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Making all things new
Address to the 152nd convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas
By the Right Reverend Dean E. Wolfe, D.D., Ninth Bishop of Kansas
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. Amen.
It is a great joy to have Archbishop Chama with us, a man who is no stranger to preaching the gospel in tough times and in difficult places. And it is a great joy to have the Rev. Bob Honeychurch with us, who hails from Montana and knows something about what it is to preach the Good News on the prairie.
It is great to have both of you here, and it’s a delight to have all of you here. If you’re a bishop you travel around the diocese, coming to a parish on Sunday and seeing people you haven’t seen in a while, having the opportunity to worship together and pray together, having the opportunity to joke around at coffee hour and find out what’s going on. It is such a joy to see so many of you in one room. And that’s why we do this. We think it’s important to gather together once a year, all of us together, to take counsel with one another, to invoke the Holy Spirit on the work that we do, and to remind us that we’re not just on our own. Sometimes it feels that way. Sometimes you think you’re doing it all on your own; you’re all by yourself, and there’s nobody but you and maybe God that knows what’s going on. But that’s not how the Episcopal Church works. That’s not how we’re structured. In the Episcopal Church we are really one church in 46 locations. We are one church with 46 different expressions of community. We are one church with a lot of different ideas and a lot of different opinions. We don’t agree on much of anything, except the fact that those of us who are here are just determined to figure out what God is calling us to do together.
It’s great to see all of you.
The words of John’s Revelation are as stunning as they are unfamiliar. Apocalyptic literature is a strange and foreign tongue to us, and it does not invite easy comprehension.
And yet, and yet, there is something compelling, something that bids us closer, something in these words from the most misunderstood and misinterpreted book of the Bible that invites us to listen for a fresh word from the Lord in a dynamic moment in our history.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’”
Trustworthy and true, indeed.
When I was asked by the Bishop’s Search Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas about my understanding of Holy Scripture, I said that for me, the ancient stories of the Bible were not merely true, they were truer than true. The Word of God is an unparalleled category of truth that stands unique among all the other sources of truth.
“See, I am making all things new.”
We took these words to be our theme for this, the 152nd convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, because we believe they are not merely true; they are truer than true. We took these words as our theme in a year of extraordinary change and transition. We took these words in a moment when financial peril lurks around every corner, when politics are deeply polarizing and polarized.
We took these words in a moment when people continue to ponder the viability of the Christian endeavor and at a time when the whole Christian enterprise can feel like it is on the ropes, and when the Episcopal Church can look fragile and unsustainable.
We took these words as our theme because we believe they are truer than true. We believe the God who was crucified, died and was buried also rose from the grave and will come again. And we believe this God is more powerful than death. All death. Any death. Every death. Physical death. Symbolic death. Financial death. National death.
“He will dry every tear from our eyes, and death will be no more.” All death. Any death. Every death. Emotional death. Theological death. Spiritual death. Institutional death.
“See, I am making all things new.”
The light of the Resurrection is always piercing the darkness of Good Friday. And the key to understanding this passage of scripture is the realization that if God is making all things new, he is making you new! If God is making all things new, it means God is making me new. It means God is picking up and transforming every single thing in creation, including this Anglican Communion, this Episcopal Church, this Diocese of Kansas and every single parish, mission, ministry and person within it.
Haven’t you been sensing something? Haven’t you been feeling an unfamiliar wind blowing through your own life, through your own ministry? What did you think that was? Where did you think this Spirit would take you? Where did you think this Spirit would take God’s church?
If crisis is the father of opportunity and necessity the mother of invention, then we are in no shortage of parental help!
Let me outline some of the “opportunities” with which we are currently challenged and blessed. I’m heading for nine years as your bishop, and about the sixth year I started to be candid! By eight years, you’re telling the whole truth. So let me share this with love and in complete candor.
Let me outline these opportunities, these blessings, these challenges.
We are right up against it at Saint Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Lawrence. A wonderful community of faith, Saint Margaret’s was led by a charismatic rector who made it a cornerstone of his ministry to minimize the importance of the parish’s connection to the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas and its identity as an Episcopal church. When that rector left, there was a large, new and beautiful building, but there also was an unfinished capital campaign and significant debt. A difficult interim period resulted in greater focus for the future but significantly fewer members. And now a smaller parish of deeply committed Episcopalians, led by a very faithful priest, struggles to overcome significant obstacles, and the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas struggles right with it, to find the right balance of, on the one hand, providing support but on the other hand, trying to figure out how this parish can be self-sustaining.
We are right up against it in terms of several other parishes in the diocese. Saint Christopher’s in Wichita is in a period of prayerful discernment about its future as a parish, and several of our other parishes are right on the edge of viability. Shifting population patterns, aging congregations, a lack of local vision, and perhaps not enough hands-on oversight from your bishop, have placed us in a position where we will need to reevaluate the sustainability of several parishes in the next year or two.
Saint Paul’s in Kansas City has a new rector and a fresh plan for the future, but it’s not going to be easy to turn that situation around. Now, am I speaking the truth here?
