The Bishop's Address
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We, westerners, think of ourselves as a self-reliant lot. However, none of us got here on our own. Some of us may be here because our ancestors crossed vast plains, dry deserts, and windswept mountains to make a home on a western shore, in a fertile valley or near the bounty of a desert oasis. Theirs was a road trip without roads where the string of wagons and families depended on each other and circled each night for protection, warmth, and shared community life. Others of us came not from the east, but from a west which is so far away that from our Euro-American perspective we rather arrogantly named it the “Far East.” These travelers crossed an even vaster ocean. They may have come by boat or plane, but their travels were dependent on those with whom they traveled as well as the hospitality of those who met them. Others came centuries ago, so long ago that they can even claim to be called native. They came and settled in tribes that will always be legendary for their sense of community and their love of the earth. And some make their way here in journeys that require a degree of stealth as they come to this land across an increasingly inhospitable border. None of us got here alone.
“When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer; for God thought, ‘If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt.’ So God led the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness towards the Red Sea.…The Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.” Exodus 13:11-18,21-22
The people of God have always been a people who wander. The Israelites wandered from Egypt towards promise. And their forty years of travel were not characterized by following a direct path. They made terrible mistakes and “grumbled.” They questioned God and their leaders, but somehow, by the grace of God made visible in manna and water pouring from rocks, they remained together as Israel, the people of God.
We know that once they settled it actually became more difficult to be the united community of God. They tried rule by earthly kings which ultimately led them to divide into separate kingdoms. And yet our patient God would not give up on them. God’s grace was that, even in the calamity of destruction and exile, they might find a vision of hope and comfort:
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins. Isaiah 40:1-2
That comfort came to us in the Word made flesh. And now our journey as God’s people is as the new Israel. No longer are we led by the Lord in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night. God now leads us by joining with us as our companion on the Way. This new Israel, the church, has wandered even from its first days when Philip met a Eunuch and shared the gospel and the waters of baptism. Paul brought this same good news and sacramental presence of God to towns which are now touchstones of our own faith story: Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, and the crown jewel, Rome.
Today, we continue to be a people on a journey. We continue to be those who follow Jesus along the Way. Like all travelers who have gone before us, we do not get to where we are going on our own. Indeed, we stand on the shoulders of the giants of faith who have gone before us. Many of those saints are well-known: Peter, Andrew, Stephen, Mary, Paul, Barnabas, Augustine, Julian, Constance. Others are known to God alone and to the souls they touched along the highway, like yours and mine. Close your eyes for just a moment and remember the person or persons who guided you along this Way with Jesus. Remember those saints in your life. None of us got here on our own.
Our journey continues as this faith community called the Diocese of San Diego, a wonderfully eclectic array of forty-nine congregations. As I travel around our diocese I find many of my conversations with you are, not surprisingly, about the church. You share with me your concerns about the future of your church, and by this you usually mean the church that you attend and the concerns that have particular impact on you and your congregation. As we talk with each other, this much becomes clear to me: We look and think a lot like a congregational church with little understanding or agreement about what it means to be an Episcopal church, that is, a church with bishops organized as dioceses. Now this should not be overly surprising. Most of us came to the Episcopal Church because we join a particular congregation. The main work of the church comes forth from these individual mission stations that we call congregations. We also tend to see our satisfaction with our church in a very local context. How is the preaching and pastoral care? What programs are being offered? What does the congregation do to minister to the wider community? Tip O’Neil said that all politics are local and I suppose we are saying the same thing about our church life. The rubber hits the road in our congregational home.
But we are called the Episcopal Church because we are a church with bishops in apostolic succession. So, we organize ourselves as a diocese, which we understand to be the smallest, the most central and complete unit of the church. Yet, I cannot assume that we share all of the same assumptions about what it means to be an Episcopal Church or that we even have agreement on what it means to be a diocese much less what our mission and ministry are together.
It is as if we have a split personality between our historic Episcopal personality and our local, parochial predisposition. This paradoxical personality can lead to hard questions about where and how ministry is done and where your congregation places its priorities and how it balances its resources. I fully understand that every dollar contributed by our congregations to our diocesan ministry through Mission Share Pledges is a dollar deferred from your local congregational priorities and ministries. I am aware every Mission Share Pledge represents a set of trade-offs and hard decisions. I am grateful for every pledge you make. I share with our Diocesan Council and Corporation an appropriate burden to be good stewards of all that you give.
