(Editor's note: The following address was given at Province II Synod, May 9, 1996.)
I think Province II is geographically the smallest in the church, but ranks
third in number of congregations, communicants, and clergy. I suspect that
is partly a result of the historical concentration of Anglicans in New York
and New Jersey in colonial times, but we're a long way from those days now
and you are still holding your own very nicely! It is easy to see why, if
you look around this room at the leadership present.
Leadership, and the perceived lack thereof, is often a topic in church circles (and national politics) these days. There are some good reasons for this and some not so good reasons. I'd like to use leadership as a sort of theme for looking at some of the major issues that loom large in our church life today. First, some updates.
More than one group proclaimed that the presiding bishop and the rest of the national church leadership must be the source of the problem. It became fashionable to call for Bishop Browning's resignation as though he had stolen the money and encouraged someone else's adultery. That is one of the burdens of leadership, I've discovered. When things go wrong, it must be the leader's fault. Let's throw the rascals out and then everything will be okay again.
Leaders do make mistakes, fall from grace, sin egregiously from time to time, being human like everybody else. But it seems to me that we have become increasingly eager to blame our leaders as the pace of change and the uncertainties of the future increase. There is a big difference between holding people accountable and scapegoating, but in our anxiety we often lose sight of it.
This concerns me personally because I don't enjoy being a target for free-floating anxiety. But it concerns me even more because I think we must find healthier ways to manage our distress, our fear, and our anger, individually and as a community. Everything we know suggests that change is not going to stop but will accelerate. Everything we believe tells us that God calls us to journey into the unknown, and that complaining to Moses about the food does not help us get there.
From the embezzlement we've learned once again how necessary it is to be good stewards, to be vigilant in maintaining checks and balances, to audit thoroughly, and never to allow financial power to become concentrated in the hands of one person. No one is immune to temptation.
The Episcopal Church's new treasurer, Steve Duggan, has put a fine team in place and they are rapidly rebuilding the safeguards which had been dismantled. I feel very confident about our new financial leadership. Once you've heard from Steve later this afternoon, I'm sure you will agree that our affairs are in very good hands. Closer attention to prudent financial management is going on elsewhere too. The embezzlement served as a wake-up call for many dioceses and parishes throughout the country who had not given recent attention to their accounting procedures.
I hope we will also learn from this painful situation that the Body of Christ is not strengthened by adopting a self-righteous attitudeÑwhether to condemn the woman caught with her hand in the offering plate or to blame her superiors. As the press has reported, Mrs. Cooke has pleaded guilty to criminal charges of embezzlement and tax evasion. She will be sentenced this summer.* The church also filed civil suit for restitution of what was stolen. The exact terms of the settlement have not been released, but our lawyers believe they have recovered all the assets the Cookes had amassed. So this sad tale is coming to a close.
Taking steps to prevent future embezzlements is a fairly straightforward task. Dealing with sexual immorality on the part of a bishop is much more complicated. In David Johnson's case, the man put himself beyond our ability to seek reconciliation, and the Diocese of Massachusetts has had to struggle for healing in his absence. Now, we learn that Maine, and the rest of usÑmust come to terms with the revelation of Bishop Chalfant's infidelity. I have no doubt that other wretched situations involving bishops and leading clergy will also come to light. Again, some are eager to blame our national leadership for the presence of sin in high places. Let me suggest another way to look at this.
The bishops of Massachusetts and Maine are not the first to succumb to sexual temptation or abuse of power. History is full of such incidents, only most of them never became public scandals because they were hidden. The victims were disbelieved, hushed up, bought off. The offenders either got away with it completely, or were quietly transferred or pensioned off. The Standing Committee knew but was sworn to confidentiality. Rumors circulated, but we certainly never issued press releases that named names and held a bishop accountable for private behavior. We didn't want to ruin careers. We propped up the fiction that leaders don't fail the way the rest of us do.
That is what has changed. We don't pretend anymore, and we've dropped the double standard. We don't trivialize sexual misconduct by calling it an indiscretion to be overlooked. We hold people accountable for their behavior instead of trying to protect reputations. We proclaim that we are a community of reconciliation that values truth, humility, and repentance, and believes in the possibility of forgiveness, conversion, and new life.
