wfn.org | Presiding Bishop's Address to General Convention, July 18

[a.whitefield@quest.org.uk]

Title:Presiding Bishop's Address to General Convention
July 18, 1997
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NEWS SERVICE
Cann Jim Rosenthal, Director of Communications
Anglican Communion Office
London, England

ACC 1288 

(ACNS) Presiding Bishop's Address to General Convention
Friday, July 18

Sisters and brothers, I greet you in the name of Christ--as your brother
in the faith, with a heart full of thanksgiving for what has been, and
immense hope for what is yet to be.

It is fitting that the Executive Council and I report together in this
joint session.  Adversity can bind people together, or rip them apart. I
give thanks that the difficult moments of the last three years have
strengthened our partnership in a way that has served the church, and
been a great gift to me personally.

At the end of the Indianapolis General Convention, the President of the
House of Deputies and I did a video interview.  Dr. Chinnis and I were
asked to reflect back on the Convention, and we did so -- with no small
satisfaction I might say.  We also projected a little into the future. 
In the euphoria of the moment, I predicted that the next three years
would be "a piece of cake."

Well, I guess my crystal ball wasn't working. I don't have to tell
you--the leaders of our church--that Dr. Chinnis, and the Executive
Council, indeed the whole church, and I have been through a great deal
in these last three years, most significantly with an unparalleled
embezzlement which has been one of the greatest personal challenges I
have ever faced.

I certainly wouldn't have willed it.  There have been days when it was
almost more than I could say grace over.   But through prayer, diligence
and hard work, we have set our financial house in order, justice has
been served, most of our losses recovered and we have laid a new
foundation of trust for the future and moved on with the mission of the
Church.

And in a strange way, these years have been a curious gift--to me, and
to the church.  We have been touched by the power of Jesus Christ to
redeem the most difficult and tragic of situations.

In these three years we have been wounded and examined our wounds. We
have been called to forgive, and asked to be forgiven.  I need to say,
as an aside, that on a personal level, I am still in a spiritual
struggle with the issues of forgiveness and reconciliation surrounding
this tragedy. But collectively the Council has moved ahead, in greater
health. Scar tissue, they say, is the strongest tissue there is.  Out of
our weakness, has come new determination. Out of our divisions, has come
new understanding. Out of our struggles, has come a new commitment to
carry out the mission of Jesus Christ. And so it is that I can come to
you this morning in a spirit of rejoicing and thanksgiving for these
wonderful servants of the church. I salute the members of Executive
Council for being in such good and creative partnership with me, and ask
you to join me in thanking them for their faithful service on behalf of
us all.

I also want to thank Pam Chinnis for such sensitive and caring 
leadership during these days. Pam, you are a trusted colleague and a
cherished friend. We are blessed in your love and leadership. You are a
model for lay ministry and an inspiration for the ministry of women, and
men.  You are a model for us all. When we end our work together, I will
leave you with deep respect, great affection, and an assurance of my
prayers. Though this particular collaboration will end, our friendship
is forever.  God bless you.

I have been thinking about this day for a long time.  I stand before you
intensely aware that this is the moment - my last official moment - to
tell you what is on my heart.  I want to reach out to each of you, and
touch you, and look you in the eye and see there the presence of Christ.
Through that divine presence, we are bound together, forever.

We end one triennium, and we are at the edge of the next. This is a time
of endings, and also beginnings.  New beginnings. Fresh starts.  Clean
slates, even as we bring forward into the future what we have been and
learned in days past. 

As we do so, I want to return to the beginning--the day of my
installation as your Presiding Bishop. On January 11, 1986, in the
National Cathedral in Washington, I stood before you and challenged this
church to be an inclusive church, and a compassionate church. I
challenged us to become more who God intended us to become. This was an
awesome and humbling thing to do.  But, I was only the messenger.  What
I held before the church that day was not of my own devising, but rather
the values of the Reign of God. They come from Jesus and are part of our
inheritance.  They belong to this generation, and to every generation.

When I was bishop of Okinawa, I had a congregation of people who were
Hansen disease patients - lepers.  At my first confirmation as Bishop, I
asked that they not use the white linen cloths to cover the tops of
their heads as they had done in the past, so that I might touch the
heads of those confirmands.  I did so because Jesus taught me to touch
the lepers. It is Jesus, not me, who said - there will be no outcasts.

As I come to the end of my ministry as your Presiding Bishop, I offer
again the same challenge.  My dear friends, the gospel is always the
same.  The imperatives don't change.  The world changes. Needs change. 
New problems arise. We don't choose how the world will be in any
generation.  We are just called to live the imperatives of the gospel in
the context of the world as we find it, in this day, in our time, in our
place.

