Andy wins! Another GenX Bishop!

Thirteen years ago, I graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary (Class of 1995) along with dozens of other folks who aspired to serve God in lay or ordained ministry. One of the fun games we used to play is "Who is going to be the first bishop from our class?" Well, looks like we have a winner! Our class president, C. Andrew Doyle ("Andy" to us) was just elected as Bishop Coadjutor of the Diocese of Texas. Though not quite as fresh-faced as we all were those many years ago, Andy is nevertheless to be the second-youngest bishop in the Episcopal Church (behind Sean Rowe, of Northwest Pennsylvania, also a VTS grad). That makes him one of only a handful of Generation X bishops.

Congratulations, Andy!

Ordinary Time

There is great anticipation here in Oregon, and across the country, of this coming Memorial Day Weekend, the official start of Summer. Summer brings to mind images of rest, relaxation, warm days and (in Oregon, at least) cooler nights. In the church there is the inevitable Summer slowdown as people take off for vacation, or sometimes just take a vacation from church!

Liturgically, we have just finished the season of Pentecost, dipped briefly into Trinity Sunday, and have now embarked on the long time period known as "Ordinary Time." I just ran across a great devotional piece on Episcopal Cafe, a portion of which reads:

Ordinary Time [the Seasons after Epiphany and Pentecost] is the time of the Church, of the daily life of every Christian community, and of each one of us. It is the time not of a brief effort during which one hurries or even runs in order to progress on the way, but the time when one goes at a measured pace in order to cover a long distance.

As a rule, it is not the time for great conversations, for decisive choices made at one time or another in one's life. But it is the time for a painstaking, though at times wavering, faithfulness; the time for an obscure faith that sustains daily life; the time for a self-effacing hope that holds us steadfast and keeps us from stopping at the first difficulty; the time for charity writ small.

At St. Alban's, the months of June and July will be a time of prayer and discernment leading up to our Program Planning Retreat in August. Perhaps for everyone, though, the arrival of Summer is a reminder that so-called "ordinary time" can be an extraordinary time to relax, re-focus, and re-create. As I mentioned in my sermon of last Sunday, the church is the ultimate re-creational vehicle!

Obama Reaches Albany

This won't be long, but I did want to note that presidential candidate Barack Obama stopped off in my little town of Albany, Oregon today and I was fortunate to be one of 2,500 people in a town-hall style meeting at the Linn County Fairgrounds. I was also fortunate to be one of the many to shake his hand as he entered the speaker's area. I didn't hear too much that was new, but it was a thrill to be there and to be in contact, literally, with someone who has an excellent chance of becoming President of the United States.

It's all about Jesus

There is a great deal of material to be found across the web, in blog after blog, about the trials and travails of the Episcopal Church. People have dug into canonical processes, hierarchical charts, and accusations and counter-accusations. It sometimes seems as if this particular part of the Body of Christ is at war with itself. As I thought about that, a passage from St. Paul's letter to the Romans came to mind:

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:21-25)

I certainly find this at work in my own life--even when I want to do good, even when my "inner being" delights in God's law, there is sometimes the sense of spiritual lethargy that sneaks up on me and the battle is joined between good and evil, right there in the choices I make each day. Might I submit that the same is true in the church? Certainly, as the Body of Christ, we do not have the same essence as the corporate, political, or social structures. The Body of Christ, like Christ himself, does not have a "sinful nature." Yet, to the extent that the Body of Christ is made up of flawed, human, and sinful "members," we do not function to our fullest or in perfect harmony. We are always subject to dis-ease, that is, anxiety and lack of focus and vision.

The only solution to this, it would seem to me, is the solution that St. Paul offers: God through Jesus Christ. After all, it really is all about Jesus. I ran across a great sermon by The Rev. Frank Logue, Rector of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland, Georgia, referenced in his blog regarding the scriptures appointed for tomorrow. The point of the sermon, and of the illustration contained within it, is that the members of the church are the only "plan" to spread the Gospel, the good news of God's plan of salvation. There isn't a Plan B. For that reason, it is all the more important for the church to focus on that message.

After all of the lawsuits, the accusations, the counter-accusations, the charges of heresy, apostasy, all of the name-calling and labeling, what really matters is our relationship with Christ. What really matters is Jesus. We are in a world that is changing every minute and that does not appear to be getting better in the changing. Nothing is solid, nothing stable. This is not unlike the first century church, where there was massive upheaval. Into that maelstrom of persecution, dis-ease, and anxiety, what does St. Peter say in tomorrow's Epistle?

