Tag Archives: Episcopal Church

Budgets, Decline, and Mission–The current meeting of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church

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Word came yesterday that Executive Council was presented with two competing proposals for the budget for the next three years (Triennium). One used 19% asking from the dioceses; the other 15%. Today, via twitter, I followed the debate at a distance. It’s similar to the debate that has been going on on the diocesan level as well as in parishes. As membership and attendance decline, how do we maintain our buildings, ministry, and mission?

There was a stark portrayal of the extent of decline by Kirk Hadaway. The full presentation is available here: ExecCncl_012712_FINAL

There’s a great deal to digest in this report, including a decline in membership from over 2.4 million in 1992 to under 2 million today. And this, between 2002 and 2010:

• Change in church school enrollment: -33%
• Change in number of marriages performed: -41%
• Change in number of burials/funerals: -21%
• Change in the number of child baptisms: -36%
• Change in the number of adult baptisms: -40%
• Change in the number of confirmations: -32%

Even more scary, for every church that was started between 1999 and 2009, 2.5 closed. There are maps of the country that show the relative growth and decline among dioceses, comparisons with other mainline denominations (and even the Southern Baptist Convention, which has seen membership decline for the first time in recent years).

But there are other ways to parse that data, and larger issues, as well. I read an article yesterday about America’s permanent dead zones, defined by the authors as areas where the unemployment rate has been at least 2% above the national average for the last 5, 10, or 20 years. It’s a fascinating read, and it would be interesting to compare the geography of the dead zones with the areas of decline in the Episcopal Church. For example, among the towns listed as dead zones are a series of towns in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina–Gaffney, Greenwood, Union, Chester, Lancaster, Seneca, Sumter. Some of these towns have thriving Episcopal churches; others don’t. By contrast, not a single city in that diocese is included in the list of prosperous zones. The diocese of Milwaukee seems not to have any dead zones, and Madison is listed as a prosperous zone. My question is: to what extent is growth in the Episcopal Church linked to those “prosperous zones”?

Here’s today’s report from Executive Council, contributed by Episcopal News Service.

If this is any indication, it’s going to be an interesting few months leading up to General Convention.

Why should there be an Episcopal Church?

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Why should there be an Episcopal Church? Why should there be any particular denomination? Is there something vital, authentically bearing witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in our fractured denominationalism? I remember a Roman Catholic professor and friend once saying that if he were in the business of creating a church, he would have the liturgy of the Roman Catholics, the theology of the Lutherans, and the polity of the Presbyterians. As a historian, I see the denominations as products of particular historical contexts, but also seeking to embody and preserve the truth of the gospel in those historical contexts, and deserving of survival and health insofar as they continue to bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in their particular forms.

After nearly two weeks of discussion around the Episco-web, we’ve finally come to the core question. On the surface, it may seem rather self-centered. After all, the Episcopal Church was not founded by Jesus Christ (the Roman Catholics make this claim, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;” the Orthodox also make the claim). We cannot. We were founded in the new United States by a group of Christians who found themselves alienated from their spiritual roots in the Church of England, yet desirous of rooting new shoots of that tradition in the soil of American democracy.

We can claim the marks of the true Church–for the Protestant Reformation it was “where the Word of God is truly preached and the sacraments rightly administered.”

We can also make claims to apostolic succession, although I would ask whether that is an ex post facto defense of authenticity and catholicity, rather than being central to the Anglican tradition (Richard Hooker, for one, thought that matters of church organization like the episcopacy were not central to the faith).

So what are we left with? Comments on facebook and the Episcopal Cafe focus on what makes the Episcopal Church, or Anglicanism, distinctive. And many of the comments stress liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer, the three-legged stool. What these comments point to is an Anglican (or Episcopal) ethos. It may be that in this case it is better to use Episcopal than Anglican, for there are unique elements in the Episcopal Church that help to explain some of the current conflicts we have with other Anglicans–namely, our mixed governance that includes laity as well as clergy in the decision-making process, the election of bishops, et al.

