Friday July 17, 2009

Welcome to Day 8, 9 & 10 of the General Convention!

The 76th General Convention is over.  It was a long 10 days for the deputies and attendees, but all seem energized by the experience.This is the last special convention issue and the eSpirit will go back to the regular schedule.

The General Convention Media Hub has created a picture site, as well: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcmediahub09 Plus plenty of pictures and blog stories on the .Ning site: http://generalconventionroundup.ning.com and tweets (Twitter) from the convention: http://www.twitter.com/wyomingdiocese.

-Andrew
andrew@wyomingdiocese.org

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Andrew Kerr interviews Bishop Bruce Caldwell about the issues at convention that meant the most to him, and on the fiscal situation of the church and what can be learned from it: http://tinyurl.com/mw7owk

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Andrew Kerr interviews Deputy The Rev Ann Fontaine about convention and her thoughts on the inclusion issues being discussed: http://tinyurl.com/mwhrsb

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Andrew Kerr interviews Deputy Dan Land about the church budget: http://tinyurl.com/l6cujh

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Andrew Kerr interviews The Very Rev Marilyn Engstrom about her convention experience: the committee she is working on and what she finds exciting for Wyoming coming out of the convention: http://tinyurl.com/kpal4p

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Andrew Kerr talks to Deputy John Smylie about his convention experience and what he thinks was important to take back to Wyoming: http://tinyurl.com/n5vnad

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Andrew Kerr interviews Deputy Kay Flores about her convention experience and what it was like to be a first time deputy: http://tinyurl.com/mx44bw

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Andrew Kerr interviews Wyoming's Marcia Himes and new national ECW President: http://tinyurl.com/lwunq5

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Andrew Kerr interviews Wyoming ECW President The Rev Carole Buckingham about her convention experience: http://tinyurl.com/nqmfor

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Andrew Kerr interviews U2 Bono-lookalike Pavel Sfera about the U2charist he is helping conduct for the Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation & Episcopal Relief and Development. The U2charist celebrates eucharist with the music of the band, U2.

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Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori’s Sermon at the General Convention 2009 Closing Eucharist
 

Picture from GC Media Hub

The following is the sermon of Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, preached at the July 17 closing Eucharist at the Church’s 76th General Convention in Anaheim, California. (Video is available on the Media Hub, http://gchub.episcopalchurch.org/)

General Convention closing Eucharist
17 July, 11:30 am
Living Ubuntu: feast day of William White

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate

We’ve heard lots of words these last 11 days. We’ve used those words to make policy, to claim our missionary heartbeat, to bind ourselves in solidarity with the least, the lost, and the left out. Some of us have even had to eat our words – unexpected things have happened, we’ve made mistakes, and we may even have misused our words. We have eaten Word, sacramental word becoming flesh in us, that our words might come closer to that original Word.
We keep coming back to where we started, as Eliot put it, we arrive at the place where we started, and know it for the first time.

Jeremiah speaks the word of God: “Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” We are having words again.
Our words have gone to build up and to plant, in compassion for human beings within and beyond this church. Our words have also focused on plucking up and pulling down injustice, destroying and overthrowing systems that oppress, from the union demonstration on Tuesday to resolutions that challenge us about continued racism and discrimination. Words have also reconciled – I’ve watched to my brother and sister bishops struggle to craft words that would draw others in, rather than shut them out.
The prophet is appointed to speak words to nations and kingdoms, to challenge and critique the enormities of power, and to nourish and encourage the despairing. Jeremiah spoke to a people struggling with leadership, who remembered their centuries old controversy over having kings.

William White did something similar, with a people just as divided over the idea of bishops. In White’s case it was the northern Anglicans and the southern ones, and the passion had a lot to do with their fears about monarchical power and its misuse. The Anglican Communion is in a dither like that right now: do we need more centralized authority, or do we need to honor the gifts and voices of every member of our churches? Our budget decisions at this Convention have challenged us to move from more centrally authorized mission toward more local mission support. Indeed, how do our structures serve God’s mission?

We remember William White not just because he presided at the first Convention, but, as the collect says, because of his gifts of “wisdom, patience, and a reconciling temper.” Not long ago, the rector of the church in Philadelphia where William White is buried wrote me to say that White isn’t “just another DWM clogging up the calendar.” DWM, referring to his status in the church triumphant, his family name, among other things, and the gender he shares with the majority of figures on the calendar. But his gift of a reconciling temper is the kind of word I want to leave with you. White modeled the gift of Anglicanism – holding together in tension polarities that some are eager to resolve. He was a master of “both/and” thinking and living. He had the audacity to change his mind – you only have to compare his early writings with his later ones to see how far he moved in his understanding of what this Church might become.