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:6-8)

It strikes me that the biggest temptation we face as a church in today's world is not the temptation to commit blatant sin, to rebel against God, or even to go off on our own and neglect our relationship with God. The greatest threat to the contemporary church may be the temptation towards complacency, despair, or lethargy. How many new ministries are we raising up? How many churches are we planting? How many disciples are we making? From all accounts, not nearly enough. We still have a death grip on what has gone before, on what we used to have, on what the world was like. We are often so afraid of losing what we have, we are not open enough to what God may yet have for us. That is the true danger--that, like the disciples, we are still looking up and waiting for God to save us rather than knowing that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit for mission and ministry.

If we use the analogy of the lion, the church's greatest difficulty is that we are not alert for the danger of that roaring lion, we are simply milling around, often oblivious, and sometimes disinclined to run anymore. If we keep our focus on the Lion of Judah, that is, Jesus, and a wary eye on that other lion, perhaps we will be a little less likely to mope around, whine, and complain, and more likely to get on with mission and ministry in the world. After all, the lion is still out there.

Remembering and Reflection

All my life's a circle;
Sunrise and sundown;
Moon rolls thru the nighttime;
Till the daybreak comes around.

All my life's a circle;
But I can't tell you why;
Season's spinning round again;
The years keep rollin' by.
-- Harry Chapin

A couple of days ago, I received the sad news that The Rev. Churchill Gibson, Jr., Chaplain Emeritus of Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS), had died. The funeral service for him was Saturday. Not quite a year ago, we lost another VTS luminary, Professor Jim Ross. I am coming to realize several things more and more as we begin to hear of deaths of faculty members that I had while I was a student. First, that I am rapidly approaching fifteen years since I left the Holy Hill. Second, that my class (Class of 1995) was, in many ways, one of the linchpins, or transitional, classes at VTS. We were one of the last classes to have class in Aspinwall Hall, were the first class to have the new (now former) Dean Martha Horne as our dean, and were essentially the last class to have an entire roster of professors that had been there many years, sometimes decades!

I recall first hearing the lyrics to the above song at Boy Scout camp, specifically Camp Oljato near Fresno, California. The camp was one of the formative experiences of my life, and the song spoke of years behind and years to come. More than two decades later, it is interesting to me that the song lyrics have stayed with me. Perhaps it is the just-past-40-years-old reflective part of me, but seeing seminary professors move on and then, eventually, die, has put me in a much more reflective mood of late. That sense of the web of relationships that I've formed over the decades, and my knowledge that I've kept in touch with fewer and fewer people from my past, is really causing me to pause and take stock. Not sure where this will lead, but God surely has something in mind!

4,000 and Counting...

The news just came across the CNN web site and television that we have reached the grim milestone of 4,000 soldiers killed in Iraq. Of course, this does not count the tens of thousands of soldiers wounded nor any Iraqi casualties. Ironically, we reached that milestone mere hours after millions of Americans celebrated the Festival of the Resurrection, or Easter Day. Mere hours after I spoke of the hope that we have in being resurrection people in the face of the state-sponsored execution of Jesus, yet more death was visited upon us.

As someone who has just turned 40 years old, is engaged in a vocation of hope, but has also seen war, economic downturn, and increasing despair in the last few years, I believe that it will be important to seek out the places and people within which God is working out God's purpose and bringing the fruition God's kingdom in the world. In an excellent article posted on Episcopal Cafe, The Rev. Donald Schell writes about faith and fear in a post 9/11 age. May I be open to seeking, finding, and acting on God's will in my own life.

This man can speak!

Having come home from a day of interviewing Superintendent candidates for our school district and then, on the way home, briefly checking in at the church, I arrived and flipped on the TV to hear that there was a great amount of reaction to a speech given today by Presidential candidate Barack Obama on race and politics. I was not able to watch the speech when it was given. I didn't even know he was giving it. However, after returning from Evening Prayer at my church, I sat down and watched it on the Obama web site via a YouTube video, specifically this one:



I am a preacher, someone who has grown up as a white heterosexual man, and have just completed anti-racism training where so much of the history and so many of the problems Obama addressed were highlighted. I served a (largely white) church just outside of Philadelphia when I was a Curate just out of seminary. I just spent today interviewing two finalists for a Superintendent position, a white woman and a black woman, who both spoke of issues of diversity in mostly (90%) white Albany, Oregon. With all those experiences, and as a member of Obama's generation, Generation X, I was more than impressed by his speech, I was stunned and struck speechless.

