New Beginnings 59 February 24-26, 2023

Living Hope – Bishop’s Address 2024

Beloved in Christ,

We gather in convention celebrating our living hope in a risen savior as we continue to work on discerning how the Spirit is leading us into the future.

Since we last met in convention in Augusta, that city has been hit hard by Hurricane Helene. As I said in my sermon this morning, the aftermath showed Episcopalians serving their neighbors including at Saint Paul’s where our previous convention Eucharist was celebrated and the Byllesby Center which is supported significantly by Good Shepherd where the convention met in the school gym. While many of us have been able to move on, it will be quite a while before many people in Central and South Georgia can say their lives are back to normal. Crisis reveals what is already present in a community and the Hurricane revealed the faith and resilience of our people and communities.

Since that gathering, I made 50 visitations to congregations, as well as visiting Episcopal Day School and our campus ministry at Georgia Southern, for 52 of the 69 visitations that make up an 18-month cycle of visits. I also had the privilege of officiating seven ordinations since we last met in convention and the honor of serving in the funerals for priests of this Diocese and the funeral for Bishop Harry Shipps’ beloved wife, Louise, who was herself long woven into the fabric of the Diocese of Georgia.

In my address last year, I called for a strategic planning process and said, “I pledge to you that I will take the time to listen ever more in this coming year through a process that reveals our common goals.”

Since then, I worked with the Executive Council of our Diocesan Council to select Armstrong, McGuire, and Associates to guide that work. As you heard from Mendi Nieters and Todd Brantley, they interviewed more than 16 people one-on-one, held 10 in-person and online listening sessions with 215 participants, and conducted a survey to learn more; nearly 500 of you answered that call. We will use a session this afternoon and another tomorrow to further the discernment toward that plan. I also said last year in my address, “I look forward to the journey of discovery and to the ways God will use the process of creating a strategic plan to reveal what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in this moment.”

Through these meetings, those of you who attended will know of the great hope within those meetings. There is a strong sense that we are connected to one another in meaningful ways. There are also lots of you who want to step forward and help so that what we accomplish together is not just bishop and staff driven, but will increasingly be you, the people of the Diocese, making new connections and assisting others in your area or even across the Diocese in ways that make a huge impact. Mendi and Todd told me that compared to other similar groups what stood out in the Diocese of Georgia is how many people know and care about each other, how connected we are and want to be. They also noted how we didn’t long for more money as the answer to everything, but we see that we need to be faithful to how the Spirit is leading us and we will see that we already have who and what we need to thrive.

One way this is true for me is seeing that we already had an elegant solution possible for using the property we already own in ways that will unlock more mission. In the first quarter of 2025, we will be moving the diocesan offices to a new Episcopal Center on the corner of Washington and Waters Avenues in Savannah. That move is waiting on an extensive renovation effort funded by the sale of the former rectory adjoining the building. The location is the former home of St. Michael and All Angels in Savannah. The benefits of the new location include having more ample parking and better, more accessible meeting spaces for diocesan gatherings while maintaining existing ministry services in the area including operating a food pantry and providing space for community groups to gather. Additionally, the worship space will become a diocesan chapel that can still be used by the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, while also being available when helpful to the Diocese. Mostly, this move emphasizes ministries happening concurrently in the same space, while offering the potential for much more. This change will also add to the diocesan budget through a sustainable additional draw which will create additional opportunities for us to adapt.

This decision is not about money. This move is about focusing on what matters most. Worship is the heart of ministry and so all of our congregations matter. The work of your bishop and diocesan staff is also important ministry as is feeding our neighbors in need and otherwise engaging with the community around us. I look forward to welcoming you all to this new center for our ministry in midtown Savannah.

One critical place for us to discern together is with our retreat center, it is time for us to find a new way forward. We can’t keep trying harder to make our current model of running Honey Creek work. If trying harder at the same thing would yield a sustainable future, we would already be there. There are no two people who work harder than Dade Brantley and GeorgeAnne Younger. If they can’t make this work, then something has to change. I am convinced that if we were to lose this parish hall of the Diocese, the next owners would turn a profit on that piece of property. Yet, we have within the networks of our Diocese, people who can assist us in a way that makes that asset work for us. To that end, I am taking three steps to address this directly and I am asking you to support me as we move in this direction.

First, I have added a $50,000 line item to the diocesan budget for Honey Creek support. This is in addition to staff costs we already pay from the diocesan budget. I do this as we have been supporting the Honey Creek budget as needed since the lockdown of the pandemic and it is the honest approach to name that reality. This will assist us in literally buying time in 2025 for the next two parts of the plan.

Second, I am making changes in our staffing to meet the expressed needs of the Diocese. I will get to that shortly as I share the ways that I am beginning to respond to the feedback I have gotten through the strategic planning process. While those staffing decisions are not made for the sake of Honey Creek, they will enable us to hold more events for both adults and youth at Honey Creek in 2025. These events will be repeated in future years. They will have the Diocese using our retreat center more often.

Third and most important, I told the Diocesan Council in our meeting in September that I will appoint a Task Group of the next Council to take a prayerful, in-depth look at Honey Creek. Task Groups of Council have, since I became your bishop, been a way to gather expertise to address some key concerns. This is part of how we are unlocking the potential within our diocesan community with more people stepping forward to lead, just as you named in the listening session.

We have been using Task Groups to completely revised our Constitution and Canons, addressed our Companion Diocese relationship, looked at our means of assessing congregations, and recommended changes to the schedule for our diocesan conventions. In the past year, a Task Group has been considering the cottage the Diocese has owned in Saluda, North Carolina since the early 1900s as a place for clergy and lay leaders to have relatively inexpensive time away in the mountains. This group, led by the Very Rev. Tom Purdy did some commendable work to look at this property from all sides. That work will continue in the coming year. It demonstrated to the Council the type of work we can do with Honey Creek to either find a sustainable path forward or to admit that we don’t have one. It is time for this realistic appraisal of what it means to own and operate a camp and retreat center. I believe that these three steps taken together—budget support and increasing diocesan usage in 2025 while we empower a group to do some hard work on behalf of all of us—will chart a path for the coming years, one way or another. We owe this change in approach to future generations of the Diocese and to Dade and GeorgeAnne who pour their hearts into keeping Honey Creek operating.

As I have been getting feedback from the listening sessions and the survey, I have seen the direction the Diocese wishes to move. While there is more to hear, I already see clearly the ways in which the diocesan staff has to be more responsive to you, the people of the Diocese. There are two tiers in the Diocese—those who know staff well and have no trouble getting what they need from staff and those who don’t know who to call or how to learn where to go for help. This is not based on the size of a congregation, but the familiarity with the team. This cannot continue. To address this, I am taking a multi-pronged approach. We are making which staff to call for what is more readily evident on the website. We will also have a complete website redesign in 2025 with the sole goal of making it easier for you to find who you need and what you need. In addition, our phone system now lets a caller more easily reach the person you need. Additionally, I know that I need a Chief of Staff as my travel schedule has me away from the office enough that the staff needs a leader who is with them when I am traveling. Some other changes on staff are taking some responsibilities off of Canon Loren Lasch’s load and I am naming her the Canon to the Ordinary and Chief of Staff. This acknowledges some of what has already been a part of her work with the staff and leaning into it more.

As I have noted, I was gratified to learn that many of you who took part experienced the same sense of connection to something larger that I have long enjoyed in the Diocese of Georgia. But not everyone is benefitting from that, so that I also see how we need to add to our sense of connection with more ways to support one another.

In learning the general idea of what was said in the one-on-one interviews, the listening sessions, and then in survey responses, I see that we need a member of the diocesan staff to assist me in increasing the opportunities for connection. To do this, I need someone who knows and loves the congregations, clergy, and lay leaders, while having top-notch project management skills. I could see that we already have this in Canon Joshua Varner. He has agreed to take on a change in his work for the Diocese to become our Canon for Congregational Vitality. His work will be to increase the connections within the diocese in support of our lay leaders and clergy. For example, this will include an offering each February to bring Senior Wardens together online to meet with me and staff and to get an introduction to what the Diocese can do for churches of every size. He will also be bringing back the one-day training we offered in each convocation to develop capacity in our church leaders. This will be just part of the ways we engage more at the convocation level with increased connection. Canon Varner will also add to the Lay Leaders’ Retreat with some other events at Honey Creek including training for Lay Worship Leaders and Lay Preachers who can effectively lead worship for their church when a priest is not present. I am confident that we can create a community among those leading worship that will strengthen what we offer on Sundays when there is not a Eucharist. We have gifted followers of Jesus who are not called to the priesthood, but who can offer engaging sermons and Spirit-filled worship. We need to support those already doing this work and invite others to join in. This is how I want to build on the strength that y’all named in the strategic planning process as Joshua’s role is to assist you, the people of the Diocese, in stepping up to assist others.

This change for Joshua means that he will be stepping away from his work with youth ministries. I am incredibly grateful for his many years of dedication to the youth of the Diocese of Georgia! Moving forward, we will need a new person to lead our critical work with youth. Youth ministry is vitally important, not because youth are the future of the church. Youth are the church now. And we all know how much these years matter. It is a miracle people get out of middle school and high school with any shred of self-esteem. Most people sometime between the age of 10 and 25 pick up emotional wounds that will remain festering and seeping poison into their psyches unless they can find healing. At 40, they remember the name of the bully in sixth grade and at 50, they recall the friend who gossiped and betrayed them. In youth programs, we get to be alongside our kids and teens during these years offering them the sure and certain knowledge that God loves them. Mendy Grant has accepted my invitation to chair a committee made up of experienced youth leaders and more importantly, with teens on the committee assisting in designing what comes next for our Diocesan Youth Ministry. That group will be named in the coming weeks and begin their work with an in-person meeting at Honey Creek. During the interim, Liz Williams will keep Happening running and assist Karen Bell with New Beginnings; we will also assist Karen in her directing summer camp; and I will ask some youth leaders to plan and carry out some additional events even as we create a position description and hire someone to do this essential ministry.

I was surprised and delighted when our search for a new Canon for Administration ended with Andrew Austin accepting this call. He has already demonstrated as Treasurer his focus on the mission of the church as driving our sense of what it means to be effective. In his new role he will continue to help us ask the important questions surrounding our ministry: Are the ways in which we are deploying our resources resulting in more people coming to experience faith in Jesus, are those who already are in our pews encouraged and offered ways to deepen their faith, and are we reaching out to our communities to share that love with others?

With Daniel Garrick choosing to step down as Assistant Administrator, we have a vacant staff position. We will not fill that yet, but the existing team will work together to cover the responsibilities through the end of the year. We will listen to what emerges from this convention and we will notice the gaps that need staff support. Then we will be in a position to decide how to best staff the Diocese with your needs in mind.

In order to keep you informed about the ways in which I have heard you and am beginning to respond, this address has focused a lot on Honey Creek and Diocesan Staff. But these are the levers at hand for me to begin to shift us in the direction that you named that is built on a desire to better be there for one another. I trust that you know that my real focus is not to make an institution more effective, as important as that is. The Diocese only matters to the degree it supports the Body of Christ in this corner of the vineyard. My goal, your diocesan staff’s goal, is to support you and your congregations for the purpose of bringing glory to God and bringing more people into a relationship with Jesus.

In every community where we have a church, we are surrounded by people who still need the grace, mercy, and love found only in Jesus. They need this more than they need air and water and yet they are sure that the one place where they won’t find that vital is in a church as they have been hurt by the church or only seen Christians as hypocritical. The world is not waiting for us to get our act together and so come flocking through our doors. We have to do what is necessary in inviting new people to worship with us, welcoming newcomers as if welcoming Jesus and then connecting them to the Body of Christ in our congregations. This is the work of every generation as we pass our faith on to those who will follow. We know that fewer people in younger generations are attending church. If we don’t work now to connect with them, they won’t find their way to the faith that nourishes us. That is an avoidable tragedy. For we know that our neighbors need Jesus as much as we do. We are to be faithful now as those who founded our churches were in their day. We know that the Holy Spirit has done not only the difficult, but also the seemingly impossible before and can and surely will do it again.

We have a living hope in a risen savior and this is no time to shrink back from the challenges before us, for greater is the one that is in us than the one that is in the world. As your chief priest and pastor, I find myself, as always, extremely grateful to be with you on this team.

Amen.

November 8 2024

Living Hope: Sermon for the 203rd Convention Holy Eucharist

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church Tifton, Georgia on November 8, 2024 for the 203rd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.

Living Hope
1 Peter 1:3-9 and Luke 24:13-35

The shepherd is out on the dusty road in the shank of the day, rounding up not one, but two lost sheep. He is seven miles beyond the old stone walls of Jerusalem. The Shepherd knows where to find these two who are wandering further from the flock. He expected this. He had spoken those words from the Prophet Zechariah hours earlier at Passover in an Upper Room, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.”

Now, Jesus joins Cleopas and the unnamed other disciple on the road. They are in the depths of despair as they walk toward Emmaus. Neither of these first followers of Jesus know this seeming stranger on the road to be their Rabbi. This lack of recognition reveals the way despair clouds our vision and hinders us from seeing rightly.

Jesus asks them what has transpired this Passover as if he doesn’t have a clue. Cleopas and the other disciple tell Jesus about how the one they thought was the Messiah had been put to death and then add, “Some women from our group have l

eft us stunned. They went to the tomb early this morning and didn’t find his body. They came to us saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who told them he is alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women said. They didn’t see him.”

Despite Jesus’ having prepared the group traveling with him by telling them in advance what would happen, they were unprepared for Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. The devastating pain of Friday’s grief had made it feel impossible to go on. That heartache remains so raw on this Sunday afternoon. These two have heard Jesus’ resurrection proclaimed by the women who described a vision of angels, but as Peter and John found the tomb empty, without seeing Jesus, they remained in anguish.

Despair is diametrically opposed to hope. This is part of the teachings of the great Christian ascetics that we know as the Desert Mothers and Fathers who lived as hermits in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century after Jesus’ resurrection. They named despair as one of what we know as the Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth is how we in the West translated their word which is better translated as Despair.

In Rowan Williams’ Passion of the Soul, which will be our 1Book1Diocese read for this coming Lent, works from this desert wisdom as talks about despair as the difference between Peter and Judas. Both betrayed Jesus. Judas ends his life while in the midst of despair, while Peter makes it through that dark night of the soul to see the risen Jesus and so finds hope renewed.

Despair is the natural condition that arises from looking at the fallen world as it is. We see all the effects of our sin and disobedience to God’s will. We see the painful divisions that we humans have collectively created. Despair is what arises in our spirits when we look realistically at this situation but do so without the hope in a God who acts in human history. Hope sees the world from the godly perspective, knowing that all we see is not all that there is.

I want to pause here to note how the Enlightenment that led to the gifts of modernity also found its way into our faith. The Desert Mothers and Fathers saw the struggle of good and evil playing out not just in their lives as they saw the cosmic struggle of good and evil playing itself out within their own hearts as they sought through their prayers and fasting to overcome temptations. They lived in a world shot through with a sense of transcendence, the knowledge that what we see is not all that exists in the universe as the time we live in is held in eternity.

The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries grew out of the Christian quest for knowledge of the natural world. The very pursuit that Christianity began and encouraged took on a life of its own when the only things that could be claimed as fact were things provable through the scientific method. Don’t hear me as bashing reason though. I love modern medicine and air conditioning. But while Karl Marx was proclaiming Christianity was “an opiate for the masses” and Nietzsche declaring, “God is dead,” the cultural concepts of God were not the only things dying. The whole Enlightenment project itself was beginning to unravel.

For anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, the idea that everything was getting better all the time was revealed to be a lie to those who watched their friends die in the trenches of Europe in the First World War. Any sense that a scientific approach alone could provide a better future died in Auschwitz and incinerated at Hiroshima. We could no longer delude ourselves into believing that science alone could guide us into a better world. We need to be guided by the Spirit of the living God.

Yet, we see how a few centuries of increasingly explaining away faith in rational terms sapped belief of its believability. Science seemed to grow by leaps and bounds, leaving religion tagging along. This put our sense of the world in the box of the immanent, the sense that what I see and know is all that there is to know. Yet our faith in Jesus Christ is both immanent and transcendent. We worship Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” The eternal Word becoming flesh and living among us shows the immanence of God, God is in all things. But unlike in pantheism, where God is identified with the universe, which is a manifestation of the divine, we know that the creator is not contained within the creation. Augustine of Hippo wrote that the divine is both within me and beyond me saying that God is, “more inward than my most inward part, higher than the highest element within me.”

God is in everything, but also beyond all matter, and not is bound by space and time. This is no small thing, as if we lose the sense that God will not show up, then despair makes perfect sense. Yet, we know that the God who made us out of love for love is not standing back like a disinterested clockmaker or an unjust judge. Our transcendent God entered into this broken world in the person of Jesus, to redeem us through his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. This same God is with us in everything we face and yet beyond us, seeing our finite world from the perspective of eternity.

I wanted to add this before we rejoin our trio on the Road to Emmaus as we see both of these aspects of God in this passage. Knowing the immanent God who is present in our hearts and minds as well as the transcendent one who inhabits eternity matters for how we Episcopalians in Central and South Georgia can navigate the coming years for our congregations and how each of us can thrive in our one wild and wonderful life no matter what happens.

On the Road to Emmaus, Jesus offered the best Bible study in human history. He patiently explains how everything he has done was predicted by the prophets which is apparent in the light of the resurrection. The prime example of this is Isaiah 53 that says, “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”

God gave Isaiah the gift of this prophecy so that after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, the church could know that the crucifixion was Divine Providence. That while we were yet sinners, the Messiah would come and die for us. We see that in his teaching after the resurrection, Jesus finally broke through to get his followers to see how this was what was planned all along. In the incarnation, God becoming human in Jesus, was God’s bold plan to enter into the creation to weave back together the fabric of the cosmos, torn by human disobedience and sin. The one who the cosmos could not contain humbled himself and in this we see that the Holy Trinity is not a distant observer, but knows and understands this broken world from the inside. When we experience betrayal, suffering, and crippling grief, we know that God truly understands as Jesus experienced all of this and more.

Jesus does not break into human history with blinding light and an audible voice. Often, I experience God in what could seem like coincidences and yet are clearly something more. One example that comes to mind here at St. Anne’s. When I was assisting Bishop Benhase as Canon to the Ordinary, I was at a meeting with my colleagues in the same position throughout the southeast. We were in Charleston. On the last morning of the meeting, I decided that rather than praying Morning Prayer in my hotel room, I would go to Grace Cathedral to pray. When I got there, a woman was about and to lead a scheduled service of Morning Prayer that I did not know was set to happen. It was just the two of us in the chapel in the back of the cathedral dedicated to their martyred bishop. After praying together, I introduced myself and learned that she was the Cathedral Administrator Emily Guerry. When she learned what I did for a living, she said she was interested in moving to our Diocese to be near her parents, ideally along I-75. I explained that those calls were rare and I didn’t always hear of them, but I promised to listen for any possibilities. The meeting ended later that morning and I drove home to Savannah. Once back, I opened my email to see that the Rev. Lonnie Lacey had written to say the vestry had budgeted money for a top-notch administrator. He wanted assistance in finding the right person. I replied that the Holy Spirit had already taken care of that for us and gave him Emily’s contact information. She interviewed and Emily, Lonnie, and the Vestry could all see that this had been God’s doing. Moments like this cause me to say, “God is showing off.”

There are also the times when someone experiences and unbidden experience of peace or a sense of the oneness of creation that they know is from God. I know firsthand about such experience and second and third hand about so many more. Considering the stigma, many remain silent rather than share what they saw and felt and the long impact a mystical experience has had on their lives. I discovered that if I ask “Have their been any experiences hard to explain to others that have mattered a lot to you?” I will find someone has had a small mystical experience that is significant for them, yet they have trouble sharing as it could easily be dismissed by others.

Our loving God often works in and through the hearts of those who will listen. The Spirit can and does use seemingly small moments like when someone feels they should take a friend to chemotherapy and sit with them or when another person shows up to be with a co-worker after the death of their child. Every time we embody love to a neighbor we don’t just have hope, we are living hope.

We saw what living hope looks like in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Along the storm’s surprising path, Grace Church in Waycross used its existing connection to the Okefenokee Alliance for the Homeless to provide sleeping bags, tents, baby supplies, and more. Annunciation in Vidalia, St. Mary Magdalene in Louisville, Trinity in Statesboro provided gift cards and pastoral care to neighbors who were hurting. In Valdosta church members provided care and support for one another and those in the community impacted by the storm. In Douglas, the people of St. Andrew’s provided meals, including a Thanksgiving feast, gift cards, and pastoral care aided by our friends in the Diocese of Alabama. Saint Paul’s in Augusta opened their hearts to the downtown, even as they welcome people to recharge physically and spiritually through safe air-conditioned space and days of meals. At the Byllesby Center in Augusta, more than 2,000 hot meals were provided together with other support. Episcopalians in Savannah coordinated drop offs to get diapers and feminine products from local nonprofit Over the Moon to some of the hardest hit areas in our diocese. We experienced the generosity of the people in the Diocese of Central Florida in sending aid to Augusta. At Calvary in Americus, they collected support for our friends experiencing the immense tragedy of flooding in Western North Carolina. In each of these acts, we were not holding on to hope, but living hope. This is part of how the transcendent one acts in human history.

Seeing the ways God has broken into your life before gives confidence when looking to an uncertain future. For example, we can look at decline in church participation across the generations and join others in despair. Or we can look to the ways that the living God has been present with us in the past, is with us now, and already holds the future. That perspective makes it possible to be both realistic about where we are and what we face while remaining hopeful about the future. Whatever causes us to despair, when we tap into the certainty that God can, does, and will show up, we have a reason to hope.

The same is true for you and your family, that whatever may come, you know and are loved by the God who holds eternity and is also Emmanuel, with you in every storm of life. Knowing the power and presence of God is what makes turning from despair to hope not only possible, but also reasonable and right. For greater is the one who is in us than the one in our despairing world. Amen.

October 7 2024

Hurricane Helene Response

FrankUncategorized

We have received a number of inquiries from outside of the Diocese about where to send donations for Disaster relief. The first way to do this is to donate directly to the Bishop’s Fund for Disaster Relief. This money will go directly to helping our parishes and Honey Creek in meeting their deductibles as they repair damages to their properties, which is a needed type of aid that is not covered by other grants. Once those initial costs are covered, any leftover donated funds will be used for additional assistance as needed.

*The damaged sanctuary of St. Bartholomew’s in Savannah.*

Donations can be sent by check to the diocesan office(18 E 34th Street, Savannah, GA 31401) or by texting “EDOG Relief” to 73256 or by clicking this link for the Realm giving portal: https://onrealm.org/EpiscopalDioces91807/-/form/give/relief

The second way to provide aid across the Diocese is to give to Episcopal Relief and Development. ERD provides grants to dioceses to help them send direct aid to the most vulnerable in their communities impacted by this disaster. Donations can be sent to ERD’s Hurricane Relief fund by clicking this link: https://www.episcopalrelief.org/what-you-can-do/give/donate-now/individual-donation/

Assessing Damage and Assisting Neighbors

Across the many towns heavily impacted by Hurricane Helene, we know of significant damage to four churches and a heavy clean up needed at Honey Creek. Beyond this, many of the communities of the Diocese of Georgia are overwhelmed by the scale of the damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure. The recovery will be a long one in towns including Valdosta, Douglas, Vidalia, Louisville, Swainsboro, and the Augusta area.

The photo shows a downed tree at Christ Church in Augusta, where the building was spared and the Byllesby Center is continuing to serve the community.

Damaged Church Buildings

The churches at Christ the King in Valdosta, St. Andrew’s in Douglas, St. Bartholomew’s in Savannah, and the parish hall at Good Shepherd in Swainsboro all suffered in the storm. This is in addition to minor damage to many other church buildings as well as so many trees that need to be cut up and removed from church property.

