What is Annual Council ?
Annual Council is like a great medieval fair. There are vendors, contests, parades and events but like a fair a meeting place among those who assemble once a year. It is a cacophony of sights, sounds and talk I went as a future president of Region One. I had been only once before.
There is the business of council the morning session each morning on Friday and Sat and the workshops in the morning and various breakfast before the Sat. session. The keynote was by Dr. Clif Christopher of Horizon Stewardship who talked about successful stewardship campaigns.
There is the networking. Seminarians looking for job, others selling the various ministries of the Diocese (Shrine Mont, Outreach and Missions, Youth, Stewardship of Creation) but mostly others catching up on the news of friends, clergy and lay from other churches. Many vendors selling clergy clothes, books, retirement homes, crafts. etc
I found the human story compulsive. The diversity was overwhelming. I met members of St. Francis Korean Episcopal Church, heard about a Latino church in Northern Virginia with 1500 in attendance (Santa Maria). Several of the hymns in the afternoon Eucharist were Spanish. The gospel was read in Korean, English, Spanish, etc. So many languages. There were babies, PYM teenagers, future clergy in Seminary, young clergy who have not been active for 5 years, many seasoned clergy. One man talked about being in Annual Council for 38 years.
It is Big!! I am going to provide key points of a few topics. This is a not a comprehensive summary by any means.
1 Goff gave a series of meditations around setting the table.
You are the Body of Christ, we have been taken, blessed, broken and given for the sake of the world. He has given us to be his body in the world today. It is both a metaphor and the literal flesh and Bones. We are the hands that bless the whole world and reach out to a broken world to a world in need, building up the kingdom of God . We are blessed by God to be a blessing to others. We have learned to give and receive. Christ gave thanks to us despite our sinfulness. He gives thanks to ways we can grow and serve.
Ogden Nash wrote “How odd Christ could choose Jews.” So why not us ? How odd Christ could include us.
We without God cannot be. We often look at God at knee level – plant garden, scrubbing the flood in dealing with thongs that are daily and ordinary.
2. The three clergy gave their own addresses. Bishop Shannon was the most personal – very different from the past which dealt with new initiatives in the Diocese, explaining the 5 basic ministries .
The talks together remind me of Luke 10:37 where Jesus says "Go and do likewise". Each bishop had a different passion – Bishop Shannon strength in diversity/conversation/dialog, Bishop Susan, food ministry and Bishop Ted, Shrine Mont. We are to do likewise. No sweeping statements of Diocesan direction. I am going to quote specific passages so it can be told in their words:
Bishop Shannon
"Council have become less contentious over a number of year. “Now, at the risk of stirring things up and opening boxes that would be better left undisturbed, I stand before you today to say that generally speaking, agreement is over-rated”
“Now, as then, there are questions that must be settled in some fashion. Even so, unanimity or conformity are not absolute tenants of Christian belief and spirituality. “
“Pause to consider that a Jewish tax collector was perhaps the ultimate collaborator with the hated Roman occupation government. Practically by definition, Matthew had used force against and cheated his own people, not only to benefit their oppressors but also to line his own pockets in the process. Understandably, Matthew himself was likely despised; a tax collector was certainly shunned and even targeted for abuse (if not violence) by the Jewish nationals.
“Consider also that the “Zealots” were chief among those who carried out such retribution. But, beyond that, they also employed what today we might call “terrorist” tactics against the occupying and coercive Roman army and government. I think it’s safe to say that no one hated those who collaborated with Rome more than did the Zealots. And so the collaborators themselves, such as tax collectors, had every reason to fear the Zealots more than they feared anyone else.
“And yet Jesus called both a tax collector and a zealot to walk together for His sake?
“You couldn’t find two people more opposite each other than Matthew and Simon (not to mention how all of the others might have sided with, or at least sympathized with one or the other.) It’s hard to imagine how those two could ever have “agreed” on the burning questions of the day. But Jesus decided that both of them were needed for what He had in mind for His Church.
“To get to that point they all had to start with something, and that “something” was the person and the authority of Jesus.
“And the key? What is it that would allow moving from human estrangement to a Godly commonality in Jesus Christ? Well, first of all, it’s grace, the gift of God to God’s repentant people. Repentant people. This means that we have to recognize the ungodliness of estrangement and enmity and be sorry for it. As we know about the origin of the word “repentance,” it means that we must turn away from the ungodliness, and go in the other direction.
“And I suggest to you that at least as often as not, the vehicle that conveys God’s grace in the Church so that we might live in the restorative power of the Holy Spirit is relationship, not theological ideology. A commitment of faith in Jesus Christ means the willingness to share your life with and for others. It’s about relationship: find it, dive into it, stick with it and just see what God’s grace can do.
“Engaging questions and differences actually makes us stronger and more confident in our own faith and corrects us when need be. Moreover, we give a better witness to the power of grace when the relationships we seek out and hold onto are, in and of themselves, “unlikely.” And by “unlikely” I mean not only against our common-sense, but even being all out nonsensical by human standards (like the relationship between Matthew and Simon). It is in such relationships that grace does its best work and gives the greatest witness to the power of God through the Church.
I have found a true brother in Christ in the Rev. Tory Baucum, who is now Rector of Truro Church, a congregation that left the Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church in 2006 under the leadership of its former Rector.
As I said, about a year and a half ago, Tory called my office and asked whether or not I would be open to a meeting between the two of us–no agenda, just to have some “face time.” I readily agreed (I hope you know by now how important I think listening is) and we had a very good first meeting. It went so well that we began to have meetings approximately every month in my office. In a remarkable convergence of experience, we both had a strong feeling that we were being called together, and that simply talking and listening to each other was somehow very important for reasons we couldn’t define. We talked about our experiences of ministry, theological influences, family, movies, books, and what-not–and yes, about our own differing beliefs and practices and the division between our two Church bodies.