What is the Episcopal ethos? In a word, Anglicanism shaped by its American context. And that is decisive. I’m not flag-waving here. Rather, I want to point to the things that would prevent me from ever becoming Roman Catholic: papal supremacy, clerical celibacy, and the all-male priesthood. Those are symbols of something else, an understanding of authority and the nature of the church that is deeply problematic in the twenty-first century: centralization and hierarchy, sexism, and a lengthy historical development that have created the papacy in existence today. It did not always look like this; it did not always assert primacy, nor infallibility.

It’s interesting that a Mennonite convert to Roman Catholicism blogged today about her discomfort with the “Roman” piece of her Catholicism. But I do think that in the US, many of the challenges Roman Catholicism faces have to do with the American context and culture.

I believe deeply that the Episcopal Church as Episcopal bears truthful witness to Christianity–in its openness to intellectual inquiry, in the beauty of our worship, and in the way we try to be the body of Christ–with bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people, all commissioned ministers of Christ.

Are there other Christian traditions that bear truthful witness to Christ? Of course, and many of them have their unique charismata. In fact, one of the stumbling blocks that delayed my becoming Episcopalian was that I believed the denomination in which I was raised and baptized, the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, is a powerful, prophetic witness to other Christian communities, including Anglicanism.

Are the things which make the Episcopal Church unique available in other denominations (or in non-denominational congregations)? Many of them, yes, but not in the particular combination and with the unique history that has made us who we are. Will the Episcopal Church, will Anglicanism survive until the Parousia? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. What matters to me is that it is the place in which I can express my faith, and experience Jesus Christ, and that I believe others can do so as well. So long as that latter statement is true, the Episcopal Church, or the Episcopal ethos in so form, should survive, indeed continue to thrive. It is when we no longer bear witness to the continued vitality of that historical manifestation of the good news, that there is no reason for us to exist.

The Church is flat–no, the church is a hierarchy

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Two pieces published on Patheos on January 3 illustrate the struggle over ecclesiology within Christianity. The first is a report on and excerpt from Tony Jones’ new book: The Earth is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church. Jones is one of the leaders of the emerging church movement and in this book he looks closely at eight of the most important congregations in the movement and relates those congregations to the theology of Juergen Moltmann. In an excerpt published on Patheos, Jones explores how the image of “friendship” takes on Christological significance for these congregations as well as helping them to rethink the role of clergy leadership and develop egalitarian structures. Jones is not Episcopalian; the Emerging Church movement grew out of Evangelicalism but it has a strong interest in liturgy and has made inroads within the Episcopal Church as well.

The same day, Frederick Schmidt published an essay entitled, “Jesus is not our elected representative.” Money quote:

The church is a hierarchy—in composition, character, and mission. Jesus is not our elected representative. He is King of King and Lord of Lords.

I read these two pieces while reflecting on the debate at Episcopal Cafe on renewing the Episcopal Church. An earlier post by Jim Naughton led to debate over the centrality of the Eucharist to our worship, whether clergy were needed, and so on. You can follow that discussion here. There’s comment at the Friends of Jake blog as well

I’m coming to the position that all of the discussion about structural reform in the Episcopal Church may need to begin with a thoughtful discussion about ecclesiology and mission in the context of a post-Christian world. In a situation with scarce resources, it’s easy for important debates to devolve into competition over one’s share of the pie. That’s what I often sense is taking place in the Episcopal Church–whether it’s the debate over restructuring General Convention,  the thread on the Cafe about the roles of clergy and laity, or debates within congregations over budget shortfalls.

Naughton’s question, “What is up for grabs?” is the important question. Can we do ministry and mission on the local level with our diocesan and national structure siphoning off significant financial resources? Can we maintain buildings that were constructed fifty or a hundred years ago, are not energy efficient, poorly-suited for twenty-first century ministry, and require expensive maintenance? What might an Episcopal Church look like that was freed up from its structures (historical, institutional, and bricks and mortar) to offer beautiful worship, thoughtful formation, and hospitality to a world full of people seeking meaning in life?

It certainly is an interesting time to be an Episcopal priest. Thanks be to God!

Covenant, Schmovenant

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Back in the news with an Advent letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Primates and Moderators. After talking about his travels, especially in Africa, he turns again to the matter of the Anglican Covenant, and the letter turns into another plea for its adoption. In his efforts to convince those opposed as well as the uncertain of the merits of this documents, Williams’ arguments become more shrill and less convincing.

