Don't Think Twice, Its Alright: The love for the assembly

The gearing up for General Convention is also the wind down of my term on Executive Council, the wind down my work in the institutional church, and a kind of freedom to look again at how I have spent my years in ministry and where to go from here.

Contrary to the belief of some who read this blog, I love the Church very much. Indeed I have loved the Church to the point of sometimes confusing the integrity of its life as community and its life as assembly. 

I have spent a great deal of time dealing with the Church as assembly, as ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) all the while believing that working with the christian assembly was a way to ultimately serve the church as beloved community, as koinonia (κοινωνία).  

I didn't go into this work blind, indeed in Seminary and afterwords in my first ministries as missionary overseas and missionary in the US, (campus ministry) it was stressed again and again by classmates that one of the first questions we needed to ask was if to Gospel was served by serving the Church - since the church itself was a fit subject for transformation by the Gospel and subject to all the proclivities of the flesh. The question was, and is, can that transformation be worked from within?

Can the assembly, with its institutional needs (even Common Prayer is an institutional need), ever free itself from institutional protectionism enough to be the place where the beloved community gathers and thrives?

Well, yes, if you believe (as I did and often do now) that every meeting of the assembly is local, and limited enough to where a community of loving care can be formed in its midst.  I believe that General Convention, Executive Council, the Presiding Bishop's Council of Advice, the Diocesan Council in Delaware, the Diocesan Convention, the local church, the vestry and on and on, are all local, all a place where a community of loving care can form.  But each of these assemblies, in the various forms of their institutional grandeur, can exhibit characteristics of what a good friend and prophet calls, "a brood of vipers." 

This is because every church assembly, every ekklesia, has institutionalized matters of spiritual health and loving kindness and has offered those cloaked in proper dress and occasionally silly pomp. And worse, every ekklesia is burdened with the care of money and power, and the worldly wisdom that goes along with it.

I have just spent the last few days with a community of people who, as koinonia, are worthy of God's love and capable of showing that love in community. Executive Council is a wonderful and talented group of people. At the same time Executive Council is caught up in all the foibles of regulatory agencies, boards, supervisors, etc. It is a place of negotiation, compromise, and small gains. The people are capable of great dreams, but the institutional life we lead grinds those dreams down to small threads of hope.

Now back home I realize just how much the life of the Church as institution has cost, cost me and I believe cost all who are part not only of Executive Council, but also Diocesan Councils, Standing Committees, Vestries, etc.  The Church we believe in, as in "We believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church" is not the institutional Church, an entity bound by all the sins of humankind, but the koinonia church that is the localized gathering of the faithful.

Of course the two churches are inseparable - the koinonia always begets assembly - but they are not the same. I use the church institutional and it uses me, but in our better moments we use the church institutional to the end that a community of loving kindness, a koinonia, can thrive. But too much of the assembly church can cause any thriving to wilt, any joy to be turned to despair.

And so it is that I returned from Executive Council with the strong feeling that I had misplaced my love - my love of the Church as a community of loving kindness had been overtaken by my love of the Church as assembly.  And now I wonder if time spent working on making the assembly a body in which the spirit can thrive was a waste.  I don't know. 

But I do know that running around in my head is the Bob Dylan song, "Don't think Twice, its Alright" as sung by Ramblin' Jack Elliot. The words are these:

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don’t matter, anyhow
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin’ anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, gal
I can’t hear you anymore
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

Oh, I know, there's all sorts of problems with identifying the Church as a woman, much less singing good ol' Dylan and identifying what he was saying about love and love of church.  I know, I know. Still, there it is. 

The question, of course, is at the end of the song -

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

And I am left with the question... did it just waste my precious time?  Well, don't think twice, it's alright.

Here is Ramblin' Jack Elliot singing:

We are not our budget, but the budget is ours

The Executive Council, on which I have the honor to serve for a few months more, just spent three exhausting days working on a draft budget to send on to the Program, Budget and Finance Committee. The report of that meeting can be read HERE
One of the difficulties with the process is that we all agree that the budget is on some level a theological statement or that budget discussions are a theological enterprise. The problem is, of course, that budget cutting seems like an exercise in a theology of scarcity and budget discussions begin to sound unseemly, involving a lot of sausage making. Death and sausages do not a pretty Theology make.