While the insurance will cover much of the cost of the repairs, the deductible in a “named storm” like Helene, is 2% of the value of each of the buildings with a loss. This leaves the congregations with $8-10,000 deductibles or more instead of the usual $1,000. This is a heavy burden the Diocese will lighten. Some of the funds given to our disaster response will assist with this need.

This photo shows one of the two pine trees that crashed through the roof of the parish hall at Good Shepherd in Swainsboro.

Honey Creek Update

Our retreat center was largely spared damage to the buildings. The exceptions are roof damage to the Dock Study building and a pine tree that fell on Jonnard Cottage, leaving minor damage to the roof. But there are a lot of trees down all over the property. Thanks to the Episcopal Camps and Conference Centers network, we will have 20 volunteers from the Diocese of South Carolina’s Camp St. Christopher working on the grounds on Thursday and Friday. If you would like to join their efforts, there is plenty of work to go around. Let our Executive Director, Dade Brantley, know you will be there (dade@honeycreek.org).

The photo shows the pine tree that landed on the corner of the roof at Jonnard Cottage, without breaking through the ceiling.

Assisting Neighbors

There are so many efforts underway, that we can’t report on them all, but across the Diocese, congregations are offering assistance to their communities. This includes the Byllesby Center in Augusta providing daily hot meals. yesterday they fed more than 150 people, while also offering lots of water as the county has a boil water advisory and many are not able to do so without power. Saint Paul’s in downtown Augusta has been opening the church to provide electricity and wifi in a rare Augusta building with air conditioning. They have also offered a meal, with chicken chalupas and ham gumbo served yesterday.

Photo of volunteers stacking up bottled water for distribution at the Byllesby Center.

An Episcopal Relief and Development Grant

Bishop Logue has secured a grant from Episcopal Relief and Development, which will assist in our congregations providing direct assistance to our neighbors in the greatest need. Additional grant funds are available from ERD if we use up this grant and are still responding to individuals and families whose lives are impacted by Hurricane Helene.

If your congregation is prepared to assess the needs and distribute money in the form of gift cards to those with a verified need, please contact Canon Loren Lasch (llasch@gaepiscopal.org). The money may also be used to purchase items like bottled water for distribution.

This crumpled roof covering an aged flat roof is over Christ the King in Valdosta.

August 21 2024

Strategic Planning Process

FrankDiocesan News

We are receiving surveys now through October 31 for our strategic planning process. Take the survey online here: Episcopal Diocese of Georgia Vision Survey

This survey is a second step, following the 10 in-person and online listening sessions, which with 215 taking part, went very well at identifying some key themes for our work in the coming years. After the survey, our consultants and the committee will offer feedback to our diocesan convention where we will also work further on the themes. This process is designed to offer multiple opportunities to help shape our visions, goals, and strategies. Here is more about what we seek to accomplish with this strategic planning process.

By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
-I Peter 1:3

New life in Jesus does not offer a vague, uncertain hope that things might one day improve. Instead, as followers of Jesus, we have the sure and certain knowledge that Jesus is with us now and always. The presence of the living God offers both comfort and challenge. We are called not simply to have hope, but to take actions that reveal the living hope within us. Living hope is embodied in our actions.

The Strategic Planning Process we are entering into this year is not just about creating a sound business plan for the Diocese of Georgia, even though we should expect our vision of how we are to be and what we are to do will make sense from that perspective. This process is primarily intended to help the people of the Diocese discern how the Holy Spirit is leading us into the future. In asking, “What does fidelity to Jesus look like in this moment?” we can confidently look to the Spirit to guide us into new ways of embodying our living hope.

In the visits we make to every congregation of this diocese, Victoria and I see that the resurrection we long for is already happening. We meet people new to the Episcopal Church who have found themselves connecting to their faith in Jesus in Word and Sacrament in the community of their Episcopal Church. We routinely meet people of every age and stage of life who are as grateful as we are to have found a home in this corner of the vineyard.

In addition, I see the new life taking root in places where parishes have begun to work with other Episcopal congregations as well as ecumenical partners. When we move outside our red doors to engage with our neighbors and to work with other churches, the Spirit shows up. When we live in hope, we give hope to others. New life is already among us. The question is not the one that faced Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” The answer to that is clearly, “yes” based on the evidence around us. Our call is to join with what God is already doing as we practice resurrection. This is the Christian call to die to what has been to let Christ be born in us anew, as individuals and as a Diocese. We strengthen our faith and deepen our trust in Jesus when we move from having hope to living hope.

+Frank

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue, Bishop

Strategic Planning Committee
Bishop Logue has named eleven members of the Diocese with diverse perspectives to work with our consultants on this planning process characterizing them to Diocesan Council in a recent meeting: The two teens on the team have experience in their own congregations, diocesan youth programs, and with the churchwide Episcopal Youth Event. Five additional lay persons bring their views from a variety of sizes of congregations and sizes of communities they serve. The four clergy likewise bring a depth of insight from the different places they serve. Chairing this committee is Carey Wooten, who has gained a broader view of the Diocese and its ministries while heading our Leading with Grace training.

Billy Alford, Dean Emeritus of Augusta
Amy Ariail, St. Thomas in Thomasville
Bob Baranko, St. Patrick’s in Albany
Jody Grant, Our Savior in Martinez
Cam Mathis, St. George’s in Savannah
Dwala Nobles, Good Shepherd in Brunswick
Becky Rowell, Christ Church Frederica
Sandy Sandbach, Christ Church in Valdosta
Kelly Steele, St. Peter’s in Savannah
Charles Todd, Trinity in Statesboro
Carey Wooten, Calvary in Americus (Chair)

August 21 2024

Diocesan Offices to Move

FrankDiocesan News

A Message from Bishop Frank Logue

Summary: I am writing to let you know that the Standing Committee has concurred with my decision to sell our current Diocesan office on 34th Street in Savannah and to move to a new Episcopal Center in the former St. Michael and All Angels building on Washington Avenue and Waters Avenue in Savannah. This move will eliminate all debt on our balance sheet while adding more than $1 million in investments to support the diocesan budget and will have your bishop and diocesan staff serving from an office in a place offering greater accessibility where other ministry is also happening.

The Former St. Michael and All Angels’ Property
When the Vestry of St. Michael and All Angels in Savannah voted to close the parish and give the keys to me as bishop as of July 1, 2023, we continued the ministries taking place, that were serving more than 350 people each week, while deciding what to do with the facilities. We did not want to lose this prime location in Savannah, but a more serious concern, not immediately evident, was the burials on the grounds and in the courtyard of the church. Working with the Standing Committee, we opted to sell the rectory next door, which had been a plan first put forward by the parish vestry. That sale is funding our catching up on all of the deferred maintenance in the church building including a new roof and addressing several serious issues raised by structural engineers. We were looking for non-profit groups to lease the space on the second floor of the parish hall in order to cover the cost of maintaining the physical plant. We found some interest, but no tenants. During this time, the Rev. David Lemburg provided a priestly presence to the ongoing ministries, and Mrs. Judy Naylor-Johnson continued to assist with the administration of the space, as Canon Katie Willoughby and Mr. Daniel Garrick, our Canon for Administration and Assistant Administrator, went above and beyond to make this work. That’s when the Aha happened.

The Aha Moment
I was walking the space soon after our Presiding Bishop-Elect announced that he was going to forgo the expensive installation liturgy at Washington National Cathedral. I looked at the rooms again wondering why we could not find a tenant and it dawned on me that the space would best serve the Diocese. I wondered why it had not occurred to me before as it seemed obvious in that moment. I am grateful for Presiding Bishop-Elect Sean Rowe’s leadership, which helped me envision a decision that was much better stewardship for the Diocese of Georgia. I immediately engaged with the Standing Committee on this new possible direction. Canon Willoughby worked with our project manager for the site on the costs of making the new location work for our offices as I considered the costs and benefits of making this move.

The Details
The current Diocesan House is a beautiful building that is costly to maintain, in addition to other shortcomings. The layout of the building has limited accessibility, especially for people with disabilities. The building itself is not accessible, as navigating stairs is required to enter, and the first-floor layout precludes the holding of confidential conversations as there are no doors on that level. While it has been a good site for the bishop and staff since 2018, moving to another, more workable ministry site provides opportunities to be more accessible, welcoming, and outreach-focused.

I have remained concerned about the debt the Diocese has maintained on its balance sheet. When I was elected bishop, the Diocese of Georgia had the much-discussed Honey Creek debt that we paid off in full in December 2022. We also had notes in our audits of internal loans from our investments of $400,000 used to buy our current office, and $115,000 for the Campus Ministry House in Statesboro. Two recent bequests allowed us to pay off the debt on the house near Georgia Southern and to reduce the debt on our offices to $200,000. The sale of our offices on 34th Street will clear that remaining note on debt on our audits while yielding more than $1 million to invest with the Board of the Corporation so that an appropriate annual draw can increase the diocesan budget. This wonderful windfall from investing in this downtown Savannah property in 2018 will assist in realizing the vision that emerges in our strategic planning process now underway.

The benefits of the new location include having more ample parking and better, more accessible meeting spaces for diocesan gatherings while maintaining existing ministry services in the area including operating a food pantry and providing space for community groups to gather. Additionally, the worship space will become a diocesan chapel that can still be used by the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, while also being available when helpful to the Diocese. Mostly, this move emphasizes ministries happening concurrently in the same space, while offering the potential for much more.

This decision is about focusing on what matters most. Worship is the heart of ministry and so all of our congregations matter. The work of your bishop and diocesan staff is also important ministry as is feeding our neighbors in need and otherwise engaging with the community around us. Having these differing ways of living into our faith in Jesus all present in our new Episcopal Center matters. We are doing this in a way that eliminates debt and increases our investments in the Board of the Corporation as well as our investments in our neighbors. I believe this move is an important witness that will advance the Gospel.

pax et bonum,
+Frank

July 10 2024

Eligible Voters for Diocesan Convention

Policies and Procedures for a Bishop Election PDF

A new policy of the Diocese of Georgia, as announced in January, calls for the Secretary of Convention to publish a list of eligible voters for our 120 days before the Diocesan Convention starts. The Standing Committee approved our beginning this best practice as a part of their setting policies and procedures for a bishop election years before we need to follow the full process:

Other dioceses have faced serious conflict over who can vote in a bishop election. To avoid those concerns when we elect a new bishop at some point in the future, the Standing Committee’s policy states that the Secretary of Convention shall annually publish the number of delegates for each congregation and the list of the canonically resident clergy entitled to a vote in keeping with the canons of the Diocese. Acting in her role as the Secretary of Convention, Canon Katie Willoughby is publishing here those lists 121 days prior to the diocese meeting in Tifton.

Delegate Count

The Canons of the Diocese of Georgia approved in 2022 define the delegate count as follows: Every Congregation shall be entitled to send lay delegates to convention with the number of delegates determined by the Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) of the congregation as “reported on the previous three parochial reports extant.”

2 delegates for congregations with 99 or less in ASA
3 delegates for congregations with 100-199 in ASA
4 delegates for congregations with 200 or more in ASA

Click here to see the 2024 delegate count.

Address any concerns with the delegate count to the Secretary of Convention at kwilloughby@gaepiscopal.org.

Canonically Resident Clergy

Clergy serving under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical authority of a diocese (typically the diocesan bishop) are canonically resident in that diocese. All deacons and priests canonically resident on the list linked below are entitled to seat and voice in every convention of the Diocese. Our canons require that those voting in our conventions, including a bishop election, have a current, active role in ministry within the Diocese

Canon I.1.3 of the Diocese of Georgia’s Constitution and Canons offers three ways a canonically resident member of clergy may have vote in convention. A member of clergy must be:

ecclesiastically employed within the Diocese; or
continually exercising clerical functions in some Congregation within the Diocese; or
exercising a ministry specially approved by the Bishop.

In announcing the list to the clergy in a prior email, Bishop Logue clarified point number three above saying, “I am of the firm conviction that someone serving as a supply priest meets that last test as does someone serving as a peer coach in our coaching network as could other service in the Diocese whether compensated or not. On the current attached list, supply priests on whom we absolutely rely for our common life are the prime reason I list someone as exercising a ministry specially approved by me.”

Bishop Logue added, “The main reason for not having a vote is that the person is serving outside the Diocese as often happens in retirement, or they are serving as an associate in another diocese during a first call out of seminary while maintaining their connection here. The second reason is that the member of clergy has needed to fully retire for health or other reasons who is not, with only very rare exception, regularly serving in a church.”

Click here for the voting status of canonically resident clergy.

Address any concerns with the status of canonically resident clergy to the President of the Standing Committee, the Rev. Walter Hobgood. Contact the diocesan office through Canon Willoughby above for an email address for him.

July 3 2024

Presiding Bishop-Elect Sean Rowe

By Bishop Frank Logue

In a first-ballot election among a slate of five well-qualified candidates, the bishops of the Episcopal Church elected the Rt. Rev. Sean Rowe to become the next Presiding Bishop. At 49, he is the youngest person chosen to lead our church. I met Sean in the fall of 1997 when we both arrived at Virginia Theological Seminary. At 22, he was the youngest person in our class of more than forty seminarians. He would go on to be the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion for many years after being elected on the first ballot at the age of 32 from a slate of four well-qualified candidates seeking to be the Bishop of the Diocese of Northwest Pennsylvania. When you get to know Sean, the pattern is not surprising.

He is the one so many of us in the House of Bishops go to for counsel. By the time of his installation as Presiding Bishop, he will have served for 17 years in this unique call. He has a pastor’s heart and knows the role well. He loves our church and yet sees how we must change to respond to the challenges of decreased membership, giving, and attendance. Yet, he is not interested at all in the institution for its own sake, but for the sake people who need to know Jesus.

In seminary, I immediately came to respect his keen intellect, deep faith in Jesus, and his often surprising sense of humor. In a homiletics class, we each found our very different voices as preachers alongside one another. While there is only one Bishop Michael Curry, Sean will always seriously engage with scripture in a sermon that challenges you or challenges our church. The sermon he preached for the closing Eucharist of the 81st General Convention is a perfect example of his seeking to put faith into practice: Sermon for Closing Eucharist

Sean said, “And finally, what about our idolatry of structures and practices that exclude and diminish our witness? We have to get it together. That’s going to mean laying some things down.” By the end of the day, an announcement went out to the church that our Presiding Bishop-Elect canceled the big, expensive installation at Washington National Cathedral opting for a small service in the chapel of our Episcopal Church Center that will be broadcast to the church online.

The bishops discerned this call and it was a surprising one for outside observers, but the spiritual discernment we did led us to see Bishop Sean Rowe as the right Presiding Bishop for the nine years ahead. He is signaling bold leadership saying “God is calling the Episcopal Church into a new future.” What you can know about our new Presiding Bishop is that he is a good man, a faithful pastor, and a devoted follower of Jesus who appreciates what our church can offer a lost and hurting world too much to let us languish.

May 14 2024

Commencement Sermon – School of Theology

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon for the St. Luke School of Theology Commencement at Sewanee: The University of the South in All Saints’ Chapel on May 10, 2024.

Working Together
1 Corinthians 3:5-11 and John 4:31-38

The hours of lectures, reading, and taking tests are so very long.

The days can also pass slowly as you toil into the night studying, researching, and writing.

Yet, the years of working toward an advanced degree are surprisingly short.

After what feels like a very long time, that somehow passed quickly, you discover that all the other lemmings have jumped off the cliff and your turn is up. The DMin thesis has been defended or the GOEs are done or, in whatever way applies to you, every box has been checked and you need only pick up your degree to move forward in a new season of ministry enriched by your time on The Mountain.

You, the School of Theology Class of 2024, have been gifted with a very different experience than many fellow alumni. Your decision to pursue ordination or advanced studies was made in the midst of a global pandemic. For those of you who are MDiv students, unlike the classes immediately before you, you were permitted to worship in the Chapel of the Apostles in your junior year. Masking precautions remained and while you were living into the EQB ideal of “how good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity” you did so without sharing the chalice in the Eucharist.

You have not only learned of how the experience of the Babylonian Exile formed the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you also experienced exile from Hamilton Hall for the past year and a half. Because of, or in spite of, these challenges, you have relied on each other, your professors, and others in your circle of support which has given you a key to ministry: teamwork. You know this well as you have supported one another.

As we read in the first letter to the Christians in Corinth, “we are God’s servants, working together.” Ministry is inherently teamwork where we work alongside others and build on their work. More importantly, even the team of people does not work alone as “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

Jesus puts it this way in our reading from John’s Gospel, “‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.”

The gift nestled in our propers for this commencement is clarity that while we long to see lives changed by the Good News of Jesus, that metanoia does not depend on us alone or even on us primarily. Everything that needs to be done has already been done by Jesus. The grace of someone experiencing a conversion of heart and mind depends neither on dazzling homiletical prowess nor on gorgeous liturgies. The metamorphosis we long for people to experience is Holy Spirit work. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. But you do get the immense joy of sharing this love of God with others.

This overwhelming, audacious Good News is life-giving. Those with whom you minister have been fed a steady diet teaching them that they are not enough. Casual cruelty on the elementary school playground or betrayal by friends in our teen years, and all the experiences of a lifetime when others see us with harsh judgment, can shake anyone. Many people know the feeling of never having measured up. You and I know that as well in our own lives. But we also know the loving care of the Holy Trinity. We know that while there is much we can do to amend our lives, no one needs to be taller, thinner, prettier, funnier, fitter, smarter, younger, more mature, or anything other than the person God made them to be in order to be loved by the creator of the Cosmos. If this awareness feels beside the point in a world on fire, remember that failure to see every other person as a sibling is at the root of all the pain and suffering we do see.

This is not to do away with our knowledge of sin and our need for redemption. I am not sweeping aside the need for repentance and amendment of life. Instead, I want to remind you that your ministry is in communities where so many people need the grace, mercy, and compassion we have found in Jesus as much as a thirsty person needs water.

Yet, we are not immune to the cult of earning and deserving. If your goal is to be successful in ministry, know that this is a never-ending race set at an unsustainable pace. Someone will always seem to be effortlessly thriving in ministry. Another will get an amazing call to some plum position. Life, especially life in the church, can become yet another place where we feel we never measure up. The antidote to this poison of perfectionism is coming to know deep in your bones that only God can give the growth.

If neither Apollos nor Paul are anything, who are we to seek to be the greatest of lay leaders, deacons, priests, and bishops. The church has suffered much from those who want to be a Great Bishop and no less from those who want to make their mark as a scholar or a pastor, priest, and teacher. This is why the word from scripture about working together matters. We work together with lay leaders, clergy colleagues, and most importantly the Holy Spirit. Your ministry is not now, nor will it ever be, about you. Our common call is not to achieve great things for God. Our common call is to faithfully follow Jesus. In any key decisions in ministry, ask the question of what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in this moment. Respond as well as you can with what you know at that time and trust God with the rest. This is the life of faith and so it is the life of ministry.

To this call to faithfulness, I need to add counter-intuitive wisdom from G.K. Chesterton, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

I say this to describe what fidelity looks like in the real day-to-day work of serving God through the church: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” There is much in ministry that is worth doing and doing well including prayer, reading scripture, teaching classes, leading Bible studies, planning liturgies, giving sermons, visiting the sick and shuts ins, being with those at the end of their life, then caring for their families after a death, not to mention stewardship campaigns and budget meetings. All of these and so much more need you to do them to the best of your ability. But if they are worth doing well, they are also worth doing poorly.

For example, you must have spiritual disciplines which you maintain in order to nourish you from the deep springs of living water which they offer. But when you have two funerals during the week and Sunday is coming fast while you are trying to finish preparing the confirmands for the Bishop’s visit, it is okay if morning devotions replace Morning Prayer, or you intercede for those on your prayer list as you drive to the funeral home. Be gentle on yourself, not everything can be done equally well every day. Sermons need more time than seems possible, and sometimes you simply won’t be able to give them all they need. As your liturgics professor has taught you, “Done is better than good.” The Holy Spirit will bless what you can do that week. Faithfulness is the goal, not greatness. Don’t let your idea of the perfect prevent the possible.

The church has suffered enough from narcissists with a messianic complex. You and I have been wounded and we have experienced healing, but we are not The Healer. Those of us who want to do this work over the long haul without getting close to that narcissistic terrain need people with whom we can share our real struggles. Get a WhatsApp, GroupMe, or private Facebook group for your sake and the sake of the church. A therapist, a spiritual director, a colleague group, activities and friends not connected with the church—these are essentials rather than options—as are spiritual disciplines that nourish your faith day-by-day.

Being gentle on yourself is not an excuse to drop your private prayers and devotions and leave the reading of scripture to sermon prep alone. That is not what steadfast devotion looks like. Yet the ebb and flow of ministry means doing all things well will always be beyond your grasp.

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” also, quite surprisingly, applies to love. The most important part of serving God in the Church is to love your people, those in your congregation and those in the community around your church. This is at the heart of any call to follow Jesus who distilled all the Law and the Prophets to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Loving your neighbor includes everyone made in the image and likeness of God, so it certainly includes the person who is chairing the parking lot conversations that have turned far less than charitable. Loving your people is everything, and it is, therefore, worth doing badly on the days when you can’t love them perfectly. Love is an act of will, so choose to love them even when it is hardest to see the image of God within them. Jesus gave his life for the salvation of the person making your life difficult. You will find a way back to loving him or her if you decide to do so and ask God to give you the grace to love. The person most difficult to love can also be yourself. You are also in need of the grace and mercy you want for others. You too need this loving kindness. This matters because the Gospel is not “get your act together and God could possibly come to love you.” The wonderfully Good News we get the joy to share is that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

The fate of the church does not depend on you, or even on all of us together. Yet our faithfulness does matter. The deepest center of our call is to fall in love with the God who made us and loves us again and again and again and in so doing remain steadfast in servant ministry, knowing that God is the one to give the growth. When you can manage this balancing act of ministry well, do so delighting in the knowledge that God is doing more than you could ever accomplish on your own.

And on all the days when this call seems much too heavy, remember that the church is not yours to save and, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Pray. Read the Bible. Reflect with your spiritual director. Share your sorrows with your colleagues. Muddle through as best you can and occasionally pause and take note of the ways the Holy Spirit keeps showing up in your life. The hours and days can be so very long, but the years will pass quickly as God works in, through, and around you, and all those on your team, to build up the Body of Christ. In this there is great joy.

Amen.

April 16 2024

The Georgia 200 Fund: Support Strategic Planning

FrankStrategic Plan

Submitted by the Very Rev. Tom Purdy, Dean of the Southeast Convocation and Rector of Church Church Frederica on St. Simons Island

The Georgia 200 Fund has been created by leaders from the three founding parishes of the Diocese of Georgia – Christ Church, Savannah, Christ Church, Frederica, and Saint Paul’s, Augusta – to raise funds to cover the cost of comprehensive strategic planning for the Diocese of Georgia. 200 years ago leaders from those three parishes had a vision to create the Diocese of Georgia. Now, as we look ahead to the next 200 years, those three parishes see the importance of our Bishop’s call for a comprehensive strategic plan for the Diocese.

All parishes and Episcopalians in the Diocese of Georgia are invited to make a gift to the Georgia 200 Fund in support of this important work. This invitation is not coming from the Bishop or Diocesan leadership bodies; it is not a capital campaign. The three original parishes in Georgia have come up with the idea for this fund and have made the first gifts to the fund in the hope that others will join them by making their own contributions – we are all in this together. Gifts to the Georgia 200 Fund can be sent to the Diocese with the notation “Georgia 200 Fund” or by giving online here. Georgia 200 Fund contributions will only be used for the implementation of a Diocesan strategic plan. If any funds remain at the end of the process, those funds will be put towards initiatives the strategic plan might identify.

While the work to select a firm to do this work is ongoing, the anticipated cost of a comprehensive strategic plan from discovery to listening to completion could be as high as $50,000. This amount is not in our diocesan operating budget, nor is there a likely source of funding from current revenue streams. The three founding parishes have already pledged $35,000, combined, towards this effort and hope that others will help us reach the goal.