His both/and thinking is the kind of tension that keeps our hearts pumping and mission thriving. It’s also the kind of tension that drives some of us crazy – what’s more important – justice or mercy? Inclusion or orthodoxy? Ministry grounded in bishops or in baptism? Most of those polarities are false choices. The long view says that if we insist on resolving the tension we’ll miss a gift of the spirit, for truth is always larger than one end of the polarity. Tension is where the spirit speaks. Truth has something to do with that ongoing work of the spirit, and it can only breathe in living beings capable of change and growth.

Jesus is prodding Simon Peter into that kind of tension when he asks him if he loves him more than these. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Can I trust that you love me? Then go out there and feed my sheep!
What are the lesser loves, what does Jesus mean when he asks if Peter loves him more than these? Does he mean the other disciples? The fish they’ve just had for breakfast? The vocation of fishing? Or maybe the whole package? Whatever it is, it has to move into the background if Peter is going to feed and tend the flock. Around here I think it has something to do with how right we think we are. What or who are we more in love with, than Jesus?
The job is to feed the sheep. Nothing else matters a whole lot. And Jesus is clear that it’s not just the flock right in front of us. There are other hungry sheep that we don’t see every day, which is one reason for many shepherds. We may all be sheep, but we all also share in the work of shepherds.

How will the work that’s been done in this gathering feed the sheep that you see week by week? These resolutions only have life as they’re implemented around this Church, in French, in Tagalog, in Vietnamese, in Hmong, Lakota, Spanish or English. Your job is to go home and help this work we’ve done become food in your own context. At least in part it’s a work of interpreting. You will have to bring digestible food, and tell the story of this Convention, in ways that your local sheep and shepherds can understand. That is an act of love. What or whom will you love most in the process? Will you love Jesus more in the telling? What you’ve learned here about Public Narrative may help your work of feeding your neighborhood sheep.

The food you have to offer has to be digestible and attractive – it needs to be good news, if you’re going to tend the sheep around you. Going home with a list of complaints, or full of anger about what you wanted that didn’t pass, is only going to generate indigestion. That is not an act of love. Sure, every flock finds a few noxious weeds in the pasture, but healthy sheep learn to how to avoid them. Tending the sheep means leading them to good pasture, and caring that they might grow. What food will you take?

Even more, the work we share is how to let the Word, the sacramental Word we receive here, become sustenance for those we meet – how does Word become hope, how does it fill stomachs as well as hearts, how can it strengthen the heartbeat of this Church?

We’re going out there to be that nourishing word. Speak a word of peace and healing to a world desperately in need of it. Become what you eat here today, and feed the world, tend the flock, feed all of God’s sheep.

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The Episcopal Church Office of Public Affairs


President Bonnie Anderson’s closing remarks to the House of Deputies at the General Convention 2009

The following are the closing remarks of President of the House of Deputies Bonnie Anderson to the House of Deputies on July 17 at the conclusion of the Church’s 76th General Convention in Anaheim, California.


Closing Remarks by the President of the House of Deputies,
Dr. Bonnie Anderson
76th General Convention, July 17, 2009

Deputies, Alternates, Guests, Visitors:

I have again been honored by you and elected to serve as President of the House of Deputies for the approaching triennium and through the 77th General Convention. Thank you for that honor.

During the first three years as my tenure as your president I have focused upon two things: identity and mission. Why Identity:

The reason for this choice was the growing concern that I have about the erosion of the practice of the polity of our Church.

As Deputy Wade reminded us this morning in the opening meditation, William White, upon whom shoulders we stand, was a revolutionary. His strange ideas about the ministry of all the baptized, taking their place in the counsels of the Church, caught the imagination and spirit of this fledgling Church in America. His strange ideas about the equality of the voices of all the people of God live today in our polity and in our baptismal covenant and in our Catechism. We are the ministers of the Church – the laity, the clergy and the bishops together, doing God’s work, each bringing our gifts to bear upon the reconciliation of God’s world.

The ministry of all the baptized is not the “lowest common denominator” as it were, from which we all begin and then some advance while others do not. The truth is quite the opposite. Our most unifying truth, our clearest moment of ubuntu is actually found in our baptisms and through our baptismal covenant. Each time we reaffirm our baptismal promises we are committing to ubuntu; we are pledging our life and our service to being agents of God’s love and grace by dying to self and living through Christ. It is from that place that we are one in the eyes of God and one with each other.

I have tried during this past triennium to address my growing concern about our identity as the Episcopal Church, and in particularly, the House of Deputies, in some specific ways.

First, to educate the deputies and the Church that we are deputies, not delegates. We are intentionally named deputies by our forebearers. We are elected because our dioceses trust us. Our dioceses deputize us to vote our mind. Our dioceses trust us, that, after careful prayer, listening to each other and stating our own views we will vote accordingly. I think that we have done that here. Our Church always has deputies. We are deputies when we leave here. We are deputies until we are either reelected by our diocese or another deputy is elected to take our place. There are ALWAYS deputies. We are leaders in our dioceses. We do not rise from the mist like Brigadoon. Our church ALWAYS has deputies. We are acting together in our own dioceses, in the counsels of the church, vestries, standing committees, commissions on ministry, on CCABs – where the only voice of clergy and laity in the larger church is possible through our canons.

