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Standing at the Crossroads
Address to the 151st convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas
By the Right Reverend Dean E. Wolfe, D.D., Ninth Bishop of Kansas
In 1859, about the time of the founding of our diocese, Charles Dickens wrote one of the most famous opening paragraphs of any novel ever written, in A Tale of Two Cities. He wrote:
It was the best of times it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Dickens knew what it was to stand at the crossroads of history, to be positioned in the place of the greatest possibility and then, to be called to decide.
It’s a great joy for me to welcome to our convention the Right Reverend Michael Curry, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. For those of you who were part of our convention Eucharist, he needs no introduction. A quiet preacher, a man who needs to be drawn out. You now, the House of Bishops is a very interesting thing. You have about 190 people who are used to being the last word in most of the discussions they participate in. We’re not in any short supply when it comes to ego or giftedness. But when Michael Curry goes to the microphone to speak, there is a respect, because not only will Michael say it in the most articulate and passionate way possible, he will say something that is worth saying, and it will come from a centered place.
It’s a great joy to have Michael here. I could go through all this wonderful biography and embarrass the heck out of him, and that alone might be worth doing. But he has had an extraordinary ministry in the church and really is one of the Episcopal Church’s chief spokespersons for the gospel of our Lord. It’s a delight to have Michael here, and I hope in the breaks and other times you’ll get a chance to meet with him. He’s really a nice guy, and you should get to know him and make him feel welcome here in Kansas. We’ve asked a lot of him – he’s preaching, he’s teaching, he’s speaking, he’s the keynoter. If we could have thought of any other thing for him to do, we’d have asked him. We thank you for your willingness to come and be with us.
The Lord be with you. (And also with you.)
Come Holy Spirit and kindle the fire that is in us.
Take our lips and speak through them.
Take our hearts and see through them.
Take our souls and set them on fire.
The prophet Jeremiah, in the Spirit of the living God, gave instruction to God’s people, saying: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’”
That’s the theme for this year’s convention, but what we did not include is the very next line: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’ But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”
Today, we stand at a crossroads, facing a choice between going forward or slipping back, a choice between ignoring the moment we’ve been given or embracing the opportunity to act with faith and passion.
Does anyone here really doubt that we stand at a crossroads? Can anyone here seriously doubt this is the moment to decide?
The question is this: Will the Episcopal Church in Kansas fade from prominence and become a mere archival memory, a historical footnote? Will we close church after church after church, unable to continue offering a supportive sense of community, our soaring worship and a passion for caring for others?
Or will we reassert our holy ways of following Christ and grow into the vibrant church we were created to be and be the inviting tradition so many spiritually inclined persons are desperately seeking in this age?
This is life at the crossroads. We sometimes think of a crossroads as a relatively empty space where two solitary roads meet, but the contemporary crossroads we face, at least in my own imagination, is a vast, chaotic intersection.
There are voices shouting, “Yes!” “No!” “Go this way!” “Go that way!” “Don’t go there!” “Follow us!” “No, no, no, this is the way!”
There’s pushing and shoving, horns blowing, and exasperated people screaming over radios, cable television shows and the Internet. There are texts and phone calls and exhausted, bewildered, gridlocked people trying to decide which way they should go, all the while, harassed by marketers constantly hawking their wares and whispering, “You should have this! You must have this! You need this! You’ve earned this!”
And if we do not take great care, if we do not squint to see them, we might overlook the countless people huddled on the edges of the crossroads: the poorer people from around our diocese and around the globe, afraid, alone and too often hungry. The sick, the very young and the very old – our brothers and sisters in Christ – are watching oh-so carefully to see which paths we will choose, watching oh-so expectantly to see if we will choose paths that will allow them to join us on the journey.
A crossroads is a place of decision. A crossroads is a place, and sometimes a moment in time, where hope and despair can beckon with equal voice, and where the people of God must always choose hope – always, always, always.
A crossroads is also an intersection of ideas and values, where the megaphones of consumerism and political demagoguery lure us down dark, shallow roads, while the still small voice of God quietly invites us to climb higher and to go deeper.
I might just say in passing that, as it turns out, the truest things in life don’t need to be shouted from the rooftops, and because we already know them in our bones, they can be whispered and still be recognized as absolutely true. As Episcopalians, we need to hear that.
The second Bishop of Kansas, Elisha Thomas, wrote in 1892, “I have come to the conclusion that there is but one path left open to me. I must educate my own missionaries.”
One hundred and eighteen years later, in the year of our Lord 2010, it is clear to me that if we are to have the leadership necessary to “secure the path to tomorrow,” if we are to guarantee the vibrant presence of the Episcopal Church for the next 100, 200, 300 years in Kansas, we will need to have the ability to train our own lay leaders, deacons and priests. Creating educated and empowered leadership is the key to almost every single strategy we have for growth and evangelism in this diocese.
Everywhere I go, Vestry members, deacons, priests, even youth group members all have the same question. They all ask, “How can our church grow?”