Tobias Haller is on the case here and here. Haller quotes Williams’ plea that the covenant is needed to provide a united front in our conversations with other religious bodies, especially the Roman Catholic and Orthodox. Curiously, Haller does not include in his quotation what I consider the most telling, sentence from that section:

“if the moratoria are ignored and the Covenant suspected, what are the means by which we maintain some theological coherence as a Communion and some personal respect and understanding as a fellowship of people seeking to serve Christ?

Theological coherence? Anglican theological coherence? What can Williams possibly mean when his own Church of England is so deeply divided between Evangelicals on one end of the continuum and Anglo-Catholics on the other. Those differences are not chiefly about liturgy. They are about theology. One of the great blessings of Anglicanism is the space it has provided over the centuries for theological difference–for different approaches and perspectives, for those of a more Protestant, even Calvinist bent, and those who find in the Catholic theological tradition rich resources for faith and life.

In fact, the Covenant aims not at theological coherence, but at limiting the provinces’ expressions of what they think the gospel means in their particular contexts.

Andrew Gerns points out that the Archbishops’ travels and interactions with Anglicans in other countries succeeded in the absence of a Covenant, that there can be communion without covenant.

There have been more developments concerning the Covenant. In Canada, the House of Bishops has discussed it again. Archbishop Fred Hiltz expressed his reservations about the punitive measures in Article IV:

My personal concern is what happens when the direction you move in is not in accordance with the standards of the communion. You’re out. It does not end on a note of restoration or hope, so I say it falls short of the Gospel

 

So why not allow some experimentation with restructuring?

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There’s been considerable debate in the Episcopal Church over the past few months about restructuring the church. The problems are clear. We can’t financially sustain the current structure of national church offices, provinces, dioceses, and parishes as they are currently conceived, and it’s not clear that the current structure, even if it were well-grounded financially, serves the current mission needs of the church.

So what to do? Bishop Sauls has offered his proposal, about which I’ve already made comment. Others have also weighed in. Currently, my friend Crusty Old Dean is putting forth a very thoughtful and provocative set of proposals: part I, part II, part III, part IV (I knew him before he ascended the heights of academe). I urge everyone interested in the future direction of the church to read carefully what he is proposing.

At the same time, in the Diocese of South Carolina, a certain restructuring is already taking place. Bishop Mark Lawrence recently issued quit-claim deeds to the parishes in the diocese, essentially granting them property rights to parish property (which canonically is owned by or held in trust by, the diocese). This move has aroused considerable anxiety and outrage among “institutional” (most of whom are progressive) Episcopalians. Mark Harris comments on developments here and here.

I find this response quite interesting. Given that the diocese as an institution is a relic of an earlier age, that the ownership of property is one of the most contentious (and expensive) issues in the conflicts within the church, I wonder what the harm is with making this change? It may go against the constitution and canons, but perhaps they ought to be changed, and indeed, Bishop Lawrence may be right that the current understanding is something of an innovation. Why use the heavy cudgel of authority and constitution to force compliance or membership, when we might all be better served going our separate ways.

One of the chief arguments in favor of restructuring is to allow more horizontal relationships across diocesan and provincial boundaries. Might there be a way that people who share theological perspectives might found solace, strength, and comfort, by creating bonds with like-minded people across the church, at the same time remaining under the umbrella of the Episcopal Church? In a sense, that’s what earlier efforts at providing alternative episcopal oversight to parishes that struggled with their bishop’s perspective were meant to do. No, it’s not a perfect solution. But the question may finally come down to whether the only things that unite us as a denomination are property and the Church Pension Fund.

 

Sexual Abuse, abuse of power, and institutional self-preservation

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As we learn more about what happened at Penn State, and people reflect more on the events and what they might mean, there have been a number of essays that examine some of the underlying issues that may have led to the apparent cover-up by Penn State officials.

Matt Feeney blames big-time college sports in general:

What happened at Penn State was the scheme of big-money college sports working as it was designed to work. The act of looking away, repeated by so many in State College, is the perfect emblem for the cognitive politics of the NCAA. It should be on their flag.

