed. The king rose from his bed and was well. Springs brought forth water, vegetation began to grow, animals were with young, and the castle was restored. Parsifal's question regenerated the whole land.

It seems to me that this parable applys today to many institutions. They are perishing because there are few seekers of truth, few adventurers. It is enough, you see, simply to raise the central questions, to pose the problems, to become a seeker, for life to return.

For a congregation (or diocese) to begin to ask questions inevitably leads to seeking answers, which leads to thinking, which leads to vision.

I have long thought that too many church leaders (mostly clergy including bishops) operate with answers, which are theirs, which makes for starting at the wrong place. They do not operate with the knowledge that they are the newcomers. They must listen to the people most of whom have not been invited to speak.

Parsifal is a model which dares us to take the chance of offering hope to the people by listening to them.

Hope is not something we capture. It must always be sought. It will hide or be hidden again and again.

Where is hope? It is there to be discovered. The rest is up to us.

The Habit of Hope

                “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” is from the musical, “My Fair Lady”. It was taken from the novel Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. The musical starred Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. Harrison played Professor Henry Higgins (the phonetics professor) and Hepburn was Eliza Doolittle. It was about the relationship between a cultural elitist and a slum girl. Eventually, despite extraordinary differences, they begin to form a deep bond. When the relationship is threatened, Higgins cries out, “I’ve grown accustomed to her face. She almost makes the day begin…her ups and downs are second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in, I was serenely independent and content before we met, surely I could always be that way again, and yet… I’ve grown accustomed to her voice, accustomed to her face.”

                 Here we have the core of the human mystery; it is that we find lasting spiritual meaning in life to the extent that we develop the “habits of the heart.” We read in Proverbs 3: “My child, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments; for length of days and years of life and abundant welfare they will give you. Do not let your loyalty and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart…trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” We have the teaching of spiritual formation by means of spiritual and virtuous habits. It is really about the formation of allowing our soul to express itself by means of the habits of the heart.

                 Habit is when a practice or a way of living becomes “second nature to us now, like breathing out and breathing in.” Habit is defined by Aristotle as a second nature of embodied knowledge; it is the overcoming our lack of control by pursuing the habit of practicing virtue until it becomes “second nature” to us. We learn what is right and wrong, but head knowledge must be turned into heart knowledge by means of practice. Habits of the heart are a metaphor for embodied practical reasoning. It runs into our very bones. Knowledge of God must be by means of habit translated into knowledge of the heart. “My commandments…bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.” Proverbs 3)

                 Habit is driven by the energy of the soul that moves the intellect and the will from abstract reasoning to practical reason which means that our will is driven by the loving and enlightened heart. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight.” Rationality is deceiving and the will gets weary and lazy; therefore habits of the heart (practical reasoning) are essential to the spiritual life. Habits are difficult to change; they make us content and successful in our action.  In the spiritual life, we choose between habits of vice or virtue. It is not within the nature of a person to remain morally neutral. Spirituality is a call to a life of virtuous habits.

                 For Thomas Aquinas in his book on Ethics, a habit is a relatively permanent acquired modification of a person that enables the person when provoked by relevant stimulus, to act consistently and with ease with respect to the objective. We cannot replace a habit of vice by means of intellect and the will; rather, habits of vice are only replaced by habits of virtue. Habit is the mediator between our behavior and the intellect and will. Aquinas insists that habits are different from instincts because habits are responsive to reason. By reason, he means the power of decision making and personal strategizing that changes character. Habit is unlike disposition in that habits are not easily lost. Habit is not an instinct; it is far more than a hunch or an insight, a feeling, an urge, a mystical awareness or therapeutic clarity. It is more than an attitude or a disposition that easily changes.

                Habits have their great persuasive force over our character because our spiritual and moral habits are founded on our beliefs. What is a religious belief? “First, it is something we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, for short, a habit…the essence of belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by different modes of action to which they give rise.” (Pierce Charles Sanders, The Essential Pierce, Vol.1, p.129).