This is very new behavior for us as a church, and it doesn't come easily. It is humiliating for all the world to know that our spiritual leaders are weak flesh and blood. We feel betrayed and angry if it is someone we respected, or counted on to lead the church in directions we want to go. We take smug pleasure if it is someone we did not like or disagreed with. We are quick to throw stones because condemning others helps us avoid examining ourselves. We prefer pointing at our neighbor's mote to admitting there is a beam in our own eye. But Christ has shown another way of justice transformed by mercy, and I trust we will continue to struggle along that path.
In this case, changing understandings about sexuality exceeded the fabled Anglican "tolerance for ambiguity" among some members of our community. Frustrated that the General Convention kept refusing to declare a definitive condemnation of the full participation of gay and lesbian Episcopalians in our life, some bishops are trying to force the House of Bishops to act on its own through the trial process. Conflicting concepts of the responsibilities of our spiritual leaders are vehemently expressed. I haven't met anyone who doesn't have strong feelings about the trial. We all want our bishops to do "the right thing," but we are not sure there is such a thing. Can this problem be solved without tearing the church apart? Whose "fault" is it? Is it up to the bishops to "fix it" for us?
On the other hand, every institution must respond to changing circumstances if it is to survive. As a living organism, the Body of Christ must continually adapt to its environment. Throughout the ages, church history records a succession of institutional changes, reorganization, and restructuring as Christians have sought to order their internal lives to support living the Gospel in different times and places. The Episcopal Church is no different.
The 1991 General Convention passed several resolutions calling for structural analysis and reform, and the presiding bishop and I brought together the various groups responsible for implementing those resolutions. These discussions led to new proposals brought to the 1994 General Convention, along with ideas from the independently sponsored "Sharing Our Future" conference.
In Indianapolis in 1994, we discovered we did not yet have a consensus about the direction for restructuring, and the major resolution addressing it failed. So work is continuing in this triennium. I expect there will be new resolutions for the General Convention in 1997. I do not know what will be proposed then, but one theme will certainly be moving away from a centralized bureaucracy toward a network model of coordinated ministries, away from national programs to support for diocesan and local programs. What might we expect about the place of provinces in a network model of the church?
There are a couple of reasons for this which are important for the future role of provinces. First, we have always been ambivalent about subdividing the Episcopal Church in the USA. During the half-century it took to agree to having provinces at all, people worried that a regional system "would dismember this Church, and out of this...united body create five or seven or ten separate Churches." Even after approval, we have seen decades of uneven experimentation and development. Provincial vitality depended more on the level of enthusiasm key individuals brought to the task than to the canonical provisions themselves.
Some people have wanted strong provinces in order to gain local flexibility and independence from General Convention, while others feared exactly such a development as a "fearful consequence" that would undermine the "bond of Christian sympathy and affection" that united the church.*** Some wanted to transfer powers to the provinces and meet less often in General Convention, while others felt such a shift would destroy our ability to function as a single church.
Some have resisted the provincial structure as adding one more layer of bureaucracy to an already suspect hierarchy, while others have sought to bring sources of authority and programming closer to the local congregation.
One step toward resolving this contradiction was the 1973 decision for each province to elect two members to the Executive Council. This created a strong link between provinces and the national governing structure, insuring broad geographical representation and giving Executive Council access to many more perspectives than might otherwise be the case. As you know, provinces are also central in constituting the Nominating Committee for Presiding Bishop, another concrete way of linking regional interests to our national decision-making process.
Internal provincial life has varied dramatically from place to place. Until 1979, the province president was required by canon to be a bishop. Deciding to allow a priest or lay person to serve as president reflected growing awareness of two things:
This opened up new possibilities for energetic participation, coordination, and cooperation, moving us naturally closer to a network model. Decisions by the 1994 General Convention to shift the administration of funds for certain programs from church center staff to provincial networks carries that process further. Province II is certainly a strong example of how this is developing, as you can see in President King's articles in the spring 1996 issue of The Grapevine .
The amazing developments in electronic communication in the past few years foster this. Some of you know that I consider my self cyber-challenged, if not actually computer-phobic; but I have a growing respect,even excitement, about what electronic networks can do to support nonhierarchical human networks of cooperation, affection, and shared ministry.