Further, regarding identity, through the work of Kim Tucker and Cheri Salanty, my two dedicated and skilled staff assistants, I have created a tool that allows deputies and first alternates to communicate regularly during the past triennium. We have created a moderated deputy online forum to share important information leading up to General Convention. We have created and maintained a tool so that I am able to communicate regularly and effectively with the Deputies and First Alternates.

Our identity as deputies extends beyond the House of Deputies and into the Anglican Communion. At a first-ever conference in Costa Rica this year, the scope of our relationships to clergy and laity in the Anglican Church of the Americas has been extended. We have created new relationships in mission through our diocesan partnerships and mission work. We have strengthened old relationships in this same way. I believe that God is calling us to this work of reconciliation.

As your president, my focus in the areas of mission and identity have intersected at this General Convention and at the pre-General convention synods leading up to it. Our relationships, our quest for UBUNTU, our “I in you and you in me” is only possible if we KNOW each other. We are one in Jesus Christ and it is where our own stories and the story of Jesus intersect that we find our UBUNTU and our call to be a people of God’s mission. I ask you to exercise the leadership that is already yours in your diocese.

So what’s next? Believing that God speaks to us in many different ways during each day and in our dreams at night, this morning I spent time in my room thinking and praying as I do each morning. Then, if I have time, I read the paper. This morning when I opened the door of my room to get the paper, the BIG letters on the front page of USA Today, read, “WHATS OUR NEXT STEP?” The paper was talking about the space frontier. But our next step as a Church is a frontier also.

First, when you return home, meet with your deputation and design the report you are canonically required to provide to your diocese. The President’s Deputy Online Forum will be a place where resources for your reporting will be posted.

Refer to yourselves as deputy. If someone refers to you or other deputies as delegates, use it as a teaching moment to talk about the polity of our church. Don’t let it go by.

Next, in your own diocese, in your own congregation, take the leadership that is already yours and do mission. Start something, strengthen something, We can use the skills we have learned here in the art of public narrative to strengthen or and create relationships, to deepen our spirituality and Christian community. Keep it in your mind and heart there is an urgency now to our mission. Keep in mind now that we are the voices of the people of God, together, clergy, laity, bishops.

It is time for us to end chapter 76 in the book of life of the House of Deputies. It is time for us to leave this place and to take leave of each other. We go back to our loved ones. I go back to the comfortable place where I am not called “Madam President” and no one waits until I rise before they do the same.

With each other in Anaheim, we have shared a part of our lives together. We have worshipped and eaten the bread of life, we have risen to sing and lowered our heads to pray. We have breathed the air that has been in our neighbors lungs. In Jesus we are one of another. We are a Christian Community, made in the image of God.

Let us give great thanks to our senior deputies that will not be returning and for all that we have been given.

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The Episcopal Church  Office of Public Affairs

Presiding Bishop, HOD President send letter to Archbishop Williams, Anglican Primates on GC actions, affirms close relationship with Anglican Communion

 A letter describing the steps taken by The Episcopal Church’s 76th General Convention and reaffirming the close relationship with the Anglican Communion was sent today to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson. A copy of the letter also was sent to the 38 Primates, and clergy and lay leaders of the Anglican Communion.

The letter to Archbishop Williams outlined Resolution D025, which was adopted at this General Convention, explaining that Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori and President Anderson understood Resolution D025 to be more descriptive than prescriptive in nature. It stated that some are concerned that the adoption of Resolution D025 has effectively repealed Resolution B033 but reiterated that is not the case. The letter continued, “This General Convention has not repealed Resolution B033. It remains to be seen how Resolution B033 will be understood and interpreted in light of Resolution D025.”

The letter also states that the Episcopal Church “is deeply and genuinely committed to our relationships in the Anglican Communion.” It also says, “In adopting this Resolution, it is not our desire to give offense. We remain keenly aware of the concerns and sensibilities of our brothers and sisters in other Churches across the Communion. We believe also that the honesty reflected in this resolution is essential if indeed we are to live into the deep communion that we all profess and earnestly desire.”

The letter expresses the profound appreciation of the Presiding Officers that Archbishop Williams, 16 Anglican Primates, and lay and clergy leaders of the Anglican Communion attended the General Convention and stressed the importance of finding ways to communicate directly about different cultural and ecclesial contexts. The letter to Archbishop Williams was hand-delivered. Copies of the letter were emailed to the Primates and to Anglican lay and clergy leaders on July 17, and were distributed to the House of Bishops and House of Deputies.

The Episcopal Church’s General Convention, held every three years, is the bicameral governing body of the church. General Convention, the second largest legislative body in the world, is comprised of the House of Bishops, with upwards of 200 members, and the House of Deputies, with clergy and lay representatives from the 110 dioceses, at over 850 members.

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