                Habit defines the indispensable nature of Christian spirituality and the living of a spiritual and moral life. The Christian life is not an intellectual enterprise. It is not the acquisition and sharing of spiritual and humanistic insights. Living a Christian life is a matter of living in a personal and communal lifestyle of spiritual habits, such as the habit of worship, of prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, personal and communal interpretation of scripture, establishing and sharing in intimate Christian friendships, examination of conscience and acts of loving compassion. 

Based on the norm of habit in Christian formation we might ask some easy questions.

 Question: What is the best worship service we ever went to?

 Answer: The one we didn’t feel like going to.

Question: When do we pray best?

Answer: When we don’t feel like it.

Question: What are the most effective acts of charity we ever performed?

Answer: The ones we did not feel like doing.

Question: When was our commitment to the church the most pleasing to God?

Answer: When we were feeling empty and discouraged.

The point is that life as a journey of hope is not about the feeling of hope, or an intellectual insight into the nature of hope; rather, it is about developing the spiritual and moral habit of hope.

               

 

Episcopal Church Achieves Boutique Status

Preliminary membership numbers released last week by the Episcopal Church confirm another year of decline.  Last year, 2012, the Church experienced a 4.15% membership loss.  This now reduces the Episcopal Church to 1.8 million members – a 13% drop in the five years since 2007 and a 50% loss in the last 50 years.  Average Sunday Attendance (ASA), often hailed as the best indicator of active membership, also nose-dived last year by 4.9% which was called “staggering” by one reporter.

The Episcopal Church is no longer a part of America’s religious narrative, according to one commentator.  That bears repeating: “The Episcopal Church is no longer a part of America’s religious narrative.”  That is to say, we are no longer a meaningful part of the future religious story of America; even the National Missionary Baptists are bigger than we are and how often do you hear about them? The best the Episcopal Church can hope for is a place in the “boutique” culture – joining boutique shops, boutique hotels, and boutique medical practices.  Boutiques in any endeavor are upscale, trendy, expensive, exclusive, snobby, and cater to an elite clientele.  Boutiques do not worry about reaching the masses; a few well-healed patrons and they can survive.

Consider the recent House of Bishops meeting with the theme of “Transforming Loss into New Possibilities.”  The 148 bishops in attendance considered re-imagining the Episcopal Church but it is nowhere reported that those same bishops addressed the fact that they, themselves, will cost the Church over 22 million dollars this year just for stipend and benefits; their staffs easily triple that number to a cost of $700,000,000 or more in the next 10 years – pricy even by boutique numbers. 

The bishops heard Dr. Elaine Heath, Perkins School of Theology, challenge them “…to go into neighborhoods and engage people where they are, where they live.”  Let’s be fair; scores of good men and good women have been bishops over the last 50 years and they have all understood what Dr. Heath advocates and even after spending over a billion dollars for bishops and staffs – our membership is down 50%.

We can play Monday morning quarterback and wish we had dramatically avoided all the dumb stuff of the last fifty years and instead shrunk the number of dioceses, reduced the number of bishops, kept multi-millions in assessment dollars in parish treasuries, and refused ordaining late-vocation, non-seminary graduates – would our declining situation be different?  Perhaps, but we’ll never know.

We do know that nothing we have done in the last 50 years has stopped the hemorrhage.  Time to bind up our wounds and actively plan to be the best boutique church on the block. 

 

The Final Resort: To Hope for Hope

In the Faith section of the Saturday Kansas City Star, two articles caught my attention. The one article was about the growing number of part time and unpaid clergy positions, featuring a number of those in the Episcopal Church including Mark Marmon, a fly-fishing instructor and unpaid Episcopal priest (or nearly so),Hitchcock, TX of All Saints’ Church.  The other article was about the growing phenomenon of “culture” rather than faith practicing Jews. “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” by the Pew Research Center indicates that 62% of U.S, Jews surveyed found their Jewishness in cultural values and 15% about religious belief. And then on the same page, a far smaller few lines was on endearing quotes from Pope Francis, ones of solid, humble Christian faith witness. On the next page over, the number of advertisements for religious service occupied 15 to 20% of the printed areas whereas when I first moved here in 2001, probably 75% of the page was ads, if not more. . .