We have much to celebrate in our 200-year history as the Diocese of Georgia! The Georgia 200 Fund acknowledges that we have a bright future and that this strategic plan will help set the stage for the next 200 years of a faithful Episcopal presence in Georgia. Thank you for prayerfully considering support for the Georgia 200 Fund.

April 16 2024

Strategic Plan Next Steps

FrankStrategic Plan

In his Address to the 2023 Diocesan Convention, Bishop Logue said, “It is time for us to work together on a strategic plan for the Diocese of Georgia.” Since that announcement, he has worked with Canon Katie Easterlin, the Rev. Becky Rowell, and the five-member Executive Council of Diocesan Council to send out a Request for Proposals (RFP) to individuals and entities that assist in facilitating this work. The RFP resulted in hearing from 14 consultants by the March 15 deadline. The Executive Council has been evaluating the proposals and meets this week to further that discernment to name the person or group to facilitate this process by the end of this month.

Every parishioner of the Diocese of Georgia will have the opportunity to assist in the creation of this plan through listening sessions around the Diocese, as well as the option to submit responses online. The listening process will result in an interim report from the facilitator(s) reviewed with the Diocesan Council and Standing Committee and the Bishop and Staff by fall. With feedback from those groups, we will use the diocesan convention this November as a time for further work toward the plan.

Following our convention, the facilitator(s) will deliver their final work naming the overall vision and key goals that will inform the strategic planning process. This will go to a Strategic Planning Committee to be appointed by the bishop with approval of Diocesan Council. That group will be responsible for working with the bishop on an executive summary, followed by comprehensive, detailed plan that identifies: shared vision, goals, objectives, strategies and tactics, while naming responsible partners and their roles, measures and outcomes, as well as identifying resource development strategies.

“This looks and sounds like a business process,” Bishop Logue said, “but we are people of prayer who know that the Holy Spirit shows up when we stop to discern what fidelity to Jesus looks like in this moment. I trust the Spirit will use this process to show us the path toward greater faithfulness as followers of Jesus.”

March 29 2024

An Easter Message from Bishop Logue

Easter 2024
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

One April morning while hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee, Victoria and I endured hypothermic conditions in an unexpected snowstorm. It had been raining when we ducked into an old barn that served as a trail shelter. During the night, the temperature dropped. Pelting rain turned to heavy snow with the official snowfall count at 13 inches.

We hunkered down in our sleeping bags all day hoping for better weather in the morning. We were not properly geared up for a winter backcountry trip as we had packed to hike the whole AT in a single hike. The next day brought more wind and cold. Victoria and I left the sheltered confines of the barn as the wind drove through our insufficient layers of clothes.

Finding our way was a serious issue. The Appalachian Trail is marked by an unbroken chain of two-inch by six-inch white paint marks which are the common thread that holds together the 2,150-mile path from Georgia to Maine. This system of paint marks is the perfect solution to marking a trail until you are thigh deep in snow and every tree is powder coated with snow blown by wind. The gusts that day were reported to exceed 35 miles per hour.

This was the most difficult time we faced in terms of making sure we were on the path, but it was far from the only time. What you do when you realize you have lost your way is to find the last clear white paint blaze and look for signs of where to go next.

The Gospels record many of the incidents when Jesus’ first followers came to see that their Rabbi was not just a great teacher, but truly the Messiah, the Son of God. But the whole trajectory of the Jesus Movement as they understood it up until then, came grinding to a halt when one of their own betrayed their teacher. Most everyone scattered into the night. The next day, the unimaginable happened. The one they knew to be God made man was put to death on a cross. And so, in the face of their own pain and fear, they went back to the last white paint blaze. They gathered back in the Upper Room where the previous night’s Passover must have seemed so long ago.

The resurrected Jesus would, of course, reveal himself to them all, even rounding up the lost sheep, like Thomas, who missed his first appearance in the Upper Room. In the years that followed, they followed the way of Jesus in the face of persecution and even death. And when they were uncertain, or afraid, they could always return to the places they had last seen God show up as confirmation that they remained on The Way of Jesus.

That bitter cold April morning on the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee, Victoria and I set out unsure of how the hike would go with the markers covered in snow. The oddest thing happened. A hunting dog that had clearly been waiting out the storm in the shelter below us now proceeded to lead us as if it were our pet out for a hike, running up ahead and then coming back to us. The hunting dog was adept at working its way around and over the drifted snow. The snow was usually calf deep, with occasional drifts that were thigh deep for me and hip deep for Victoria, when it was at its worst.

As we hiked in the bone-numbing cold of a driving wind, we came to see that the dog unerringly knew the path as from time to time we did find another white paint blaze. While crossing over a grass-topped mountain, the dog cut down hard to the left off the mountain while the well-worn trail, though covered in snow, clearly continued straight ahead. We trusted that the dog knew the way, so we descended steeply from the ridge into ever-deepening snow. At the tree line, we saw it. A white paint blaze showed through the mostly snow-blasted bark on a tree. That odd encounter with a dog became not a coincidence, but a God-incident, in which we saw we should remain on the Appalachian Trail to the end.

These God moments are meaningful, but they are not ever present. Each day or even every week will not give you an incontrovertible sign of God’s presence. When I hit a time where I want God to show up but fail to feel the Spirit’s presence, I look back on recent occasions when I have seen the Holy Spirit showing off and I know I remain on the right path. I trust that if I venture in the wrong direction, that God will reveal that as well.

How did God last show up in your life? Look for the signs of God’s presence in the weeks to come. Treasure the times in which God has been real for you as the risen Jesus is with you during this season of Easter, through the times when you don’t feel it and in the moments when you do. God’s presence and power are with you always, even to the end of the age.

May the Lord bless you and keep you; make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you and give you peace. Amen.

+Frank

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Georgia
Easter 2024

March 26 2024

Waking from the Nightmare

A sermon from the Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue for the reaffirmation of ordination vows
Trinity Episcopal Church in Statesboro, Georgia on March 25, 2024
St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Tifton, Georgia on March 26, 2024

Waking from the Nightmare
A Homily for the Reaffirmation of Ordination Vows
Philippians 2:3–11

Saul lies in the dust on the road to Damascus. Stopped in his angry tracks by a light from heaven that flashes around him, he hears a voice saying,

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

“Who are you, Lord?”

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

Saul now knows that everything he once knew with certainty was an illusion. He thought he was fighting the heretics on behalf of a vengeful God. His self-righteous quest was designed to both appease an angry God and propel him into the religious elite. His rigid religiosity left him blinded to the grace of God found in Jesus.

Then God speaks to Ananias in a vision to send him to Saul. When Ananias lays hands on him, Saul has something like scales fall from his eyes. Saul awakens from the nightmare to see the world anew.

In a carefully crafted passage in his Letter to the Philippians, the one-time persecutor of those on The Way writes, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is writing about metanoia, which literally means to have an “after mind” or your mind after being reconfigured in a metamorphosis like the one he experienced on the road to Damascus. We describe this type of transformation as a change of heart and mind. Translators like to opt for the most economical way of conveying a concept with a single word standing in for another single word. So that the word “repent” stood in for a change in how someone sees the world and their place in it. Jesus began his public ministry with the brief proclamation: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

The word repent is metanoia in the Greek, which encompasses repentance, but means so much more. The aftermind or converted or transformed mind refers to seeing everything in a completely new way. This is more like waking from a nightmare to see the world rightly. This change of heart was perhaps best captured in a Neil Diamond song made into a hit by The Monkeys. It became a hit again thanks to the greatest movie credits of all time at the end of Shrek. You know the words:

I thought love was only true in fairy tales
Meant for someone else, but not for me
Love was out to get me
That’s the way it seemed
Disappointment haunted all my dreams

This is a description of the Before Mind. Our thinking pattern before the metamorphosis. Then a moment in time causes the singer to have their perceptions of the world changed forever. This After Mind is described in this unforgettable chorus:

Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind
I’m in love
I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave her if I tried

This same transformation happens to Saul when he encounters Jesus, comes to know him for who he is, and falls in love. This change of heart and mind is what happens to Andrew, Simon Peter, James, and John that has them walk away from their nets. This moment of recognition of the truth of the Good News of Jesus changes the heart of Mary Magdalene, who becomes the apostle to the apostles after Jesus’ resurrection. This change in seeing the world causes the first followers of Jesus to face persecution and even death for the love of God they had found in their savior. Down through the centuries, we see saints in every age in whose lives we find a metanoia, a revolution, that takes over their hearts and minds after which life is never, ever the same.

This right view of the world is not the dominant perspective. We serve communities where people made in the image and likeness of God are trapped in a nightmare. The evidence is there with addictions of every kind, not just to alcohol and drugs both legal and illegal, but in people whose justifying stories are found in work, romance, exercise, parenting, and more. In his book Seculosity, David Zahl details how with organized religion declining, people fill the void in their lives by making other everyday pursuits into a form of worship. As everyone is entranced by the same illusion of self-sufficiency and a need to control, this can be difficult to see, but through our Gospel lenses, we know the truth that we don’t have to earn or deserve the love of God we have found in Jesus. We don’t have to prove ourselves to be enough, as Jesus is enough.

This is where Saul, the promising young man who wanted to be successful as a religious leader, can lend a hand. In the chapter after our reading, Paul would tell the church in Philippi, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Compared to knowing Jesus, Paul came to see that everything he had achieved was “rubbish.” That’s the cleanest word the NRSV translators could come up with. The venerable King James Version didn’t mince words as Paul tells it like it is, “I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but dung.”

This is Paul with the after-mind that followed his conversion seeing that he was addicted to the esteem of others. The reality is that if we decide that what matters is to be successful, then we jump on a never-ending treadmill. Someone always has more and has it better. Life, even life in the church, becomes a contest, and we find ourselves never measuring up. Paul describes that way of life with a poop emoji. Compared to the surpassing grace of God, striving for success is a load of crap.

We know that love is not only true in fairy tales. It is not just for someone else, but for you. The surpassing knowledge of the love of God found in the face of Jesus is yours now.

The grace is that others coming to experience this same conversion of heart and mind does not depend on dazzling homiletical prowess or stunning liturgies that make the Gospel real. There is, of course, nothing wrong with good preaching and beautiful liturgies as long as we know that everything that needs to be done has already been done by Jesus. The metamorphosis we long for people to experience is Holy Spirit work. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. But you can share this love of God with others. They need to awaken from the nightmare of the endless treadmill of deserving. They need to awaken to experience the reality of God’s love.

Our common call is not to achieve great things for God. Our common call is to faithfully follow Jesus. This call we are gathered today to renew is a call to fall in love over and over and over again. For we have seen the love of God in the face of Jesus and we couldn’t leave that love if we tried.

Amen.

March 9 2024

Testify to the Light – A Mass of the Resurrection sermon for Louise Shipps

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Clemson, South Carolina on March 9, 2024.

Testify to the Light
A Sermon for the Mass of the Resurrection for Louise Huntington Shipps
Revelation 21:1-17 and John 1:1-14

We begin in the dark.

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”

Formless. Dark. Then comes the spark of creation and God calls light out of the darkness in these first three verses of sacred scripture.

Our Gospel reading echoes this ancient theme in the luminous prologue of John’s Gospel which retells the story of creation, starting in the same place as Genesis, “In the beginning.”

The evangelist writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

He goes on to tell us, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In the moment of creation, light shines in the darkness.

We gather to give thanks to God for the life of Louise Huntington Shipps, who through her art, as through her whole life of selfless service, testified to the light of the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus. The moment of creation is such an apt text for Louise. Trained as a commercial artist, graduating cum laude from Boston University, she knew how to bring life to a blank canvas. Across decades she created drawings, paintings, and collages that gave a window into her perspective on life. She would teach others to nurture that same creative spark at St. Pius X High School in Savannah, the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, and in hands on workshops at Kaunga, a Episcopal Conference Center in the mountains of western North Carolina. Her reverence of God and love of art were further inspired by her travels around the world bringing Louise to focus solely on the highly structured process of writing icons in the Greek and Russian Orthodox style.

Beginning in 1987, she took a series of trips to Russia where she learned of theology written in paint in a series of definite steps. She studied for five years with a Russian iconographer who lived in New York, learning to write the images beginning with the darkest tones, working toward the light.

In 2006, Louise told a reporter from the Savannah Morning News, “When you get involved in Eastern iconography you study church history, art, spirituality and theology. It’s a step-by-step process of enlightenment and inner illumination.”

Enlightenment. This move from darkness to light is wired into creation from its first moments.

In our reading from Revelation, we move to the new heaven and the new earth. In this text, we find embedded, a different shift from dark to light as the grief we know in our earthly lives is met with the presence and power of the Holy Trinity. We read of the age to come:

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.

We gather in mourning for the loss of a dear friend, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She lived a very long and extraordinarily full life and yet there is the pain of grief.

After her recent fall, when doctors and nurses were working to return her to health and it became clear that might not be the path this time, I was reminded of an email I received from Bishop Harry Shipps in 2016 as he learned his lungs were riddled with cancer cells from asbestos. He had been a steady correspondent with me for 19 years on the day he sent the email telling me that this would likely end his life. I wrote to Louise’s daughter, Rebecca, who had been a steady daily presence at her side with my recollection of this email. I said, “I recall your father saying something to the effect of given what they are telling me, it is time to turn toward the sunset.”

I was right about Harry trusting in the sure and certain hope he held in Jesus Christ, but I had the image reversed. Harry was married to an iconographer, who knew well that we don’t walk toward darkness, but toward the light. I found his email this week. He wrote of the issues that bear on his remaining time as being, “Quality of life for me and also for dear Louise.” He said,

“If either deteriorates too far, I will end treatment and walk proudly into this glorious sunrise. 90 plus wonderful years have been given me and 63 years of delight with dear Louise.”

Harry knew death not as darkness, but as light.
Not a sunset, but a glorious sunrise.

This is the theology that supported every icon Louise ever wrote. Shadows moving toward light. Chaos moving toward order. Grief moving toward the enlightenment that comes from knowing that nothing can or ever will separate us from the love of God. This is the rock on which Harry and Louise Shipps anchored their hope.

Here I need to confess, that Bishop Shipps did not like the way I preach at funerals. In many years of sharing sermons, he was not unkind even as he was crystal clear. He said I preach funerals with too much said about the person who has died rather than focusing on the purpose of a sermon in a Mass of the Resurrection, which is to point to the light of the glory of God that we find in Jesus. My words to you today are to be a straightforward proclamation of the Gospel with a slight nod to Louise while the emphasis is on the salvation we find in Jesus and the trust we can have that what we now see is not all that there is. The same God who called light out of the darkness, will wipe every tear from our eyes.

But we gather to mourn his dear Louise and I trust he will forgive me this indulgence of seeing the mark of the creator in the soul of an artist. For in our illuminating glimpse of the Good News offered in our Gospel reading, we see how John the Baptist was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. We are to do this as well. And through Louise’ years of faithful service as a wife, mother, and lay minister, we see how she testified to the light. In her steadfast, loving support of Harry as priest and bishop, she testified to the light of Christ as in her loving care for Ruth, Susan, Rebecca, and David, and their children and grandchildren. In tutoring at-risk kids and volunteering at Emmaus House and many thousands of hours of serving others as if serving Jesus, she testified to the light of Christ.

Louise found a wonderful home here in Clemson – and most especially here at Holy Trinity—when she moved here after her husband’s death to be closer to her daughter. Rebecca tells me you opened your arms to her, and she became one of your own. She also grew especially fond of St. Paul’s, your “mother church” in Pendleton, where she often attended Sunday evenings services.

And even here, she dedicated space in her apartment for a studio as she continued to create as long as she could, icons that begin with finely ground red clay as a basecoat, covered with layer on layer, seven layers deep until heaven touches earth in 23-carat gold, burnished to shine.

We gather in grief even as we celebrate a life well lived. But we do so knowing that God will wipe every tear from our eyes. For “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Louise has turned toward the light of the glorious sunrise. In every time of grief and loss and pain, we too can have that inner illumination that comes from faith in Jesus. For we know that the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we too have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.

We begin in the dark. By the grace of God, we end in the light.

Amen.

January 24 2024

1Book1Diocese for Lent 2024

FrankNews

This Lent, the Diocese of Georgia offers a study using a book The Good Life written by the directors of a more than eight-decade-long study of what makes for a fulfilling life. The Harvard Study of Human Development offers a window into lives of meaning and purpose through the data they have collected. The book also looks at what is gleaned from similar studies around the world. While the book itself does not make connections to our faith in Jesus, the discussion guide does.

As the authors write, “The good life is joyful … and challenging. Full of love, but also pain.” And for those of us who follow Jesus, the good life is one in which loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself is central. We will see how these two greatest commandments connect to the key insights of the study that is the heart of this book. Join Episcopalians around Central and South Georgia for this 1Book1Diocese read this Lent.

The discussion guide is designed for a five-week study beginning in the week after the First Sunday in Lent and ending the week following the Fifth Sunday in Lent.

Click here to download the Discussion Guide

January 17 2024

New Beginnings #61

LizYouth, Youth Min New Beginnings, Youth Min

New Beginnings #61
February 9-11, 2024

New Beginnings is a youth retreat led by high school youth for middle school youth. During the retreat participants have a chance to hear talks from their peers about issues in their lives, and discuss them together. They also pray, play, and sing together, and enjoy time at Honey Creek!

The high school youth who staff the event remember their time in middle school, and share their experiences with family, friends, changes that occurred in their lives, and more. They also offer their thoughts and their questions about Faith, about their relationship to Jesus, and about what it means to say that God is Love.

The Lead Teen for New Beginnings 61 is Evander Purdy of Christ Church Frederica on St. Simons Island, GA. The rest of the staff come from across the Diocese, including Savannah, Augusta, Valdosta, Thomasville, Brunswick, and more.

To register as a staff member or sign up as a participant, click here.

December 22 2023

A Christmas Message from Bishop Logue

Christmas 2023
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

As I prepared to speak to you, I found myself thinking back on my first occasion to preach Christmas. I was in my first year of seminary in Virginia, with my first semester nearly finished, when I received offers to preach while visiting family in Georgia…at a new church start in Thomaston on Christmas Eve and at Grace-Calvary in Clarksville on the First Sunday after Christmas. It was intimidating to prepare the two sermons. The evening I arrived in Thomaston, the priest asked, “So what new insight will you share with us this evening from your seminary studies?”

“All of my best material is 2,000 years old,” I told him. “I am quite sure I have nothing new to say.”

“Thanks be to God!” he replied. “I was nervous about asking a seminarian to preach.”

The story is familiar and was probably best told by Linus in the old Charlie Brown Christmas special. Yet, if we let it get too familiar, we lose how world-changing it is to talk about God becoming human.

There is a different turn on Jesus’ birth that has found its way into my preaching. This way of looking at the Nativity can be difficult to share, because so many of us carry hurts related to birth and to parents, but I hope you will hang with me, as this word, Nativity, is also a healing word for all of us.

Victoria and I know first hand, the grief of losing a baby that did not make it all the way to birth. And, I have prayed faithfully with women on the difficult journey of yearning to get pregnant. Sometimes that fervent prayer appears to have resulted in the birth of a child that seems all the more miraculous and sometimes, that is never to be. Then beyond this, we know, painfully well, that not every child is born into a loving family.

The Nativity is a story of birth that holds out the hope of healing and wholeness for everyone, especially those of us who know the pain of miscarriages and those who remain childless while longing for a baby as well

as those whose parents were abusive or absent. The hope of that healing comes from God with us, a Savior who fully understands this grief and all the suffering of this life.

So with this build up, it sounds like I am ready to offer some great insight. Instead, I offer something small. A moment in time.

I used to think that the most miraculous of moments was that of a mother and father looking into the eyes of their child for the first time.

I recall that moment with our daughter, Griffin.

Pure magic.

I discovered this year an even more world changing and life-giving moment of recognition.

This moment comes when a baby sees, truly sees and knows the people who nurture and care for them as people separate from all the other people who have ever been or ever will be.

This is my person. They care for me. I can count on them.

The baby learns to love from the love she sees, the love he feels.

In this I see Jesus’ birth with new eyes. For when the Word, who is Jesus, became flesh and dwelt among us, the second person of the Trinity experienced this moment, finding himself in the eyes of his mother, Mary, and then seeing the love shining on Joseph’s face.

The love that is God, experienced this magical moment of recognition of perfect love looking on him.

The God who is love did not stand back like a disinterested clockmaker watching from afar, or as a righteous judge ready to condemn. The God who

is love needed nothing, and yet created us out of love for love. Then the second person of the Trinity chose to enter into creation and became the neediest being of all, a baby, dependent on parents for everything. In this baby is love, for love is always vulnerable.

While Jesus was fully divine, in the Incarnation, in becoming human, Jesus was also fully human. Mary and Joseph were chosen to provide what every infant needs, eyes of love for the baby to find themselves within.

Each of us is aided by finding ourselves mirrored in the love of someone who sees us fully and loves us completely. It need not be a parent and it does not have to occur when we are an infant. When we experience that love, we experience what the love God has for us is like. For some that is a grandparent or teacher or some other person who comes to love you not for what you can do for them, but for your very existence. While I was raised by loving parents, I also saw this healthy mirroring in others, like my leaders in Boy Scouts, and so have felt what it is like to provide this same type of unconditional love for people who missed this love from their parents.

Everyone needs to experience the sure and certain knowledge that while they are not perfect, they are enough for someone, and so see how they are also enough for the King of Creation. The cost of not knowing this truth is incalculably high.

We find so much suffering unleashed as hurting people wound other people in a vicious circle, until shame and fear begin to guide someone’s responses to the people around them.

We see all of the tragedies of this world as turning from God, especially in a year where the land of our Savior’s birth has been torn apart by terrorism and war.

In the fallen reality that is human existence, the Good News is that God knows fully, pain and grief. Jesus came to know his parents’ love as they were on the run from King Herod’s rage, seeing Jesus as a threat to his kingdom.

Jesus’ first years were spent as a refugee in Egypt. He grew to adulthood in a country oppressed by an empire extracting wealth from far flung lands.

Jesus’ life revealed what the love of God looks like in the face of a Savior who could see, truly see, those who others looked past. He taught us to love our neighbors and showed us that everyone is a neighbor, no one is meant to be seen as Other. Jesus looked with eyes of compassion on those who were lost and left out or marginalized, and in so doing, transformed their lives.

Christmas is the heart of the Christian faith, for human history was forever changed by a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, and who himself, experienced love in the eyes of his mother, Mary.

As we move into the joyous celebration of the God who is love entering into creation, may the Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his face to you and give you peace. Amen.

November 18 2023

Deaconess Alexander Named Patron Saint of the Diocese

The delegates to the 2023 diocesan convention unanimously voted to name Deaconess Alexander as the Patron Saint of the Diocese. Deaconess Anna Ellison Butler Alexander (1865-1947) has been recognized as a saint by the Diocese of Georgia since 1998 and by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church since 2018, with her feast day celebrated on September 24.

She served the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia despite the persecution and hardships she faced during the Jim Crow era, founding Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Pennick in 1894 and Good Shepherd Episcopal School in Pennick in 1902. She was set aside by Bishop C. K. Nelson as the first and only Black Deaconess in the history of The Episcopal Church in 1907. She tirelessly and devotedly taught, led services, cared for the poor and elderly, and inspired young people with hope for six decades.

This gives every congregation in the Diocese the express permission to observe the Feast of St. Anna Alexander, with its assigned collect and scripture readings every year on the Sunday closest to September 24 if they choose to do so. The resolution also urged congregations to take up a special offering on that Sunday to benefit the St. Anna Alexander Center for Reconciliation & Healing and the preservation of the historic Good Shepherd Episcopal Schoolhouse. You can find out more about her life and legacy and the schoolhouse restoration here: GoodShepherdSchoolhouse.org

November 11 2023

Closing Remarks for the 202nd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

Closing remarks at the 202nd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia by the Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue

November 11, 2023
Church of the Good Shepherd, Episcopal Day School
Augusta, GA

Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.

