Category: Episcopal Church

The harvest is plentiful…

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church, Mission1 Comment

Students of history will know that the Episcopal Church (and other Anglican churches) used to have missionary areas overseen by missionary bishops. In places where the church did not yet exist, the church consecrated men to serve as bishops who had the sacramental authority needed to build the church in that area. Over time, the missionary areas grew into full dioceses capable of supporting themselves.

(For the record, one of the reasons the Anglican Church in North America is so purple-heavy is that they’ve adopted a similar strategy. Todd Hunter’s Accidental Anglican has more on this. Evaluating that decision is for another post.)

A lot of great missionary bishops are in the commemoration calendar of the church, people like Jackson Kemper and Philander Chase. (The latter of Kenyon College fame: “The first of Kenyon’s goodly race / Was that great man Philander Chase; / He climbed the Hill and said a prayer, / And founded Kenyon College there.”) But they are no longer. While some dioceses of the Episcopal Church receive financial support from the central church, they are all self-governing. Missionary areas and bishops are a thing of the past.

Or are they?

News comes from the Anglican Church of Canada that one of its dioceses, the Diocese of Moosonee, will become a mission area of the province of Ontario.

The plan evolved after almost a year of discussions and consultations on the fate of the diocese, which has been burdened by extreme financial difficulties….

Under the plan, the Ontario metropolitan will exercise the authority, jurisdiction and powers presently held by the diocesan bishop. The metropolitan may authorize other bishops to perform episcopal duties including the ordination of deacons and priests, confirmations and consecration of churches, chapels and churchyards.

Is Moosonee the canary in the coal mine for dioceses in the Episcopal Church? There are many dioceses that face similar financial difficulties. (Just look at this list of diocesan giving and see how small some of the budgets of dioceses are. How do they survive?) There’s been talk of combining dioceses. (In at least one case, it was tried and the vote failed.) What would it mean if, instead of combining, dioceses reverted to mission areas?

I happen to know something about the diocese of Moosonee and the part of the country it’s in as it’s where my grandparents lived. (In fact, the current bishop of Moosonee presided at my grandfather’s funeral.) It’s rural. It’s relatively poor. There’s a large native population. It is The North (capital T, capital N), rich in natural resources, plagued by chronic illness, shut out of political power. It is a place dear to my heart, though the years I spent in the northern latitudes were to the west. It’s an area (like every other) that needs to hear the good news of Jesus Christ.

Moreover, many Christians recognize this. If you drive through some of these hard-up towns in northern Canada, you’ll see quite a few pentecostal-style churches in old malls and storefronts. The spread prosperity gospel churches on First Nation reservations is one of the great unreported trends of North American Christianity. Evangelism is happening here. I just happen to think the Anglican/Episcopal interpretation of the Christian faith has a lot to offer. That, sadly, is not happening.

I was reading about the Moosonee at the same time I was reading about news from the ongoing General Convention of the Episcopal Church. There’s all kinds of talk about how the church needs to change, take risks, be bold, make sacrifices, etc., etc. Love it. It’s great rhetoric. But as more than a few have noted, where’s the action to back up the talk?

There’s no doubt in my mind that there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm in the church, especially among its younger generation. What would it mean for some of this energy and enthusiasm to be translated into some of the great missionary areas of this continent, places like Moosonee, that so need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ? What would it mean to consecrate missionaries—bishops or not—who don’t expect any perks of status or rewards of income but are so fired to share the teachings of the kingdom of God that it doesn’t matter to them? What would it mean to take this great well of energy and enthusiasm that is—let’s face it—concentrated in the urban areas of the country and spread it wider across the land? It’d be risky. It’d be bold. It’d be sacrificial.

I’m not sure what the result would be. But I do know that if we don’t try, we’re going to end up with a few American dioceses going the way of Moosonee.

Bring back the Church Congress Movement!

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church2 Comments

Proposals are flying around to restructure the Episcopal Church and it’s clear that the make-up of the church’s governing body, General Convention, is on the table. The bishop of Long Island wants to combine its houses. The bishop of Arizona wants to shrink it substantially. It has already, due to budgetary constraints, been shortened in recent years, though with no apparent reduction in workload. That, in turn, has led to calls for certain items—like resolutions calling for the government to do (or not do) something—to be jettisoned from Convention’s agenda. Across the board, there are calls for more collaboration across the church with more “sharing of resources.”