All I could think of when I finished listening to the speech was "Wow. I wish there was a bishop in our church who could speak as clearly to the legacy of colonialism in the Anglican Communion, the fears and frustrations of GLBT people in our church, the despair of an increasingly marginalized mainline church, and the hopes, dreams, and experiences of liberal and conservative alike, in such a way that the polarization of the church that so much mirrors the polarization in the political arena could begin to be healed." What most impressed me about Barack Obama's speech, was that he talked about the fact that "perfecting our union" was not a zero-sum game where one person's dreams come at the expense of another person's dreams, but a way of binding ourselves together in a common purpose that allows everyone to work against the injustices, inequities, and systemic problems in the world. I'm flat out impressed.

I don't really know what else to say, so I won't say anything else, but I'm already thinking of sermon material...

Palm Sunday and Passion

It is the afternoon of Palm Sunday, so Holy Week has officially begun. I suspect I won't be blogging this week. I spent the bulk of Lent not blogging, either, which seems more than fine, considering that Lent is a time of self-examination, not proclamation. However, once Eastertide commences I will endeavor to post more regularly, as befits the season of proclamation.

I will say this--it is amazing to me how selective our memory is regarding traditions. This morning I had to remind several people that it was Palm Sunday and that we were to gather in the Parish Hall before the procession to the church! Yet there was also some strong opinions about whether to have an Easter egg hunt next Sunday or not. Sometimes it seems like our local traditions overwhelm or supersede Biblical or liturgical tradition. Perhaps a excellent spiritual discipline during this Holy Week would be to get back in touch with our identity as pilgrim people, as people on a spiritual journey, and so to enter fully into the life, suffering, and death of Christ so that we may enter fully into Christ's resurrection.

A blessed Holy Week to all.

Whose conflict is this?

For at least several months now, I've been an avid reader of Dan Martins' blog "Confessions of a Carioca." Formerly a priest in the Diocese of San Joaquin, having left before the culmination of the current unpleasantness, and leaning towards the conservative side, he nonetheless has some interesting things to say about the current conflict (or "slow train wreck", as he calls it) raging in the Anglican Communion. In a recent post he writes, among other things:

I am angry with my own Baby Boomer generation, now pretty much running the Episcopal Church. That we are also running the country is also true, but too scary to contemplate--we are a generation of Peter Pans. We walk and talk like adults but we have never laid aside the self-indulgence of youth, and the mantra that we learned just as we were starting school in the 1950s, that we are special because there are so damn many of us. In the Church, our dominance is seen in the hyper-individualism by which we apprehend the Faith, and the complete sentimentalization of its content.

As a Generation Xer, who grew up seeing the families of his friends disintegrate around them, I've often thought about how similar the current strife is to a divorce and wondering whether this has as much to do with the generation "running" the church as it has to do with the issues in play. It short, I'm wondering whether, thirty years from now, we (those of us who are left) will look back and wonder why there was such a huge fight, much like we do when we look back on the fight over the "new" prayer book (now nearly thirty years old).

I'm also avidly watching the political scene, with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, and it is looking like a serious generational choice is facing the country. As far as I can tell, Obama is a GenXer, Clinton a Boomer, and McCain a Silent/Builder. It will be interesting to see who ends up in the White House, after two successive Boomers (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush). So, perhaps both church and state divides can be attributed, to generational views, at least somewhat.

Something to think about...

Heaven and Earth

I must confess that when I read the headline "Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop" my first thought was "Oh, no! Another Episcopal bishop providing fodder for the conservatives to claim that the Episcopal Church has degenerated into some sort of pagan cult." To my surprise, and no doubt to the surprise of many others, it is none other than Bishop N.T. (Tom) Wright, Bishop of Durham, and hardly a card-carrying liberal! His point is that the current popular view of heaven, as a place in the clouds with harps and angels where God takes us if we're good enough, has little basis in the Bible. Instead, Wright notes that:

Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal.

Wright point out that the sense that our bodies don't matter has more to do with Plato and the Greek view of creation as "shabby and misshapen and full of lies" than it does with the Jewish, and thus more authentically Christian, view in the Bible that "the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again." In other words, the Biblical view of heaven is an antidote to the well-worn criticism that some Christians are so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good.

Bishop Wright talks about a sort of holding area or holding pattern in which we will be placed until the final resurrection. While that may be Biblical, it also fails to emphasize that at that point we will be outside of normal space and time. In other words, we could be "there" (wherever "there" is) for a thousand years and it might seem like a single day. The Bible does say that God's view of time is not ours.