These words from the collect in Evening Prayer kept calling to me this year. I was drawn to this prayer as this is an invitation to the Living God. I mentioned in my Address that as we arrived in Kingsland, we had a vision for a church that was essential to the community around it. The other thing we said in those days was that we wanted to do something for God that if the Holy Spirit did not show up, we would fall flat on our faces and look like idiots. The vision had to be big enough to fail, save for God’s action.

There were times during that decade of work that I wished we had a vision small enough to accomplish on our own. And yet, I found time and again the ways in which what was unfolding was not our doing. In church planting circles, what we were doing was starting a church from scratch, rather than being the daughter church of a larger congregation nearby. From scratch. Once we were doing the work, I could see how I would meet someone and invite them to be a part of this new community and would hear all the ways in which the Holy Spirit had long been preparing the soil for that seed to take root.

Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.

Kindling new fire took a bit of faith in the first centuries of the Church. They were blissfully unaware of Bic lighters and all too familiar with the struggle to spark a fire from scratch. Yet, in the earliest Christians would extinguish their lights on Good Friday, wait across the uncertainty of Holy Saturday and spark new fire for the Easter Vigil.

The darkness on that long night of Good Friday into a hopeless dawn left the disciples in deep grief. The light of the Glory of God that had been revealed in the face of Jesus had gone out for ever. The first followers of Jesus were flat on their faces, looking like idiots to everyone who had seen and heard them proclaim Jesus as the promised Messiah. And what happened next in the resurrection relied solely on the Holy Trinity. The kindling. The awakening. These were the Spirit’s actions. This is why sparking a new fire for the Easter Vigil became such a powerful symbol of how God can and does make a way where there is no way.

There are times when it all seems too much. A church is too heavy to carry. Y’all know this. If ever someone is preaching to the choir, it is me telling y’all a church can be heavy. And a Diocese is more than any of us could possibly carry. The Good News is that we don’t have to and we shouldn’t try. This Church belongs to the Holy Trinity. There is a savior and that savior is not me and it is none of you either.

Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.

We are not waiting in darkness. We do have the light of Christ and there are many ways that I am already seeing the sparks, the evidence of God doing something new.

This past year, I met several times with a couple who hoped to do something to help turn around the present situation of our not having enough priests to serve our churches. They decided to make an anonymous gift to the Diocese of Georgia creating the Great and Small Fund to assist with the expenses of those studying for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Georgia, hoping that they can make the path possible for the people God is calling to serve as priests. Their gift of a quarter million dollars is most generous and helpful. I join them in hoping that their donation will spark generosity from others who will add to the fund, growing the opportunity for us to raise up a new generation of priests and with your support, a generation of priests after that one. Their hope gave me hope and it came at a time when some of the other sparks I am seeing are the many people stepping forward to discern a call to serve as a deacon or priest.

Dr. Bertice Berry and Becky Dorrell are both candidates for the diaconate finishing up the Deacons’ School for Ministry, following not too long after I ordained the Rev. Noelle Raiford as a deacon. We have Shelley Martin, Brenda Brunston, and Roger Speer studying full-time at Sewanee where Doug McPherson and Jim Strickland are studying to serve bi-vocationally in the ACTS Program and Ken Shrader is finishing up his internships that followed those studies as he prepares for bi-vocational ministry. We have Ethan White as a full-time student at Virginia Seminary. Brandon Medley continues to work in the Colquitt County School, while taking part in a new Hybrid program at General Seminary. Brandon has taught fifth grade for 14 years and he gets to stay in that vocation while taking part in this four year long Masters program. In December, I will ordain Shayna Cranford and Kimberly to the priesthood two weeks apart from each other.

And I am discerning with 12 other people who are discerning calls to serve as Deacons and Priests. Among these are three people who feel called to be deacons and four others who feel called to the priesthood who will meet with the Commission on Ministry and Standing Committee during a retreat at Honey Creek in January. And there are three more people feeling called to be deacons and two others who feel called to be priests who are in earlier stages of discernment.

Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.

The Holy Spirit is active in the hearts and minds of parishioners of the Diocese of Georgia. This is as true for most of the parishioners of our congregations who will never be called to serve in Holy Orders, yet they do have God given gifts they are called to use in the work, at home, and at church. We have seen this in faithful wardens and treasurers and an ECW member in the convention videos. We have seen this in the persons who were given the Deacons’ Award, Deans’ Award, and Bishop’s Award. If we have eyes to see, the sparks of what the Spirit is kindling in our midst are all around. When we see those sparks for what they are, God making a way where there seemed to be no way, then the fire follows in our hearts and hope is awakened.

Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.

There are so many times throughout the year when I say to myself or exclaim aloud, “Now, God you are just showing off.” There are so many times when I see that the work that God is doing to kindle hearts and awaken hope is more than I could have asked for or imagined. I get to show up and see the fruit of that kindling in baptisms, confirmations, and receptions and in seeing people stepping forward in faith, trusting that God will show up.

So I know that if we spend some time not in making something happen, but in prayerfully discerning, the Spirit will use that faithfulness. This has been my message to search committees and vestries for 13 years of discernment work on calling a priest. I have told many of you that this work is first and foremost an act of prayer. The whole church can and should take part. We should pray expecting the Living God to guide us. I have named again and again that if we enter a call process and at the end we can say we made a good business decision, we will have worked so hard that we missed the Spirit’s presence in our midst. And so many times, we have reached the end of a search being able to name how we were surprised by what God did do, the ways the Holy Spirit did enter into the search.

Kindle our hearts and awaken hope.

If we want to return to the next convention with a strategic plan in place, we need to begin, continue, and end in prayerful discernment. First and foremost, the need is to pray and to wait. We need to ask God to reveal the next steps and we need to not take any action in absence of seeing God’s direction, or we will end up with something that is merely a smart move or a good business decision. God will be with us, but we will have missed God’s perfect will. If, instead, we pray, really pray, and expect the Holy Spirit to guide us, there will be ways in which we see the sparks of a fire we never dreamed of kindling. We will find a hope that is sure and certain. For the true missionary is God, the real work is being done by Jesus. We are given the grace to be on the team.

Amen.

November 11 2023

Bishop’s Address for the 202nd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue’s Address to the 202nd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia
November 10, 2023
Church of the Good Shepherd, Episcopal Day School
Augusta, GA

Beloved in Christ,

I am so grateful to be together here in Augusta where our three founding congregations gathered 200 years ago for the first convention of the Diocese of Georgia. This year is the 290th that Anglicans have worshipped in Georgia, as a priest of the Church of England, the Rev. Dr. Henry Herbert, stepped ashore with the first colonists and led them in prayer. Those forbears entrusted to us a faith rooted in Jesus, growing out of the soil of the early church as the first followers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

At no time in the history of Christianity has living into that faith seemed easy or the next generation of followers been certain. But the Living God is faithful and the Church continues in spite of our efforts more than because of them. The Holy Spirit has kindled hearts and awakened hope again and again, in catacombs as well as in cathedrals. We gather today in that sure and certain hope that God has not brought us this far to leave us. If we, like the generations before us, do not trust in our own wisdom or strength, but lean on the everlasting arms of Jesus, we will see God showing up in our lives and in our communities in ways that give us the courage to step boldly forward in faith.

Since we last met in convention, Victoria and I have criss-crossed the Diocese, finding joy in being with the people of our congregations. I made visitations to 52 churches as well as our campus ministry at Georgia Southern and here to Episcopal Day School. These 54 visits are most of the 71 visitations that made up a full cycle of visits for the Diocese of Georgia since our last convention adjourned. The current pattern has me visiting everywhere at least once every 18 months.

Sadly, the number of visitations needed has decreased this year. The vestries of St. Michael and All Angels in Savannah and St. Richard of Chichester on Jekyll Island each voted to close their congregations. I should not have been caught off guard. All of the candidates for the 11th Bishop of Georgia knew that the coming decade would likely mean some churches deciding to close. That was not a surprise, yet I was not prepared for the loss I would feel as Chief Pastor. I was also not prepared for visits to congregations who had gone a year without the presence of a priest offering the Holy Eucharist. At Holy Spirit in Dawson and Holy Trinity in Blakely my visits came after months with no supply priest, their last Eucharists had been for funerals. Yet, the parishioners were grateful for the visit, having remained grounded in the Word even as they awaited the Sacrament. I find their faithfulness in gathering inspiring even as I look to meeting the challenge of providing priests for our parishes.

In convention last year, I talked of our entering a time of holy experimentation, trying old things anew, even as we try some new ideas. I named two initiatives we were undertaking that were largely paid for by grants from Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street. Trinity’s grants program was seeking to support efforts targeted for congregations with fewer than 70 people present on a typical Sunday. As the median Episcopal congregation is 35 in attendance on a Sunday across the church and 50 here in the Diocese of Georgia, these programs would assist most congregations.

We worked with our partners in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America’s Southeastern Synod on a ten-month long expert-led learning cohort with Episcopal priests and Lutheran pastors meeting together in what was called a Strategic Imagination Sandbox. Unfortunately, the feedback was consistently bad from those taking part. The weakest link had been what we hoped would be most helpful as we were sure that no matter the quality of the training, getting priests and pastors together to share candidly with one another would be worth the effort. But the leaders fulfilling the grants failed to facilitate those groups and despite trying to offer feedback along the way, this effort failed to deliver as we anticipated. Though this offering did not end up working out, we are so grateful to those who participated for their willingness to try something new with us.

We also worked on a second effort with the LeadersCARE program together with the Dioceses of Atlanta, West Tennessee, and East Tennessee. LeadersCARE is not a set plan, but a way of prayerfully discerning what is right for your congregation. This one did bear good fruit as the trainers from LeadersCARE came to Honey Creek for a retreat with lay leaders in congregations that are not served by a priest. As we hoped, offering people a time to step away and worship together, to learn alongside others, and to have time for reflecting on how to take this back to the congregation were all helpful. Just as we have seen with the Church Development Institute and Leading with Grace, it is always most helpful to bring together people facing similar issues in different parts of the Diocese. We are always stronger together and there is no substitute for getting with others face-to-face to reflect prayerfully on what God has been doing and then to act strategically based on how the Spirit is guiding you to take that next faithful step.

As always seems to be the case for me, I came to see what we need to do next by listening to leaders across the Diocese. In our Diocesan Council meetings this year, we continued as the convention in recess, taking up the challenge offered in our presenting to convention 2022 the reality the Diocese faces in the coming years.

All of our congregations are experiencing the impact of the loss of generations of parishioners who gave generously to their church. For some, this means fewer priests on a staff. For others, it means difficulty having a full-time priest or not currently having a priest who routinely serves the congregation. During the Diocesan Council meeting in March, we did a Question Burst exercise to discover the questions that get at the root issues. In four minutes, we generated twenty questions such as: Are we more concerned with parish self-interest and survival or Gospel mandate? What’s non-negotiable? What does church look like? and What do we prioritize?

The discussion that followed on that Saturday revealed how the pain points are different in varying contexts, but we are all in the same boat. I shared then how some changes are occurring as congregations find ways to thrive with lower levels of income and attendance. In Camden County, Christ Church in St. Marys and St. Mark’s in Woodbine each adjusted their worship times to be able to share a supply priest and later called the Rev. Michael Moore to serve the two congregations as Priest in Charge. Congregations that have generationally been multi-priest churches are also working with what this means for them. And as we just saw in a video, the shift from full-time to part-time clergy is not easy, requiring more from lay leaders and straining the faithful priests serving bi-vocationally.

What faithfulness looks like now is for clergy and vestries to look honestly at the trends in giving and how the passing of generations of generous givers is posing an ever increasing challenge. We would do well to look proactively at how this will come to impact us in the coming years rather than sitting by as if we do not know of the concern.

As your bishop I spend time in every church in the Diocese. From my vantage point, I can say that we do face serious threats to business as usual. The changes we face will be demanding. I also see there is no existential threat to our church. The threat is to the church we became in the boom years following the Second World War. Bishop Scott Benhase would tell churches that Ozzie and Harriett are not coming back. But I never saw that TV family even in re-runs. But I think his point was that faithful TV families like The Simpsons, for whom church is a regular part of life for most everyone in the fictional town of Springfield, are no longer the norm in the fallen world we serve.

And while I am concerned about the institution of the Church, I am far more concerned that people come to know that God loves them, that in Jesus we can not only discover that deep love, but we can also find the grace of repentance and the strength to forgive others and ourselves. There are so many people in Central and South Georgia who need to know and experience this connection with a loving God and will never be able to follow Jesus the way they feel called to if our Episcopal Churches are not present in their community. This is about the Gospel touching the hearts of people who need it desperately and don’t yet know the joy of what we have experienced in being part of the Body of Christ.

I saw this same concern for our witness to the Good News mirrored in those present for our Fall meeting of Diocesan Council and even more so in the Clergy Retreat that followed. I also saw how, while there is no one-size fits all solution other than faithfulness to the ways in which we perceive our Triune God leading us, there is room for us to plan together on a coherent strategy for moving forward together. It is time for us to work together on a strategic plan for the Diocese of Georgia.

This is not wholly new. I keep a notes file on my phone labeled Campaign Promises, that holds what I said I would do as Bishop when doing the Question and Answer session around the Diocese. I am open to changing or letting go of strategies that no longer fit as the situation on the ground changes and we learn more by experience. But I do hold myself accountable for what I named to you in the election process.

I said that the Diocese of Georgia could afford no big ideas as we needed to spend the first three years of the 11th Bishop’s episcopacy paying off the Honey Creek Bond Debt. Even as we did so, I said we would try a new way of forging our path together with Task Groups of Diocesan Council working on some discrete issues. Then with the debt cleared and new experience in working through committees to set strategies for change, we would create a strategic plan. Since May of 2020, we’ve made great progress including:

Passing a thorough review of the Constitution and Canons.
Assessing the effectiveness of the Church Development Institute and retooling it from the ground up as Leading with Grace and finding new ways to connect this training with the Diocese.
Mapping out, assessing, and making important changes to our Holy Order process.
Evaluating how our diocesan convention is working. We will be making changes to the schedule starting with the next convention, with a Friday afternoon start with the convention finishing a few hours later on Saturday.
Evaluating our Companion Diocese relationship and will consider a recommendation based on our Task Group’s review to continue our work with the Diocese of the Dominican Republic.
We also have two groups that will continue their work in the next year to consider the cottage we own in Saluda, North Carolina, and with a review how our assessment process is working and whether changes are needed based on experience with appeals to the assessment.

With that new experience of smaller groups doing the homework and reporting back to the Council, who charts a course, we are ready for the next step. We will begin work immediately on selecting the right process for our Diocese, using listening sessions with an outside facilitator with the Executive Committee of Diocesan Council assisting me as we chart the way forward to crafting a plan that represents fidelity to Jesus in this moment in our common life.

Before we embark on this, I need to confess how I view plans like this. As a church planter, I learned from those who had successfully established new churches that plans fail where a process can see you through. This happens if you let your plan become scripture and refuse to adapt as you learn more along the way. Yet, plans are essential as a way of deciding what we want to achieve together.

I want to share a critical time that I thought I knew what we were going to do and I was wrong. I arrived in Kingsland in 2000 to begin founding what would become King of Peace Church and Day School with a clear goal. Victoria, our daughter Griffin, and I wanted to start a church that would do so much good in the community that if we had to close our doors in a decade, people who had never attended the church would miss it and wish it had remained. We knew about this first hand from working with the Soup Kitchen at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rome, Georgia, when I served on the vestry there. I could already see how a new church could serve the community.

The process for church planting had me chart the way forward by looking at the demographic data for Kingsland. Then I mapped out how to knock on doors and speak to 100 of my new neighbors using a plan that would have the houses where I spoke to someone would reflect the demographics of all of Kingsland. I asked the people I met what they wanted to see a new church do for the community.

Perhaps not surprising for a Navy Base community with 80% of residents then 39 or younger. Lots of people told me of the need to offer more for children and teens. I learned through this work of a pressing need for a full-day preschool for families with both parents working. I also saw that the small core group I was gathering had the skills needed to undertake the project. These conversations led to the creation of a full day preschool. I had arrived in Kingsland with a clear goal of making a difference in the community, and I was sure I knew what that would look like, but was surprised to be moved in a very different direction I had not seen until I took the time to listen.

I pledge to you that I will take the time to listen ever more in this coming year through a process that reveals our common goals. When we have a plan in place, we will know where we will head together, yet we will stay open to the Spirit’s ongoing guidance as we begin moving in that direction. In the process, I trust that we will be changed. I look forward to the journey of discovery and to the ways God will use the process of creating a strategic plan to reveal what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in this moment. As your chief priest and pastor, I find myself, as always, extremely grateful to be with you on this team.

Amen.

November 11 2023

Sermon for the 202nd Convention Holy Eucharist

Dr. Lisa Kimball
Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church
Augusta, GA
Lessons – “For the Ministry II”
1 Samuel 3:1-10
Psalm 63:1-8
Ephesians 4:11-16
Matthew 9:35-38

Speak God, for this servant is listening.

A writer and theologian who had an enormous impact on my understanding of faith and on my growth as a Christian during my college years (and ever since) was Carl Frederick Buechner (1922-2022). Buechner, as he was fondly known by backyard readers, academics, and Pulitzer prize winners, had a gift for being utterly and authentically himself. Whether in his poetry, fiction, or theological writing Buechner always communicated his reverence for the mystery of God and his utter delight and humility at the enterprise of being fully human.

I will never forget Buechner’s definition of doubt:

“Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

In a collection of essays and other writings The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction, Buechner published his Commencement address from Dartmouth. It is an unsuspectingly brilliant theological reflection on the Wizard of Oz.

In this meditation, Buechner asks the students to consider connections between the moral of the Wizard of Oz story and their own threshold moment: finishing a life-stage and beginning another, most probably with uncertainty, anxiety or even dread.

He explained that in Oz, it is only a gold path on which one is safe. And the end of that path is an emerald city which we know, with the passage of time and from much literary criticism, the author Baum intended to represent as green cash/currency. There is a friend group, a motley crew of four vastly diverse people: Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow who set out to find the Wizard who, according to legend, could grant wishes.

They set out, trusting only in unproven stories (flimsy as they were. After all, no Wizard had ever stopped the power of the local wicked witch and her flying monkeys) and in promises that gold would lead them to the currency of power in the Emerald City. One can only guess that the Dartmouth students were already seeing the connection between Oz and the American Dream.

The dominant culture of Oz was too much in love with stories of powerful wizards to listen for experiences of true liberation and salvation.

The four reach Oz only to discover that the wizard is just a man. He cannot give the gifts that they seek at that moment, and he buys time to cover the lie of his reputation by sending them on an impossible mission to face the witch on their own. So, they take matters into their own hands and face the witch with no wizard power or presence. Ultimately, their own strength, their care for one another, their sacrificial love and sheer grit defeat the witch. And when they return to the wizard for a reward, they learn that he can do absolutely nothing for their deepest longings.

But he does finally come clean and explain the things that humans CAN do for one another. He gives them symbolic gifts so that the world will understand their inherent and God-given gifts. And the four heroes take pride in these symbols, as all of us do of diplomas, medals, collars, and certificates. They are signposts of sacred gifts and opportunities from God.

In this post-pandemic church, that was already shrinking in size and joy and imagination, we are in a strange land. We are in a decidedly post-christian America. Even more, the sociologists tell us what we see, which is that any voluntary associations with weekly attendance are collapsing. The Rotary Club, the Bowling league and the Bingo groups have the same shrinkage as the church. We are not in Kansas anymore.

And it is tempting to look for colorful lies and unproven stories. It is tempting both to seek human wizards and to pretend to be human wizards. Everyone wants the anxiety of church to ease and so we chase the posts, the people and the strategic plans that lay out gold paths to places of promised prosperity.

But the wizard was right about one thing: only God gives the gifts. The only power worth seeking in life is the resurrection power of the Triune God. In God, we find salvation for our souls AND paths along still waters of baptism to eternal life in this world.

We must face the witches of the world. But four is better than one in Oz, and community is the nature of the Body of Christ. When we go together, we come together as Jesus in the world.

We find this truth throughout today’s lessons – lessons identified in the BCP “For Ministry.”

Who knows how old Eli actually was when Samuel barged into his bedroom (three times no less) but we know he was a high priest and judge of Israel, a revered sage, an elder who had so many things he could have told Samuel – just as your diocesan staff could choose to “tell” you how to run your parish – but Eli understood that if instead he could teach Samuel how to listen to God it would be a source of formation forever.

And what is formation? According to Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, it is the process of building up the body of Christ until we all reach unity in the faith becoming mature – fully who God created us to be in Christ. It is a lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep process by which each of our bodies learns to receive the gifts God has given us so that we can be knit together in love for the sake of God’s mission.

And this theme echoes right up to the Gospel … it is God who gives the gift and God who holds the manual for the gifts and for the mission. Or in the language of our Convention theme, it is God who kindles our hearts and awakens our hope.

This gospel is often read at ordinations and I find that odd. How it often gets read and preached is that there are not enough (read: ordained) laborers for all the work there is to do. But that is not my understanding of this text. It is instead a statement of fact. There will never be enough workers for the work to be done because the work to be done is, in fact, the work of the coming of the Kingdom of God and that cannot be accomplished by any number of human beings. That has already been and is being accomplished through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus began his ministry in the temple, reading the words of Isaiah from a scroll, that he was coming and had arrived to usher in the Kingdom of God.

We live in a world that is an Emerald City, an internet circus, a global marketplace with promises of a wizard who will help us with our deepest longings.

An anxious, post-Covid church too often marked by exhaustion, burnout, retirement, shrinkage, and grief situated in a world ravaged by greed, fear, and hatred has headed toward the Emerald City’s oppressive lie that we can buy our way out of this crisis or work harder to achieve the gifts we need. The clear message of today’s Gospel is that it is impossible for any number of laborers to do the work of bringing the Kingdom if they are not listening to their shepherd. Control and busyness are not marks of Christian maturity.

What IS possible is that we learn to depend on each other, to mean it when we say, “We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.”

I find it befuddling when we interpret this Gospel account through a lens of scarcity in liturgies that should be – as all Eucharists are – celebrations of God’s abundance … there is always enough grace and there are always enough gifts in the community right now to do all that God has called us to do. We bore witness to that truth in the video testimony from the good people of St. George and St. Thomas this morning.

Having been one of the writers of the Way of Love curriculum, I remember the original vision of offering verbs that reflect the pattern of life of the early church, the rhythm of the catechumenate that prepared people for baptism. The vision of the Way of Love was not to give the Church a new set of ideas or plans, it was an attempt to call people back to ancient spiritual practices so that when we Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest we will become people whose lives ooze the love, mercy, and justice of Jesus Christ. There is no other way, no other wizard.

As Aslan said to Jill in The Silver Chair in the face of her crippling thirst, “there is no other stream.”

As baptized leaders in the Church you and I are called to build up the Body of Christ by preparing people to receive and use the gifts God wants to give. And that always happens in community – messy, strange, inconvenient, awkward as it can be – Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, or the Fellowship of the Ring, The Three Musketeers, the Rebel Alliance. When we confront our fears and our adversaries honestly and together, we can discern the gifts God is already kindling among us, and our hope WILL be awakened.

“Speak God for your servants are listening.”