“What grounded our relationship was this: we did not paper over our differences, but neither did we exaggerate them or allow them to divide us any more than the ecclesial realties and politics dictated. And “Grace Happened.” We found that we had become fast friends, bound together in relationship through our mutual discipleship of Christ and our conviction that our time together is what our Lord wanted of us.
“Now this is what I think is meant by “Christian unity” and “like-mindedness,” the one heart and one mind that the Prayer Book and St. Paul call us into. This is what our classic Anglican heritage has handed down to us and still embodies. The spectrum, the whole spectrum, Right, Left and Center holds, and it must be valued and nurtured as a whole. And in my judgment, the Diocese of Virginia must be the “whole Church,” Right, Left, and Center together.
“What’s more, we both know that we’ll probably not see structural or organic unity restored between our church bodies. But, we are committed to the vision that, so far as it is in our power, our congregations should not walk farther and farther away from each other. From this, it is our hope that at least some common mission and ministry might be shared, not for “feel-good works” but for the sake of nothing less than the Gospel of Jesus Christ
“Bishop Justin was much moved and encouraged by the relationship Tory and I shared. He was impressed that, somehow, we had–at least in a way– transcended theological and ecclesial boundaries. In fact, he was so moved that on Pentecost Sunday he used our story in his sermon at Durham Cathedral as an example of how the Holy Spirit can come crashing into the Church’s life, and soon he invited us to be presenters at a conference called “Faith in Conflict” that he is co-sponsoring at Coventry Cathedral
“I’ve come to see something like a parable in our story, a parable about relationships that are grounded in the grace of the Christian faith.
“The wider truth is that God never stops calling us beyond our familiarities. Not knowing “why,” or what that next step meant, we trusted the fact that the Holy Spirit was leading us. The wider truth is that we are all asked to give ourselves over to the presence and leading of God’s Holy Spirit.
3. Bishop Goff’s talk was on the Dayspring congregations.
“Dayspring is a Diocese-wide initiative that was created at this time last year, after the judge’s decision returned disputed propertied, including consecrated church buildings, to the Bishop of Virginia.”
“Each of our five Dayspring congregations is faithfully struggling with unique issues of identity, growth and financial sustainability. Each congregation is working in partnership with a Dayspring team and with others in the Diocese. And each, while perhaps tempted to close fists and hold onto resources tightly to meet their own needs, is giving back.”
“In addition to these five congregations whose new life in old facilities began this year, we have some 35 mission congregations. These include our mountain missions, our Korean congregations and the bulk of our Latino congregations. Nearly 20 percent of the congregations in the Diocese of Virginia are missions, and the great majority of those receive financial support from the Diocese. That means from all of us. The majority of congregations that receive monetary support would not survive without it. Yet they, like
the Dayspring congregations, also give back. Even though they receive from the Diocese, they make pledges to the Diocese. And they give in other ways.”
4. Bishop Gulick’s presentation was on Shrine Mont. We saw an engaging movie Shrine Mont and he was most passionate have been a camp counselor over 40 years ago.
"Great things happen on the mountain for our campers, seeds of faith are sewn, and the harvest is abundant… he story line is the vocational transformation that is happening to the young adults, from all walks of life, from the best colleges and universities in the country who come to the mountain to live more deeply into the awesome reality of whose they are in a world that is all too quick to tell them who they are.”
“Because Shrine Mont is such a lab for leadership and in a sense a pathway to power in this diocese and in this church, it is essential that the community served and the staff community recruited reflects the diversity that sometimes eludes our church. We need to lower the sticker shock of summer fees for folks in our ethnically defined congregations, our mountain missions, and our urban congregations. The only reason to have a campaign for Shrine Mont is if it will advance and broaden the mission of God in Jesus Christ for this generation and for the generations to com
“So what is it worth to you? What does the fact that God has been transforming lives through Shrine Mont camps mean to you? When you vote on Resolution 1 tomorrow you will have a very concrete opportunity to answer that question. I beg you – to use the language of St. Paul, I beseech you – to vote yes to a pre campaign feasibility study only if you are invested and will invest in continuing the trajectory of the last fifty years into the future.”
“One final story to illustrate the importance of this moment before us: Once upon a time a young girl whose faith had been deepened on Shrine Mont mountain wrote a heartfelt letter to a trusted counselor as she was about to go to college. Part of that counselor’s response contained these sublime words. “Remember your way home: wherever you are, never forget your place in a circle unbroken around a table, set in a stone shrine on a Virginia mountainside…He is waiting for you still.” The camper was one Paris Ball, the trusted director of St. George’s Camp, Henry Burt. Where would we be without the transformation that God has accomplished on that mountain, at that Spiritual Home? Tomorrow when you vote on Resolution One, answer this one question: What is it worth?”
4. One joyous event was the movement of St. Peter’s in the Wood from mission church to regular church. The whole congregation dressed in the red of Pentecost paraded onto the stage singing a hymn with a stupendous ovation. Young parents carrying babies, older folk and just plain folk .
5. There were numerous awards which was a testimony to the Diocese and much it revolved around food ministry. The offering at the afternoon church service was to the Diocese to assist with feeding programs.
6. The resolutions were a high point on Sat with the real controversy over R3 (“Response to Gun Violence”), R4 (“Action to Reduce Gun Violence”). The resolutions were edited up to this morning. Both eventually passed with rewording to protect existing gun holders, not to exclude gun back programs, but yet to prevent “future sale of military-style semi-automatic weapons. “ R3 was to encourage the Congress to restore the ban on “military-style semi-automatic assault weapons” and R4 was more of a policy statement.