It is almost impossible not to see the defunding of a particular program as a statement about its worth. This is particularly true of programs that relate to justice issues. How can we note believe that a reduction in staff or program funds signals the sense that this or that area of work is simply not all that important.

Vestries have to deal with this all the time. Do we give to the Food Bank or hold the funds for youth ministry? Either way one or the other worthy program feels devalued. Out of a long string of "balancing the budget" processing, even the most seasoned person begins to be unbalanced! Over the three days of meetings I came close to losing it, as did others. But we stuck it out.

One of the issues that the whole process raised for me is this: why do we think that being a line item in the budget gives life and not being there is death? Lots of activities that are below the radar or over the rainbow don't get line itemed, and God willing, they don't get administered and overseen. Many of them are central to the Faith and quite appropriately none of the business of regulatory agencies in the church.

I share the sentiment of the President of the House of Deputies, who felt that although we had done good work, we none the less caught up in too much business a usual. She said, "We have worked hard and faithfully during this meeting, but I think the budget we have passed is captive to an ethic of survival of the institutional church as we know it."

True indeed. Part of that captivity is the sense that we are defined by the budget, rather than defining the budget's place in our thinking and faith. When people are so defined by their work that that is the sum of who they understand themselves to be we say that they have misplaced their personhood for some other thing. They have in some sense become captive to a false god.

It is hard not to get bummed out in the budget making process. It is easy to buy into a world of scarcity, of falling resources.

Still there is comfort in the fact that God's Justice and Mercy is not a budget item, and that bread and wine for the table are a local expense, and that Jesus is just all right with me and can't be bought or sold.

Even those things cut from the budget will, if they are needed by God, show up, by God.

The Episcopal Church has Missionaries

But then you know that. Still it is good to be reminded of that.


At an otherwise ordinary meeting of the world mission committee of Executive Council we had a chance to hear from a returned "Young Adult Service Corps" volunteer who served in the Diocese of the Northern Philippines and her fiancée who has worked in Navaholand. Melanie Jianakoplos and Chris Slane came and shared something of Melanie's experience in the Philippines. You can read all about her work and experience on her blog melaniespineapplediaries.blogspot.com


Both Melanie and Chris are engaging and dynamic young adults, articulate and committed.







There are currently 48 missionaries named by The Episcopal Church. Additionally there are many more serving through parishes and dioceses throughout the church in a wide variety of places all over the world. Some of those work through other agencies, some work independently.


But the fact is, this church has missionaries. It is good to remember.

The budget and the future of the Church

The Executive Council is in the midst of a major new budget building effort. In July of 2011 I wrote about a budget process and idea about a new configuration of the work if the Episcopal Church. Here is what I had to say then. It remains to be seen if what I wrote resembles what comes of all our efforts here.


"There is a significant change in the way the development of budget is being constructed this round. Executive Council instructed "council's executive committee to design and manage the process to develop council's draft 2013-2015 budget (EC018)"

The Executive Committee "made up of Jefferts Schori, Anderson and six elected council members, was created in the revised by-laws that council had passed ...The budget process will take into consideration the projections contained in a "long-range financial modeling" tool that was presented to council."

ENS also reported, "(The) Finances for Mission Committee Chair... told the council that the (long range financial modeling) tool's assumptions about future expenses, coupled with conservative income projections, show annual multi-million-dollar deficits from 2012 through 2015 and "growing to a substantial amount in 2021."

He cautioned that the deficit prediction in the tool "is not a forecast, but it's a tool which says unless you do something different, this could be the result."

So the work at hand for the Executive Committee is to put together a budget process that will produce a budget for 2013-15 and also begin to address long term needs to "do something different."

Doing Something Different:

The trouble with all this is that in the hands of those who can't stand The Episcopal Church or its leadership this sort of information provides all sorts of opportunities to yell fire, hoping for a stampede to the nearest exit, where of course other so called Anglican entities will be glad to provide shelter, etc. The temptation is for this all to take on crisis status, and therefore crisis yelling and stomping about.