For me, this article emphasizes a core truth during this Lenten season--that 99% of our lives as Christians have to do with what we do here, now, as people who serve as Christ's hands and feet in the world. If we're simply waiting on God to "do something" we're as useless to both God and the world as if we were sitting on a mountain top waiting for the end of the world. There is a bumper sticker that says "Jesus is coming. Look busy." Perhaps this Lent that could be modified to read "Jesus is coming. Get busy."

Covenant and Discipline

Today is Ash Wednesday, a day on which, among other things, the church invites us to "the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word." Perhaps providentially, today is also the day on which the second draft of the Proposed Anglican Covenant was released. Finally, it is the day after "Super Tuesday" and the media is abuzz with reflections and prognostications about what it all means for our future. It also happens to be just over a month since I last put fingers to keyboard and posted anything on this blog.

As I prepare to say and hear the words "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" today it strikes me how such words put into perspective all of the issues and conflicts that seem to loom so large in the church and in the world. A century from now, no one now living, except for perhaps a few of the smallest children, will be anything but dust. All of the parties wrangling over church property, all of the political candidates vying for their party's nomination, and all of the bloggers (including me!) with their voluminous writings on this or that--all will be dust. Unless Jesus has returned, there will no doubt be new controversies to replace the old (just as the current controversies are replacing the old ones), new political candidates addressing new problems, and new bloggers (or whatever follows blogs) opining about the issues of the day.

For me, this Lent offers me an opportunity and a challenge not to give up paying attention to such issues, candidates, and opinions, but to place them in the context of a more disciplined life of prayer, study, and action. It is a time when we are all invited to examine our own lives even more minutely than we examine the lives of others, to engage in the time-honored activities of prayer, bodily discipline (fasting), and what might be called "life discipline" (self-denial), and to study the scriptures not as an academic exercise, but with an eye towards deepening our relationship with Christ and seeking out God's will for us as people living and working in the world.
Let the Lent begin!

Tour Bus or Roller Coaster?

I recently ran across this post on Irenic Thoughts, the blog of Prince of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland, Georgia. I'd run across it before somewhere, but it says something about how such a spiritually charged event often is presented and experienced as the same old thing, week after week.

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?...Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

—Annie Dillard, (1945 - ) from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Perhaps it is not God who is asleep but we who worship God, lulled into receiving God as a normal, regular, benign part of life who would not dare disrupt our carefully planned lives. I wonder what God could do with us if we woke up?

Looking backward, Going forward

As I vacation with my immediate and extended families in California, I am struck anew by the flurry of cultural, economic, technological, and media retrospectives on 2007. As yet I have not found an Anglican/Episcopal retrospective, but I'm sure someone in the blogosphere will put one together soon (if you know of one, feel free to leave it in the comments section of this post). I am also less than two months away from turning 40 years old, always an occasion for both looking back and looking forward. As the Anglican/Episcopal world convulses and raises questions of identity, structure, and purpose, I've also been thinking about my own identity as an Episcopal priest and my own values for ministry on which I hope to focus a bit more purposefully in 2008. Those values are:

1) The transformational power of faith in Jesus Christ.

Perhaps it is my own grounding in the evangelical flavor of Christianity, but my own belief is that if the church is not standing up and proclaiming that being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not just a nice thing to do, a trendy (or counter-trendy) lifestyle, or even something that changes your world-view but something that fundamentally transforms one's life in both real and mysterious ways, I'm not sure what exactly we're here for. If you want to serve, there are plenty of service clubs around. If you want to learn, there are many blogs, podcasts, video courses, and even classroom-based opportunities for learning. If you want to socialize, there are likewise plenty of social clubs (including social networking web sites) in which you can join. Heck, even worship of God is something that one can do alone with an iPod, at least to some extent!

I am at once frustrated with my own tendency to 'put God on hold' amidst the pressures and demands of life and ministry and frustrated with the tendency of the church to be so self-absorbed with similar demands that there is little time given for exploring our relationship with God in Christ. So little, in fact, that many people in the pews have no idea what I'm talking about when I mention such a relationship! For 2008, I want to 'go deeper with God' and invite members of the congregation I serve to go there as well.

2) Being grounded in traditional Christianity and yet drawn to fresh expressions of the church through the emerging church and missional movements.