The landscape of the national and global religious environment has been shifting in my life time since the 1960’s, but the last ten years has been “fast forward.”  In my own Diocese of Kansas, we just have inaugurated a seminary in Topeka serving these very same part timers for all of Kansas, West Missouri and  Nebraska for occasional and monthly courses, much like what has been happening in Texas for some time. Of course just about all Christian denominations are facing the part time ministry phenomenon because many of our and all denominations’ lay persons are more or less part time themselves, just trailing the Jews and Europeans in general but moving down the same decline. And now occasionally we see the once stellar mega churches folding, as we have locally, as their slice of the lay pie was always based on numbers of folk whose commitments were never really very long term and where no work was ever much done to create reserve trusts or endowments for those inevitable “lean years.”  And many established, endowed congregations have withered their reserves for “keeping up appearances” as Mrs.Bucket used to do on her British tv series. My former parish of St. James in Wichita had a trust that I did much to protect of about $1.8million when I left in ‘01 and now has something over $400,000, but that loss is hardly unique among many congregations, dioceses and adjudicatory bodies. General Seminary and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC are commercializing good size chunks of their land to hold out for “better times,” as 815 2nd Ave. rents out about ¾’s of its space. Many years ago, I was talking with  a major fund raising company about St. John the Divine whose research profile of it indicated that by the 1980’s much of the new money they got for projects came from Jews,not Episcopalians, who understood the cultural importance of that institution while wealthy Episcopalians had grown weary of various social tirades coming from the Cathedral location. What an interesting turn of social identity, secular Jews supporting our institutional grandeur. Well, better that than nothing to say the least. . .

I am certain some sort question must be arising in the mind of the reader concerning toward what the writer is pointing. The writer is not certain either. . . Some days this author’s very human feelings are so confused by the many turns of events not only of the Church but of the many levels of American governments that seem hell bent to self destruction, of mindless but sober drivers looking at their phones swerving in front of me in full daylight, of my own issues about aging leading toward those concerns around my own “last days.” I just wonder, pray and do what may at last be the final resort of a spiritual journey. . . surrender myself to the will and grace of God as I have tried to understand it through the Christian witness of my beloved Episcopal Church. .  . I hope to find hope. And you?

The Diocese as the Fundamental Unit of the Church?

I first heard the notion of the diocese as the fundamental unit of the church back in the 1980s from my bishop.  But I never heard a reasonable theology that supported his claim.  Practically, I recoiled at this absurd idea thrust upon the church by the bishops who had, under this rubric, either lost touch with reality or suffered form significant amnesia.  Anybody with any sense knows that the fundamental unit of the church is the local congregation.  The local parish is the place where the people are, and as we all know, the baptized faithful are the church.

I tried to find a theology that justified the Bishop's idea.  I "googled" theology of diocese" and came up with nothing.  But I do believe that I remember correctly that the notion that the diocese is the fundamental unit of the church arose accidentally from the 4th century Roman political organizational system.  After Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church continued to flourish and grow, and therefore, needed to organize itself to fit the growth.  The church thus adopted the Roman form of administrative organization which was the diocese.  An early definition of the word diocese means to dwell, occupy, manage, derivative of oikos house.

In the New Testament the first churches were house churches, relatively small, probably attended by no more than 50 people.  Think about that when we consider that an early definition of the diocese was a derivative of the word "house."  Jewish Christians also met in synagogues.  As the church grew, they used bigger houses and some of them were donated by wealthy Roman citizens who were Christians.  This made them "churches" in the modern sense of a public building set aside for worship.