On that January day in Washington, I had no idea what I was really
asking of you, of this church, or of myself. I had no idea what the
personal cost would be to me, to Patti, and our family.  I could not
foresee how painful my challenge would be to some, and how empowering it
would be to others. Responding to the challenge to become more
compassionate, more inclusive, to become more than we are, has not been
easy, for any of us.  But hear this: If I had it to do over, I'd do it
all again.

During these last twelve years we, all of us, left and right,
progressive and conservative, have been working hard to order our
institutional life, and set our priorities for mission based on the
values of the gospel given to us in Jesus Christ.

And, we have been doing this when our plate is piled high with all the
issues that face our society: racism, children at risk, environmental
degradation, drug abuse, sexual misconduct and abuse, the widening gap
between rich and poor (especially of women and children), violence,
regional wars, the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass
destruction, human sexuality, health care issues, to name a few.  So
here we are, bringing the teaching of Jesus, the values of the reign of
God, the wisdom of the church from the earliest days, here we are trying
to bring these to bear on the thorniest, most contentious problems of
our global society. We have been trying to bring our gospel values to
those questions for which we have no simple yes and no answers, those
questions about which there are passionate convictions, those questions
that touch our hearts and shake our sensibilities.

My dear friends and fellow survivors, we have been through a lot!  Let
me reflect on a couple of the issues that have been so contentious for
us today.

We have made a great deal of progress on understanding that racism
begins within the heart of each of us and the only way we can rid our
church and our society of this evil is to transform our own hearts.  I
give enormous thanks to every member of this church who has struggled
against this pervasive sin.  This past January we inaugurated a
church-wide anti-racism dialogue.  It was an excellent beginning and
something to build on.  I commend the dialogue to all of you and thank
the ad hoc anti-racism task force that Pam Chinnis and I called
together. Through our staff, materials were developed and they will be
updated and augmented as we go along. Until we have uprooted racism and
banished it from our beings, the Reign of God cannot come.  Full stop. 
Racism makes all of us less than we should be. We have also been in a
struggle to discern God's will for the role of women in this church.  I
long ago reached the conclusion that God never intended that only half
of the human race should run this world, or this church. And we now have
over 30 years experience since women began entering into leadership at
all levels of our common life.  I hurt for those for whom this remains
painful.  But I also have no doubt that experience has affirmed the
wisdom of our decisions.  The ministry of women has brought a wholeness
to our ministry. Our experience has been a model for other provinces in
the Anglican Communion, even in spite of our own rough patches along the
way.

Let us focus for a moment on our struggles around sexuality. And what
could be closer to us than something that is central to each of us, at
the very root of our being.  We actually do agree on most issues around
sexuality. We agree on the sanctity of marriage.  We agree that
exploitative relationships and abusive relationships are evil. We have a
message for our culture about this.  We should be delivering it with
unity and strength. Instead, we have been diverted by fear, and, let me
name it, by hate.

And I have wondered if this diversion does not come from the evil from
which we pray daily for God's deliverance.  Our witness, which should
and could be vigorous and strong, has been divided, and at times
ludicrous, to our society, because we do not agree on what a 
"wholesome" relationship means.  Some of the most extreme among us have
used the disagreement within our body to foment difficulty and advance
themselves and their causes. This is not of God.  Surely, this is not of
God.

I'm a traditionalist.  That's right.  I'm a traditionalist because I
treasure and believe in the ethos of Anglicanism.  As Anglicans, we
discern God's will through Scripture, tradition and reason.  However,
some have chosen to embrace biblical literalism instead of our Anglican
tradition. History tells us that biblical literalism was used to support
both the practice of slavery and the denigration of women.  We have
moved past slavery and we are moving past the oppression of women. It is
time to move past using literalistic readings of the Bible to create
prejudices against our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Biblical
literalism may be someone's tradition, but it's not our tradition and
it's time we came home to our Anglican roots.

Again I remind you: I did not choose these issues.  Nor did you.  They
are the challenge of this generation given to us through the God of
history.  I believe with all my heart that for the most part, we are
responding to them out of the gospel: not some literalist gospel, or a
liberal gospel or a conservative gospel, but the gospel of Jesus Christ,
whom we know and love.

And because we have persevered to discover what inclusivity and
compassion mean for these times, I can offer real thanksgivings today. 
I give thanks and praise for the women who have enriched the ordained
ministry of this church.  I give thanks and praise for our gay and
lesbian brothers and sisters who serve this church so faithfully.  I
give thanks and praise to all people of color in this church, who make
us so much more a reflection of God's creation.  We are at our best when
we can celebrate our diversity and find joy in our being together, joy
and thanksgiving for the whole life of this Church and all its members.

I know that not everyone in this hall shares my views today and that 
some of what I say hurts.  But I also know that there are many here who
do share my views.  I have not been alone.