We are right up against it in terms of our new church start in Spring Hill. We are excited about the growth and the progress we see the faithful people of Saint Clare’s have made, but they will need to continue to bear more and more of the burden of their expenses so we can concentrate on planting additional communities of faith.
“I am making all things new.”
We are right up against it in terms of our capital campaign to raise money for the Kansas School for Ministry. We have approximately $3.4 million raised for the Kansas School for Ministry, which is a significant accomplishment by any standard. At last year’s convention I said, “We are asking every single person in this diocese – every vestry member, every small group, every men’s or women’s group, 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 this diocese.”
But in all honesty, not every single person, not every vestry member, not every small group, not every men’s or women’s group, not every altar guild member, not every deacon and not every priest, has contributed their time, tithe and talents to the fullest capacity to help us reach this crucial, crucial goal. We all agree on the goal. We all see what will happen if we do not train lay leaders, deacons and priests locally for service in the Diocese of Kansas and beyond, but we have not yet sacrificed equally to achieve what we have said we believe God is calling us to do.
This being said, there still is time to push through to our goals, and I will be talking to every leader of every parish to make certain this opportunity does not slip through our grasp. I have said it before and I will say it again. There is no more important priority for this diocese, and there is nothing that should push this initiative to the side burner in your parish. We are one church in 46 locations in the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, and we really need to start acting like an Episcopal Church and not like some loosely connected confederation of autonomous, independent-led congregations. We have seen the results of that attitude; we know as much about that as any diocese in the United States and beyond – most notably at Christ Church, Overland Park – and it does not lead to “a new heaven and a new earth.”
You see, parishes live or die because of faithful, skilled, gifted leadership, and in a world when God is “making all things new,” we cannot hold onto the old patterns of decay and death.
We are right up against it in terms of our diocesan budget. I honestly believe we have assembled the finest diocesan staff to ever serve the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas. That may be bragging, but as we used to say in Texas, “It isn’t bragging of you can do it.” I often say that, as a diocese, we compete regularly and successfully above our weight class. And I believe you would need to look at dioceses with much deeper resources and many, many more staff members to find a diocese that gives more effective support to its parishes and missions.
But given changes in the economy and the inability of several parishes to contribute their budgeted mission share, we just don’t have the level of financial support from our parishes to maintain this level of service. We will need to creatively rethink what we are doing as a diocese and how we can best serve the needs of our parishes and people, while staying within the constraints of our resources.
We should not, and we will not, continue to spend more than we take in. We consistently operate under budget, but we’ve been consistently not receiving budgeted amounts. This year’s budget is the last budget that will leverage our endowments so significantly, and the Finance Committee, working with the Council of Trustees, will be working on innovative ways to more carefully utilize our precious resources.
If “all things are being made new,” then every structure, every old way of doing things, will need to be reevaluated, reviewed and revolutionized. We join the wider Episcopal Church and virtually every other diocese I know of as we undertake these changes. At the House of Bishops meeting in Quito, there was not a bishop in the room who wasn’t working through a reorganization, in the midst of thinking about one or working at the end of having made such a transition.
The Church Center, both in New York and in offices around the country, has undergone massive change and will continue to be adapted to more effectively provide mission and ministry in Christ’s name.
The Episcopal Diocese of Kansas, I would be quick to say, has always, and often sacrificially, given our full mission share of 21 percent to the wider church for mission and ministry. But I think we’re wondering, is this the best allocation of resources, and are there better to expend this money? The Church Center is working very hard and very sincerely on finding creative solutions to this, and I will be working with them as we work to find out way through these questions. I trust God will continue to raise us to new and abundant life in Christ.
Now, we have some extraordinary ministries in the diocese. I think most of you know these, but let me take just a moment to talk about some of the things I think we do very well.
If you look at the mission plan for this year, you will find that a lot of the money we spend as a diocese collectively goes to youth ministry, campus ministry – we have a real emphasis on young people. I believe we have an extraordinary staff doing extraordinary work in these areas. We’re also beginning to recognize, I think, the international character not only of our church but even in the Diocese of Kansas. We may be a long way from the coasts, but there’s not anywhere you can go in Kansas where you don’t hear Spanish spoken, where you don’t hear other languages, with people from other parts of the world gathered.
The Episcopal Church in Kansas will need to be more and more attuned to this wave of immigrants, because we believe we are welcoming, and we believe we have something to welcome these people to.
The Kansas to Kenya program is a model. It’s Kansas to Kenya and Kenya to Kansas – K2K. We give to them, and they give to us. We have been richly rewarded by our involvement in this ministry. Here’s an example of a little bragging. For a 12,000-member diocese, 46 churches in the middle of Kansas – more than $1 million in aid, in care, in time, tithe and talent, has been given to the Diocese of Kenya in the past year or so. You won’t find much of that in the diocesan budget, I’ll tell you. That’s collaborative work, that’s the hard work of individuals, deacons and priests, people committed to sharing God’s love with the world. And that is something that is quite extraordinary.