To be good stewards, it is essential that we have good business practices and transparency in our processes. Over the last two years, we have made great strides in this regard. This year’s audit and accompanying management letter are demonstrative of this program. However, stewardship is more than careful accounting and good management practices. It requires clarity of mission and directing our resources wisely in the fulfillment of that mission. By its approval of a Strategic Plan, the 33rd Convention of the Diocese provided clarity on our mission and vision. That mission is: “To share the love of Jesus Christ through our words and actions, and to reconcile all people to God and each other.” Our vision in living out that mission is to be “an open, diverse community of celebration and hope recognizing God in everyone, inviting all to a spiritually rich, life-changing journey of faith by practicing service, study, prayer, care, and advocacy.”
In addition, the convention approved five broad goals to advance and incarnate that vision. Those goals are:
- Provide every minister - lay, deacon, priest and bishop - with dynamic, unceasing Christian Education.
- Develop all ministers to be messengers of hope, purpose, and reconciliation, as disciples of Christ
- Share the Good News through Mission and build up the Church
- Foster strong, complementary, and nurturing relationships among congregations, with the Diocese, and in the community
- Become a community of justice and peace through advocacy and service in Jesus' name
With this plan, we have advanced the task of focusing our resources and our energies towards implementing these goals. Thus, the work of Diocesan Council over the past year has been to build a structure to develop objectives and measurements to accomplish these goals. In the spring of 2007, we recruited and commissioned individuals to bring to life six commissions of our diocese that will be the main focus of our programmatic work. The inaugural reports of those six commissions, Christian Formation, Spiritual Development, Evangelism, Servanthood, Justice and Peace, and Stewardship and Administration are included in your booklets. Not only does this new commission structure provide us a method to live out our Strategic Plan, I imagine it also to be the mechanism through which we articulate our diocesan ministry. It will be the fundamental way that all of us will find ourselves being involved in wider church work in our diocese. It will be the way that we describe the budget in narrative form. Would it not be instructive to know how many funds we are really spending on the ministry evangelism or Christian Education?
The narrative will be part of the work of our budgetary process and our commissions in the coming year. Nevertheless, let me make some broad observations about the 2008 budget and focus on the work which it funds. The main expenditures fall into three areas: canonically mandated offices and activities, direct support of missions and aided parishes, and indirect support of missions and aided parishes. This year, we will spend $624,170 in direct grants, a 16% increase over last year. We will spend over $1.4 million in indirect aid to congregations. Our investments in these resources have also increased about 16%. This aid mainly comes in the form of consultation and support from me and my senior staff, which leads me to say a bit more about our diocesan staff.
In the summer of this past year, I announced the addition to our senior staff of the Rev. Canon Stephen Wendfeldt as canon to the ordinary for mission. An unexpected bequest received last year permitted me to bring Canon Wendfeldt on board with his considerable experience in developing congregations. Canon Wendfeldt joins Canon Jenny Vervynck and Canon Howard Smith and to complete our team of skilled counselors and coaches in congregational development.
I use the word, “coach,” with great intentionality. Each canon brings helpful experience and wisdom which I believe will be transformative over the next few years. Steve brings a generation of parish leadership and previous experience as a diocesan congregational development officer and stewardship officer offers us the chance to continue to move from maintenance to mission. Specifically, we now have the added skill and resources to work more and more with our stressed and struggling congregations. Canon Jenny Vervynck has served our diocese for over twelve years, working with all the congregations as deployment officer. Jenny is a nationally recognized professional in clergy deployment. In addition, she knows this diocese very well. I don’t think anyone cares more for you than Jenny. Her history and passion is a blessing to us. She will help us continue to bring the best and the brightest clergy to our diocese either through ordination or through recruitment from the wider church. She will help us build that strong platform of Christian formation that critical for vibrant congregations. And Canon Howard Smith will continue to run the day-to-day operations of our diocese as executive officer and chief financial officer. However, Howard too will be out in the field, coaching you in the best business practices of the church. As a seasoned lay leader, he has served in many of the roles that our lay leaders hold including church school teacher, vestry member, junior and senior warden, and head of a calling committee. For him, your work is familiar.