I'm an anomoly--a Generation Xer who grew up in a very traditional, middle-of-the-road Episcopal church in Silicon Valley with parents that are still together to this day. I didn't suffer from a broken home, a broken faith, or a broken church. We had major players from Silicon Valley companies in our congregation, but no one would have dared suggest that we incorporate the least bit of technology into our services. At the same time, the rest of my life was saturated with cutting-edge technology as well as cutting-edge ideas. I married that very traditional liturgical church upbringing with an evangelical fervor caught in high school and fanned into flame during my college years at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Humboldt State University. Even so, I am drawn to fresh expressions of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. These are often expressed in the emerging church and missional church movements.

All that is to say that while I'm grounded in traditional expressions of Christianity, I'm searching for ways to live out my calling as an Episcopal priest in the very exciting world of the emerging church without losing that traditional base and evangelical fervor. I suspect that exploration will continue in 2008, primarily through the addition of a new evening 'alternative service' to the very traditional service currently at the church I serve.

3) Love of technology as a tool for ministry.

I'll admit it--I love technology with a passion. Raised in Silicon Valley and in high school at the beginning of the technology wave, I'm as fully plugged in as my time and money allow. I obviously blog regularly, check my e-mail constantly, monitor a variety of blogs, and essentially live on the Internet, with only one exception--my ordained ministry. Sure, I use the Internet to get ideas, illustrations, and examples for sermons, but the church I serve has no real value for technology as a tool for ministry. This is not limited to my current congregation. There have been plenty of folks over the years who wonder why I'm on the computer 'so much' and exactly what I'm doing there. I will readily admit that occasionally the lure of technology overwhelms my call to on-the-ground ministry.

So, in 2008 I'm resolving to explore ways to unite my love of the church with my love of technology, all under the umbrella of being a more faithful disciple of Jesus Christ and a more effective priest of the church. Viewing technology as a tool for ministry rather than simply a toy for entertainment means being more focused in my use of technology and my learning about how best to integrate it into my ministry. It also means making sure that I do not neglect face-to-face ministry in favor of 'screen-to-screen' ministry.

We'll see how all of this goes. I'm mindful that most people break New Year's resolutions before the end of January. Hopefully by my birthday at the end of February, I'll still be plugging along!

Paradox and Polarization

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that there is such a treasure trove of opinion and research from which to draw. After my own blog entry regarding bishops, I happened upon this excellently written post by Fr. Tony Clavier which discusses exactly the difficulty we get into when we relegate our bishops to a political role as members of simply one of two Houses of General Convention. It is very much worth a read. Coupled with that, the Episcopal Majority blog has an excellent article by The Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett on the struggle for the church to embrace paradox over exclusion, something he points out that we've never done well.

In my opinion, both of these articles point to a difficulty we face in this conflict. We face a cultural chasm in which most Western cultures have been in conversation regarding issues of sexuality for decades, while in some African and Asian countries such discussions cannot even begin due to cultural taboos. Even beyond that, the foundational point in the modernist/postmodernist divide--the conflict between the "either/or" way of seeing things and the "both/and" way of seeing things--means that the clash between the "one truth" aspect of thinking (i.e., the "plain truth of scripture") wars with what former Presiding Bishop Griswold has referred to as "pluriform truths." I also note that, at least in my experience in the Episcopal Church, such a tolerance for paradox is less likely to occur in the Baby Boomer generation than it is in postmodern generations (Generation X and Millennials).

Add to this conflict in both culture and ways of thinking the fact that, at least according to this article in Ekklesia, most of us have both very short memories and very little tolerance for long explanations. The author also makes a point related to my last post, that is that:

Hard work will be needed if the gulf which has opened up is to be bridged. Moves towards increasing the power of senior clergy, and their unaccountability to those they supposedly serve, will not help. Why should laypeople used to taking responsibility in other areas of life, and having to argue their case if they are to persuade others to take their views on board, passively accept the pronouncements of bishops who have not done their homework, especially if this undermines local mission and ministry?

In other words, while I would assert that bishops do have a charism and responsibility for teaching and for 'guarding the unity of the church," they also have an obligation to study and consult widely as they consider their positions. As well, we are well past the time when anyone can be said to have the final word on anything, much less an aspect of a two-thousand year old faith tradition.

I'm not sure just where this leaves us, except that we need to be in a lot less of a hurry to resolve the situation and a lot more willing to deeply consider possible solutions, including the possibility that this particular issue may remain unresolved for a long time to come. Perhaps we just need to live with that fact.