The early church in the British Isles had no diocesan system.  Celtic Christianity was organized around a monastic tradition where the Abbot was more powerful than the bishop.  This was a spiritual community united through a communion of friendships and alliances between spiritual leaders and their monasteries.  The diocese as an administrative principle in British Christianity was not adopted until after Augustine of Canterbury arrived on British soil in 597 A.D., establishing sees at Rochester in Kent and East Saxon (London).

Parish priests and their people know that the local parish is the fundamental unit of the church.  This is where the baptized faithful assemble for worship, prayer, discipleship and ministry.  Our catechism puts it this way:  The Church is described as the Body of which Jesus Christ is the Head and all baptized persons are members.  It is called the People of God, the New Israel, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, and the pillar and ground of truth.  This basic statement says nothing about organizational and administrative structure, but to me implies that the local assembly is the organizing principle of the body.

While the diocese is the traditional judicatory style of Anglican and Roman Catholics, there is no practical or theological justification for the notion that it is the fundamental unit.  Ecumenically it doesn't hold water either.  The Methodist are organized in conferences.  The Lutherans have their Synods.  Ecumenical charity demands that we recognize these and other Christian organizational structures as just as valid as the diocese.

What planet are the bishops who believe this living on?  The local parish has always been the fundamental unit of the church.  This is where the action is.  If the local parish did not exist, there would be no diocese.  The diocese depends on us, not we on them.

The Bishop Speaks from the heart

Long ago (1992) and far away (Arizona), I became bishop of a diocese with 65 congregations and a lot of issues. I worked very hard and visited all of the congregations in one year as was expected of me. This required me to have more than one visit each weekend. Sometimes I had one visit, sometimes I had two visits and sometimes I had five visits. I was in congregations on Saturday and Sunday. I did confirmation in each of the congregations.

After that year, I was exhausted. I did it another year. After that year, I was exhausted and I did not like confirmation any longer. I would go to some churches and confirm 20 people, 50 people, 8 people, and sometimes 1 person. I thought there has to be a better way.

We began to do things which had not been done elsewhere. We reduced the size of the diocesan staff to 1 bishop, 1 Canon to the Ordinary, 1 archdeacon (a deacon), 1 secretary, 1 finance person, 1 communication person and 2 general staff persons to take care of the phones and assist others as needed. We eliminated 5 staff positions. I believed we were not responsible for doing things which congregations could do for themselves. We were there to serve the congregations.

We became stewards of the finances. I declared at the diocesan convention that we were going to tithe the diocesan budget. We were going to return 10% of all of the diocesan assessments back to the congregations. Most people thought it would never happen. I was determined that it would happen. We looked at some of the things we were doing as a diocese which could be done easily by congregations and we stopped doing them. There is more to this story, but for the sake of blog I will tell you that at the diocesan convention the next year we presented an envelope to each congregation at the offertory (we did not take an offering) which was 10% of what they had given to the diocese as assessment. We returned $140,000 and these people were stunned. The smallest check was $38 and the largest was $18,000.

From that moment on we were about the business of being different from any other diocese. It was not a competition. It was about freedom and excitement. It was about believing that anything we could dream, we could do. And we did it. If there is interest, I can share more in future blogs.

Now, back to confirmation. I told our clergy and congregations I was exhausted by the schedule and I intended to try something new. I asked if they would help me. The response was positive and we began to do regional confirmations. We started on the Saturday after Easter and concluded on the Saturday before Pentecost. They were big celebrations with hundreds of people. They knew it was something important. They knew they were part of something larger than their parish. They knew the reception after the liturgy was for them and not the bishop. It was wonderful. We did it for another 10 years.

The point is this. It is quite easy for us to find reasons why we cannot do something. It is easy to keep our heads down and tread through life. It does not have to be that way.

My colleague, Gary, made a case for merging neighboring smaller dioceses under a single bishop. The first comment I heard was that it cannot be done because the bishop could not go to all of the churches in a year.

It is not a requirement that the bishop is in every church every year. It is not a requirement that the bishop do confirmation every week. If we want to be a little frisky, we could even ask the bishops to vote to turn confirmation over to the clergy.