So here’s an idea—building on that same proposal from the bishop of Arizona: what if we brought back the Church Congress Movement?

The Church Congress Movement (about which there is no Wikipedia article so you know it’s really obscure; you get a whopping eight Google entries when you search for it) flourished in the Episcopal Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was back when the Episcopal Church had pretensions to grandeur and thought it had something to say to the world around it (and that people were listening). Folks came together to debate the issues of the day in the world and in the church.

Why might this be a good thing to consider reviving?

  • General Convention is awfully focused on doing stuff: passing a budget, authorizing liturgies, etc. The Church Congress can be focused on exactly the kind of consensus-building and resource-sharing we need in the church—without getting distracted by the pressure of having to take care of the business of the church.
  • The Church Congress was an early example of what we now take for granted: networking. This is what makes the world go ’round (however you may feel about it) and a lot of it seems to happen at Convention. Why not de-emphasize Convention, though, where the focus is on the folks who happened to get elected as deputies, and open the door to a broader-based conversation with less hierarchy and more open participation.
  • The Church Congress separates the important business of governing our church from the equally important (but I think slightly different) business of figuring out where the church is going and what it should be. Let’s be clear about what’s important for governance and what’s important for the church as a whole.
  • The Church Congress is open to all comers, not just the kind of people who stand for and get elected as deputies to General Convention. As a result, there’s a wider slice of the church represented.

There are already plenty of signs of movement in the direction of a Church Congress-like organization. Gathering 2013 or the Gathering of Leaders are both groups that do similar sorts of things to what I’m describing here (with the important distinction that both are clergy-only affairs). But I think there’s something to be said for scale and regularity. The Church Congress was an event in a way that neither of these two Gatherings are.

The major obstacle, of course, is financial. We can barely fund General Convention. How can we fund another big meeting? In the twentieth century there were three Anglican Congresses that brought together Anglicans from all over the world. (Once we’ve brought back Church Congress, let’s bring back the Anglican Congress!) The Lambeth 2008 design team wanted to have an Anglican Congress but scrapped it for lack of money. I’m not sure I have an easy answer to the financial question, though a much-reduced Convention should help, nor am I going to let that stand in the way of an idea.

There’s one thing I’m not telling you about the Church Congresses: they actually represented a church faction (the broad church types) and so were not truly an equal meeting ground for all. Moreover, the movement foundered when consensus (in this case, over the creeds) began to break down in the church. The meetings were an expression of a consensus in the church rather than a tool for creating consensus. I’m not sure how that would translate to today’s church.

Still, the idea remains. De-emphasize the governing of the church and emphasize the being of the church. A movement like the Church Congress could be egalitarian, broader-based, and feature the kind of networking that leads to change.

Sounds a lot like the world around us that the church is so often encouraged to learn from and emulate.

Committing to the Anglican Communion

On By Jesse ZinkIn Anglican Communion, Episcopal Church6 Comments

It seems pretty clear that the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant will not be approved by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church this summer. Having been rejected in Scotland, stymied in England, turned down by more conservative provinces, and approved by only a handful of churches around the world, the Covenant has had a tough row to hoe. It’s demise, I think, will be little lamented.

Several of the Convention resolutions concerning the Covenant politely turn it down but then use some sort of language about “committing” to the Anglican Communion. No one, it seems, wants the American church’s rejection of the Covenant to be interpreted as a step back from the Communion.

Actions speak louder than words, however, so here’s the question: what steps can this General Convention take to make it clear that its commitment to the Anglican Communion is more than nice words on a piece of paper?

Here’s a short list of ideas:

Fully fund the Anglican Communion Office. Congregations pay money to support the work of their dioceses because they are committed to work in their region. Dioceses pay money to the national church because they see that it does important work. National churches (or provinces of the Anglican Communion) should pay money to the international body that, on a bare shoestring, provides some sort of organization to the Communion and facilitates important projects like the Continuing Indaba or the Bible in the Life of the Church. The first head of the ACO (though it wasn’t called that at the time) was an American bishop named Stephen Bayne. Full disclosure, he is one of my Anglican heroes (yes I have those) and I think his legacy and his vision deserve all the support we can give them.