Bishops and Democracy

The long-awaited Archbishop of Canterbury's Advent Letter has been published and is worth a read. Folks with far more free time on their hands than I have dissected and parsed the text trying to read between the lines for what it really says (or what they would like to think it really says) and I will leave that to them. The question which is as yet unanswered is this: Can the members of the Anglican Communion agree to disagree regarding ordination of partnered homosexual persons and blessing of same-sex unions, or are the irreconcilable differences of opinion on this one issue such that schism is inevitable? It seems more and more that this is a cultural, rather than a biblical or theological, divide, but it is no less critical for that.

I'm also interested in +++Rowan's thoughts regarding bishops:

A somewhat complicating factor in the New Orleans statement has been the provision that any kind of moratorium is in place until General Convention provides otherwise. Since the matters at issue are those in which the bishops have a decisive voice as a House of Bishops in General Convention, puzzlement has been expressed as to why the House should apparently bind itself to future direction from the Convention. If that is indeed what this means, it is in itself a decision of some significance. It raises a major ecclesiological issue, not about some sort of autocratic episcopal privilege but about the understanding in The Episcopal Church of the distinctive charism of bishops as an order and their responsibility for sustaining doctrinal standards. Once again, there seems to be a gap between what some in The Episcopal Church understand about the ministry of bishops and what is held elsewhere in the Communion, and this needs to be addressed.

Having just had my own bishop call for the election of his successor, and having seen from afar some of the issues with which he has been forced to deal, the question of what we in the Episcopal Church think is, to use the Archbishop's words, the "distinctive charism of bishops as an order." Do we think of the episcopate, or even the priesthood and/or diaconate, as simply jobs or positions? Do we believe in the "Bishop as CEO, Priest as Caregiver, and Deacon as Social Worker" model or do we believe that there is, in fact, some special gift of the Spirit that is conveyed or recognized at ordination? What do we think God does when we ask God to "make" someone a bishop, priest, or deacon in God's church?

More than sexuality, it appears that here is where the real divide between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion lies. We like to dress our bishops up like everyone else, parade them around, and have them make speeches and wax theological, but God help them if they actually exercise any power! Ever since the first colonists came over and established a settlement at Jamestown 400 years ago, we have been uncomfortable with the role of bishops. I would submit that we often have far more in common with the Lutherans, for whom I believe that bishop is a role or job, not an permanently ordained ministry, then we are truly catholic in our ecclesiology. I keep seeing other bloggers wondering why we should give the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference so much weight and seeing the most representative body, the Anglican Consultative Council, as having the only true and legitimate authority in the Communion. Don't even get them started on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates! Why? Why do we see democracy as having the highest authority? I would say that says more about our culture than it says about out theology. While we certainly shouldn't give bishops more authority than they are due, it may well be a part of what Dan Martins refers to as our "impoverished ecclesiology" (though that blog entry was written before the Archbishop's letter and referring to the unpleasantness in the Diocese of San Joaquin) that we give them so little authority.

In any case, I would love to see a discussion on what we believe ordination is and what we believe the ministry of a bishop is. As the Archbishop says, "this needs to be addressed."

Anxiety, Fear, and Expectation

As I contemplate Christ the King Sunday, Thanksgiving, this season of Advent, and the escalating unrest across the Episcopal Church and, to a lesser extent, the Anglican Communion, it strikes me afresh how much we are in an unsettled, Advent-like time in the church and in the world. We have had a spate of letters to various bishops from our Presiding Bishop warning against actions that could be seen as "abandoning the communion of the church" and, at least so far, seemingly not making a bit of difference in the subsequent actions of their respective Diocesan Conventions. It seems as if we are headed for uncharted territory in the Anglican Communion and the level of anxiety is as high as I've ever seen it.

As I've remarked before in this blog, anxiety is a difficult state from which to make good decisions. In such a state we tend to devolve to the "fight or flight" response to just about everything. I'm a lurker on the House of Deputies/Bishops email list and even (perhaps especially!) there, it seems that every comment, even a seemingly innocuous one, provokes a flurry of responses, many critical. It would be nice to simply declare a "time out" from all of this, take a deep breath (or several!) and simply wait for what God will do. In other words, what we apparently need is a season like...Advent!

I doubt the first "Advent" (weeks prior to the birth of Christ) was any less tense and anxiety-ridden as this current time. There were factions in the Temple, the country was occupied by a hostile foreign power, and God had not spoken to God's people in hundreds of years. Into this time comes Immanuel, God with us. God breaks in to an anxious world as the Prince of Peace. I hope and pray that these Advent weeks will be a time of deep breathing, expectation, and peaceful prayer as we wait not only for Jesus' coming again, but for all that God will do in, through, and sometimes in spite of the Episcopal Church.