I will speak only for myself. I would vote to put confirmation in the hands of the clergy because it is not necessary for the bishop to do this. It is not admission to anything which requires those hands. As a matter of fact, it makes more sense to me to recognize the laying on of hands of the priest at baptism of a child or adult as being “the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ's Body, they Church and inheritors of the kingdom of God”. That is it.

This is no longer the entry into communion as is was in my life. We now say confirmation is a “sacramental rite” which is a mature commitment to Christ and the reception of “strength from the Holy Spirit through prayer and the laying on of hands by a bishop”.

There is no reason for us to think the Holy Spirit is only available from the bishop. I know we have always done it like this and I know lots of bishops really feel the need to have something which only they can do, but I must say, it does not make any sense and it does not make a bishop.

I know I have a different perspective than many bishops. I saw my role as being Teacher, Preacher, Evangelist, and Sign of Unity. That is what I chose to do and I let that lead all of my actions. I was never thought of as a leader among the bishops. I was never invited to say a prayer or lead a worship in the House of Bishops.

I had a wonderful time being bishop in a wonderful place. I have many bishop friends. But for now, I am just a blog guy with a sense of hope.

Via Media Metaphysics

A. William McVey

 

In this postmodern culture, where more and more people describe themselves as spiritual as opposed to religious, I hear “something” statements like, “Well, there must be something there. There must be something that explains life. I mean there has to be something.” Usually, such statements are immediately followed by declarations that the person is definitely not religious. Furthermore, the same person seems to have a certain arrogant scorn for any previous religious formation.

It appears that very few seekers of the spiritual “something” are conscious that Western religious scholars have, since the time of Greek philosophers, been concerned about the nature of the “something” of the universe. The Greeks looked for a permanent and foundational reality to believe in. In other words, they were looking for the foundational something of the universe which they called “Being.”

                It was Aristotle who insisted the metaphysical quest for the divine comprehension of the universe is found only in grasping the essence of the universe. Knowledge of the divine “something” is known by means of understanding the workings (the causation) of the universe. Eventually, this metaphysical teaching of Aristotle, with the development of medieval philosophy, became the foundational truth for theology and spirituality; Thomas Aquinas calls it the analogy of being. Up to the present day, Martin Heidegger continues to reconstruct a modern approach to the issue of the “Something of the Universe” with a new methodology of Phenomenological Metaphysics in the classic work Being and Time. In this modern work, the thrust of Heidegger’s metaphysical inquiry is about the essence of Being as it is disclosed in time.

 The metaphysical has become in the age of modernity no longer the pursuit of the unchangeable nature of the universe; rather it is an inquiry into humanity’s divine destiny. The “Something” has become a question of what is the foundational truth that must drive the universe and human consciousness. For Christian philosophy, it is the Catholic expression of metaphysics that has been extremely important. Scholastic theology has, for example, relied on Christian metaphysics to prove certain truths called the preambula which are presupposed before revelation and can be considered reasonable and possible.

  I want to draw attention to the issue of a needed Anglican metaphysics because we do have our Catholic side.  I suggest in our Episcopal journey of hope in a postmodern culture that we give serious attention to philosophical theology and a neo-scholastic approach to metaphysics. My argument is based on two Episcopal basic philosophical and theological pillars of identity. First, we describe ourselves as a hermeneutical community who hold that God is revealed through a triad of scripture, tradition and reason. For this approach to revelation to have validity we must borrow from the Catholic scholastic philosophy. In other words, we must have an Anglo- Catholic foundational preambula if we are serious about the place of reason within the context of revelation.  Note I am using reason here in the sense of a methodical dialectical pursuit of a metaphysical foundation for theology, especially spiritual theology, in an age of radical postmodern skepticism of foundational truth. The second pillar of Episcopal inquiry into the nature of God’s continuing revelation is the path of the via media (the middle way). It is John Henry Newman as part of the Tractarian movement who coined the phrase Via Media. It was a concept used within the parameters of doctrinal theology that saw Anglicanism has the middle path between a Reformed and Roman Catholic doctrinal theology of revelation and ecclesial authority.