Today, half of our congregations receive some form of diocesan financial assistance. Some of these congregations receiving aid are our fastest growing congregations; some are in significant decline. Ironically, the congregations that were affected by departures of members and clergy in 2006 are not the greater concern. They are our fastest growing congregations. I am concerned about some of the congregations that will simply disappear if we continue as we have in the past. In addition to financial assistance, we are providing significant resources through these staff members as an investment in the future of these congregations. Through coaching and teaching, it is my expectation that we will strengthen all our churches. We are bringing the best practices of Christian education, spiritual renewal, community outreach and stewardship to our diocese. We are becoming a diocesan community that is made up of healthier and more effective churches.
I believe that within five years each of our congregations will be strong and vital places of Christian mission. I believe that we have the capacity to help each of our congregations become great congregations. You have every right to expect me to be the best bishop I can be. You deserve the best that I have every time that I preach, every time I serve at the altar, when I work with your vestries or Bishop’s Committees, when I represent you in the wider church. I expect you to be a demanding diocese. I expect you to push me to excellence so that the Kingdom will prosper through our work. And in return my friends, I expect the same of you! Of you, who are leaders of this diocese—lay and ordained—I expect great things. I expect excellence in ministry. I expect participation. I expect you to take advantage of every opportunity to advance your knowledge, your skill, and your faith. And here is some really good news. It is fun to have great expectations of each other. It is a joy to be supportive of those who hope and to see those hopes fulfilled together.
I should hasten to note that what will define excellence in each ministry and in each congregation will be unique. It is not a function of size but of substance. It is about building strong and vibrant communities of faith.
The characteristics of strong and vibrant congregations are well known. They are congregations that develop gifts for ministry. These congregations discern and call forth the spiritual gifts of their members. The people of these congregations delight in being involved in purposeful and life giving ministry. Not surprisingly these congregations are well-known on the community grapevine. These healthy congregations are places of formation. They are rich places of learning and growing in the faith. And they are places where life-long formation happens; where the ministry of teach for all ages is excellent. In an age of the unchurched, this is incredibly important. And these congregations are generous. The leadership both tithes and calls the congregation to live into a perspective of realized abundance. This generosity empowers their ministry.
I believe that every congregation in our diocese wants to be a strong and vibrant congregation. And I want to help you. Jenny, Howard, and Steve join me in this work. There is a lot of experience on this team. And every time we are with you, sharing your successes and challenges, we learn and we take that learning on the road.
To continue our work of building strong congregations, it has been necessary to raise capital funds from a variety of sources. In particular, we have begun the work of raising $2.25 million to assist in the reinvigoration of churches affected by departures. I am pleased to tell you that we have raised over $600,000 so far, which has allowed us to make direct grants to these redeveloping congregations. As we look at this task, I find myself astonished and grateful for the generosity of so many of you. I also find myself wondering about the long term funding needs of our diocese. By any objective standard, our diocese is not sufficiently endowed. The same is true for most of our congregations. We must build endowed resources for our whole diocesan community not only as a remembrance of those who went before us, whose shoulders we stand upon and who bequeathed us so much, but as our gift to those who come after us. Doing this giving is an elemental part of our faithfulness.
We should also note that there are significant parts of our diocesan territory in which the Episcopal Church is not present and should be. It seems to me that as we strengthen our present congregations, we must develop a long term mission plan for planting new congregations. East San Diego, Murrietta, Perris, Westermoreland, Imperial: these are just a few places where our Episcopal Church is not present. Such a long-term mission plan will lead us to a search for adequate resources to fund land acquisition and start up costs for future congregations. For these reason, I will form a task force to examine our long-term capital needs with a charge to make an initial report to the 35th Convention of our diocese. I see the mission of this task force to be completing the funding of our congregational renewal fund, exploring other capital needs in the mission field, and evaluating endowment needs for our future. My assumption is that this will lead to more formal capital fund development in a few years. This is an appropriate and periodic task for each of our congregations and our diocese as a whole.
I noted at the beginning that none of us got here alone. And I wish to return to that notion. Having mentioned Steve, Jenny, and Howard, I want to make it very clear that I would not have gotten here without them. I dare say the same is true of Bobbi Hoff, who most of you know is the real power of the diocese. Her care of me is a great gift on the journey. The rest of our great staff members also are friends on the journey: Isabel, Pauline, Candy, Sandy, and Sue. I particularly want to say what a joy it is to have Hannah Miller on this ride. Her creativity and enthusiasm have blessed to our diocese.
