Dear Parishioners & Friends of St James,
For the next few kneemails, I am going to address this summer’s General Convention GC of the Episcopal Church, which will meet in Austin for the first two weeks of July. Longtime Episcopalians are probably already groaning, but for those who are not familiar with this exercise, the GC is a triennial meeting of bishops and clergy and lay delegates from each Diocese of the Episcopal Church.
GC meets for these two weeks to consider changes to the national canons (laws) of the church, to approve a national budget, and in recent years, to pass resolutions on every topic under the sun. Resolutions passed at the 2015 GC included lecturing legislators on income tax parity, food systems advocacy, and encouraging Congress to end the US embargo on Cuba. Much heat is generated, but very little light.
Of course, GC is not the only ecclesiastical legislative body of this particular bent. I recall that in 1997, the Messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott Walt Disney products, and in 2009 to encourage their members to withdraw their children from public schools. These resolutions generated many headlines in the media, but on the ground made very little difference. I will return to media coverage of religious news subsequently.
Of most controversy in recent history of the Episcopal Church has been the ongoing debate over matters of human sexuality. This year the possibility of revision of the Prayer Book will also be discussed. I will return to these matters later as well.
GC has been called the largest deliberative body in the world. It has, for instance, more members than the Parliament of India, a country of 1.3 billion people! The clergy and lay delegates tend to be of the baby-boom generation, wealthy (who else can afford to take two weeks off work for this), and overwhelmingly white. In many dioceses, those who are elected as delegates seem to have some sort of cause or issue for which they wish to advocate. In this sense, I suspect that those who attend GC are unreflective of the vast majority of people in the pews. GC, while part of our polity, is unwieldy, expensive and, by its own admission, badly in need of reform.
That is not to say that GC is a complete write-off. It is helpful to have a gathering of the dioceses that comprise the Anglican Communion in America—and let us not forget that GC is just that, a gathering of dioceses, each its own Particular Church, in communion with its bishop, who is in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. There must be a national budget, there must be national canons, there must be a unified witness to society insofar as unity is possible. All these are laudable.
If you will forgive me a political analogy, GC is, in some ways like Congress in Washington DC. There must be a Congress, and yet poll after poll indicates that voters of all political stripes believe that the political class is likewise beholden to special interests, gridlocked, and in need of reform. Being in the “Beltway bubble” legislators can lose touch with those they are said to represent. Of course, no one would say that Congress is America, no more than GC is the Episcopal Church.
Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, which I recommend to you, has opined that Americans, even American Christians, tend to view most things through the lens of politics, and not through the lens of the Gospel. Translated into the realm of the GC, this means that we are now in a sad situation where delegates view matters of the day in political terms, instead of theological categories. Truth, it is thought, is subject to a democratic vote, and as with any vote there are winners and losers as a result. This engenders bad feelings, anxiety, and cynicism. Our duty as Christians should not be for conservative or liberal causes, traditional or progressive issues, but only for the Truth, and whether the decisions we take are reflective of the mind of Christ.
Every three years, I must remind myself—and remind you!—that whatever the actions of the uber kirche, GC has very little effect on our life in the Diocese of Dallas, and even less in Texarkana. At St James’ we will continue to proclaim the “faith once delivered to the saints” in communion with our bishop. The Gospel will be preached from the pulpit and the Sacraments faithfully ministered until Jesus comes again.
Like I said, more on this next week. In the meantime, if you have not done so already, please have a look at the Bishop’s pastoral letter to the Diocese, found here:
http://edod.org/bishop-george-sumner-eastertide-2018/