Anglo-Catholics have strongly assumed the via media identity not only in matters of doctrinal theology, but we seem to apply it to all controversial issues. Personally, I find continuing via media identity extremely promising for our Episcopal journey of hope.  Consequently, I am defining via media as a practice of more than live and let live, or we agree to disagree because this thinking is not an exercise of profound reasoning. Via Media might serve as the basis of an Anglo Catholic, neo-scholastic metaphysics that opens up new avenues of dialogue within the Catholic and Evangelical community, and simultaneously provides our Episcopal  theology with the real heft necessary in an age when the conversation once again is about the spiritual nature of Being (the Seeker Something).

I propose that there is the beginning of this philosophical theology in the American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce.  Some have called Pierce the American Aristotle, but I like to call him the American scientific scholastic.  His philosophy was tremendously influenced by scholastic realism, especially the works of John Dun Scotus. From this starting point, Pierce began a reconstruction of religious metaphysics to a scientific or cosmogonic one.  It is metaphysics about the divine nature of the universe becoming manifested and real over time. It is really metaphysics of more is yet to be revealed. “I think that the existence of God, as well as we conceive of it, consists in this, that a tendency towards ends is so necessary a constituent of the universe that the mere action of chance upon innumerable atoms has an inevitable teleological result. One of the ends so brought about is the development of intelligence and of knowledge; and therefore I should say God’s omniscience, humanly conceived, and consists in the fact that knowledge in its development leaves no question unanswered.” (The Essential Pierce, P. 236).

Pierce’s metaphysics is a method of painstaking and persistent inquiry into the movement of the universe and human conscious to foundational truth.  Humanity in its questions, disputes, opinions, attitudes, theories and tests is driven to a final compromise and opinion. Human beings at their best are driven in intellect, will and soul to the final truth of the universe through a type of dialectical via media inquiry.  Rosa Maria Perez-Teran Mayorga writes that Pierce’s metaphysics “…claims that  the drive towards a consensus about things is as much an actual force or law or power as the gravitational one; it is a tendency that guides thought in one “fated” or determined direction-the truth…the very fact that we engage in inquiry presupposes that we will be persuaded by the right kind of evidence to accept the correct answer… according to Pierce there is some predisposition, some occult power… we are destined in the direction of truth, so given enough time, we look likely to arrive at it. It is a real fact that there would be a final option were the investigation to continue long enough.” (From Realism to ‘Realicism’, The Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Pierce, and p.145)  Finally, I take it that Pierce is a Via Media type person, and there is a Via Media metaphysics that gives Anglo-Catholic theology real heft and sustaining power in our Journey of Hope.

 

 

                               

 

Is Redundancy Immoral?

by
Gary Gilbertson
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Congratulations to the United Methodists of Kansas and Missouri.  They openly acknowledged the population movement from rural areas and the resulting decline in the number of Methodist churches in the two states.  So like good stewards, on August 23rd, they merged three Conferences:  Kansas East, Kansas West and Nebraska, into the new "Great Plains Annual Conference"; please note that they will still have over 1,000 Methodist churches across the two states.  So why merge?  Their answer:  "Our hope is that we'll be stronger, and able to do more in mission by uniting than we could as three smaller conferences."

The Episcopal Church also has three jurisdictions in the two states:  the Diocese of Nebraska, Kansas, and Western Kansas.  Could they not be stronger and do more in mission by uniting into one rather than continuing as three smaller jurisdictions?  The reality of rural to city movement and the decline of the number of Episcopal churches is as true of us as it is for the Methodists.  Even with merger the two states would have only 129 Episcopal congregations with many in the waning moments of life:  50 congregations (39%) have an average Sunday attendance (ASA) of less than 20 members, another 35 congregations (27%) have an ASA of 20-49.  At the National level 68% (4,580) of our congregations have an average Sunday attendance under 100 members; in Nebraska and Kansas 66%of our congregations have an average Sunday attendance under 50 members.