The budgets that have been proposed for Convention both slash (yet further) the Episcopal Church’s contribution to the ACO. I’m not sure how Episcopalians can gripe about dioceses that don’t pay the full asking when we don’t pay the full asking to the ACO. Other Episcopalians complain the ACO doesn’t do what we want, much in the way that Republicans in Congress are continually threatening to cut off funding to the UN when it “steps out of line.” Fully fund the organization and let it do its job.

Provide increased funding for the networks of the Anglican Communion. These are organizations, like the Anglican Indigenous Network or the Anglican Health Network, that bring together Anglicans from around the world to work on issues that are not, blessedly, the issues that have consumed the Communion for the last decade and more. Networks are important not only for the work they do but for the way they represent an effort to change the discourse in the Communion. The Episcopal Church used to contribute money to some of these networks as a way of bringing people together from different backgrounds to talk about important issues. That money is now gone. (Disclosure: I’ve been involved with the Anglican Peace and Justice Network.)

Challenge dioceses to be involved in at least one companion relationship. Many American dioceses, happily, have overseas partner dioceses. The companion diocese idea (which came out of work done by the Anglican Communion Office, incidentally, way back when) has been an important tool for building relationships across the Communion and sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. But not all dioceses have companion relationships. Some dioceses have relationships that need to be reinvigourated. We can challenge parishes to have web sites (Resolution A025); why not challenge every diocese to have a companion? (Or two: some of the most exciting companion relationships involve three dioceses.) Companion relationships challenge the dominant Anglican narrative of fissure with one of relationship across reconciled difference.

(Convention has passed resolutions in the past encouraging companion diocese relationships but to the best of my searching has not passed one establishing an expectation that every diocese have a companion.)

Encourage the companion idea to spread to parishes. The budget of many dioceses around the world is equivalent (or smaller than) the budget of a good-sized parish in the U.S. What if, in addition to diocese-to-diocese relationships, there were parish-to-diocese relationships? (We’d have to think about how these relationships might be complementary or competing in a diocese.) There are hundreds of Anglican dioceses around the world, many eager for companions, as I have learned. There’s no reason large, mission-minded parishes can’t take the lead in partnering with them. (The Diocese of Virginia has done some exciting things around this idea.)

Encourage better communications. Communications in the Anglican Communion is abysmal. As I have found in my travels around the Communion, there is exciting work being done in so many parts of the world that few people know about because no one tells anyone else about it. Instead, the dominant communications medium in the church is something like Virtue Online, a polemical, often-false source of “news” that drives a narrative of fracture and decline. This needs to be matched with, well, facts. Solving the communications problem in the Communion is not something Convention alone can do. It can, however, take steps in that direction, like increasing funding for the Episcopal News Service so that the organization can broaden its horizons and get more Anglicans talking to one another. Right now, Anglican Journal, the newspaper of the (smaller and poorer) Canadian church does a better job covering the Communion than ENS does.

Many of these ideas cost money (not much) but, again, actions speak louder than words. If we mean what we say in these resolutions, we need to back it up. These are some of my ideas to do so. Yours?

“God is the interesting thing about religion.”

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church4 Comments

The Episcopal/Anglican world commemorates Eveyln Underhill today, a noted author and proponent of contemplative prayer and the importance of the spiritual life. Her book Mysticism, now more than a century old, is still an important reference on that topic.

Recent graduates of Berkeley Divinity School likely know Underhill better for a letter she wrote to then-archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, in 1930. Our dean was fond of quoting one bit: “God is the interesting thing about religion.”

Odd as it may seem, It is very easy, for those involved in the life of the church, to lose sight of this basic fact. In seminary, we can get distracted by the shiniest new theological idea,  debates about theologies of ordination, or whatever. In the governance of the church, we get distracted by the particulars of resolutions and committees. In the day-to-day life of congregations, we get distracted by the pressures of keeping the lights on, the church clean, and the brass polished.

All of these things are important, of course, but they can tend to obscure our focus on what Underhill puts, self-evidently, at the center of religion: God. To my way of thinking, Underhill’s comments give added impetus to my earlier proposal for this summer’s General Convention: begin the thing with a retreat. The complete text of Underhill’s letter is online and I think it has important reminders for the church, particularly in a season of contentious conventions and governance meetings.