The sorts of issues presented in a budget for the church is boring to many, a titillation to others, and to a very few a way of focusing on ministry in an uncertain time. It is the latter very few that need our support and prayers.

Doing something different requires that we not make budgets in a crisis manner or even in a "business as usual" manner, but working from a different base line.

The Executive Committee of Council has its work cut out for it. It is easy enough to provide a balanced budget by the old proven method - simply calculate the expected income, subtract the pay down on the debts at hand and projected, and apply the remainder to the mandated and proposed programs of the church.

What that would look like is more of what has been the norm: budget reductions in program areas, the appearance of top-heavy governance costs, the pay down of debts, and the general shrinking of the size and shape of Church wide agencies and programs, all under the cloud of corporate "failure." That way is the model so well attested to by other Churches in America and by some dioceses within The Episcopal Church as they face their own budget crunches. It is depressing and has very little good news in it.


But there is another way:


I believe The Episcopal Church is alive and well. When I say "The Episcopal Church is alive and well", it is mostly The Episcopal Church as it is found in the congregations, less often in the dioceses, and occasionally in Church wide efforts that comes to mind.

There are thousands of parishes where people are being the people of God in place, doing and being a community of faith in a broken world. ENS picks up on many of these, but most are known in their own neighborhoods and towns and not far beyond that.

Still, when we talk about The Episcopal Church we don't often remember that the vast majority of its life is played out on a local level, and all of its work at any more rarefied level finally finds voice locally. The Book of Common Prayer is a locally used, Episcopally supervised, Church wide standard for prayer and sacrament, but its whole weight is felt in the congregation at prayer.
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So what would it look like to have a Church-wide budget that acknowledge and reflected the reality - that it is in congregations that all the fullness of the Church is pleased to dwell?

The Episcopal Church, particularly as its work became unified under National (later Executive) Council, which incorporated the work of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, ended up supporting national church offices for a wide variety of activities in the Church. It did not encourage independent agencies (mission agencies, ministry in higher education, etc.) believing that such agencies would breed party conflict - similar to the mission agencies in England which were ideologically at odds with one another. We would have ONE National effort, with one staff and a program and priorities set by General Convention which would be inclusive of the many concerns in the church.

Well, the problem is that ONE effort was often greatly distant from the lives of people in the pew, or at least they felt that. It felt like the work of "them" being imposed on "us." In part this was because the organizational "diagram" of the church was on levels - congregational, diocesan, provincial, church-wide. Work by the Church-wide agents dug through those levels, usually stopping short of actual engagement with congregations. We can understand why: with 7000-8000 congregations there were just too many to be reached by a staff person in the Church Center. We relied on networks that were hierarchical, and hoped that sufficient people on the next level down would get the message, or the skill set, or the ideas, or the tools, and pass it on. When the network broke down the relevance of the Church wide program simply dropped from sight.


Suppose a new sort of horizontal network of circles.

But suppose a network that is pervasive, not dependent on carrier pigeons from this to that level. Then we might not need a Church Center staff person for this or that ministry, rather we might need energized, recognized, and affirmed leadership from through out the church system, who in a horizontal network provoke interest and skills in particular ministries.

What we would need is a Church wide way to recognize and affirm leadership when it arose in these networks. We do need to lift up the work done by those who are motivating and energizing efforts in the Church. And it needs to be done by a person or persons who carry the full weight of the whole Church.

Even now our Presiding Bishop and the House of Deputies President do this work remarkably well. The Presiding Bishop makes a point of going to church on Sundays when she is traveling in parishes where encouragement is needed. President Anderson makes considerable efforts to acknowledge lay and ordained leadership in dioceses where she visits. If those officers, along with others on a provincial and Church wide level were given the support needed to really touch base locally that would be amazingly helpful, particularly when in turn people in location were encouraged to connect across the church with others concerned with particular ministries.

So I think a piece of the Church wide budget would need to go to provide the support for this task of acknowledgment and encouragement.