Provinces can serve as "nodes" in an Internet-like network, channeling information back and forth, facilitating resource sharing/ programming, exchanging news and pastoral concerns, and supporting "virtual" ministry teams addressing many different needs without the need for a centralized authority. I know that Ecunet/Quest has already improved the ability of your officers to communicate with each other, with diocesan and local members, and with officers and staff of the General Convention and Episcopal Church Center. Most arrangements for my visit with you today were made via the Ecunet/Quest network, and I was able to read the latest issue of The Grapevine , "hot off the monitor" within hours of its posting. The bonds linking the American Convocation of Churches in Europe with the rest of this province will be dramatically strengthened through use of Ecunet/Quest.
Developments in communications technology offer wonderful tools for whatever modified church structures we may develop. It will certainly be interesting to see what proposals are offered to the 1997 General Convention when we gather in Philadelphia, July 16-25. Our response will require prayerful consideration of The Blue Book reports and other resolutions. It must also be made in the context of our deliberations and action on the proposed Concordat of Agreement with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and on the choice of the next presiding bishop. Individually and in tandem with our ecumenical partners, Episcopalians are struggling to discover what kind of a church God is calling us to be as we approach the third millennium of the Christian era.
It is tempting to long for a charismatic leader who will rally everyone and set a twenty-first century church in motion, a sort of ecclesiastical Lee Iaccoca. But I wonder how much we would actually trust someone who came along with a detailed plan all ready to implement. Plans can be developed by any group of reasonably competent people if they share a vision of what is to be done. But to share a vision for the future, we must first share a history, a tradition, a story about who we have been.
Author Jim Fenhagen, retired dean of General Seminary and Cornerstone Project leader, says in his recent book, Ministry of a New Time , "We live in a world that has lost touch with its story. The breakdown of community, the loss of those values that make for honesty and civility and faithfulness are signs of a deeper problem, a world of rootless people who have no tradition that inspires compassion and hope. To be entrusted within a community of faith as a 'keeper of the flame' is to be trusted with the key to the human heart."
As church leaders we are called to be keepers of the flame, tradition-bearers, tellers of the story. If we let ourselves be seized by the Good News of Jesus Christ, of the faithfulness of God whose love will not let us go, of the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling right here in our midst; if we let that faith set us on fire we can become a beacon for those "rootless people who have no tradition that inspires compassion and hope." Our world very much needs such a beacon. Let us be a church that holds up a vision of community, of honesty and civility and faithfulness, of accountability and forgiveness and reconciliation. When enough of us share that vision, the rest will fall into place: structure, organization, priorities, finances.
Archbishop Brian Davies of New Zealand has said that "church leaders need to see themselves as vision bearers, not problem solvers." We must be vision bearers first. Our task is to be open to God's presence among us as the prerequisite for corporate discernment of God's will. We can only do that if we can suspend our own agendas and let the vision of God's agenda take shape in our hearts and minds. Then we can be problem solvers. Until then, we can not even accurately recognize what the problems are.
As you prepare for the responsibilities many of you will carry to Philadelphia, I urge you to focus first on the story, the vision, the flame. Then hold up the proposals, resolutions, and concerns you are asked to consider to the light of that vision. We do not need lots of resolutions in order to be the church God calls us to be. Rather we need a lot of love and prayer and conversation. Let's be a community of grace, confident that God will work through our political and parliamentary process.
Finally, let's remember that this is God's church, not ours. We have an important role to play in our time, as others have had before us and will have after us. But the survival of the church is not in our hands, and the redemption of the world is the responsibility of one far better qualified than we. Our faith and hope come from knowing that God's plan of salvation is already being implemented. All we have to do is cooperate. Jesus has already been raised from the dead. All we have to do is say, Alleluia!
*Former Episcopal Church treasurer Ellen Cooke was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison.
**Charges against the Rt. Rev. Walter Righter, retired, for ordaining a non-celibate homosexual were dismissed by the ecclesiastical court.
***Quotations are from the Convention Journal of 1874, as quoted in the exposition of Article VII of the Constitution in Annotated Constitution and Canons for the Government of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America , New York, Seabury Press, 1981, Volume I, p. 107.
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