But that is not the point.  The point is to see how we live together in
this Church with our differences.  I want to share with you that there
was a time during these twelve years when I wasn't sure our church could
hold together. I feared that we had gotten so polarized around issues
that we had lost our center and that our work of evangelism and our
mission were threatened.  The General Convention in Phoenix six years
ago was a pivotal time. Some of you remember this from personal
experience. For others it is a page from history.  I believe it is
important for us to continue to tell each other our story, so let me go
back to that time for a moment, so that it might serve as counsel to us
in Philadelphia.

Bishops and deputies arrived in Phoenix anxious and fearful about what
would happen.  I sense some of that anxiety present here.  Part of the
anxiety came from extreme views and dire predictions made prior to
Phoenix. May I say as an aside that I have seen some of that same
dynamic at work in this present day. Some were angry and came ready for
battle.  The House ofbishops erupted into turmoil and I had to do
something I never thought I would.  I closed the doors so we could
express ourselves openly and begin to work through our anger and our
hurt.  But God was with us and by the time we were ready to go home,
both Houses of that Convention knew that the Holy Spirit had not
deserted us after all. God had not forgotten to be gracious.  We found
common ground and a way forward.

Of course, some believed that they lost because they didn't win.  But
most of us, most of us learned a great lesson.  We learned that we have
more to gain from listening and struggling together in charity than we
do from passing legislation that leaves some victors and others losers.
We accepted the fact that we don't all agree, and that the legislative
model has serious limitations when it comes to issues about which there
is no consensus.  We began to move beyond winners and losers, and to
focus on what it means to live in a community where we don't all agree.

During these six years the House of Bishops has come into a new place. 
At our last interim meeting in March we discussed the fact that the old
memories have no power for the 65 bishops who have been consecrated
since our first meeting in Kanuga in 1992. The old way of being is
unknown to them.  They have never experienced a House of Bishops whose
members didn't even know one another, who sat in formal rows by order of
consecration, who voted after formal debate and little opportunity to
know the mind and heart of one another, and to build a new community of
trust.

The health of the House of Bishops has not been for themselves, but for
their ministries and those they serve.  We have also seen a new
cooperation between the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies.  The
fact that our legislative committees are working together as teams gives
witness to our new partnership.  I give thanks for the strong community
of our two houses. Out of this community, we've been able to talk about
the difficult issues that have dominated so much of our institutional
life.  And friends, we need to keep talking and stay in community.

We have not put behind us all of the problems that beset us. That's no
surprise.  If we did, others would rise in their place as our focus
shifted. It is no surprise that these disagreements are hurtful.  Some
are angry. There are serious differences present in this hall today. 
Sadly, I know that there are those who wonder if they have a home in the
Episcopal Church anymore.  But hear me again: for the sake of the
gospel, we must stay in fellowship, read Scripture together, pray
together, break bread together, and discern God's will for us, together.

Someone asked me how I want to be remembered.  I hope I am remembered
not just for what I professed, but because I worked for a Church where
there is respect and room for everyone.

On Monday the House of Bishops will elect and the House of Deputies will
be asked to confirm the election of the 25th Presiding Bishop.  I want
to give thanks to those bishops who have allowed their names to be
considered, and to their families and their dioceses as well. They have
given us an enormous gift.  The election will be a time of wonderful
celebration, because out of it will come new vision and fresh
leadership.

Be good to your next Presiding Bishop.  Be cautious in your
expectations.
Do not look for a miracle worker.  Do not look to him for all the
answers.Pray that he knows the grace of God when he sees it.  And most
of all, love him.  And know that the change from one Presiding Bishop to
another won't make all things new.  Only God does that.

And give him a gift from this Convention.  Give him and this Church a
budget to do the mission we are called to do.  The dioceses have a
decision to make.  And you are the decision makers for your dioceses at
this Convention.  We have to decide whether giving to the budget of this
church is about taxation or mission.  The dioceses have to understand
that collectively they are the national church.  We, you, us, together
here, are the national church.  There is no national church apart from
the dioceses gathered together in this Convention and its elected
Council.  And the financial support of the General Convention budget is
the budget of the dioceses, collectively.  It's how we do our mission as
a partner church of the Anglican Communion.  So be bold and pass a
budget to further our mission, and have the resolve to support that
budget because it's yours, not anyone else's.  Claim the national church
as our church. Well, dear friends, it's time to wrap it up.  I see the
sunset on the horizon and it beckons me.  I carry a heart full of
thanksgiving today.  I want to thank this church for the incredible gift
of serving you as your 24th Presiding Bishop.  And know this.  I am
thankful today not just for most of you, but for all of you, because
together, as the baptized, we are more than a legislative body.  We are
the Body of Christ, walking in unity, though not uniformity.

(Continued in next note)