It’s actually a complex question that invites a series of responses, but to begin simply, I believe the key to church growth is directing our precious resources to the place where they are most desperately needed.
The key to church growth is developing highly motivated and highly trained leaders in every order (lay, deacon and priest), and the key to developing highly motivated and highly trained leaders in every order is developing an excellent school where these values and these traditions are faithfully taught.
I knew even before I was elected your bishop, like most of you knew, that whoever was elected the ninth bishop of Kansas would need to raise new resources to do ministry in this diocese. With the exception of a partially completed campaign for campus ministries, no diocesanwide capital campaign had taken place in the Diocese of Kansas in the past 30 years.
And so we began.
For eight months, from February until September of 2008, a group of clergy and lay leaders from around the diocese met with more than 300 leaders in the diocese to present an initial vision for the Kansas School for Ministry and to hear what the people of Kansas had to say in response.
As it turned out, you had a lot to say, and we learned a tremendous amount from those conversations. The initial vision began to evolve, and our plans were dramatically revised as a result of our conversations with all of you. As it turns out, the people of Kansas weren’t all that interested in a diocesan center with a school thrown in. The people of Kansas were interested in a first-rate leadership and theological training center with some space for the diocesan staff thrown in. We got it. We got it.
With the unanimous vote of the Council of Trustees, on Sept. 23, 2008, we hired a respected stewardship and fundraising firm, RSI, to coach us through a capital campaign to build a leadership center, to endow the faculty for the school and to tithe 10 cents of every dollar raised toward outreach. We weren’t going to do anything without caring for the least, the lost and those whom Jesus loves.
We were set, and I might say, we were looking good.
Less than one week after we signed our contract with RSI, the stock market lost $1.2 trillion in value, with the Dow dropping 7 percent and the Standard and Poor 500 dropping 9 percent. The situation quickly evolved into the worst financial crisis in our nation since the Great Depression.
What now? What do we do? A moment of truth!
Well, we panicked (okay, I panicked, but only for a little bit), and then we prayed and we planned and we recalculated.
And then we did what Kansans always do. We did what Christians always do. We got up, we dusted ourselves off and we climbed back into the saddle. We believed then as we believe now that God had called us to something that is not finally dependent upon the financial news of the day.
We put our contract with RSI on hold between October 2008 and February 2009 and used that time to gather a capital campaign leadership team (including an invaluable prayer committee). We wrote a fresh case for support, and we formed an initial building committee. We identified an architect and began to discuss preliminary drawings. We just kept moving forward, step by step by step. We worked with a construction company to clarify our building costs, and we discovered our original working goal of $4 million would not cover the costs of the leadership center and the endowment for the KSM faculty we needed. So with faithful audacity, we moved the working goal to $6 million, and we took the next step.
We reengaged with RSI in November 2009 and visited with hundreds of members of the diocese to talk about what we were developing. Meanwhile, our canon theologian, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Grosso, along with a talented team of educators, began to revision the Kansas School for Ministry. We rethought the curriculum and the course schedule and developed one-, three-, five- and 10-year goals.
The Kansas School for Ministry, version 2.0, reopened in 2008 with seven students in three groups, 11 courses and eight instructors. By the 2009-2010 academic year, we had 14 students in four groups, 20 courses, 13 instructors, and we had three graduates.
This wasn’t some theory we had. This was a real school!
Now, we know there will always be a need for residentially trained priests, and as many of you know, it took me some time to agree with Bishop Thomas’s vision about training clergy locally. I wanted the best, the finest, lay and ordained leadership possible for our diocese, and initially I believed that goal could only be achieved through our existing seminaries.
But in a diocese where half of our parishes are served by part-time and non-stipendiary clergy, in a diocese where we take the notion of empowered lay leadership seriously, the need for local leadership training became imperative.
People who are willing and able to serve a parish without pay are neither willing nor able to sustain the debt that accompanies a contemporary three-year residential seminary degree, nor are they able to be away from their jobs and families for the length of time such study requires.
The closest Episcopal seminary to our diocese is in Austin, Texas, and this does not make for an easy commute. Additionally, we find that when people are trained in the hills of Berkeley, California, or the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where I was trained, there’s a certain degree of retraining necessary before candidates for ordination are prepared to do their best work in the unique context that is Kansas.
In a time when so many efforts in the church are being scaled back and so many visions are compromised and in retreat, we have a vision for the Kansas School for Ministry that remains undaunted. Simply put, building on a firm foundation laid by those who came before us, we plan to build the finest diocesan-based school in the Episcopal Church. Period.
You see:
• The Kansas School for Ministry is the strategy for smaller, rural churches who can’t afford to pay a seminary-trained priest a full-time salary (along with pension and health care costs), and who would benefit enormously from having teams of one or two local priests, two deacons and a cadre of trained lay leaders.
• The Kansas School for Ministry is the strategy for growing suburban parishes who would like to add additional clergy to help their parishes grow, but who need to invest limited resources in a variety of other mission initiatives.