November 10 2023

Evening Prayer Sermon for the 202nd Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

FrankBishop, Uncategorized

The Very Rev. Al Crumpton, IV
Our Savior Episcopal Church
Dean, Augusta Convocation
Sermon – Year A – EDOG Convention Evening Prayer
November 9, 2023
Text: Luke 11:9-13, 1 Corinthians 12:4-14, & Psalm 139:1-9

When the weather is nice, one of the things I enjoy is grilling on the back patio of our home. When cooking outside, I use lump charcoal, which means that the process of starting the fire is not immediate like with a gas grill. Those of you who are familiar with lump charcoal know that it is not uniform in shape like manufactured briquets that are mostly the same size. I sometimes think of this form of grilling as being similar to cooking over a campfire. The lumps of charcoal, in a variety shapes and densities, must be stacked in such a way as to allow for air to flow through the heap. After lighting the stack, I make sure the bottom and top vents are open to allow for the greatest amount of air to flow and feed the smoldering flame. After about 15 to 20 minutes, I usually return to find the embers ablaze with fire and ready for whatever needs to be cooked.

As I thought about the theme for the 202^nd Convention of the Diocese of Georgia which is “Kindle our hearts and awaken hope,”, the image of starting a fire for grilling came to mind. The starting of the fire begins with my decision to take action in doing what needs to be done to get things in order for the initial flame to have the greatest chance of igniting. One of the key components for this process to be successful is allowing for the right amount of air the pass through the flame that will cause it to grow and spread. As air hits that small flame, kind of like the Holy Spirit hitting our souls, the result can be fantastic. This image brought me back to our Collect of the Day that we will pray in a few minutes when we will call upon God to, “grant that by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we may be enlightened and strengthened for service.” (BCP p. 151)

As we ponder these images, we might also be prompted to recall a familiar passage we hear at Pentecost. Luke tells us in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles that, “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” (Acts 2:2-3) I am aware that we are well past Pentecost Sunday for this year, but the last time I checked, the Holy Spirit DID NOT keep a calendar for when to show up and show off. The question is, are we paying attention to the Spirit’s presence, that may not be literal fire and wind, but is definitely a presence that can burn brightly in our souls as the Spirit whirls in, with, and among us?

In order for the Spirit’s presence to be known, we must be open to allow the Spirit to move within us and remember that we have no control over how or when this movement may occur. I remember being at Cursillo 113 at Honey Creek back in 2008. It was time for us to make our way to the Chapel of Our Savior. As we entered that sacred space, there was only candlelight and the consecrated elements of bread and wine on the altar. Like it was yesterday, I can still recall bowing my head and feeling an overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit. It felt like a scene from Pentecost. It was as if the unbridled Spirit was all throughout the room at once. It was a powerful experience of God’s amazing presence that I shall not soon forget as it was exciting and intimidating since I had no control of what was happening.

In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, we hear once again about the Holy Spirit in action. Paul says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” (1 Corinthians 12:8) Notice that this passage says NOTHING about the recipients of the gifts picking and choosing what they want. The fact remains, it is the Spirit who chooses the gifts that are best for us to use in serving our Lord. According to Paul, “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.” (1 Corinthians 12:11) Not all of us will utter knowledge. Not all of us will have exemplary faith. Not all of us will have the gifts for healing, miracles, prophecy, and discernment which is exactly how a healthy body functions. No one person or part has it all. The unique gifts the Spirit bestows to each of us are intended to be used by us for the benefit of the greater community as we come together to offer our gifts in supporting each other as we engage in the work and mission of our Lord. To sum up this fact, Paul concludes by stating, “Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.” (1 Corinthians 12:14)

Thankfully, we don’t have to search very hard to discern the hope filled kindling presence of the Holy Spirit who is always eager and willing to be with us when we are ready. This fact is noted when the Psalmist asks, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” The Psalmist continues by saying, “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.” (Psalm 139:6-9) Nowhere is out of reach for the Spirit.

In an article for Church Times, The Rev. Dr. Robert Davies Hughes offers a quote about the importance of the Holy Spirit from Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatios IV, as translated by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware when he states, “Without the Spirit, God is far away, Christ belongs to the past, the Gospel is a dead letter, the Church is a mere organization; authority takes the form of domination, mission is turned into propaganda, worship is reduced to bare recollection, Christian action becomes the morality of a slave.

But in the Spirit God is near, the risen Christ is present with us here and now, the gospel is the power of life, the Church signifies Trinitarian communion, authority means liberating service, mission is an expression of Pentecost, the liturgy is making-present of both past and future, human action is divinized.”[1]

As we engage in the work of the Diocese of Georgia over the next couple of days, do we see our actions as being divinized by the Spirit of our Lord? Are we opening ourselves for Pentecost moments to happen at anytime and anywhere? Are we loving each other and allowing that love to spill over into our words and actions for the benefit of others?

As we face challenges and seek new opportunities, I believe that with God’s help and our committed efforts our eyes can be opened to the Holy Spirit’s motivating presence. We can make the gospel the power of life! We can share the Spirit with the world as our hearts are kindled and awakened to hope. Perhaps we can see ourselves as being like pieces of charcoal in various shapes and sizes waiting eagerly for the flame and wind of the Spirit to rush through and ignite us into a roaring blaze of faith and action.

[1] Robert Davies Hughes, “Nearer Now Than When We First Believed,” Church Times, March 11, 2016, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/11-march/features/features/nearer-now-than-when-we-first-believed, articled accessed 11-1-2023 and 11-2-2023

May 24 2023

A Ministering Community

A Ministering Community

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church in Cochran, Georgia on May 20, 2023.

A Ministering Community
A sermon for the ordination of Shayna Warren Cranford to the Sacred Order of Deacons
2 Corinthians 4:1-6

“It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In this verse from our reading from the 2^nd Letter to the Christians in Corinth, the moment of creation as God called forth light in the darkness fuses with what the Holy Trinity does in baptism making all things new. If we continued reading the epistle it would make this plain in adding in the next chapter, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18).

God is making all things new in Jesus and for those of us who are baptized Christians, we are each called to the ministry of reconciliation until all humanity is reconciled with God and one another. The grace, mercy, and love we have found in Jesus is for everyone. You have never met a single person who was not fearfully and wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God. You have not known anyone who God does not know fully and love completely, even as God wants better for each of us than the mess we can make of our lives. This is great and glorious Good News. And yet, we can still find that our friends and neighbors find this hard to believe as what they have encountered in church is something far less than Amazing Grace.

Given Shayna’s first experiences of church, it is a wonder we have arrived at this day. Growing up in the community of Cary, church is never far away. For Shayna, it was in her backyard at Mount Calvary Church. Shayna wanted to go to church and yet there in Sunday School she met that wonderful and sacred mystery – the Body of Christ, that is the church –embodied in mean little boys jumping off the table and trying to kick her.

The teacher passed out envelopes of all the “Christian” things you had done that week, such as whether you read your Sunday School lesson, brought your Bible to church, and placed money in the envelope. She had nothing to check, but the boys who kicked her had checked every box, and were on the chart showing perfect attendance, and they knew the answers to every question about Bible stories.

I am not bashing the Baptists here. We all know people who show up to church each Sunday with Bible (or Book of Common Prayer) in hand whose lives don’t seem to shine with the light of the glory of God. There is a reason why in a world that so needs to experience the love of God, people around us are sure the one place they won’t find the answers to our broken and hurting world is in a Christian church.

There are more twists and turns to Shayna’s journey to this day but suffice to say they included moments when the church assured her of judgment, without sharing the same assuredness of forgiveness and mercy offered in Jesus. God’s will sounded cruel, heartless…as mean as boys kicking you in Sunday School.

After meeting Dave at college, falling in love and marrying, the two tried to find a church home only to discover that they were miserable sinners as they had their feet metaphorically dangled over the flames of hell. While raising kids, they took a break from church. That is when Shayna’s old softball coach’s pleas to go to church with him broke through. Dale Jones persistent invitation finally reached the point where she could not keep turning him down. Shayna says of coming into this beautiful church, “I remember that first visit so well. Yes, we were a little overwhelmed with keeping up with the prayer book, and the kneeling and standing. But, [she added] we felt the love, the genuine spirit of the people, the closeness of God. I truly felt the spirit of Jesus.”

Within weeks, their kids were acolytes and as I have heard Dave say it on multiple occasions, “We have been Episcopalian our entire life and didn’t know it.”

They had arrived not in any Episcopal Church, but here at Trinity. The recent history of this church offers an important context for today’s ordination. Shayna is being raised up from Trinity to be first a deacon and then a priest in the midst of this same community. That is not the usual path for priests in the Episcopal Church, but it began with a bold experiment by Bishop Henry Louttit, who served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Georgia from 1995-2010. Bishop Louttit was very much involved directly in the process of Liturgical Renewal that gave us the 1979 Book of Common Prayer with its strong emphasis on baptism. His convention addresses and his preaching focused on evangelism and church growth, as he lifted up “the ministry of all the baptized” and “mutual ministry”.

Mutual Ministry was an approach he learned from the Diocese of Northern Michigan. In this way of being church, the congregation is not seen as a community headed by a minister, but a ministering community that encourages all baptized Christians to use their gifts both in the church and in the community. The worship of the church certainly matters, but the main focus of ministry is seen as daily life. Every baptized person is empowered by the Holy Spirit to serve where they are deployed in their family, with their group of friends, and among their co-workers as Christ’s agent in the world.

Bishop Louttit could immediately see how this could benefit Episcopalians in South Georgia. 27 years ago, he asked a delegation to travel to The UP – the Upper Penisula of Michigan, to learn more firsthand. That group of four included two Episcopal priests together with Joy Fisher, then a lay member of the diocesan Standing Committee, and Dr. John Pasto who were both from here at Trinity.

At the next diocesan convention, held in 1997, Bishop Louttit invited Bishop Thomas Ray of Northern Michigan to address the clergy and delegates to share this concept of a community of ministers. In his bishop’s address that year, Bishop Louttit said, “In many, if not all places, we have got to learn that the parish ministry cannot be done by paid staff.

We have to use the gifts of all our members, in both the nurturing and priestly ministry to the members of the congregation, and in the diaconal service of the congregation in Christ’s name to those in desperate need in our counties.”

The next year, he told the convention that Trinity in Cochran was ready to take the next step. In time, Joy Fisher, George Porter, and Vernon Wiggins would discern calls to the priesthood and be formed locally and ordained together. During their time of formation, Bishop Louttit told the 2001 convention, “Trinity Church, Cochran has shown amazing imagination, commitment, and a willingness to risk and try new ways of being the church in order for the church that is so valuable in their own lives to be healthy in their community.”

This church would still later raise up Shayna’s old softball coach, Dale Jones, for ordination during Bishop Scott Benhase’s episcopacy. Shayna arrives here on this day of her ordination to the Sacred Order of Deacons having come to know the Episcopal Church very well, but she has only been a member in a church where every priest she has known was lifted up by Trinity to serve this church. She is called to be a minister in this community of ministers.

What Shayna brings to her ministry is a deep knowledge of Bleckley County and a longing to share the love of God as found in Jesus. In her heart of hearts, she longs to feed the members of this church in word and sacrament so that each one can serve Christ through serving others with the gifts God has given them. She is called to be a priest in this place, rooted in the soil of this corner of the Vineyard that she knows so well. So, why then did I ask you earlier if it is your will that Shayna be ordained as a deacon, and you all said, “It is!” as if you don’t really want her to be ordained a priest, right now?

That is because serving as a deacon is the essential next step in her becoming a priest and we want that next step for her. This time of being a deacon in preparation for the priesthood is no less than six months. My intention, with the endorsement of the Commission on Ministry and the consent of the Standing Committee will be to ordain Shayna a priest in December.

We ordain her a deacon as the Church, in its wisdom, doesn’t trust anyone to be a priest who has not spent time living into serving others, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely. That is why centuries of practice among the many millions of Christians in not just our Anglican Communion, but also the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran and other churches ordain a priest in training as a deacon first. We don’t intend this to diminish the Sacred Order of Deacons, but to show how vitally important servant ministry is to every follower of Jesus in any Christian community.

The work of real deacons is the work of a lifetime. Shayna will serve as a deacon during this time of further preparation for the priesthood. This is not just in line with church tradition, but also with the example of our Lord. Our Gospel reading for this day recounts a dispute arising among Jesus’ disciples as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. Jesus reminded them that they are not to look to the example of the world. He said, “Rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.” Then he brought this home in saying, “I am among you as one who serves.”

Yet here at Trinity with its history of Mutual Ministry, we all know in our bones that Shayna is not to serve others on behalf of or instead of us. Trinity is a ministering community encouraging all baptized Christians to use their gifts both here in the church and as importantly in the community. Every one of us is to care for all in need and that need is vast. Shayna has a particular role, but everyone shares the call to the ministry of reconciliation.

There are still kids growing up right here on the buckle of the Bible Belt hearing plenty of judgment who need to know that God knows them fully and loves them completely. There are plenty of adults beat up by the fear of God who need to rediscover the grace of God. For God is still bringing forth light in the darkness and calling us to speak love to hate. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” When the baptized each make this ministry their own, nothing can stop God’s love.

Amen.

January 9 2023

From the Cradle to the Grave and Beyond

FrankBishop Bishop, Sermon

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon at Calvary Episcopal Church in Americus, Georgia on January 9, 2023.

From the cradle to the grave and beyond

A sermon for the funeral of the Rev. John Lane
Revelation 21:2-7 and John 14:1-6

We gather as a people who mourn, in the confidence that our friend and brother, Deacon Johnny Lane, is with Jesus.

Our reading from the Book of Revelation tells of a coming time when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

We are not to that time of the Kingdom of God. Now we still mourn. It hurts so bad to get news of a cancer diagnosis and then so quickly, John is taken from us. But Deacon John was not taken from Jesus. He has passed through death to the life eternal, where he is with his savior. In his dying days, his faith did not dim. We can be strengthened by John’s faith.

This was faith he learned in the cradle. Born at home, in the little Central Florida settlement of Clay Sink, the entire population were his family by blood and marriage. He was at birth added to the cradle roll of Clay Sink Baptist Church. While his family would move around the Lakeland area, church was a constant for his parents, for Johnny, and his four brothers and three sisters. He was a steady presence in Sunday School, sang in the youth choir, and took part in all the activities for youth. He made his public confession of faith at the church in Kathleen, Florida, where four generations of his family are buried.

His family was oriented to their community and their country as well. During the Second World, his parents placed three blue stars in the front window, giving thanks when all returned home with the blue star being replaced with a gold one.

This idea of service to a great good was significant for John, who saw in the parable where Jesus took a coin in the Temple and told those questioning him about whether they had to pay taxes something I had not seen before. Jesus said render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and what unto God what is God’s. John saw in this, his savior teaching citizenship. We are to be good citizen of the Kingdom of God and a good citizen of this world in which we live.

Life changed when his father died in 1948. John was the only one still at home. His mother went to work and, on graduating from high school, John joined the Navy. He chased the American Dream and after four years in the Navy, he married, earned an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Florida and landed a job with Western Electric. To know and love John Lane is to appreciate his engineering brain. Very loving and caring, he could seem stoic when his brain that was so adept at problem-solving would have him working to solve a problem in logical steps. But then there is also his quick wit and his big smile.

Work went well. He moved around a bit, serving the Navy again, now as a contractor. During this time, he and his wife adopted Ricky and a few years later, Tricia. They joined a Baptist Church, but travel for work prevented him from connecting there. In time, his first marriage came apart at the seams and ended in divorce. God does not create the tragedies in our lives, but God does use what happens in our life to enter in. God works all things together for the good for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. God used the divorce to bring John closer.

In time, he met Beth. As they decided to marry, John said they more importantly committed to each other that Christ and the Church were going to become permanent members of their life together. They have not missed many services in the 45 years since that decision. With five children in their blended family and grandchildren on their way, life was good.

John had been a faithful Baptist. He became an Episcopalian the old fashioned way, just like I did. He married one. John said that he told Beth, “It doesn’t matter to me where we go to church as long as we go.” Beth told him, “It does matter to me. I’m a cradle Episcopalian. We will go to the Episcopal Church.” We are all most appreciative Beth!

They found their church home right here at Calvary where Bishop Paul Reeves confirmed John in 1980. Beth sang in the choir, served on the Altar Guild, and was active in the Episcopal Church Women. John became a lay reader and a lay eucharistic minister. Never having lost his community-oriented upbringing, John also worked in the food pantry and with the soup kitchen. He said he worked with the children from the barely potty trained to preschool. The next thing you know, his heart for servant ministry had John taking the Eucharist to shut-ins and helping to organize a chaplaincy program at Sumter Regional Hospital. Feeling called to the ministry of a deacon, he entered discernment and then formation and was ordained here on November 11, 1990.

Across the next decades of servant ministry, John continued to faithfully take the church out into the world and to bring the needs he saw in the communities he served to the attention of the church. He served here at Calvary and then for a year at St. Stephens in Leesburg. Next, he went to St. John and St. Mark in Albany, where worked in the food pantry, taught Sunday School, and worked with the acolytes.

He went back to St. Stephens to assist Father Bill Stewart as he worked on the steps to faithfully close that church, before going to Christ Church in Cordele. There he served as the Deacon in Charge of Worship on the Water, their summer outreach ministry. I loved serving with John on the resort dock on Lake Blackshear. He was always so passionate about that ministry and so grateful for assistance. To speak of John’s ministry is to also speak of how John and Beth have been a team. He was living his best life when he and Beth were helping other to get set up for Worship on the Water. In a Hawaiian shirt clergy shirt greeting the congregation arriving by boat.

John reflected in 2010 on what was then more than 30 years of ministry, writing that his ministry reminded him of the scene with Jesus on the beach with Peter. This was after Peter’s denied he even knew Jesus. On the other side of the cross and the resurrection, Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me.” Three times, Peter says “Yes Lord, I love you.” Each time, Jesus told Peter, “Then feed my sheep.” John looking back on years of serving the need through organizing and managing food pantries and soup kitchens. Years of working on providing low-cost housing. Years of being a servant to those who would otherwise, be lost and left out. In all these ways, Deacon John faithfully fed the sheep that the Holy Spirit sent his way.

In our Gospel reading we hear Jesus telling his first followers, “Do not let your hearts be trouble.” He goes on to say, “I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

John has been with Jesus from the cradle to the grave and now is with Jesus beyond this life, into the life eternal. We mourn, because we have lost him, but we mourn as those with the same sure and certain hope that he held on to even in his last days. We pray for Beth, his beloved wife and partner in life and ministry; and we pray for his children, Steve, Rebecca, David, and Tricia; and we pray for all of us who mourn.

As we mourn John, we can honor him in a way befitting a deacon. When you miss him, pick up some food to drop by a food pantry or volunteer to serve in a soup kitchen. Not only will these actions honor Deacon John Lane, these steps to assist those in need will continue his servant ministry as you feed the sheep as Jesus taught us to do.

Amen.

December 20 2022

New Beginnings 59 Information

Joshua VarnerYouth, Youth Min New Beginnings, Youth

New Beginnings 59 February 24-26, 2023

The Lead Teen for New Beginnings 59 is Jackson Beckham, of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Tifton GA. The rest of the staff come from across the Diocese, including Savannah, Augusta, Valdosta, Thomasville, Brunswick, and more.

New Beginnings Information

When is New Beginnings?
Who is New Beginnings for?
How much does New Beginnings Cost?
What about masks and vaccinations?
What behavior expectations are there?
In short, we expect participants and staff to live up to the vows made in our Baptismal Covenant. We ask that each person treat others with respect and caring. This includes respecting others’ desires about name and pronouns, respecting others’ possessions, making sure our words build each other up rather than tearing others down, and generally treating each other with loving-kindness.
Part of this respect also means being present for the entire event, barring emergencies, fully participating in each activity, and listening to and following staff instructions.
There are also general ground rules, which include the prohibition of alcohol, nicotine, vaping products, weapons, and so on. In order to enable the fullest participation during the event, the Coordinator collects all cell phones at the start of the weekend and returns them at the end.
This sounds fun! Can adults come too?
How do I register?

December 16 2022

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare. – A sermon for Virginia Maxwell’s funeral

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon at Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia on December 16, 2022.

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare.
A sermon for Virginia Maxwell’s Funeral
Wisdom 3:1-5,9; Psalm 139:1-11; Romans 8:14-39; and John 10:11-16

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare.

If you did not know Virginia Maxwell and you heard those of us who knew her and love her talking, it would be easy to see the surface of the words and miss the fullness of their meaning. Of course, no one could describe Virginia without saying elegant or gracious. If someone tried, we would know they had never met her. After all, George, her husband of 62 years loved to say, “Ginny has more grace in her little finger than I have in my whole body.” And we knew he didn’t have that much grace either.

Yet this fails to capture the liveliness of a woman of great depth. With a playful spirit and a great sense of humor, you just never knew what she was going to say. Of George’s call to ministry coming after he had settled well into the family’s furniture business, she said, “We were convinced it was a call from God, because we would have never thought of it.”

She and George were a dynamic duo. The Reverend Cynthia Taylor recalled the lasting impact the Maxwells made on her parents and her family when they arrived at Holy Comforter in Sumter, South Carolina, in the mid-1960s. The low church parish did not know what to do with a Father Maxwell, much less a priest who would show up for a New Year’s Eve Party in a black clergy suit acting as if he did not have a party hat perched on his head. Beside him, Ginny dazzled in the perfect cocktail dress for the occasion. During that time, the Maxwells made a principled, Gospel-based stand, for integration as they took the implications of their faith seriously. Reflecting on the difference they made in her parent’s lives, Cynthia said of the Maxwells, that they paid attention to their lives and the lives of others. They gave you permission to look at your life, which tended to lead to people changing for the better.

Ordination gives one an entrée into someone’s life in important moments. I sat with Virginia after Father Maxwell’s fall, and we talked a long while as it seemed he was leaving the hospital for his heavenly home rather than returning to their house on Calhoun Square. Being with her then revealed to me what y’all know so well, Virginia had a living faith in a risen Lord.

Our reading from Wisdom tells us that, “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God…In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died…but they are at peace.” Ginny knew that her beloved husband belonged to God and whether he lived or he died, he would be with Jesus.

As Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”

Paul knew both God’s love and persecution. We know of five occasions when Paul was given 39 lashes with a whip, which was the harshest sentence minus one. Three times Paul was beaten with rods. He was stoned once and shipwrecked three times in his travels. And out of experiencing God’s love in the midst of this, the Apostle wrote that none of these things could separate us from the love of Christ.

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Virginia could sit by the beside of her husband of 62 years, not with vague wishful thinking, but with a sure and certain hope founded on a lifetime of prayer, reading scripture, and putting her faith into action. Experience taught her that the Gospel is true—death is real and so is resurrection. For followers of Jesus live not as people without hope, but as those who have in this life glimpsed God’s faithfulness so many times, we know we can trust no matter the circumstances.

Virginia enjoyed the support of a small prayer group that met faithfully for more than 40 years, usually in the home of Bill and Liz Sprague. Neither Ginny nor Liz were from Savannah and so they shared that perspective. The group would sit in four chairs facing one another, drink coffee, talk about what was going on in their lives, often with their children. And Mrs. Sprague told me something I will share just with you, as long as you promise not to tell anyone. They would also share a little gossip cloaked in concern and prayer.

Perhaps no small prayer group has faced division like this one as they found themselves on opposite sides of a fault line that would divide this church. Even as Ginny and Liz’ husbands held to positions that would be adjudicated by the Georgia Supreme Court, the women gathered still. What held them together, their love for each other and faith in Jesus, was stronger than what might have separated them.

And what did Liz see in a friend with whom she shared everything in difficult times? She said Virginia was unselfish. She would do anything she could for you to a greater degree than most of us. And importantly, Virginia made everything more fun.

But her life was not without trials. Virginia’s last years were difficult as they are for any of us whose memories fade. Even when you can meet your beloved daughter as if for the first time, not one of us can be lost as our whole loves are held in the heart of the God who made us and knows us so well. As the Psalmist writes,

LORD, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting-places
and are acquainted with all my ways.