Why have three bishops?  Why have three diocesan staffs managing similar programs for so few congregations?  If the Methodists can service seven times as many congregations in the same geographical area, why can't we Episcopalians centrally manage 129 congregations in the two states?

Repeatedly lay-persons suggest the reason we can't merge is the lack of leadership in our bishops and senior clergy.  To be fair one of the bishops involved did offer to take one or both of the other dioceses under his wing; nevertheless, when was the last time any bishop challenged a diocesan convention to make merger a major priority?  When was the last time a parish delegation pushed legislation for merger?  The remnant Diocese of Quincy did retreat back into the Diocese of Chicago last month but that was a move based on financial desperation and not mission; in any case, it is atypical.

If we used the Methodist example of 1000 congregations as a decent basis for a new jurisdiction - the Episcopal Church in the United States would have only seven dioceses instead of the 100 we have now.  The National Church listed just 6,736 congregations in the last reported year of 2011 and that was down 58 churches from the year before; hundreds of these congregations have no priest at all and hundreds more have only part-time clergy - this in spite of the fact that there is no clergy shortage in the Episcopal Church.  So why do we need 100 Episcopal dioceses and staffs that are inefficient, or worse, that incompetent that we need so much redundancy?  The Methodists merged to be stronger and do more in mission.

What keeps the Episcopal Church in Kansas and Nebraska from actively working toward merger?  What keeps the other 97 diocesan bishops from actively working toward merger?  The most common answers do not focus on inefficiency or incompetency but rather that our most senior leaders are "territorial" - "empire builders."  If this is accurate, it is a sad commentary that those entrusted with leading the Church are actually about keeping dominion over their domain.  As Author David Gibson says, "An organization that was born as a divine kingdom...and flourished by donning the trappings of monarchy does not yield easily to retrofitting."  Granted, many in Episcopal Orders are dedicated and committed but many others are aloof and their ministry lacks accountability and transparency; one respected university historian put it this way, "...a betrayal of fidelity enable by arrogance that comes with unchecked power."  That may be too strong but it is time for renewal and reorganization.

History teaches us that change will not originate from those with Holy Orders; it must come from "ordinary" lay people who, face it, have little leverage in a voluntary organization that is proudly defined as hierarchical.  Nevertheless, if the Episcopal journey forward is to be one of "hope," the key is in the hands of the laity.

Part III: Where's the Hope (Now)?

About 1990, then five years after the final closure of the Venture in Mission Office in the Office of Stewardship Development, as Executive for Stewardship, I began to realize that there was waning interest in supporting stewardship as the main work of the Church from the Office of the Presiding Bishop (Browning). Ellen Cooke, the Vice President and Treasurer of the Episcopal Church and later awarded with five years of prison for her embezzlement at 815, removed from us The Stewardship Report newsletter with the never fulfilled promise of comparable space in Episcopal Life. Then we lost the income from our materials that had been held in a special fund from which we did research and development as we actually made income and were market driven by selling products that congregations actually wanted and used. Through a rather complex organizational/political maneuver the office of stewardship was broken up and dissolved into “offices” controlled by the Rev. Bill Caradine who came in with Bishop Stowe as VP for Mission under Browning about the same time. While the changes were not especially obvious publicly at first the key element that was removed was the source theology of stewardship out of MRI and its replacement by an evangelical theology based on “making a safe place” for people to come to tithing or at least percentage giving. That model prevailed inside the facade of a year round stewardship approach for many years and was finally incorporated into the fine work of The Episcopal Network for Stewardship.