Another part of the Church wide budget would go to help make open, transparent, and minimally controlled communication possible across the church by every means possible, but with particular attention to what Google+ is talking about when it talks of "circles."

Imagine a "circle" of all those interested in ministry in higher education, in which not only sharing of resources but planning of face to face group meetings might happen. Or one involving all those interested in refugee resettlement. This is not a "communications" budget, but a budget to support people connecting around interests, communicating with one another. There would also have to be a regular communications budget devoted to encouraging people in the church to share their thoughts and prayers, and their planning for action, and providing "public" stories of such efforts.

But the staffing of many offices would drop away, not because the work was not important, but because the work was going on "out in the field."

How would any order come from this? How would there be any checks on wackos and seriously non-Episcopal "flavored" work happening? Well, it would mean supporting Episcopal engagement with these circles. It would mean being clear as to just what sorts of actual, on the ground, local, work was to be done in the name of the Church. That is, it would require an episcopate that was pastorally engaged with the vocation of every member of the Diocese. So the Bishop's job would have to be reconfigured not to be primarily an administrator, but a pastoral encouragement to sound faith in action on a local level.

The change in the Church wide budget to a smaller, less hierarchical, less top-down, staff and effort would require then an accent on (i) horizontal networking, (ii) acknowledgment of and encouragement of leadership as it appears within the circles of interest, and (iii) Episcopal oversight of actual work on the ground.

It would not require a large Church Center Staff, indeed it could be argued that a large staff would defeat the horizontal network purpose.

I would suppose the Church Center Staff could be reduced to a somewhat enlarged staff in support of the networking affirmation given by the Church to efforts being done in the field, the continuation of essential personnel for the Presiding Bishop's office, the Treasurer's office, the Offices of General Convention, including an enlarged staff for the President of the House of Deputies. (My guess is a reconfiguration of existing slots for those offices could be done with no new staff added.) There would need to be staff paid for by the Church Center who would attend to the work and personnel needs of missionaries paid by the Church (both domestic and foreign), and a whole new configuration for the support of communications for action among members of the church.


There is already an effort to reconfigure the work of the many Commissions, Committees, Agencies and Boards, of the Episcopal Church. That effort would have to be intensified.


We would have to be very careful not to end up pitting offices of the Church Center against one another in competition for restrictions of budget. The question always before the reorganization of the work would be how can this be done across the church, rather than from a central place for the church?


I believe we could reduce the staff of the Church Center by half and be better prepared for the future of a church led by church supported horizontal engagement with initiatives and leadership acknowledge and encouraged rather than appointed and directed.


Then of course we would have to address the issue of funding. If there were a reorganization on this level, might we not also then be able to say to all the dioceses, the funding for the Church wide budget is one - and mandatory? It covers the essentials for the work required by Canon and the encouragement of engagement in ministry across the whole church at every level. I would wonder if a much smaller diocesan apportionment would not be possible.


In sum:


A different sort of way to be conduct Church wide ministries would include (i) Using the offices of the Presiding Bishop and the President of the House of Deputies and all other Church Center staff as encouragement to those active in leadership in church efforts and programs from a local base, (ii) encouraging and developing ways for horizontal communications on issues and programs to take place, (iii) drastically reducing the staffing of program offices and support of horizontally determined training and events, (iv) greater use of the episcopate as the agent of encouragement on a local level, and (v) a reduced asking from dioceses for a national budget.

The basic sense would be this: The Episcopal Church is alive and well, ask the people who are making it so, ask them how you can join them in the work of The Episcopal Church as it works to be a source of life in this broken world.

Well... a beginning point."

Brother Bragging Rights: Professor Precious Cooks.

OK. This has nothing to do with the Anglican Communion, The Episcopal Church, or other matters of modest importance. This is about cooking Cajun curry chicken, and other great dishes, and the chief for the occasion is my brother Christopher R. Harris, professor at Middle Tennessee State University.  Who would have thunk it?

As he said in sending this around, "Ain't life grand!"  And indeed it is. Apparently he can't afford to cut his beard.