We have a number of parishes in the diocese committed to work in Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere, a country in great need. We have long tradition of mission in that country, and we’re going to have to redouble our efforts, because they need our help now more than ever. We’re going to have be streamlined and reorganized and do every bit as much in Haiti as we’ve been able to do in the past year in Kenya.
Other than being elected the Bishop of Kansas, probably the greatest honor I’ve ever received is being elected by the House of Bishops to serve as Vice President of the House. That process has had me travel to Zambia, where I met Archbishop Chama for the first time, before he was an archbishop – he was just a regular bishop. I had a chance to see the vibrancy of the Anglican Church in Zambia as they celebrated a hundred years of an Anglican presence in that country. And you could see it. You could feel it. Those people were on fire for Christ, and it was contagious.
I spent time this summer in Maai Mahiu in Kenya with a number of our college students, working with Kenyan college students. They almost killed me. They were building stone houses – I am too old to build stone houses! But what an extraordinary experience, and we were reminded of the love and the bonds of affection that we share in the Anglican Communion. We disagree on all kinds of things, we have very different cultures, but we love one another. We are of very different minds bit of the same heart.
I was in York, England, meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury and his staff, and the gathered bishops and lay leaders of the Church of England, and I was reminded of a very important connection we have to the Anglican Communion and to our brothers and sisters in our mother country.
This past week in Quito, Ecuador, Don Compier, who is with us today, was speaking before the House of Bishops explaining liberation theology and Latin American theology to a House of Bishops meeting outside of their comfort zone. 9,000 feet of altitude is not good for 60-year-old bishops. But it was an extraordinary experience to see that very vibrant church in that place and to be reminded that we are the Episcopal Church in Ecuador, we’re the Episcopal Church in Colombia, we’re the Episcopal Church in Taiwan, we’re the Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Northern California, Texas, Montana and Oklahoma. We are a very diverse body of Christians.
I asked Ellen, when we were in Quito, looking at the beautiful mountains where we were meeting, if she ever thought in her wildest dreams that I would be the Vice President of the House of Bishops. And she said, “Honey, you’re not in my wildest dreams.”
We’ve got a long way to go. At this next general Convention we will struggle with same-gender blessings. This diocese is not of one mind on that topic, but I believe we are of one heart. We have worked long for many years to try to find accommodations for people with a variety of thoughts on this topic. I have said that I felt it was the role of the Diocese of Kansas to be in the midst of the church. I thought Bishop Smalley had acted outside the authority of the office of bishop in moving before the church, but I will make sure we do not move behind the church. This diocese will move in sync with the rest of the church, and in communication and cooperation with the Anglican Communion.
These will be very difficult things to sort out, and I look forward to our Gathering of Presbyters meeting in a couple of weeks, to talk to the presbyters about the policies we will try to implement if the General Convention does approve these blessings. We sort of know where we’re headed; the question for me is how many people can we bring along? How much accommodation do we bring for those who disagree? How much safety can we provide for those who have waited patiently for far too long to receive blessings from the church? And how can we comfort those who feel the church is making a terrible mistake in taking these actions? As bishop I’m going to stay up late and get up early, with that time spent in prayer, because I believe the Holy Spirit’s guidance will be the thing that leads us through.
I read an article not long ago By Martin Smith about the three postures of a bishop, and he took his inspiration from walking around Washington, D.C. He said the bishop is seated, not unlike FDR seated in his wheelchair. Seated, the bishop is in communication, the bishop teaches, the bishop listens. Then the bishop is standing, very much like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. The bishop has a particular perspective and stands to speak, stands to oversee, stands to be prophetic. And then Martin walked by the Holocaust Museum, and he as reminded that there are times when the bishop is silent. And he remembered that it was Irenaeus who said, “Be very afraid when the bishop is silent, because you never know what will come of that.”
I will be taking a sabbatical at the end of this year, where I spend some time in silence, and I will tell you more about that as plans become clearer. But I believe that bishops do sit and teach, when they work together. There are times when they must stand and proclaim sometimes very difficult things. In these next couple of years I think you will hear that proclamation coming from my office, but I hope you will also pray with me when I am silent, when I have not yet made up my mind or when I do not yet feel that the Spirit has moved so that we can go collaboratively together, moving in sync with one another.
When Jesus called Lazarus from that dark tomb, he had no doubt that his friend would come staggering out into the bright sunlight, still wrapped in his burial linens. “Come forth. Come forth.” It was a bold call. We are coming forth in the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas – in committed youth ministries, in creative campus ministries, in a bold church plant, in very creative ministries done in every parish in this diocese – Bible studies, worship, music, children’s ministries, youth ministries, outreach ministries, feeding ministries, in conflict resolution, in strategic planning, and in better and deeper stewardship.
And it is said, “And the one who is seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” The light of the Resurrection is always piercing the darkness of Good Friday. And the key to understanding this passage of scripture is the realization that if God is making all things new, he is making you new. If God is making all things new, it means God is making me new. It means God is picking up and transforming every single thing in creation, including this Anglican Communion, this Episcopal Church, this Diocese of Kansas and every single parish, every single mission and person within it.
Thank you.