Katha Pollitt also blames college athletics, not only for the Penn State crimes, but for its effects on academia in general. She goes further, attacking the masculine privilege inherent in athletics today:

There really is a message here about masculine privilege: the deification of a powerful old man who can do no wrong, an all-male hierarchy protecting itself (hello, pedophile priests), a culture of entitlement and a truly astonishing lack of concern about sexual violence. This last is old news, unfortunately: sexual assaults by athletes are regularly covered up or lightly punished by administrations, even in high school, and society really doesn’t care all that much. A federal appeals court declared that a Texas cheerleader could be kicked off the squad (and made to contribute to the school’s legal costs) for refusing to cheer her rapist when he took the field—and he’d pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault too, so why was he even still playing?

Jane Leavy, whose earlier essay may be found here, writes an open letter to Mike McQueary. Commenting on all those who have vilified him for not taking stronger action, she points out that

When you were called to testify by the grand jury, you didn’t just expose a predator, Kohn pointed out. You exposed the morally lax administrators, directly contradicting the testimony of the now-fired university president, the vice president, and the athletic director. “But for McQueary, the coach [Sandusky] may still be there,” Kohn said. “The athletic department would be unchanged. That he didn’t throw himself under the bus doesn’t surprise me in the least. Look at the janitors. They didn’t tell anybody.”

I can’t help reading the Presiding Bishop’s statement about Bede Parry without thinking of Penn State. Bede Parry was a Roman Catholic priest and monk, accused of sexual misconduct and eventually released from the monastery (He has confessed to committing sexual abuse during the late 1970s). He found his way to the Episcopal Church and was received as a priest by Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori when she was Bishop of Nevada. News about this broke several months ago when one of his victims filed a lawsuit. There’s background here.

What I find surprising is the absence of a psychiatric evaluation in Parry’s process. The PB states that he was required to undergo medical and psychological evaluations and a background check. The canons for reception of a priest (as for ordination) also provide for “psychiatric referral if desired or necessary.” When I was in the ordination process, a psychiatric evaluation was required. Mine was somewhat perfunctory, but all of the necessary questions were asked, and one would think that a bishop would want to have as much information as possible, especially if someone had undergone treatment.

If true and there’s no reason to doubt her, the PB has done no wrong here. But waiting since the allegations were first made public in July, till now to make an official statement sends the wrong message. The impulse for institutional self-preservation should not silence the truth.

Numerical Decline and the local congregation

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The dramatic numbers reported last week continue to reverberate across the Episcopal Church.

From Jim Naughton’s lede on Mariann Bude:

I’d ask you to read Michelle Boorstein’s story about the situation that confronts the bishop and the church, and then look at the Q and As in The Post and the Examiner. Several things struck me as I listened to her give these interviews. She is unabashed about the need to rebuild the church. Unlike some of our leaders, she does not theologize our decline. She is also clear in her opinion that the church does not lack a heart for mission. Rather, it lacks capacity because so many of its congregations are weak and struggling simply to keep their doors open. It makes no sense (this is my opinion, not hers) to tell these people that if they look inward they will flounder, but if they look outward they will thrive, because they may be in no position to look effectively in either direction.

It’s hard to focus on mission and outreach when all of a congregation’s energy is going into survival. Or to put it another way, given how thinly stretched resources are in a typical congregation, resources in terms of staff, clergy, and volunteers, it’s almost impossible to do things well, let alone innovate, when so much effort is expended on making sure the doors are open.

Donald Romanik says much the same thing, challenging us to focus on the local, not the national or international:

for the overwhelming majority of members of our congregations, the Episcopal Church is equivalent to their local faith community and the mission and ministry of that local congregation is measured by the impact it makes on the people it touches both on Sunday, and, more importantly, throughout the week.

As leaders of our local faith communities, our primary responsibility is to bring the message of Jesus and his healing presence to our immediate surroundings and engage our neighbors and friends in the work of God’s reconciliation in the world. And we do this through a constant cycle of prayer, worship, education, fellowship, outreach, and evangelism – that awful “e-word.” The Episcopal Church has a powerful message of hope to a broken world. Likewise, our local faith communities also share this important message.