To everything there is a season

It has now been four days since I returned from the Convention of the Diocese of Oregon. At the opening Eucharist, following the Peace, our bishop said the following:

Thanksgiving for a Season of Ministry

As a people of God we are always called to new opportunities for discernment and invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit to guide us into new directions. Thanks to God, as a diocese, amid all the challenges of our time and circumstance, during these past years we have made considerable progress in charting a new future. Thanks to God, many of our congregations are getting healthier, stronger, and more financially secure, although the rising costs do not always keep pace with available income. By God’s grace, our spiritual and financial house is in relatively healthy order and we have made some difficult yet prudent decisions about how best to further our mission and ministry in the wake of competing demands on our limited resources. By the grace of Almighty God, I feel confident that we are doing fairly well, although in the Lord’s vineyard there is always much more work to do. In this regard, I personally feel thankful that the tasks to which I have been called to tend to have been realized in some significant ways. There is much more to be done, however, I think we are in very good place to discern how we as a diocese need to be moving forward.

All of our ministries are part of a much broader continuum of service in Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church. Each season of ministry has its own rewards, challenges, and opportunities. It has been a blessing to serve as your bishop and to preside over this fifth convention with you. The Lord has been faithful and good and I feel that we have laid the foundation for a new direction and focus in missional thinking, reflection, and ministry. After some time of prayerful discernment, in recognition of personal, professional, and family needs, I feel that now would be the appropriate time to share news of my desire to begin the important work of electing my successor, the tenth Bishop of Oregon. I have shared this news with the Standing Committee and some key persons within our diocese so we can together work on bringing about a smooth and grace-filled transition in the future. There are so many of you here and throughout the diocese with whom I would have wished to share this news personally, however, given time, distance, and other limitations, this would have been most difficult to accomplish. Hence, I am using this time to share some of these thoughts with you as members of our diocesan family. In the months to come I ask that we prayerfully begin to think about our future and the needs and demands of a different season of leadership. Early next year I will be inviting the Office of Pastoral Development of the House of Bishops, to come and speak with the officers and Standing Committee of the Diocese about a process of transition. The details of this process will be clearer later, however, I am sharing this news with all of you now out of deep love, respect, and thanksgiving for our witness together in this vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ. The process to call my successor, as I remain your bishop, will take some time; however, I am simply sharing this news in advance so we will not be overly surprised or alarmed when the transition happens, but know that we will be working together to continue to strengthen the wonderful ministries that are offered in Christ’s name.

Though there had been rumors, I can say confidently that this call for the election of Bishop Itty's successor stunned the Convention, including the clergy with whom I sat during the service. In the days since then, I have been asked the big question: "Why?" I currently have no real answer to that question, and decline to speculate. It suffices to say that this particular transition comes at a pivotal point in the history of the Diocese of Oregon, where we have discerned a Strategic Plan and will begin its implementation in 2008. I personally will be sad to see Bishop Itty go and will miss his passionate call to mission. May God guide the Diocese of Oregon in the choosing of his successor.

On to Diocesan Convention

I've once again felt called to put fingers to keyboard as I consider the upcoming annual Convention of the Diocese of Oregon. Like other Episcopal dioceses, we meet in Convention once a year to do the work we have been given to do -- generally involving approving the budget for the following year, electing people to various decision-making bodies (including, this time, deputies to General Convention 2009), and debating a variety of resolutions that have varying effects on what happens at the diocesan level in the coming years. This year will debating a somewhat controversial radical restructuring of the Diocesan Program Assessment (what each congregation pays into the diocesan program fund). If approved, it would cut income to the program fund by about twenty-five percent, forcing some serious decision-making. Though it wouldn't take effect until January 1, 2009, it would mean that next year would be one of radical rethinking of the role of the diocesan personnel and structures in the life of the diocese.

As I think of these decisions and discussions, I am also conscious of having prayed last Sunday for the Diocese of Pittsburgh (where I was baptized and where my godfather still attends church) and the Diocese of Pennsylvania (where I was priested and spent the first two years of my ordained ministry). At their convention, the Diocese of Pittsburgh voted for a resolution that, if approved next year, would effectively sever ties between the diocese and the rest of the Episcopal Church. The diocese of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia area), on the other hand, was dealing with the recent inhibition of their bishop (elected and ordained just before I left the diocese). So, I continue to think about what it means to be part of a diocese.