Hannah joined our staff to assist us with communication. With Canon Smith’s guidance, Hannah produces our Diocesan Quarterly Magazine, The Messenger, now entering its second year of publication. She manages the Clergy E-News, and our new subscription, Diocesan E-News. I hope that you are already receiving these important communications, and if not, please sign up for them before you leave today. If not, you can do so before you leave today. As important as these communication resources are, I sense that our best means of communication is to connect directly. For that reason, I am committed to continuing what has become my practice of twice a year regional “Town Hall Meeting.” In these meetings, I can share with you my perspective and you can ask me your questions, share your hopes, concerns, and dreams. In addition, starting this month, I will be holding regional office hours in Temecula, Palm Springs, and alternately in Yuma and El Centro. In addition to making it easier to see you, I hope that you will take advantage of these times to connect me to your life and local ministries.
Before I close, I would like to say a bit about the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion and our place in it as diocesan community. This year has been one with its challenges, not so much for San Diego, but in other places. Let me tell you what I did in the last week of January because it says something about my perspective on the church and on where we are situated as a diocese. On Saturday, January 26th, I joined in the ordination and consecration of Mark Lawrence as Bishop of South Carolina. On the following Saturday, I returned to my former Diocese of Chicago to join in the ordination and consecration of their new bishop, Jeff Lee. Now for those who are not up on recent church events, I should tell you that Mark Lawrence is a rather conservative bishop, who had to go through the consent process twice because of fears that he might try to take South Carolina out of the Episcopal Church. And Chicago is considered a liberal bastion where one of the bishop candidates was a partnered lesbian. You said that you wanted a bishop who was a bridge builder and I think that this is what a bridge builder in today’s church looks like. And friends, I pray that we will be a bridge building diocese. I think we are getting there. It requires us to change the way that we talk to each other. It demands that we be like Jesus. It means that we know that we are incomplete without the other, the stranger, the one who may make us unsettled. Let us be a diocese that teaches the broader church that when we focus on Jesus, the gospel, and mission—when we do excellent ministry—making the main thing the main thing, God will richly bless us.
My friends, the world needs the good news of Jesus Christ now more than ever. We have work to do as bearers of the Gospel. We need to share hope in Christ to those around us. We need to be followers of Jesus that engage the world and call ourselves and all God’s creation towards the Kingdom come near.
For this work, God has given us each other. God has given us forty-nine mission stations from our ministry flows. We also have wonderful diocesan ministries that we should not forget. We have a great and growing presence on the campus thanks to the good work of our campus missioner, Mike Angell, supported by Chris Chase and the people of Good Samaritan, and the financial help of Randal Gardner and the people St. James, La Jolla. Episcopal Community Service gives hope and care to thousands of people each year. Under the leadership of Lesslie Keller and aided by a fine Board of Directors and dedicated staff, ECS has made incredible progress towards becoming a premiere Christian social service agency. Every Episcopalian in this diocese can be a part of its work through prayer, giving, and volunteering. It is a fundamental way that we “seek and serve Christ in all persons.”
ECS has also provided the leadership for our fire relief efforts. Over $200,000 has been given to our 2007 Fire Relief Fund I am pleased to tell you that Episcopal Relief and Development has committed to provide additional funds to this enterprise. With outpouring of support and in partnership with the Methodist Church, we have begun Recover San Diego. We hired Michael Wilson to manage our work. Lee Teed and Milt Collins assist as we provide care, support, and aid to those rebuilding after the devastating wildfires. In the spring over school break, our Methodist/Episcopal collaboration will expand to include our Lutheran partners as we provide a day camp for children of fire survivors.
The year ahead is one that we will celebrate and travel together. In April, we will welcome our Presiding Bishop to our diocese. We will grow together through regional stewardship workshops, Vestry and Wardens training, Treasurer’s and Administrators Workshops, a Children’s Ministry Day, and a Godly Play Workshop. I just love this diocese. I love what we are becoming. We have an array of wonderful congregations and ministries. I am in awe of the grace-filled ministry that you do. Let me not forget to say, “thank you.”
It was three years ago that my family headed westward and joined with you in your journey of faith. It has been a time of extraordinary challenges and incredible blessings. And now, we look together upon the next horizon together and wonder what God has in store for us. We do not fully know the answer. We can count on two things. God will be with us in Jesus Christ. And we will be there for each other. For none of us got here alone. And we will be company for each other for the rest of the journey.
Diocesan Convention 2008
February 8-9