The importance of the change is that stewardship as the main work of the Church had at its core a deep commitment to leadership development based on personal and systemic transformation of the institutional church into “new creations,” and ones that by bringing hope could help the local, diocesan and national bodies become capable of maneuvering into mission projects that had local authenticity and effectiveness. Unlike most of the work of the staff offices of  the Church Center, the Office of Stewardship was itself constantly able to be responsive to defined needs we got from our “customers,” the clergy and people who were leading stewardship and needing our support. One our products, a video which people asked for to help them understand what “815” and the general Episcopal Church actually did in missionary efforts was nominated for an Emmy in the early ‘90’s. We had discovered that no one at 815 actually had consolidated a full listing of all mission projects in one way or another sponsored by “our dollars” because the staff was more interested in their own programs.

Once the center core of leadership development and commitment was removed and an evangelical approach inserted, then stewardship education slowly became more and more about personal giving and just a few steps later about institutional maintenance. When the statistics are  compared to the timing, it is becomes clear that MRI/VIM modeling of mission growth where new projects, new people and new money emerged was replaced by an increasing cascade of losses, institutional angst, “issue” orientation and demands for greater conformity around them. In short, the Episcopal Church became very self absorbed, much like an ill person who is less able to focus on anything or anyone except themselves. The hope was gone.

So now, in the chapel of the Episcopal Church Center, the following program is being offered: It’s All About Money! Fund Raising Symposium-- September 26 and 27, 2013 designed to meet survey results. Perhaps it does not sound that noxious until the whole core theology is seen in historic perspective. . . Where’s the hope???

When My Rector (Pastor) Resigned

I have been ordained 52 years.  My spouse and I have attended and belonged to two different Episcopal Churches since I retired at the end of the year 2000.  We've been in our present parish two and a half years.  During this brief period of time it has been my privilege not only to mentor my priest but also to become his friend.  Even though he is seven years younger than my youngest child, I thought of him as a son.  We became very close and when he let me know that he was leaving I became very sad.

Several weeks ago I had a hunch that it was time for him to update his resume and personal profile, and I was going to talk to him about this at our next luncheon.  Then the Rector called me the Sunday before to tell me that he was going to resign the parish and take a position on the staff of a Diocesan Bishop.  It was then that I shared with him that I thought it was time for him and his family to move on.  Now then, was this the Holy Spirit or mere coincidence?  I like the idea that it was the movement of the Spirit of God.

I moved several times during the 40 years of my active parish ministry.  Each time I felt a measure of sadness and grief because I had made good friends with several members of each parish.  I missed them for a brief period of time, and many of us remained friends throughout our lives.  But I also had the energy and the drive to start up a new ministry in a new place and make new friends.  Therefore I moved on to my new set of relationships without a prolonged period of grief about leaving the old parish.  The point here is that for me, leaving a congregation as a priest is altogether different than being a parishioner and losing your priest.

Now I know the immediate sadness of losing a priest AS A PARISHIONER.  Sure, I know about the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and I've pastored many folks over the years as they coped with their losses.  And at my present age of 76 I've had to manage several acute losses in my own life.  But the sadness I feel in the loss of my young priest is surprising, startling and somewhat amazing.  I can't believe that it is happening to me because I am deluded enough to think that I'm immune to such things.  But the truth is that I was really unprepared for the grief that I felt precisely because I am a member of the parish.  At last I can truly identify with members of the parish and I truly understand what they are going through, because I am going through them myself.  I also understand in my head that the feelings of grief that I bear are perfectly normal even though it surely doesn't feel good.  Because of this my empathy for the congregation is acute.

Sometime soon the search committee will start a ministry to look for a new rector.  But now is not the time to begin.  The members of the congregation need time to process their feelings.  As a trained interim I know that this is true. As a member of the congregation I know that this is true.  As an experienced parish priest I know that this is true.  Frankly, I'm clearly not ready for a new priest.  But with God's help and the help of other people in the parish, I will process my feelings of grief.  I will reach a stage of acceptance, just not now.

I will trust that the Holy Spirit will guide the vestry and the search committee.  But I really hope that they and the diocese do not rush into it.  As my friend and fellow blogger Gary Gilbertson says, "that's a recipe for disaster."