I suppose I began my annual report to the parish with those same statistics because I wanted to provide some larger context for our struggles at Grace, but also, at least implicitly, to remind people of the great resources we have at Grace to reach out into the world, and that we are already doing many of those very things, including evangelism.

Pastors need to be challenged and disrupted

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Patheos is running an online symposium on the future of seminary education. Like higher education in general, graduate education for clergy is in a crisis–rising tuition, rising debt for students, shrinking enrollments.

Reading the various entries brought home to me how inadequate my education at Harvard Divinity School was. We knew it was at the time; HDS offered very little in the way of courses in the practice of ministry. But it finally dawned on me that there was an even larger disconnect. I remember thinking at the time  I was doing my field ed in a struggling mainline parish in Boston’s Back Bay that it seemed that the only people attending church were elderly or so disfunctional because of mental illness, substance abuse, or other forms of abuse, that what we were learning at HDS had no relevance in the pews or on the streets.

Fifteen years in the south were somewhat deceptive. Attending church was still culturally acceptable, even expected. It was easy to imagine that the Church could survive, perhaps even thrive in the American landscape. I remember how surprised I was when I began teaching at Sewanee to find seminarians who had come from suburban churches and were expecting to return to similar congregations where they would face no greater challenge than making sure acolytes were wearing black shoes. It seemed like we were still in the 1950s. Sometimes I wonder how many of those students I taught are still in the priesthood and whether their education has prepared them well for the challenges facing the church in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

I wonder whether seminaries, by their very nature blind students and faculty to the reality of the outside world. For denominational seminaries, even those in the throes of survival struggle, there still may be a sense that if we can just get it right, the institution will survive. I know that for many who enter the ordination process in the Episcopal Church, think of it not as an ongoing challenge, but only as a series of hoops through which to jump on one’s way to the promised land of a a settled cure somewhere. The ordination is designed to create clergy invested in the denomination as it stands, because the promise of an well-paying job and a secure pension are the pot at the end of the rainbow.

The most recent entry in the symposium comes from Kurt Fredrickson of Fuller Theological Seminary, who advocates for those institutions “to serve and resource the whole church.” But the most compelling thing he said is the phrase that appears as the title of this blog post: “Pastors need to be challenged and disrupted.”

I think that’s exactly right, and more true for denominational seminaries than for non-denominational ones or for divinity schools. In the latter, students will be challenged and disrupted by the encounter with students from other religious traditions. In the former, the tendency is to do little more than indoctrinate students in the denominational culture, which by any measure, is in radical decline.

The new bishop of the Diocese of Washington

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Mariann Edgar Budde was consecrated Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington on Saturday. Here’s the report from The Washington Post.

The Post also printed her first sermon as Bishop, preached yesterday.

Here are two key excerpts:

We of the Episcopal Church have been entrusted with a particular expression of Christ’s gospel that is priceless. Think of what it means to you to have a spiritual home with such an appreciation of mystery and all that is beyond our knowing and curiosity about the world as we can know it through the rigorous inquiry of science. Think of what it means to you to have a spiritual home that lives the Via Media, the middle way among all expressions of Christianity, affirming the wholeness of faith that can only be fully experienced in the creative tension of polarities — heart and mind, Catholic and Protestant, word and sacrament, mysticism and service, contemplation and social engagement. Think of what it means to you to be part of a Church that does not ask its members to agree on matters of politics or theology or biblical interpretation, but rather to allow the grace of God to unite us at the altar of Christ in full appreciation of our differences and the God-given right of everyone to be welcome at God’s table.

 

And:

You have called me as your bishop at the time when the first priority for the Episcopal Church is the spiritual renewal and revitalization of our congregations and core ministries, not as a retreat from social and prophetic witness, but in order to be more faithful to that witness, with greater capacity not only to speak but to act in God’s name. This is a time when the cultural and societal context in which our churches find themselves is constantly changing, and we must learn how to sing our Lord’s song in a new land.  It’s a time when we aren’t sure yet what we need to let go and what to keep, what is essential to our identity and what is secondary. It’s a time of deep spiritual longing yet superficial spiritual grounding, and that’s as true within our congregations as outside them.