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips,
but you, O LORD, know it altogether (Psalm 139:1-3)

Not all is lost. It can’t be as our whole lives live in the memories of God. I join the Apostle Paul in the conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This faith in the resurrection is not just about some glad morning when this life is o’er when we fly away to heaven. Not being separated from the love of God will be evident then. The bedrock trust that Jesus is with us always matters most in the here and now when we face adversity. Christians do not have a Get-out-of-trouble-free card. We are as likely to end up facing tragedy as much as anyone else. What we have is a living faith in a risen Lord. We have the knowledge of who we are because we have come to know whose we are. And knowing that, we know we can never be lost.

George said his Mom became more fully herself in some ways in recent years as with the loss of a filter, she was much funnier more often, as the humor she always saw, but sometimes held back, came flooding out. As so much was lost, Virginia remained.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.”

“I know my own.” Jesus knew Ginny well. She who could see the good in everybody was seeing Jesus in those around her, just as we all saw Jesus in her.

“And my own know me.” Ginny knew Jesus. Her active faith had her pursuing her savior her whole life not just intellectually, but also with her heart in serving him through caring for others. She was, of course, not perfect, but she was willing to be perfected by Christ as she did her best to put her beliefs into practice, usually behind the scenes, not taking a lead role, but making every group she was a part of more effective.

In all this, she had a mature understanding of God through reflecting on how the Holy Spirit had been present with her and those around her. And even as her memories faded, her daughter Anne said, of course she still knew the Good Shepherd who was ever with her.

Virginia Maxwell was and remains Christ’s own, a sheep of his own fold, a lamb of his own flock, a sinner of his own redeeming. And Jesus has received her into the arms of his mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. We know this as we saw in her life, a trust in Jesus that in its simplicity and depth was and ever shall be a faith that is:

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare.

Amen.

November 15 2022

Closing Presentation – Convention 2022

The following was given as a closing presentation to the 201st Convention of the Diocese of Georgia by Bishop Frank Logue.

Let Your Light Shine
Matthew 5:14-16

The longest serving Secretary of Convention for the Diocese of Georgia, was the Reverend Doctor James Bolan Lawrence, who served several decades in leading these meetings. When he arrived at Calvary Church in Americus in 1905, they didn’t know what to do with him. He was a 27-year old priest and he was different, having earned a Masters in Classics at the University of Georgia before going to seminary, he fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. He was known for his love of “good food, good drink, good tobacco, good music, good clothes.” He once created a scandal by preaching a sermon about how good it was to play golf on Sunday.

In the history of Calvary Church in Americus, they talked about how his sermons were not that inspiring, they were too erudite, technical. But he served there for 47 years as a pastor to that community. When he died, his funeral was at Calvary and he was to be buried 13 miles away beside the log cabin church he had built in Andersonville. Many people walked the route with the procession itself stretching out for a mile. He was such a pastor that they saw the light of Christ shining through him.

The people in southwest Georgia loved Brother Jimmy enough to forget his sermons while recalling his example of “kindness, selflessness and utter goodness.”

The previous year, when he retired, Bishop Barnwell told the diocesan convention, “During these years Dr. Lawrence has shed the light of his life not only in Americus, but also in a half dozen or more mission stations scattered over a vast area in western and south-western Georgia.” He founded churches in Blakely, Cordele, Dawson, Moultrie, Benevolence, and Pennington, wherever he could ride a train to during the week and gather a congregation and preach and pray. When there were enough of them, he founded a church.

He shed the light of his life, the Bishop said, which caused me to look at the Gospel anew. Jesus put it this way, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

I am struck by Jesus saying, “Let your light shine.” This is about the gifts God has given you, that make you unique in what you have to offer to the Body of Christ.

While I have held up the very unique priest who his neighbors called, Brother Jimmy, he was not alone. Anson Greene Phelps Dodge Jr. accomplished much on the Georgia coast, dying before he turned 40. The Rev. Paul Hoornstra more recently planted churches on the islands at St. Francis of the Islands and St. Peter’s on Skidaway.

Then there is our beloved Saint of Georgia, Deaconess Anna Alexander, who accomplished so much with so little, especially little help from her diocese. And we see others who also served their African American communities with similar devotion, like her sisters Mary and Dora who started the school at St. Cyprian’s in Darien. Then there was Father Perry who led the school at Good Shepherd in Thomasville for 32 years. And from 1884 to 1928, St. Athanasius’ in Brunswick ran a very impressive secondary school with an Industrial Arts curriculum. I could go on to tell of generations of black Episcopalians who have been and are today leaders in this Diocese.

Rita Griffeth, a Glynn County native who led summer camps in this Diocese for 25 years at Camp Reese on St. Simons Island. Every year of 1925 to 1950, she drove the backroads of central and south Georgia to personally find counselors and campers and then tirelessly run the program. It is impossible for those of us who know camp in more recent decades to fail to compare her to Pam Guice, who also provided such dedicated service.

When I said yesterday that we find evidence of the Diocese of Georgia having creativity and resourcefulness deep in its DNA, these are the people I am talking about who decade after decade served the towns we now serve. My list could go on and on and would include names of people in this room. I find followers of Jesus meeting the challenge of their times led by the Holy Spirit. That same spirit abides in this Diocese.

My parting offering to you is a list of ideas and tools that are just a starter to get you thinking. We will email out the PDF files and the web page version is linked at the diocesan website now. There are ways to deepen faith, and ideas for engaging with your community, alongside new ways and time-tested old ways to engage with stewardship.

As I said yesterday, these ideas are not an invitation to work harder and do more. Some of the resources will assist you in what you are already doing, like having free studies to choose from as an offering on a Wednesday evening. For any new initiative, you will have to find something else you have been doing that it is time to stop. Some really good ideas from the past need a plaque and a sheet cake. Celebrate what was accomplished as you discontinue an effort that bore good fruit for a season.

Assess what you are doing now as a congregation. Any area that takes more energy than it seems to offer parishioners or the community in return, is probably ready to give thanks for and end. Anything that lacks leadership and volunteers, that could be a sign to let up for a season. There could also be great ideas from your past, that are time for a return. What we need now as a church can very well be what worked well before. None of this is about the institution of the church per se. I know I have a job that would make it seem otherwise, but the institution of the church is not worth getting up for in the morning unless it is serving the Gospel of Jesus Christ and making a difference in the lives of the people in the community. If the church is doing that then it is worthwhile. To the degree the institution of the church gets in the way of that mission, we have to acknowledge that it is getting in the way of our reason for being. Because there is a lost and hurting world that does not know that they were fearfully and wonderfully by the creator of the cosmos. There are people made in the image and likeness of God who have seen themselves in the eyes of others. Showing the love of God, however we do it, is something that matters so much.

My deepest conviction as we embark on a time of holy experimentation, is that the Holy Spirit will use our faithfulness. We don’t have to let the potential for the perfect prevent us from doing something good. I learned in working with Kairos Prison Ministry that being merely flexible is still far too rigid. Flexible is, here I stand. I can bend a little. They said that in the prison, that is not enough. We can be working as the whole prison goes into lock down and we are in the room longer, or it can go into lockdown overnight and we can’t get back in the next morning. We want to be fluid like water going down a mountain toward a river and the sea. The water knows its purpose and never loses track of the ultimate goal. The water may have to take a different path to get to the river and the sea, but it will accomplish its purpose.

In this way, we need to be fluid about methods, but we know that we are about is people coming into a relationship with Jesus Christ that transforms their lives as they see that God loves them, wants better for them than where they are now. This is the offering of healing, repentance, and new life. That is the goal, which is why we can be fluid in how we go about it.

The first Anglicans arrived as the colony of Georgia’s founders in 1733. While so much has changed, that core purpose has remained the same as they wanted to offer a haven for those in need of a fresh start. Sharing the Good News of Jesus is worth getting up for in the morning and is worth spending your days, and giving your life to accomplish. As we commit together to looking for new ways to share our ancient faith, we do not do so alone, the true missionary is God, the real work is being done by Jesus. This is the work of the Spirit. We are given the grace to be on the team.

Amen.

November 12 2022

God meets us in reality – Convention sermon 2022

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon for the Convention Eucharist for the 201st Convention of the Diocese of Georgia at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Savannah, Georgia, on November 11, 2022.

God meets us in reality
Isaiah 58: 6-12 and Matthew 25: 31-40

God meets us in reality.
God is not in my idealized past.
God is not in my hoped for future.

The God who made us, loves us, and wants better for us is with us now and in every moment of our very real, sometimes glorious, sometimes messy, lives.

God becoming human in Jesus was all about the Second Person of the Holy Trinity entering into creation, weaving back the tattered tapestry of our world from the inside.

My Mom helped me to see this insight–God is real and deals with our actual lives, not our fantasies.

She has often repeated that phrase: God meets us in reality.
This year, I have heard my mother’s sage counsel differently.

I had a poignant epiphany in September, when I was speaking with Diocesan Council at Trinity Church in Statesboro. Having a light bulb going off over my head as I am in the midst of talking to a group happens to me with some regularity. As an extrovert, I benefit from processing my thoughts externally. I sometimes don’t know what I think, what my deepest and best thoughts are, until I talk a matter through.

I was taking our Council through the process by which Canon Loren Lasch and I separately had arrived at the same conclusion about this convention. We realized that it would be most important to share a clear-eyed view of where the congregations of the Diocese of Georgia are now, after having experienced great shifts during a global pandemic.

In Canon Lasch’s opening presentation and in my Bishop’s Address we have done just that in a way that I trust is hopeful. We have seen the data on our attendance and finances as well as the signs of how God is present with us in the midst of what we face today in our corner of the vineyard, which is the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. That morning in Statesboro as I told the members of Council about my Mom’s favored phrase, God meets us in reality, the word reality was a hard one to say.

Sixteen months ago, my mother called me to share a frightening incident. She had been sitting at a red light, waiting for the traffic on the state route to go by and the light to turn green. She knew that she was driving to her daughter’s house. That much she remembered. But Mom told me that she realized that she had not the slightest idea which direction to go to get there. My sister, Leigh, has been living in the same home near Arnoldsville, Georgia for 25 years. My Mom, Julia, had been, at that time, living in the same house in Winterville for nearly 20 years. Mom had made that 11.4-mile drive countless times, always making the left hand turn onto US 78. That day, she was stuck. She knew where she wanted to go and yet had no idea what to do next. Soon after, her doctor diagnosed my mother with dementia.

I can’t say strongly enough that she was brave in facing that new reality. My Mom was one of eight children. She had cared for one of her sisters, Laura Frances, as the relentless progression of Alzheimer’s had her sundowning each afternoon. My aunt would be looking for her deceased husband, Joe, and their children, who were by then living in three different states. Mom lovingly looked after her sister until care at home was no longer an option. She had witnessed how far from reality dementia can take someone.

All of this came to me at once as I told the Council that God meets us in reality. What does it mean, I wondered, when our view of what is real suffers distortion. And, as sometimes happens, the next step opened for me. Just as clearly as I could see my mother learning of her dementia diagnosis, I recalled the book that the Lasches gave to me. The Rev. Ian Lasch had been reading the work of John Swinton, a Practical Theologian in Aberdeen, Scotland. He and Loren gave me Swinton’s book Dementia: Living in the Memories of God. So as I spoke, I took that next step, following where I felt the Holy Spirit leading me and I told the members of Diocesan Council of it being difficult to talk of my Mom saying God is with us in reality now that she is less connected to what is real. I let them know of the book in which Swinton explores:

Who am I when I’ve forgotten who I am?

What does it mean to love God and be loved by God when I have forgotten who God is?

His exploration goes far from where my mother is now or may ever be with dementia. Swinton takes the reader to the farthest borders of where the various forms of what we call dementia can take a person. This work of practical theology is so important as it works from what we know of God to puzzle through the implications of our beliefs. If we are each made in the image and likeness of God, what does the loss of memory do to the imago dei, that image of God, imprinted on each person? We are not confined by what we can remember for we are always remembered by God. Even if someone’s cognition is such that they forget God, God never forgets that person. This is the deepest reality even in the furthest reaches of varied conditions we call dementia.

Since that phone call when she could not remember which way to turn, a lot has happened with my Mom. We worked through a variety of possibilities with her and after she visited for a few weeks last December, she decided to move into the apartments with her sister Emily. She pared down her possessions, we sold her house and moved her to Chattanooga. With her sister nearby and the care of the staff at her new home, she has remained as independent as possible. Between medication and a stable routine, my Mom is in a great environment. But it isn’t home. Even though I have been with her there as often as possible and my siblings have visited, the apartment may never feel like home to her. We all do what we can. Her two great grandchildren stayed with her for some days. We will be with her for her birthday later this month. The loss of home remains. Then there is the more difficult reality. Sometimes, when we talk, she does not remember any of us ever being with her in Tennessee.

Swinton’s book, I told the Council, helped me to see the value in spending time with my Mom even, or especially, when she might not recall it later. A visit that makes the hours spent with her better matters so much, whether she remembers it or not. And that time spent with her is good for me, even if she forgets the visit.

It’s not about trying to get my mom to the reality she used to be in, or the exact way our relationship used to be. Going back to the past like that simply cannot happen. What we’re living into now is finding new ways of expressing the love and care we’ve always had for each other, that’s still fully present even though it’s different than it’s been before. I can’t let the loss of abilities prevent me from appreciating my mother as she is now.

The insight that we need to appreciate what we have is, of course, relevant to any situation we face. For people who feel like they have everything under control and life is perfect, the day will come when chaos breaks into that careful order. For followers of Jesus, when our carefully maintained façade of perfection crumbles, we know that our savior remains with us, even in the midst of the chaos. When anxiety overwhelms us, when we face problems with no clear answer, Jesus will never leave us or forsake us.

In our reading from Isaiah, the Children of Israel were living in exile in Babylon trying to hold the faith passed down in families through generations. The prophets had warned that Israelites would not be exempt from the judgment of God if they failed to be faithful. The people did not heed the prophets. Exile came in a traumatic way to Ancient Israel twice, first when the Assyrian Empire took over the northern kingdom of Israel, the land of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, and again when the Babylonians captured the two tribes of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel. When our reading takes place, the people were remembering God’s teaching while exiled in an enemy land. The people in exile would have been tempted to think “we can’t find God until we get back to where we were, and how we were.” But they needed to find God anew in exile.

The exile is a central story of the Hebrew Bible. The Children of Israel looked back to the Exodus, when their ancestors were brought out of captivity in Egypt to be returned to the Promised Land. Now in Babylon, they mourned the loss of Zion and longed to be restored once more as God’s people living in the land of Israel.

Our reading from Isaiah was a word from God to remind them that they were always God’s people, no matter where they lived. Then they could trust that God would be faithful, without yet knowing whether they would ever return to their homeland.

God instructed Israel to put their faith into practice if they wanted to find light anew in the darkness all around them. In the words of our reading:

If you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

The exiles learned once more to faithfully follow the God who made them, loved them, and wanted better for them. They studied scripture and found their faith was born anew as they learned not to long for the past, but to serve God in the here and now.

The lesson to the exiles holds just as true for us. For the light of Christ to shine brightly in our lives and in the midst of our congregations, we know the way–study the scripture together, say our prayers, gather regularly for worship, and serve our communities as if we are serving Jesus himself. As we worship and serve, we are more likely to be attuned to how God is already present among us.

When we put our faith into practice, we remember who we are, which is to know whose we are. For those with dementia, as long as someone remembers them, they are not lost. The Gospel tells us that even if everyone we know were to forget us, each of us lives in the memory of God. Even in exile, we can still serve God in the knowledge that we are never God-forsaken.

The God who will never forget us is with us now. This is true with my Mom’s journey. And as I saw during the Council meeting in Statesboro, it is true for where we are as a diocese. We don’t have to go back to our churches as they were in 2019 to find Jesus present with us, or to 2010 or to 2000 or any other magic date. When we get real with ourselves, we will see how the Holy Spirit is already in our midst, leading and guiding us, not back to a longed for past or even ahead of us in a hoped for future.

The overwhelmingly Good News is that the God who made us, loves us, and wants better for us is with us now and in every moment of our very real, sometimes glorious, sometimes messy, lives.

God meets us in reality.

Amen.

November 12 2022

Bishop’s Address – Convention 2022

November 11, 2022 – Georgia Southern University’s Armstrong Center, Savannah

Beloved in Christ,

This is my third Convention Address as your bishop. A Bishop’s Address, by the canons of our church, is to share the work undertaken since our last convention, give the state of the diocese, and name plans for the coming year. While this year was quite unusual with Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion gatherings, a familiar pattern to my work is in place here at home.

Victoria and I have found a rhythm to our lives with each week focused around a journey. This past Saturday, we traveled the 229 miles to Good Shepherd in Thomasville. The drive is a favorite, hitting Georgia 122 just west of Waycross with more than 100 miles of two-lane blacktop cutting through a beautiful section of south Georgia all the way into Thomasville. I met with the vestry for a conversation about their future and then we celebrated the Holy Eucharist together in that beautiful church and enjoyed hanging out with folks at the reception. On Sunday morning, Victoria and I were at St. Margaret of Scotland in Moultrie for the Holy Eucharist and a fun time of fellowship over food.

Since we last met in convention, I have made visitations to 52 congregations and also made my visitation to Episcopal Day School for a total of 53 of the 71 visitations that make up a full cycle of visits for the Diocese of Georgia. In order to minimize multiple visits to a church over the course of one year, we have been counting celebrations of new ministry and ordinations as a visit. In this way, I am currently getting everywhere at least once every 18 months. I often hear that congregations would like to see me and Victoria more often, and we share that desire. Victoria and I love worshiping with you and spending time together. We are open to more non-Sunday visits if congregations would like to find a way to see us a bit sooner, but we are grateful that our current pattern allowed us to get to 53 visits in a year when the General Convention and the Lambeth Conference had us outside of the Diocese more than usual.

Canon Loren Lasch already told the stark reality of the drop in attendance and the shortage of priests in the Episcopal Church. Canon Katie Easterlin and our Treasurer Beth Robinson will offer more of the current financial picture of the diocese. In this address, I want to turn to the plans for the coming year, because a reasonable question after the reality check in the opening presentation is to look at me and ask, “Well bishop, what are we going to do about this?”

I will lay out some steps we are taking, but to understand why these steps now, I have to look backward. Canon Lasch rightly directed us to the present in her opening presentation. We also know that we need to learn lessons from the past. In this year as we lead up to the Bicentennial of the founding of the Diocese of Georgia, we are sharing stories from our history in From the Field. In our past we see mirrored some common struggles which remain today, as we seek to let the light of Christ shine through us.

In 1892, Bishop Cleland Nelson, elected well into a long economic depression, charted a bold course saying, “The proper attitude of the Church in Georgia is best described by the word aggressive.” He named areas which needed “to be attacked.” From 1893–1906, the diocese, which then encompassed the entire state of Georgia, funded missionaries as we expanded from 88 missions to 108 in 13 years, going from 6,292 communicants to 9,229 and building sixty-two new church buildings.

In 1920, as we were still reeling from the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Rt. Rev. Frederick Reese, was pushing forward mission work within the Diocese saying, “Brethren, we have pulled up a peg or two; we have got a new conception of our duty and our ability, we have made a good start. Let us not drop back, go to sleep again or stop to congratulate ourselves. There is much to do yet. It would be fatal to feel that we had completed the job. Everybody’s mind must be set with a forward look. We cannot afford to grow weary and rest.”

I could share other times with different struggles met by new strategies. However, we are not serving in the same context as our predecessors. In addition to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which comes on the heels of more than a decade of churchwide decline, we face the increasing secularization and polarization endemic in our world today.

In our Diocese, we have cities that have more Episcopal Churches than they can seem to support alongside county seat towns that are doing well to continue their witness to the Gospel in the midst of a dwindling population. This is why it is helpful to see how each generation has responded to the challenges of their times, letting their light shine in their communities.

Throughout our history, we find evidence of the Diocese of Georgia having creativity and resourcefulness deep in its DNA. More importantly when I study writings from my predecessors, I see how our primary response has been to be prayerful as we seek to remain faithful to where God is leading us. This is still our call.

Moving forward in the present reality there will be new ways of being church and connecting with our communities that will be fruitful, and there are certainly some old ways we would benefit from turning back toward. While there is no silver bullet, one-size fits all way to be the faithful church in this moment, we can respond to challenges knowing that whatever we face, we do so guided by the Holy Spirit. Rather than being led by the latest business practice the church wants to baptize, we can see the benefit of energy and leadership coming from the ground up to support creative endeavors that are life giving to each unique community.

The Rev. Melanie Lemburg recommended a book that has been helpful to me, How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going. The challenge for me is that the author, Susan Beaumont, convinced me of what I already suspected: as bishop, I have a different role in faithful experiments. As much as I love being creative, I am not the Chief Entrepreneurial Officer for the Diocese or any other kind of CEO. I am the Chief Pastor. My day-to-day life and ministry are diocesan, which is often a helpful perspective. Yet, removed from serving a particular parish in a certain city, I don’t need to be the one making every local decision. We all know that what is perfect for Augusta, may not be right for Albany, and is less likely to be what is needed in Cochran, and what is faithful for a congregation with 200 people attending each Sunday is not possible for most of our congregations. Beyond this, if the bishop initiates an idea, that is different in kind in an Episcopal Church as it could be seen as holding more weight than I intend.

I am working to further foster our existing diocesan culture of sharing ideas among congregations. The lay leaders and clergy can decide what is right for their congregation to consider. One important means of learning from others in this Diocese is Leading with Grace. This is the retooled version of Bishop Scott Benhase’s signature program, the Church Development Institute. This training has not been simply renamed but reconfigured based on the experiences of leaders and past participants. Our Director of Leadership Ministries, Carey Wooten, will share more about this later today.

Canon Joshua Varner will talk tomorrow about the lay ministers’ conference, which is another way we have been sharing best practices we are discovering. We brought this conference back this fall after not holding one for 12 years and plan for it to be held annually.

In meeting with our peers, Canon Lasch and I were drawn to two new initiatives paid for largely by grants from Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street. They have focused their funding with grants targeted at congregations with 70 or fewer people in worship on Sunday.

The first, LeadersCARE, is a program that has us learning alongside the Dioceses of Atlanta, West Tennessee, and East Tennessee. This is a training for lay people in just the sort of faithful experimentation I am pointing toward, as it offers not a single solution, but a prayerful approach to discern what might be right for your congregation. Canon Lasch, Carey Wooten, and Shayna Cranford, a postulant for the priesthood from Trinity, Cochran, joined leaders from the three other dioceses for a multi-day meeting in Atlanta recently. Based on what they learned, the three began working on a new vestry retreat for this February. Vestries of congregations not regularly served by a priest will be invited to take part in this retreat, shaped by the principles of LeadersCARE. No vestry has to take part, of course, but this will offer a time to be at Honey Creek to worship together, to learn alongside other vestries, and to have time for each vestry to work on its own, in planning the coming year and beyond. We are also working on a way to share what we’ve learned from LeadersCARE with the wider Diocese during Lent even as we plan to bring the formation opportunity to a larger group at Honey Creek later next year so more lay leaders can get training first hand.

We are also working with our friends in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Southeastern Synod on a ten-month long expert-led, peer-enhanced learning cohort called the Strategic Imagination Sandbox. This will have a group of our priests learning alongside peers who are Lutheran pastors. The details of this have just been solidified. Canon Lasch and I will be contacting priests for the pilot cohort in the coming weeks.

And yes, I get it. Saying there is no one-size-fits-all solution and then talking about LeadersCARE and a Strategic Imagination Sandbox sounds exactly like chasing the shiny new thing. The goal of this approach is to benefit from learning alongside other Episcopal dioceses and our Lutherans colleagues. These are gifted leaders who are working in very similar circumstances. A process for learning together is much more adaptable than any plan created for another congregation in a different setting. We selected these initiatives precisely because of this: they do not offer a set plan, but a process of discovery that will lead to varied faithful responses in differing contexts. This path is about opening ourselves up to where the Holy Spirit is leading us.