• The Kansas School for Ministry is the strategy for larger, established parishes who need highly trained lay leaders for children, youth and young adult ministries, music ministries and the like, but who are finding it difficult to effectively train such leaders.
• The Kansas School for Ministry is the strategy for more extensive Christian education for our adults, many of whom belong to parishes in our diocese who find it difficult to offer in-depth biblical and theological education for their members.
• The Kansas School for Ministry is the strategy for developing better continuing education for our clergy. Every deacon, priest and bishop resident in the Episcopal Church is mandated by canon to participate in annual continuing education programs, and the Kansas School for Ministry will be the educational resource providing innovative continuing education locally, at prices clergy (and their parishes) can afford to pay.
• The Kansas School for Ministry is the strategy for increasing the number of deacons available to serve in this diocese, and this is crucial. Over the past several years, we have lost a number of our deacons to illness and death, and we have called several others to the priesthood because we desperately needed their skills in that order. We need to reinvigorate the diaconate in this diocese, an order that has played such an integral part in leading our outreach ministries.
Of course, the Kansas School for Ministry is not a new initiative. We’ve been training lay and ordained persons in the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas for years, and many of KSM’s earliest graduates have gone on to distinguish themselves in service to Christ and the church.
What is new is the level of academic expertise we expect to be able to bring through the faculty in this moment. Eight of our current faculty members hold Ph.D.s, two faculty members have earned Doctor of Ministry degrees, and the remainder of the faculty hold Masters of Divinity degrees from some the finest seminaries in the Anglican Communion.
What is new is the academic rigor we hope to be able to provide in balance with practical field training experience, making certain the Kansas School for Ministry is not simply a last-chance alternative to a seminary education, but an outstanding theological education in its own right.
Over the past couple of years I’ve wondered if this moment would ever come, but I have to tell you this is one of the most exciting moments in my episcopate.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, it is with high and hearty thanks to our gracious God and the generosity of the people of this diocese that I stand before this Diocesan Convention to announce that we now have commitments for $2.2 million (applause).
We have several other gifts in the final stages of decision-making. In other words, we are now at the point where we can bring this effort to the full attention of every member of the diocese.
So we are asking every single person in this diocese – every vestry member, every small group, every men’s or women’s group, every Bible study, every altar guild, every deacon, every priest – to help us raise the remaining $3.8 million needed for this effort, which will positively affect every single member of the diocese.
It took us a year and a half to develop our vision and to raise one million dollars from fewer than 24 people. It took us two months to raise the second million dollars from an additional 47 generous people.
And I firmly believe we will raise the remaining $3.8 million from the 11,929 Episcopalians who have not yet been asked to participate in this effort, and we will do so in time to celebrate the successful completion of this campaign at next year’s 152nd Diocesan Convention.
This represents the largest fundraising venture ever in this diocese, and because of our tithe to mission, it will result in the largest amount of money raised exclusively for outreach in the history of the diocese, some $600,000.
If it were entirely up to us, I wouldn’t be so confident about our chances for success. But if God wants this school to be built, then I believe nothing on heaven or earth will be able to stop it. Not stock markets, not our own inability to let go of our hard-earned money, not our lack of faith – nothing. Nothing. Nothing will keep us from achieving this goal, if God seeks it to be so. I love the Haitian prayer which goes something like, “Lord, there is a big devil called discouragement. We ask you to send him away, because he is bothering us!”
Writer Margaret Wheatley tells the story about Yitzhak Perlman, the great violinist, who was playing a concert in New York.
Yitzhak Perlman was crippled by polio as a young child, so the bottom part of his body doesn’t work well, and he wears these very prominent leg braces and comes in on crutches, in a very painfully slow way, hauling himself across the stage. Then he sits down and, very carefully, unbuckles the leg braces and lays them down, puts down his crutches and then picks up his violin.
So this night, the audience had watched him slowly, painfully, walk across the stage, and he began to play.
And suddenly, there was a loud noise in the hall that signaled that one of his four strings on his violin had just snapped.
Everyone expected that they would be watching Yitzhak Perlman put back the leg braces, walk slowly back across the stage and find a new violin. But this is what happened.
Yitzhak Perlman closed his eyes for a moment. Yitzhak Perlman paused. And then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. And he began from where they had left off. And here’s the description of his playing from Jack Riemer in the Houston Chronicle:
“He played with such passion and such power, and such purity, as people had never heard before. Of course, everyone knew that it was impossible to play this symphonic work with three strings. I know that. You know that. But that night, Yitzhak Perlman did not know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.
“When he finished, there was an awe-filled silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. Everyone was screaming and cheering and doing everything they could to show how much we appreciated what he had just done.
“He smiled. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He raised his bow to us. And then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet and reverent tone, ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.’”
That is our task, we who stand at the crossroads of this sacred moment. Let us discover just how much music we can still make with what we have left.
Let’s not be discouraged by small churches, by tasks that seem overwhelming. Let’s not be discouraged by the things that confront us that seem insurmountable.
Let’s see what we can do with what we have left.
“Thus says the LORD: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”