The Church wants not more consecrated philanthropists, but a disciplined priesthood of theocentric souls who shall be tools and channels of the Spirit of God: and this she cannot have until Communion with God is recognized as the first duty of the priest. But under modern conditions this is so difficult that unless our fathers in God solemnly require it of us, the necessary efforts and readjustments will not be made…. God is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God. But only a priest whose life is soaked in prayer, sacrifice, and love can, by his own spirit of adoring worship, help us to apprehend Him. We ask the bishops . . . to declare to the Church and especially its ministers, that the future of organized Christianity hinges not on the triumph of this or that type of churchman’s theology or doctrine, but on the interior spirit of poverty, chastity and obedience of the ordained. However difficult and apparently unrewarding, care for the interior spirit is the first duty of every priest.

Read the whole thing (it’s a page and a half). In an age of managerial rectors, is the answer to church decline more “theocentric” souls? And is that an issue that can be addressed by a Convention resolution?

“If you are not baptized, please sit down”

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal ChurchLeave a comment

I was recently looking through my notes from my trip a year ago to China and I found this story I had forgotten.

One Sunday I visited one of the major, sanctioned Protestant churches in Beijing. The congregation stood while the pastor prayed over the communion elements. Then, just before the distribution, the pastor made an announcement. “If you are not baptized, please sit down.” About a third of the congregation did so. They watched while the rest of us received communion that was passed through the pews. None who sat down seemed offended. No one stormed out in a huff. This was how things were. They were not baptized yet but looked forward to the day when they were.

So what’s the difference between this church in Beijing and your average Episcopal congregation, where I can never imagine something like this happening?

One difference—and there are many—is that folks are beating down the door of this church in Beijing. I had to wait in line twenty minutes to get into that service. The sanctuary could probably hold 1000 people and it was standing room only that morning. In the Episcopal Church, perhaps, we’re so desperate for folks to come in, we don’t want to do anything that will turn people away.

I’ve written before about how the “open communion” conversation in the Episcopal Church is about much more than the relationship between communion and baptism. However that may be, I was struck to find this story in notes this morning.

What would we think about an Episcopal rector saying the same thing on a Sunday morning?

Learning from the past

On By Jesse ZinkIn Anglican Communion, Episcopal Church, Mission, Sudan3 Comments

This is the first summer in five in which I will not visit some part of Africa and spend time with our sisters and brothers in Christ in that part of the world.

But I’ve found what is, perhaps, the next best thing.

St. Paul’s Sudanese Mission in South Phoenix is an Episcopal church like no other in the country: it’s the only free-standing Sudanese Episcopal church in the country. The congregation is primarily what are often called “Lost Boys”: some of the thousands of children who walked into refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya twenty or more years ago and were resettled in the U.S. a decade ago.

On past trips to Sudan, I’ve done a fair amount of teaching: in dioceses, and in seminaries. (I’ve also done much more learning than I’ve done teaching.) St. Paul’s has a Saturday school for lay people that they call the Sudanese American Theological Institute. Thanks to a generous grant from the Evangelical Education Society of the Episcopal Church and building on a course I did at Yale this past spring, I’m teaching a course this summer on Sudanese Church History. Here’s the first class.

Now, at first glance, you might think it a bit odd that an American should be a teaching a bunch of Sudanese about their own church history. In fact, however, many Sudanese, particularly many of the Lost Boys, became Christian after they were forced to leave southern Sudan. Their conversion happened in places like Kakuma Refuge Camp and Khartoum. Church history is not something that is widely known.

So on Saturday we began at the beginning, with the so-called Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 (Really, he was from the Meroitic empire in what is now northern Sudan) and the Nubian Christian empire that withstood an Islamic invasion and was a flourishing Christian kingdom for centuries on the Nile River. We talked about what we can learn about the enculturation of the Gospel, missionary strategies, Christian-Muslim relations, and much more.

I had them read extracts from the sixth century writer, John of Ephesus, who documented the work of missionaries to the Nubian kingdoms.

Then we talked about the pros and cons of a missionary strategy that focused on converting kings and nobles and discussed how relations between the Nubian kingdoms changed from enmity to friendship when the kings became Christian.