Unlike laity, who belong to a congregation (parish or mission), clergy belong to (are "canonically resident" in) a diocese. The diocese is, in effect, our "congregation" with our bishop as our Pastor. Because of that, we live in a sort of in-between world in which (to misquote a scripture passage) we are "in the congregation but not of it." Our name never appears in the Parish Register as a communicant yet we are called to lead a portion of the members of the diocese who have congregated together as a church, sometimes decades prior to our arrival. For that reason, Diocesan Convention has a greater effect on me than I think it has on the lay delegates and certainly those who we leave back within our parishes. It is a much more immediate thing for me, composed of friends and colleagues and led by a bishop who I respect. For members of my congregation, I suspect, it is just another reason Fr. Tom has to be out of town.

As all of that swirls around my mind, I am always mindful of the drama being played out in the wider Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Bishop Pierre Whalon, Bishop in Charge of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe, wrote an essay for Anglicans Online in which he states, among other things, that:

There remains among Anglicans worldwide, however, a large area of agreement, and this is crucial: the basic doctrines (or dogmas) of Christianity are not in question. Anglicans all respect the so-called “Lambeth Quadrilateral” as essential to our identity everywhere: the Scriptures as God’s Word, “containing all things necessary for salvation,” as the formula goes; the Creeds as the foundational interpretation of the message of the Bible; the two sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist as essential to Christian living; and the “historic episcopate” of bishops, “locally adapted.”

His point, with which I agree, is that what we are really talking about is not theology (view of God) but ecclesiology (view of the church). More specifically, the pattern of all of the colonial churches running home to Mother Church (and Father Archbishop of Canterbury) no longer works in a post-colonial world where the vast majority of developing countries have native "locally adapted" expressions of the Anglican faith that sometimes bear little resemblance to the Church of England, much less one another. The challenge is not what to do about homosexuality, the challenge is what to do about any controversy that has international implications and who makes those decisions.

In any case, as I think about how we make decisions on a parish, diocesan, national, and international level, I am struck both by how tightly we are bound together and how sometimes that binding is a blessing and sometimes it chafes! Perhaps a little ecclesiastical baby powder in the tender spots...

What's your theology?

Yes, I took one of those cute Internet quiz things. Guess you could call it "What's your theology?" Try not to read too much into it!

Eucharistic theology created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Orthodox You are Orthodox, worshiping the mystery of the Holy Trinity in the great liturgy whereby Jesus is present through the Spirit in a real yet mysterious way, a meal that is also a sacrifice. Orthodox 88% Calvin 81% Luther 63% Catholic 50% Zwingli 44% Unitarian 6%

All Shall Be Well

After two weeks without a blog entry, several things seem to compel me to put finger to keyboard today. Primarily I am aware that the Fall Pledge Campaign (or Fall Stewardship Season, if you wish) is currently either ramping up or in full swing in many congregations, including mine. When one puts money, discussions of money, and budgets that never seem to have enough money together with the general state of anxiety in the church at large, there is the recipe for a goodly amount of tension and anxiety.

Second, for my Church Development Institute program, I am reading How Your Church Family Works: Congregations as Emotional Systems, by Peter Steinke. He writes:

"Anxiety diminishes clarity and objectivity. It interferes with our capacity to think creatively. We cannot stand outside of the vague dread and observe it. We do not know what we are afraid of, what terrifies us. In contrast to fear, anxiety is undifferentiated. It has no definite focus."

To me, this sounds very much like what appears to be happening in many churches today. Even when sexuality is the focus, we are repeatedly told that it isn't "the issue." Perhaps the issue, rather than the authority of scripture, is simply anxiety that periodically finds a place within us or gravitates to hot-button issues and triggers our instinct to protect against what is different or not understood. I have often seen otherwise perfectly rational discussions degenerate when the topic of sexuality, money, or even evangelism arises--an almost instinctual reaction against dealing with the reality of what is going on in the world and the church in any way but defensively.

I join that thought with my continued consideration of the Gospel passage for this coming Sunday (tomorrow!) where Jesus says to the leper "your faith has made you well." I wonder, what made the lepers who did not return to thank Jesus well? Was it their faith also, or simply the unrecognized (or at least unacknowledged) power of God?

As I was walking back home from the park this afternoon, a perfect Fall day in the northwest, the famous words of St. Julian of Norwich came to mind:

"All shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of things shall be well."

It occurs to me that we do not need to have a disfiguring, incurable, or terminal illness to need healing and certainly do not need such a thing for us to need faith that "all manner of things shall be well." That sense of peace in the midst of anxiety is perhaps the greatest healing possible--the comfort of placing our lives (once again!) in God's hands, trusting that God is in control and that we need not pretend to be in control.