Beyond these initiatives, we are testing new ways of forming licensed lay leaders. We currently have two people in the lay preacher training offered online by Bexley-Seabury Seminary. At the same time, we are keeping in touch with the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast as they work with the Episcopal Preaching Foundation on another way of forming lay preachers. We will see if that experience could bear fruit in our diocese as well, while they learn from what we are trying out here. We will similarly test ways to form licensed lay worship leaders, building up the capacity of those who lead Morning Prayer when a priest is not available on a Sunday.

I am also working with bishops from other dioceses around the country and the world on sharing what we are trying as we learn together, rather than going it alone. The relationships I continue to form among colleagues in the House of Bishops and others that began at the Lambeth Conference are also bearing fruit in our corner of the vineyard.

In a very different way, I see how the work of RacialJusticeGA is also part of our faithful response to our times. After lunch, we will hear how their interracial fellowship pilot program is already having an impact on those who have taken part. In addition to this, the pilgrimage they have put together for the weekend of the Feast Day of Saint Anna Alexander has been successfully tested for two years. They will open the pilgrimage up to others next fall. I have added this important new event to my calendar to take part as a pilgrim. There is much in their work that offers us critical ways we need to learn and grow.

Tomorrow, I will share ideas and resources from around the Diocese of Georgia as I see this season as one of possibility, rather than decline. I will say more about this then, but know that the answer is not simply to work harder and do more. Looking at new possibilities will also mean discerning what we need to stop doing, in order to let new possibilities flourish. The perfect idea that was just right for a congregation in the 1970s, 1990s or even 2019, may have seen its season. We do not need to do more and more. God has already done everything that needs to be done in Jesus. We are not looking for a program to save us. Jesus already did that on a Friday more than 2,000 years ago.

What I am hoping for in this season is to cross-pollinate simple ideas that bring Christ’s light into our midst and I want you to bring your creativity to the party. The Diocese will benefit as others come to know what is bringing your congregation life and giving your parishioners and community hope.

This is an intentionally messier strategy than a single plan for everyone. It needs to be so. As we seek to honor the unique needs and gifts of each of our churches, I trust that we will see what Jesus is up to in our communities. Because God is already active.

As your bishop, I have come to see how dispersed experimentation, learning, and decision making fits us so well, as the Episcopal Church is less hierarchical and more democratic than it first appears. For the oversight that a bishop in the Episcopal Church is charged with is shared oversight. I don’t serve alone. I am blessed to work with a dedicated staff, the deans and archdeacon, the Standing Committee, Diocesan Council, and the other commissions and committees of the diocese, as well as the wardens and vestries of each congregation, and all of the deacons and priests of the diocese. Shared oversight is also the work of this body. Each one of you is participating in our shared responsibility for this Diocese that we steward for future generations.

I am so very grateful for the Diocese of Georgia, where I see how your varied gifts come together to let your lights shine as you serve your communities. I look forward to seeing how the Holy Spirit will bless our faithfulness as we keep Jesus at the center of our common life for the year to come. As your chief priest and pastor, I find myself, as always, extremely grateful to be with you on this team.

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
Bishop of Georgia

November 12 2022

Opening Presentation – Convention 2022

Reality
Canon Loren Lasch
201st Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

Thank you, Bishop Logue, and good morning, everyone. As Bishop Logue said, I am the Canon to the Ordinary for the Diocese. I began in this role in July of 2020, and so I may still be a relatively new face to many of you. However, before this time, I spent 16 years of my life as a part of this diocese, first as a high school student, and continuing on through college, seminary, and the first five years of my priesthood. This is the Diocese that shaped me and encouraged my vocation…I see many faces in this room who have played an integral part in shining the light of Jesus Christ into my life. I have been so grateful to be back in my diocesan home these last two and a half years!

Before I share with you what I’d like to talk about today, though, I should be honest…when I first arrived here, a month after beginning my freshman year of high school in 1995 I was…not grateful. And maybe just a teensy bit bratty about it. My mother and I had moved from Gordonsville, VA, a town of just over 1500 people where I’d lived all my life, to the sprawling, grand metropolis of Savannah (remember…1500 people). I went from being in a class with several dozen people I’d known since kindergarten, to a class of several hundred people I’d never met. And I’d left behind my church family at Christ Church in Gordonsville, people who had helped raise me from birth, who knew me and loved me, just as I was. I was not happy about this move.

In time my mother and I joined St. Paul’s in Savannah, and were graciously welcomed by the community there. In the spring of my sophomore year of high school, still unhappy with the move and feeling lonely and adrift, I attended Happening #52 at Honey Creek. Happening is a Christian weekend retreat for youth, led by youth, that encourages faith renewal, community, and discipleship. I’d been signed up for the weekend by Father William Willoughby, the Rector of St. Paul’s (a risky move on his part!) and I knew very little about what I was in for. We had a family funeral that week, and so I was several hours late arriving to Honey Creek. Happening doesn’t begin until everyone has arrived, so I walked into a room full of people who all turned to stare at the person who’d delayed their retreat. Not at all awkward. As my mother spoke with the organizers to get me signed in, a kind young man ran over to welcome me. At that moment the entertainment team began to play the song Lord of the Dance. If you were active in diocesan youth programs in those days, you know that whenever that song was played, the crowd went wild and began dancing and running around the room. The kind greeter grabbed me by the hand, yelled “hey, I’m Cletus, c’mon, let’s dance!” and took off running. I immediately fell to the floor, and proceeded to be dragged across the room while he sang with glee and joined the group.

If my life had been a movie, that would be the point when everyone else would suddenly freeze, and I’d look directly into the camera and say something like “how in the world did I get here???” At that moment I did not feel hopeful, or ready for renewal. I felt even more deeply in my bones that I did not belong here and I wanted my life to go back to exactly the way it was before.

During a Happening weekend there are a series of talks given by the teenage staff members, about challenges and opportunities that youth face on a regular basis, and how God is present in those moments. One of the first talks at each Happening is the Reality talk. It invites the participants to think about the different realities of our lives – physical, material, social, and spiritual.

Basically, it asks the listeners to ask where they are in the present, and how God is a part of that reality. Listening to that talk, on that first night, I did not have a sense of God’s presence in my reality. I so longed for what had been that I couldn’t see past my disappointments and envision a future of new possibilities, with Jesus walking alongside me.

As you might have guessed, much changed for me during that weekend. It was my road to Emmaus experience. I saw, possibly for the first time, how God was present in my reality, even when that reality wasn’t what I expected or even what I hoped for. When I was able to begin to let go of the way things were, I saw that God was calling me forward, into the community of this diocese and the joy could come with sharing in ministry here.

This is a long introduction to the core of what I’d like to share with you all today: the reality of our present moment as the people of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. The reason I share this story of my own recognition of God in the midst of reality is not to say “look at how faithful I was!” It’s to share that, even though I had that powerful experience, many times since then I’ve fallen back into the default of missing the presence of God in the now, because the then was better. I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that many of you have, too. Episcopalians aren’t really known for liking change!

The way in which I’ve embraced this tendency the most has been, of course, in the months and years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In March of 2020, I’d already begun the interview process for this role, and had spent a good bit of time thinking toward the things I’d love to focus on if I were to return back to the Diocese of Georgia. COVID guidance and risk mitigation strategies were not among those things. The arrival of the pandemic put a halt to so much, in our lives and in our churches. We spent so much time yearning to return back to normal, to pick up where we left off and not lose all the momentum we’d built.

But normal never came. Church life has been different in so many ways. Some of them brought unexpected joy, like livestreaming services so we could join in community. But many of them have brought stress and worry and disillusionment into our parishes. Rather than directly facing that reality, I’ve held tightly to what was, convinced that normal must be just around the corner.

Early this Fall I was putting together the annual full time priests’ salary survey. For a decade this has been an incredibly helpful tool, helping parishes to determine fair compensation relative to churches with similar attendance and finances, and toward parity among the clergy of the diocese. As I was working on this document, I was struck by seeing the average Sunday attendance of our parishes, knowing what they’d been in recent years. And so I went to the parochial reports, to compare the average Sunday attendance for in-person services across the diocese for 2019 and 2021. (In 2020 the report only used data from January to March, so those numbers aren’t as accurate a picture of the state of the diocese). I decided to look at 2019 because that’s the year that we’ve been looking back at in the Diocesan Office. Knowing our parishes have been in such flux, we’ve continued to focus on 2019 data, until things settle down (read: until things return to normal). We even used the 2019 ASA to determine the number of voting delegates for this convention. I knew we’d been doing a lot of looking back, and I wanted to see how different that really was from our current reality.

For the 2019 parochial report, the 68 worshiping communities of the Diocese of Georgia reported a combined total in-person average Sunday attendance of 5,176. For the 2021 report, it was 2,816. A 46% decrease across the diocese.

I’d like to note here that plate and pledge has gone up around $228,000 from 2019 to 2021…while this is heartening, it means that fewer people are giving more money to reach a modest increase, and that may not remain sustainable.

When I looked at those numbers, there in black and white on my screen, my first impulse was to simply close the computer, forget what I’d seen, and just keep looking back. But after the initial shock, I realized that much of the stress we’d been feeling as a diocesan staff, and much of the stress I’d seen in the parishes I’d been working with, could be attributed to the chasm between these numbers, and the struggle to move backward, thinking God was waiting for us in the before. And instead of feeling anxious, I felt relieved. (Ok, yes, I was still a little anxious!) Truly facing the reality of where we are with this data was a weight off my shoulders. Of course things have felt drastically different in our parishes. Because, on the whole, they simply are. And in a way that’s not likely to change over the course of just a couple of years. I shared these findings with two attendees of the Diocesan Lay Ministers’ Conference the following weekend, and recognized my own reactions on their faces: shock, anxiety, and then a bit of a sigh of relief, knowing that the things they’d been seeing were not just present in their own congregations, but across the diocese.

Around the same time as I was looking into these numbers, diocesan transition ministers from across the country were coming together for annual gatherings. At these meetings open positions and clergy searching for calls were being presented, in case a good match between priest and parish could be made. I met with colleagues from Province IV, which encompasses the Southeastern part of the United States. Together, from eleven dioceses, we presented 41 full time openings, 51 part time openings, and just 11 priests looking for positions. The next week another group of transition ministers, from 32 different dioceses across the church, presented 104 full time openings, 177 part time openings, and just 26 priests. We saw very clearly that the days when we had more priests than openings are far behind us. The reality is simply that there is a shortage of priests, and especially those looking for part time calls.

That reality has felt especially stark here within the Diocese of Georgia. Of our 68 congregations, we currently have 19 in transition, from rectors who have just announced retirement, to congregations with interims in place, and those actively searching for candidates (and we have another four congregations not actively in transition, who will likely rely solely on lay leadership and supply priests for the foreseeable future). Of the 19 parishes in transition, 12 are searching for part time priests.

This is all the reality of our present moment: we’re at 46% of our previous average Sunday attendance, fewer people are giving more to reach a modest financial increase, and 27% of our congregations are searching for priests, in a wildly different transition ministry landscape. It is not at all surprising to find ourselves wishing to get back to normal. To the way things were. This new reality is complicated. Scary. And, yes, like so much else since March of 2020, unprecedented.

I do not share all of this with you to leave you with a sense of depression or dread. Believe me, when the Holy Spirit led me to make this presentation to convention, I replied with a firm (but polite!) no thank you. Because who wants to get up in front of the dedicated leaders of the diocese and say here’s where things are, and on paper, they seem somewhat bleak. I share all of this with you because I hope that you too can find some encouragement, as I have,

in the fact that we are not alone in any of what we’ve been experiencing. Churches across all denominations are facing similar situations of lower numbers and clergy shortages and none of it is because we didn’t work hard enough or believe deeply enough. We simply are where we are, and we’re facing it together. I believe there is hope in that sense of community in the midst of our new reality.

But, here’s the most important thing I want to say to you all here today. The Triune God is present with us in this new reality. We don’t need to go back to the way things were to see the Holy Spirit’s movement. Even with fewer people and more churches in transition, the light of Christ is shining so brightly across the Diocese of Georgia. One of the gifts of coming back to the Diocese in July of 2020 is that I can say, without a doubt, that God was not only present here before the pandemic. Since I began in this role I have had the privilege of worshiping with 26 parishes. I’ve worked, in many cases multiple times, with 9 search committees and 30 vestries. I’ve spent time talking with most of the deacons and priests of the diocese. In all of this I have seen God at work more times and in more ways than I can count.

In the form of congregations who have spent their time providing lunches for children who didn’t have enough to eat when school wasn’t taking place in-person. In the form of parishioners banding together to build a home for a family in need. In the form of vestries and search committees prayerfully and deliberately leading and discerning throughout the pandemic. In the form of laypeople and deacons and priests across the diocese providing compassionate care for others in a time of immense worry and grief.

Though we find ourselves in a new reality, the mission and ministry of the 68 worshiping communities of this diocese has not changed, and the fruit of that work, God’s work, is all around us, here and now.

Throughout convention we will share a series of stories and resources, including some to take home with you after the closing prayers. These will hopefully provide some ways we can, even in the midst of uncertainty, move forward together and hold fast to the knowledge that God is here, and God is faithful.

I’d like to close today with the first of these, a video from Grace Episcopal Church in Waycross, which reveals God’s presence and work among us in this reality more beautifully than I could ever put into words.

November 12 2022

Convention Videos

Joshua VarnerYouth, Youth Min New Beginnings

November 4 2022

Diocesan Safe Church Policy Update Information

LizYouth, Youth Min Youth, Youth Min

Several years ago, The Episcopal Church approved new Model Policies for the Protection of Children and Youth. Their expectation was that every Diocese would update their policies based on the new Model Policies. This past September, Diocesan Council approved an update to our Diocesan Policies. These policies are intended to work in conjunction with the Safe Church, Safe Communities Training Modules which can be accessed through Praesidium Academy. They will take effect for Diocesan Youth and Children’s events beginning in January 1, 2023. Each congregation will adopt their own policies either by formally adopting the Diocesan policies or by submitting any amendments in advance to the Bishop’s Office by emailing them to Canon Joshua Varner at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org.

Below is a list of primary differences between the Diocesan Policies as they currently stand, and the older Diocesan policies (approved in 2011). Underlying each difference is a shift in theological approach away from a focus on limiting liability, although that remains a concern, and toward caring appropriately for children and youth in the context of both our call to love God and love neighbor (Luke 10:27) and our Baptismal Covenant which requires us to respect the dignity of every human being (BCP 305).

There is a list of definitions that is helpful to read through prior to taking the online training modules, as the modules sometimes refer to terms without defining them.
The number of people who are required to undertake the basic “universal” training, is expanded to include everyone who has unfettered access to the building (key holders) and thus could potentially be present in the building at the same time as children.
The section that details supervision of programs and best practices is expanded to include helpful guidelines in a variety of situations.
There is a section detailing how to respond to concerns as they arise. The Diocese will also be providing a reporting form to assist in this responsibility, should it arise. Note that in the state of Georgia Child Protective services considers all clergy and religious leaders, along with those in many other professions, to be mandated reporters.
Appendix B contains guidelines for Social Media and Electronic Communications with children and youth.
Appendix C details Screening Expectations for a variety of different paid and volunteer positions in the congregation.
Appendix D details specific online Praesidium Academy modules that are required based on a volunteer or staff members role. Note that these roles include elected positions such as Vestry Members or Convention Delegates.

The full policies as approved by Diocesan Council are available on the Diocesan website here. Additional information and an opportunity for questions will offered at Convention. In the meantime, please email Canon Varner at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org with any questions or concerns.

September 30 2022

Register for New Beginnings!

New Beginnings!

What is New Beginnings?
When is this New Beginnings?
How much does New Beginnings cost?
What about masks and vaccinations?
How do I register?
Follow this link to register for New Beginnings: https://bit.ly/NewBeginnings58. To register you will need to pay at least the non-refundable deposit (approximately $45), or the entire cost of the event. You will also need to provide basic information such as name and pronouns, as well as t-shirt size, health, allergy, and emergency contact information. If the deposit is a financial hardship, please contact Canon Varner at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org and we will work things out!

August 19 2022

Register Now for Happening #106!

Joshua VarnerYouth Min Happening, Youth, Youth Min

Happening 106 takes place August 12-14 at Honey Creek! Participants must have completed Grades 9-12 in order to attend this event, which is led by high schoolers for high schoolers. More information is available at www.georgiahappening.com, and the direct registration link is at https://bit.ly/Happening106Candidates.

Jake Diamond, of Christ Church, Valdosta, is the Rector (teen-in-charge) for this event. Sarah Brittany Greneker serves as the Diocesan Happening Coordinator.

Please note that all Youth Events in the Diocese of Georgia require participants to wear masks while indoors and to test negative for Covid the week prior to the event.

August 16 2022

Baptized for Life: A Lay Minister’s Conference

LizUpdates lay ministers

“Baptized for Life: A Lay Ministers’ Conference” will take place September 9-10 at Honey Creek! This conference is intended for any lay person in the Diocese who is in any active ministry in their congregation. Examples of such lay ministries include those who assist or lead worship, serve on the Vestry, serve on committees, teach Sunday School or lead youth activities, serve on the Altar Guild, care for the buildings and grounds, lead outreach activities, and more. This conference will be led by Dr. Lisa Kimball, the Vice President for Lifelong Learning and the James Maxwell Professor Chair of Lifelong Christian Formation at Virginia Theological Seminary. “Dr. Kimball has focused her teaching and research on lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep discipleship and Christian vocation…She is a passionate advocate for lay ministry, the full inclusion of all generations, digital literacy, and leaders who are confident teachers of the faith.” For more information about Dr. Kimball’s background and history, click here.

This conference will focus on the ministry of the laity, including its joys and challenges especially over the past two years. It will frame our various calls in the context of our Baptismal identity and the vows we make at Baptism, and will give participants an opportunity to think toward the future in their own specific contexts.

There will also be time to rest, relax, worship together, and enjoy simply being together at Honey Creek! The event begins with Evening Prayer at 5:30 p.m. on Friday and ends at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday. Registration is available here. You may choose to register for a single or double occupancy lodge room. If you choose double occupancy, be sure to name your roommate in the registration.

Contact Joshua Varner, Canon for Program and Liturgy, at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org with any questions about this conference.

August 13 2022

A Spouse’s Perspective on the Lambeth Conference

FrankUncategorized

The Lambeth Conference—as an introvert, I both looked forward to and dreaded attending. From meeting with other spouses of Bishops (via Zoom instead of in-person because of Covid), I learned that we would be broken into small groups of 8-10 with other spouses from around the globe. Which meant, I was sure, that I would have to hear the simple phrase that accelerates the hearts of introverts: Let’s go around and introduce ourselves.

Because I am on the board for the Spouses Planning Group as their new tech person, I was asked to set up a WhatsApp group for spouses attending Lambeth, which turned out to be really helpful for a number of things from setting up a luncheon for what we termed the “mauve spouses”, the partners of gay and lesbian bishops who were uninvited to Lambeth (although four spouses did show up and were invited to tea by Caroline Welby, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury) to tracking down a Bishop who had unintentionally left her vaccine card in an airport lounge at Heathrow.

Working with the app also helped me to acquaint myself with some of the spouses attending Lambeth. So, the first time I was asked to introduce myself, I was already familiar with a number of spouses. (photo of Caroline Welby)

The second time was when we began our spouses retreat and we were separated into small groups. “Table 26,” my badge read so I found my table and sat. At that point, there was only one other person at the table. By the time the retreat began, we’d been joined by two more spouses. We were the smallest small group at the Conference, which turned out to be a blessing for both me and Apollo, the husband of the first female Kenyan Bishop, who is also an introvert. Also in my group were Flora, the wife of a Bishop from Zimbabwe, and Steve, the husband of a Bishop in England. Interestingly, and we couldn’t discover another group that had a similar situation, Flora’s and Apollo’s spouses were in Frank’s small group.

Once the retreat was over, we fell into a more regular pattern for our remaining time at the Lambeth Conference. I found that what we did fit in well with the Five Marks of Mission, something talked about regularly around the Anglican Communion, though rarely in America.

Tell: To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
Each day, a Plenary session or two would be held in the largest venue (Venue 1) in which both bishops and spouses were invited to attend. There, speakers would talk about the subject for the Lambeth Call that day. This varied from Mission and Evangelism to Christian Unity.

Teach: To teach, baptize and nurture new believers.
Every morning, we would start the day with a Bible Exposition on the verses from I Peter that we were reading that day. This was for both bishops and spouses in Venue 1 and was usually led by Archbishop Justin Welby.

Tend: To respond to human need by loving service.
We would then break up into our small group Bible studies with the Bishops crossing the street to gather at the Parkwood Apartments in small groups and the spouses hurrying over to Venue 2 to gather at our round tables. Here we would look at the verses we had just heard about and speak to them in what became the favorite phrase at the Lambeth Conference: in my context. Because the gathered bishops and spouses were from more than 160 countries from around the world, the context for a spouse in South Sudan was different than the context for a spouse in Pakistan, which was different for a spouse in Malaysia, which was different from a spouse in America . . .

We were able to share within our small groups just how the verses from I Peter spoke to where we were from. We also heard testimonies from spouses around the Communion on everything from their personal relationships with God to the persecution they suffered for being Christian in a Muslim country. Each Bible Study ended with a different Diocese or Country entertaining us with Christian songs from their area in their language. Among those who sang were spouses from South Sudan, the DRC, and Ghana.

Transform: To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.
While the bishops worked on these subjects in their Lambeth Calls sessions, spouses were offered a chance to attend what were called “Strengthening Sessions”. These were courses broken up into four sessions of three subjects: Personal Wholeness, Leadership, and Community Action.

As an introvert, I took that time to be alone and recharge my battery for the following day’s program. I did this with the knowledge that all sessions would be available to me online to “attend” once I returned home. In addition, on some days, bishops and spouses were given the time to attend panel discussions on everything from safe church to menstruation.

Treasure: To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
This was the subject we learned about on the day that we were invited to Lambeth Palace in London. After walking an outdoor prayer path and enjoying the gardens and lunch, we gathered to attend a short service as a tree was planted as part of what is known as The Communion Forest. This is a global initiative that will include local activities of forest protection, tree growing, and eco-system restoration that is to be undertaken by provinces, dioceses, and individual churches across the Anglican Communion in order to safeguard creation. Our Creation Care Commission will be working with this initiative in the Diocese of Georgia.

This is just a taste of the many things we were able to do together as bishops and spouses of the Anglican Communion. It was an eye-opening experience as the more than 1,100 of us ate together in the dining halls of the University of Kent and worshipped together at Canterbury Cathedral, taking away memories that will last a lifetime.

Victoria
Victoria Steele Logue

August 3 2022

Going Home from Lambeth

In every congregation of the Diocese of Georgia, I know people who disagree with each other profoundly on politics (and sports which is even more difficult) who are grateful to worship together and miss one another if someone is not in church. I value this so much. We differ in many ways, but we all know that we need Jesus and we need each other. I have seen this writ large in gathering with more than 650 bishops from 165 countries at the Lambeth Conference.

One reminder that kept popping up throughout the Conference is the Five Marks of Mission, which are a common framework for Anglicans from the Melanesian Islands to Angola to Brazil but virtually never referenced in the Episcopal Church. The content will not surprise you:

The mission of the Church is the mission of Christ

Tell: To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
Teach: To teach, baptise and nurture new believers.
Tend: To respond to human need by loving service.
Transform: To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.
Treasure: To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth .

And this is what binds us when unanimity fails: one Lord, one faith, one baptism. We are all reformed and catholic, we love the scriptures and the sacraments and at our best we love one another.

When we gathered here, Archbishop Welby said, “You are the shepherds of your flock as I am the shepherd of the flock that I serve. Let us not act in a way that disgraces our witness. Speak frankly, but in love.”

I know we have been candid with one another. I know deep division remains. Yet, we spoke in love and honored our witness to that first proclamation, “Jesus is Lord.” While on retreat in Canterbury Cathedral, I saw graves and monuments all around, the site where an Archbishop of Canterbury was martyred and a king repented. I found myself contemplating the differences that must have existed between all the people those monuments honor. What came to mind was the praise song, “Jesus, Jesus, there is something about that name. Kings and kingdoms shall all pass away, but there is something about that name.”