You get this sense, sometimes, that westerners think Christianity is a relatively recent import to Africa, brought by Euro-Atlantic missionaries in the last century or two. That’s obviously not true. After Pentecost, the Gospel radiated in every direction from Jerusalem—not just to the north-east—and we do well to remember that. Christianity is part and parcel of African history. Studying that history seems like a good idea to me, both for what we learn about what happened and for what it can teach us about our own time.

Next up: the beginning of the European mission era. Why did European missionaries—who had so much success elsewhere in Africa—fall flat on their face when they encountered the Dinka people? And what does that tell us about mission and evangelism in our own time?

0 for 4

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal ChurchLeave a comment

Four dioceses in the Episcopal Church today elected new bishops—a kind of Episcopalooza.

While I am sure the Holy Spirit was at work in each election, it’s striking to me that in not one election did a woman win. In fact, of the 18 candidates in the four elections, only five were women, one of whom had to be nominated by petition so the slate wouldn’t be all male. This is so striking to me because in my recently graduated seminary class, more than half of my classmates were women. What gives?

A friend directed me to the report from the Executive Council Committee on the Status of Women in the so-called Blue Book prepared in advance of this summer’s General Convention. The report begins on p. 623 of the Blue Book and this paragraph of the report seems to speak directly to today’s results.

The data reveals a growing possibility of a two-tiered clergy system emerging where one tier, largely male, engages in full time parish or diocesan ministry as a primary vocation, and the other, largely female, engages in part-time ministry within or outside the parish system. Compensation for those in the second tier is very often not commensurate with experience or hours committed and many times they work on a non-stipendiary (unpaid) basis. While we acknowledge the need for the church to reexamine assumptions about full time and bi-vocational ministry, we feel it equally important that such trends do not contribute to existing patterns of inequality, with a disparate impact on women. Along those lines, we also call for a reexamination of the canons regarding clergy canonical residence. For this emerging tier of largely female extra-parochial and assistant/associate priests, years and even decades can pass before one is granted residency. Without the ability to participate in the councils of the Church in the places where they minister, these priests cannot live into the vow they took at ordination that they take their place “in the councils of the Church.”

The report references Called to Serve, a newish report from the Church Pension Fund (and others) about female clergy. I haven’t made it all the way through yet but it’s well worth your consideration.

There are many reasons why the lack of female bishops is problematic but here are at least two. First, the church is a diverse body and needs all its members to function properly. That diversity needs to be true of all levels of the church. Second, the church is a counter-cultural society. Yet there are more female U.S. Senators than female Episcopal bishops, even though the Senate has long been a bastion of male (and other) privilege.

Clearly, there are all kinds of complicating factors here: vocational aspirations, family life, length of time in ministry, and so on and so forth. But the raw statistics of today’s elections—five candidates of 18; zero new female bishops in four dioceses—bears consideration and reflection, particularly by those of us who have not given serious attention to these issues in the past.

I’m not saying male bishops are a problem. It’s just that I think the House of Bishops could benefit from some gender (and other kinds of) diversity. People who look like me are already more than adequately represented in the House of Bishops.

Punching above its weight

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church1 Comment

The Diocese of Western Massachusetts will elect a new bishop tomorrow. Prayers ascending for all of candidates and delegates!

Any election is noteworthy in the life of a diocese. One of the reasons this election is noteworthy is that no candidate from within the diocese is among the nominees. That means that by December, when Bishop Scruton steps down, there will be one fewer member of the House of Bishops with roots in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts.

It’s a small diocese but when when you have a look at this list (recently posted on Facebook), you realize it’s a diocese that has punched above its weight.

The Rt. Rev. Gordon Scruton – Western Massachusetts
(served @ Grace, Dalton 1977-1981 & St. Francis, Holden 1981-1996)

The Rt. Rev. George Councell – New Jersey
(served as Canon to the Ordinary 1986-1995)

The Rt. Rev. Lawrence Provenzano – Long Island
(served @ St. John’s, North Adams 1987-1994 & St. Andrew’s, Longmeadow 1995-2009)

The Rt. Rev. Mark Beckwith – Newark
(served @ All Saints, Worcester 1993-2007)

The Rt. Rev. John Tarrant – South Dakota
(served as curate Atonement, Westfield 1983-1985, St. Paul’s Gardner 1985-1989,
St. Paul’s Holyoke 1989-1991 & St. Paul’s Stockbridge 1996-2005)

The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt – Tennessee
(served as curate @ All Saints, Worcester 1984-87)

The Rt. Rev. Michael Vono – Rio Grande
(served as curate @ All Saints, Worcester 1976-80 Christ Church, Rochdale 1980-92)

The Rt. Rev. Ian Douglas – Connecticut
(Home parish Christ Church, Fitchburg)

The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche – Bishop Coadjutor New York
(served @ Good Shepherd, West Springfield 1990-2001)

The Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld – Bishop Coadjutor elect New Hampshire
(served @ Grace Church, Amherst 2001-2012)

That’s enough for a baseball team, with one sub. (It’d be an all male baseball team, you’ll note.)

What accounts for this preponderance of Western Massachusetts-related bishops?

Forming and choosing new priests

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church1 Comment

I sit on the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and we’ve devoted considerable time in recent meetings to the question of what kind of priests the church needs in this era of its life. This is of more than a little interest to me as, God willing, I may one day be one of those priests.

So I found the resolutions submitted to this summer’s General Convention of the Episcopal Church interesting in this regard. By my count, there are two that propose changing what candidates for the priesthood should be trained in. (You can see the text of these on this page.)

  • A071 changes the language regarding inter-cultural training. I’m not sure I see the force of this resolution other than to specify what groups priests should know about. (The resolution does seem to leave in place the implicit assumption that priests will be white Americans and they need to know about these “other” groups.) The explanatory text says seminarians aren’t receiving enough training in this area (which is likely true) but the solution to that is more money for seminaries, I think, not changed wording. Berkeley sends lots of people overseas and into other inter-cultural settings. The school needs more money to make sure everyone has that opportunity.
  • A072 adds a requirement that new priests be trained in “the practice of ministry development and evangelism.” The resolution makes no reference to the existing (and, in my experience, neglected) canon that requires training in “missiology and mission theology” (III.5.g.3), which seems to be of at least overlapping interest. The resolution also crams in as many popular buzzwords as possible—”storytelling” “building capacity” “engaging God’s mission”—and, in its list of resources for evangelism fails to mention the Bible.
If the Episcopal Church—and mainline Protestantism in general—is, as we continually hear, truly at a point in which everything needs to be re-considered as we build the church of the future, surely that includes the priesthood as well. Just as we are (hopefully) considering church structure from the bottom up, I think we should be considering the formation of new priests in the same way.

This seems to be what resolution A148 accomplishes when it calls for establishing “a committee to initiate and coordinate a Churchwide conversation regarding what essential learnings (knowledge and skills) The Episcopal Church expects its candidates for priest and deacon to have at the time of ordination.” Although I have a default suspicion of committees and commissions, I find this to be a pretty good idea, particularly if it succeedes in initiating a truly churchwide conversation.

But I think A148 doesn’t go far enough. When we talk about the future priests of the church, I hope we talk about how they are chosen as well, not just how they are trained. The current system of picking priests begins when people decide they are called to be a priest. There is then a lengthy process of testing that call within the church. One result of this is that since the 1970s, when the current ordination process really came into being, the number of priests ordained each year has stayed steady even as the number of Episcopalians has declined precipitously.

What if we began the process of choosing priests not by letting applicants initiate the process but by actively recruiting those we thought had the gifts the church needed? To some extent this is true already: I wouldn’t be a deacon were it not for people who actively encouraged me to go to seminary and enter a diocesan discernment process. But I think we can go farther in this direction. Rather than making priests of people who say, simply, “I feel called to be a priest,” I hope we can shift the conversation in the direction of “The church is need of these particular talents/gifts/experiences and I believe I can provide them because close friends/mentors/advisers have told me so.”

It is clear that the choosing and training of the church’s ordained leadership is as much in need of review as the church’s structure. I hope A148 passes and I look forward to the fruits of its labours.

“I don’t understand what happens!”

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church1 Comment

I once heard a story about an older woman who reprimanded her priest for giving communion to young children. “Father,” she said, “you can’t give them communion. They don’t understand what happens!”

To which the priest replied: “Mrs. McGuillecudy, I don’t understand what happens!”

I think of that story often as I read about—and participate in—the conversation in the Episcopal Church about the relationship between communion and baptism.