Last evening, in a bit of serendipity, I came back to the dorm from the Eucharist walking, holding hands, and talking with the Archbishop of South Sudan, on a lovely late evening in Kent with Canterbury Cathedral at our backs and a return home in front of us. Two bishops from very different contexts with different views of a Jesus shaped life, but with the most important thing in common: we are both beloved children of God, united by one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

The Anglican Communion and the Lambeth Conference are contingent, temporary. As is our Diocese of Georgia. The degree to which we keep Jesus at the center determines the eternal significance of what we do. This time away has me longing to be with y’all as we continue following Jesus in this Anglican way that connects us to siblings around the globe.

pax et bonum,
+Frank

August 3 2022

A Report from the Lambeth Conference

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house” —1 Peter 2:5a

I am at the Lambeth Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion with more than 650 bishops and more than 460 spouses from 165 countries. Our time together includes a deep dive into the First Letter of Peter led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. This week Bishop Hosam Rafa Naoum, the Bishop of Jerusalem and the Middle East, who I met at his church in 2018 before either of us were elected as bishops, told me then and repeated again to a gathering this week that people go to the Holy Land to see the stones, but need to meet the living stones, the Christians of the Holy Land. Now here at Canterbury Cathedral, an ancient site of pilgrimage, I have enjoyed this historic place, but am being transformed by the living stones, the bishops and spouses from around the world.

I am in a small group Bible Study like no other as the Archbishop of Canterbury, who as an evangelical places a very high priority for scripture, opens up a passage for us. Then I gather with a group facilitated by a bishop from Kenya and meet with bishops from Northern India, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, and England. You get a passage to consider and soon you are hearing about a group of people faced with: how can we forgive the people who killed our families as we think God is calling us to do? Or how do I navigate my role as President of the Council of Churches with a Dictator who does not want to hear the truth, but my role is to speak it? There are so many more transformative conversations I have enjoyed in my time here. Like Sunday evening when I had a long talk with a 21-year old man from Sri Lanka who is a cradle member of our Church of South India, and learned of the ways his faith has been tested and yet he hears the Holy Spirit calling him to reach those hurt by the church who struggle with the same questions he encountered.

I am finding this time so humbling. The problems we face in Central and South Georgia are put into perspective by dedicated followers of Jesus who love Word and Sacrament as we do and face daily challenges we can not imagine. This is the 15th Lambeth Conference since the first in 1867. While the provinces of the Anglican Communion, such as our Episcopal Church, are independent, we are also deeply interdependent and while this conference has no authority over us, the moral authority over time makes a difference.

I have so enjoyed seeing people around our church, like Bishop Lloyd Allen of Honduras who is part of the Episcopal Church. I enjoyed serving with him on Executive Council and we both have daughters in Vet School. And then there is Bishop Mark Strange the Primus of Scotland who was in my Zoom small group in the lead up to this conference and who took part some in our pilgrimage to Scotland before Lambeth. I have also been amazed by the providence of finding myself in line for the procession on Sunday alongside a bishop to whom I introduced myself. I learned he is an assisting bishop in Kibondo, Tanzania, where I served as an intern while in seminary in 1998. We have never met and yet we know so many of the same people! What a delight.

I am here because you elected me as your bishop and I represent you here in a worldwide gathering. I remember Bishop Harry Shipps talking glowingly of meeting colleagues from around the world and coming home to share his joy in being a member of the Anglican Communion. I remember Bishop Henry and Jan Louttit being here in 2008 for the last Lambeth Conference on our behalf. (The Lambeth Conference was not held during Bishop Scott Benhase’s episcopacy).

Know that you are connected to millions of followers of Jesus around the globe who get what it is to be Prayer Book people. They face hardships we don’t have to endure and are supported by the same Jesus we know and love. This is such a comfort, a gift, and a sign of grace.

pax et bonum,
+Frank

July 27 2022

The Logues represent Georgia at the Lambeth Conference

As the Bishops of the Anglican Communion meet together for the first time since 2008, Bishop Frank and Victoria Logue are representing the Diocese of Georgia at the historic meeting. First convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1867, these conferences are an essential part of establishing and maintaining connections with Anglicans around the world. With the theme of ‘God’s Church for God’s World – walking, listening and witnessing together,’ the conference will explore what it means for the Anglican Communion to be responsive to the needs of a 21st Century world.

The conference takes place across venues at the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral, and Lambeth Palace from July 26 through August 8. The more than 650 bishops and 460 spouses represent dioceses from around 165 countries of the Anglican Communion – one of the largest Christian communities in the world.

Victoria is on the leadership team for the “House of Spouse” as the spouses of the House of Bishops are known. She will take part in a variety of events at Lambeth that will include any of the spouses of the Episcopal Church who will be present for the conference as well as spouses from around the Communion. The spouse gatherings are an important part of the meeting.

Bishops of Georgia have made the trip since our second bishop, the Rt. Rev. John W. Beckwith (1831-1890) attended two Lambeth Conferences. Bishop Logue began his preparation last August when he started meeting online monthly with a group of 15 bishops from northern India to the Yukon, including the primates of the churches of Scotland and Canada. This week, that group will meet in person for a Bible Study and then a retreat within Canterbury Cathedral to begin the meeting.

The announced goal of the conference is to resource, inspire, and encourage Bishops in their local ministries; supporting their pastoral and leadership roles in church life and mission as we all follow Jesus. In an unexpected move, the Archbishop of Canterbury sent out a 58-page document to affirm as a body. The text is problematic as it asks for clear stands together where there are deeply held differences. Most notably, it initially asked those in attendance to reaffirm Lambeth resolution I.10, from 1998, which is against extending all of the sacraments to all baptized Christians. The concerns many bishops raised, including Bishop Logue, led to a revision, which itself may be the subject of further debate. This late change is shifting the character of the meeting even as bishops are checking in on site for the conference. Please hold the Logues in prayer as they worship and discern alongside their colleagues from around the world a faithful way to continue to walk together given these differences, while honoring the dignity of all God’s children.

+Frank
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue, Bishop of Georgia

July 20 2022

The Logues renew an historic connection to Aberdeen

LizGeneral Convention General Convention

This week, Bishop Frank and Victoria Logue travel to the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney in Scotland as part of a journey to further renew an historic connection. This trip is thanks to his ordination and consecration as bishop being significantly downsized to prevent spreading COVID-19.

In the spring of 2020, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry saw how the pandemic led to history was repeating itself when planning was underway to consecrate a handful of bishops with only the minimal people present as required by canons. He was reminded of the Scottish Episcopal Church’s cathedral in Aberdeen where a small gathering consecrated Samuel Seabury as the first American Bishop in November 1784. Bishop Curry referred to the liturgies in pandemic as “Aberdeen Consecrations.” When Bishop Logue became the first person made a bishop with a congregation largely online, the image was even clearer as Communications Manager Liz Williams’ photo of the moment with just three bishops laying on hands looked more like a stained glass window in Aberdeen than any consecration in memory.

Today, Seabury is better know as being a rival to Alexander Hamilton thanks to a Broadway Musical, but his consecration in Scotland became a catalyst for the interconnectedness we see Anglicanism developing in the centuries. Seabury had been duly elected Bishop of Connecticut, but when he went to England seeking consecration, he was told he would have to pledge allegiance to the King of the consecration to go forward. This was a non-starter for a bishop of the new nation. The independent streak that runs deep in Scotland, made it natural for the bishops there who had refused to swear and oath to William and Mary to consecrate a bishop with no such requirement. The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church in American forged close ties in the 18th century that have remained.

To honor this history and further renew the connection, Bishop Logue, together with Bishop Deon Johnson of Missouri, Bishop Glenda Curry of Alabama, and Bishop Craig Loya of Minnesota will travel this week to Scotland for a series of visits in the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney. Bishop Logue will preach at St. Andrew’s in Alford this coming Sunday as a part of this visit.

From Scotland, the Logues will travel south to England to represent the Diocese of Georgia at the Lambeth Conference, a gathering more than 650 Anglican bishops from around the world. Bishop Henry and Jan Louttit attended the most recent Lambeth meeting in 2008. We will share more on the Lambeth Conference in next week.

July 18 2022

A change of perspective in the House of Bishops

LizGeneral Convention

A report from Bishop Logue on the 80th General Convention held in Baltimore, MD July 8-11, 2022.

This General Convention was the seventh I have traveled to on behalf of the Diocese of Georgia, but my first in the House of Bishops. The General Convention is sometimes compared to the US legislature with a larger House of Representatives and small Senate. In the General Convention, the House of Deputies comprises four lay persons and four clergy persons from each diocese for more than 800 deputies in a typical convention. Every convention has a lot of first time deputies learning their way around. The House of Bishops, which is more analogous to the Senate, has less than 150 members and most have previously taken part in a convention.

Beyond this, the bishops meet at round tables with 5-6 bishops at a table. These table groups meet for the three years leading to a General Convention so that the group knows each other well before considering any legislation together.

This familiarity changes the nature of debate on resolutions in the House of Bishops as you are speaking to a smaller group of people who you know well, creating a higher level of trust and allowing deeper conversations.

When we took up a resolution setting the pattern for revision of the Book of Common Prayer, we could hear concerns raised in the room about the process not be clear enough as written. We moved to table discussions and then asked a few bishops who had been very involved with the committee that drafted the resolution to speak to us about the intent. We discussed how best to clarify the text. Then we tasked a smaller working group with drafting a revision overnight that would take our discussion into account. Bishops raised concerns and tasked a smaller working group to draft a revision overnight. We returned to the matter led by Bishop Andy Doyle of the Diocese of Texas who was on that working group. We spent two more hours discussing the important matter that ended with greater clarity.

The resolution we ultimately passed with slight revision from the deputies, would not change the status of the 1979 prayer book or of the various liturgies authorized by General Convention that are not in it. It would, however, set the canonical framework for future evaluation and reorganization of those liturgies. The goal was to rein in a situation in which more than a dozen liturgical texts have been “authorized” – for trial use, experimental use, or simply “made available” – by General Convention over the years without clear guidance. The change to the constitution and this convention requires a second reading in 2024. At that convention, additional canonical provisions will be added after due consideration providing even further clarity. The resolution leaves in place the requirement that any prayer book changes must be approved by two successive General Conventions, and specifies that any changes must be authorized for trial use first meaning a new prayer book is at least eight years away and more realistically would take 11 years. Both the 1979 and 1928 prayer books would remain authorized for use.

I found the lengthy process of discussion helpful and saw how the ongoing relationships among bishops make this possible in a way difficult to achieve in the larger House of Deputies meeting only once for four days. I am grateful to get to represent you with my colleagues.

+Frank
Bishop Frank Logue

Pictured at top: Bishop Logue with the five bishops in the book This Band of Sisterhood written by St. Peter’s Savannah parishioner Dr. Westina Matthews. They are Bishops Jennifer Baskerville Burrows (Indianapolis), Carlye Hughes (Newark), Shannon MacVean Brown (Vermont), Phoebe Roaf (West Tennessee), and Kymberly Lucas (Colorado). Pictured below: Bishop Logue with table mates Bishops Betsy Monnot (Iowa) and Ruth Woodliffe-Stanley (South Carolina) in the foreground and Bishop Susan Brown Snook (San Diego) standing to Frank’s right.

July 18 2022

Report from the 80th General Convention

The 80th General Convention of the Episcopal Church met in Baltimore July 8-11. The typically once-every-three-years meeting was postponed a year because of COVID-19 and shortened from eight days to elect persons for office, approve a budget, and to attend to other essential matters. Yet, the convention still considered 436 resolutions.

Online meetings permitted the legislative committees to make decisions prior to arriving for the in person portion of the meeting. The House of Deputies and the House of Bishops then met in person solely for floor debates, rather than any committee work. Most of the resolutions were approved in larger batches placed on the consent calendars to allow time for debate only on more controversial measures or on actions that they wanted to raise to greater prominence.

Reflections from the Deputation

First Time Deputy
Submitted by Cissy Bowden

Having attended four prior General Conventions in the past (twice as an ECW Triennial Delegate and twice as a Deputy’s spouse), I felt somewhat prepared to serve as a first time Deputy for GC80. I was quite overwhelmed, however, with the rapid pace of voting on legislation on the house floor, with over 400 resolutions to be considered in only four days (and nights!). Just the time involved in searching the Virtual Binder to review the resolutions, the explanation of the resolutions, the floor amendments, the calendars, the agendas, the committee reports, and listening to the debates both for and against the resolutions, then being prepared to vote, was enough to make this first time Deputy’s head spin! Whew! It looked so much easier from the observer’s point of view! And then there were reports, memorials, elections, worship, and late evening deputation meetings, not to mention the daily Covid testing and wearing masks. But it was truly a privilege and a blessing to have the opportunity to do this work on behalf of our Diocese, and I am so very grateful for the support and assistance I received from my fellow deputies and from our Bishop, and for the opportunity to share this experience with them.

Pictured: The Diocese of Georgia deputation

Technology at General Convention
Submitted by the Rev. Ted Clarkson

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was technology at General Convention. The 80^th General Convention was the shortest in generations due pandemic concerns, only four days rather than the usual eight to ten days. How was this possible? The answer was technology. In particular, the committees of General Convention, which have previously only met in-person at convention, accomplished their tasks via zoom meetings in the three months leading up to the in-person meeting in Baltimore. Committee work is essential to the functioning of General Convention and thus the Church. Without technology, ie. the availability of zoom, it is possible that General Convention would have had to have been postponed another year. Technology, however, was not all good. General Convention has gone paperless with every deputy being assigned an iPad for access to the resolutions under consideration and for voting. Great idea, but an iPad is useless without reliable WIFI, and reliable WIFI was in short supply. A meaningful portion of those precious four days was squandered due to this problem. For all of its good and bad, technology is here to stay at General Convention. One of the resolutions passed was a change to the rules of the House of Deputies that will allow the use of zoom meetings in future conventions, not just in the extraordinary circumstances of this pandemic shortened meeting. This will allow more people to give input into the workings of the church—people can participate in committee without having to travel to convention for committee hearings—but we may lose the substantial benefit of people meeting face-to-face with all of the interactions that provides. Having been a deputy at four General Conventions. Technology, for good or for ill, will be playing an ever expanding role in the governance of the Episcopal Church.

Pictured: The screen of the iPad during the wifi issues.

Racial Justice and Equity and the Episcopal Church
Submitted by the Rev. Tom Purdy

One of the recurring themes at this 80th General Convention has been racial justice and equity. The Episcopal Church has been on a journey in this regard for some time, having addressed matters of race consistently for decades. Much of this work has accelerated in recent years because of what has gone on in our nation, and the leadership of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. While the General Convention has previously established educational offerings and encouraged the Beloved Community model as an aspiration for the Church, we have now committed to a time of study and introspection about our own specific history with race as a church. This includes evaluating the sources of Episcopal Church financial resources and beginning to allocate future funds to building up historically underrepresented peoples. We have also called for an honest evaluation of the Church’s role in facilitating indigenous boarding schools, where indigenous children were often abused. Understanding our history and the actions of previous generations is not about guilt, but about healing. If we do not know or admit the legacy of the Church’s historic actions we will continue to struggle to facilitate healing and reconciliation. Much of that history is recent enough that Deputies gave personal testimony on such matters. Before the 81st General Convention such investigations should give us a full sense of where we’ve been in the hopes that we can form a future that is defined by reconciling love.

It is also important to note that the House of Deputies also embodied some of this work at this Convention by its historic election of a Latina lay woman, Julia Ayala Harris as it’s President, and an ordained indigenous female priest, Rachel Taber-Hamilton as its Vice President!

Pictured: The clergy of the deputation on the floor of the House of Deputies at General Convention.

The Election of Julia Ayala Harris as the President of the House of Deputies Submitted by the Rev. Kelly Steele

In Austin, at the 79^th General Convention, Georgia’s Deputy the Rev. Cynthia Taylor was working with a group of lay and clergy women to bring forth reckoning and healing regarding gender-based abuse with the ultimately passed set of “#metoo” resolutions. Principle in the coordination of those successful efforts was Cynthia+ and others’ testimonies, which came forth through the collaborative organization of Executive Council member Julia Ayala Harris among a few others.

Back in 2018 in Austin, after the #metoo resolutions were sent along, I heard then-Deputy Ayala Harris talk excitedly late into the night about the ways to pull the levers of our governance to “do the right thing” for those wronged, and not only for the church’s #metoo movement. She was determined to help usher the church into better alignment with discipleship of Jesus while elevating those historically left behind, all while making our governance more adaptive to our present and future needs. As an obviously perceptive, collaborative, and generous person, I trusted Julia to do just that on Executive Council. As a former fellow Executive Council member seeing her work and promise, Bishop Logue convinced her to stand for election.

Even after years of hard work in the trenches with the highest form of church governance, she is someone who reads the Constitution & Canons of our church “for fun”. It was clear then and now: Julia was and is a workhorse for Jesus and a true force for inclusive and adaptive church leadership. I have the highest trust in her tenure, which will be like putting “new wine into new wineskins” (Luke 5:33-39).

Ayala Harris won by 37 votes above Ryan Kusumoto, also lay, with the three clergy candidates trailing them by 300 votes, signaling a desire to elevate lay leadership in the typical alternating pattern. Additionally, the House of Deputies elected The Reverend Rachel Taber-Hamilton as Vice President of the House of Deputies, the first Indigenous woman and first ordained woman in that role. Both President Ayala Harris and Vice President Taber-Hamilton will began their tenures at the final gavel on July 11, 2022. I am confident about their ability to handle the challenges and gifts of the coming biennium as our officer of the House of Deputies.

Photo by Deputy News/Scott Gunn: Julia Ayla Harris receives the gavel from former President of the House of Deputies, the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings, at the end of General Convention.

Creation Care and Immigration
Submitted by the Rev. Leeann Culbreath

While the entire experience of my first General Convention was illuminating and inspiring, I was especially excited about legislation that advanced two of my own areas of ministry, immigration and Creation Care.

Immigration

A courtesy resolution (A167) commending the work of Episcopal Migration Ministries named staff and volunteers who have led their work with refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers in the past several years. I was honored to be personally named in the resolution, recognizing my work as a co-founder and co-facilitator of EMM’s Asylum and Detention Ministry Network. Members of that network developed a resolution (D031) to oppose detention and surveillance of immigrants and asylum seekers, which passed both houses. This resolution establishes a clear position for the church on this issue, thus enabling the church to advocate for and develop humane alternatives to these abusive and exploitative practices.

Creation Care

Numerous resolutions addressing the care of God’s Creation set clear goals for the church’s ministry of healing and justice for the non-human world and for humans harmed by environmental degradation. Resolution A087 commits the church to “a goal of net carbon neutrality in its operations and the work of staff, standing commissions, interim bodies, and General Convention by 2030, through a combination of reducing emissions from travel, reducing energy use, increasing energy efficiency in buildings, and purchasing offsets from duly investigated, responsible, and ethical partners” and “encourage parishes, dioceses, schools, camps, and other Episcopal institutions to pursue their own goal of net carbon neutrality by 2030 through a combination of reducing emissions from travel, reducing energy use, increasing energy efficiency in buildings, and purchasing offsets from duly investigated, responsible, and ethical partners; and be it further.”

Resolution A088, “Commit to the Pressing Work of Addressing Global Climate Change and Environmental Justice,” recommits the church to the work and policies affirmed in previous conventions and encourages church advocacy ministries to advocate for policies and legislation that mitigate climate change, especially among marginalized, Indigenous, and frontline communities. Details on all Creation-centered resolutions can be found here: https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2022/07/11/general-convention-affirms-series-of-environment-creation-care-measures/

Pictured: The Diocese of Georgia marker with a peach and Georgia peanuts on top on the floor of the House of Deputies.

Indigenous People and the Episcopal Church
Submitted by Molly Stevenson

There were two particularly important pieces of legislation involving our Indigenous brothers and sisters that passed at the 80th General Convention. On the first legislative day, the House of Deputies heard testimony from some of our indigenous sisters who had been personally affected or whose family members were affected by their experiences in Episcopal boarding schools. The testimony was heartfelt and impassioned, and sometimes difficult to hear. To hear about incidents of abuse that happened to indigenous students “on our watch” was disturbing and eye opening. It was important for all of us for these testimonies to be given. It is a step toward much of the focus of this convention – Truth Telling and Reparation. We must know our entire past to be able to have a stronger future.

The second piece of legislation of particular importance for our indigenous brothers and sisters was a resolution that was on the consent calendar on the final day of legislation, involving the churches in Navajoland. Generally, there is no discussion on individual resolutions that have been put on the consent calendars. However, during a “Point of Personal Privilege”, a young woman was given permission to stand to thank the House of Deputies for including and passing the resolution that called for the people of Navajoland to have a voice in and be part of the process when choosing a bishop to serve their people. The person speaking is an indigenous woman who is an Episcopal priest who heeded the call to serve her people in Navajoland, and whose father had been a bishop.

When we listen to the reasons and stories behind resolutions that are part of legislation, so much can be learned!

Pictured: The deputation on Camp Day with Honey Creek t-shirts in the House of Deputies.

LGBTQ+ Representation in the Episcopal Church
Submitted by the Rev. David Rose

As a first-time deputy, it was a joy to attend and represent this diocese that has become home to my family and me. One of the truly refreshing aspects of General Convention was its inclusive nature. Inclusion wasn’t something simply given lip-service, but intentionally lived out in multiple aspects. From the ASL interpreter and captioning on every screen; worshiping in multiple languages; deputies who were in their teens to deputies who had been to 15 conventions; diversity among deputies including a high number of deputies of color, women, and deputies who are part of the LGBTQ+ community; one could not fail to notice the work that has been done to truly give voice to as broad a spectrum as possible.

As the parent of a child who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, I was especially encouraged to be part of this convention with its more inclusive nature. Instead of arguing and endless debate focused only on creating winners and losers, what came forth was discussion on how best to engage in advocacy for, support, evangelism, and ministry to and with members of the LGBTQ+ community. Resolution A063 emerged as one tangible step forward emerging from this General Convention; the creation of a new staff person on the Presiding Bishop’s staff to focus on LGBTQ+ & Women’s ministries. A063 will focus on research and data collections, creation of resources, and forming networks to carry on this work. It is encouraging that as more and more of our parishes in the Diocese of Georgia begin to create space for increased ministry to and with our fellow LGBTQ+ parishioners and clergy colleagues, we don’t step out into this work alone, but with support from GC fellow Episcopalians around the world.

Pictured: The Rev. David rose with his rainbow socks.

From the sidelines to the field
Submitted by Liz Williams

As the former Nominations Chair and Elections Czarina for the Diocese of Georgia, I’ve had the opportunity to facilitate the elections of our General Convention deputies the last few General Conventions. It was always an honor to send our deputation off to the infamous General Convention, and when I decided to run, it was with great respect and excitement. As a self proclaimed Church Nerd, arriving to the floor of convention was overwhelming. And getting to vote for the first time? Pure giddiness! Each session I grew more comfortable with the process and the flow of convention. We passed a lot of resolutions, had interesting conversations, and held elections. But more importantly, I came away with an even greater love for our church and the people in it. We continue to see where we have wronged others and how we can make amends, we continue to work towards proclaiming that the love of Christ is not exclusionary, and we look towards the future of the church. For all of this, and more, I am grateful to have been a member of our diocesan deputation.

Pictured: The lay deputies on the floor of the House of Deputies.

A General Convention like none other
Submitted by Jody Grant

After a one year delay due to the pandemic, we returned to General Convention masked, vaccinated and ready to do the work of the Church. As Chair of Credentials, I had the unique opportunity to oversee the “checking in” of all deputies to ensure voice and vote of the dioceses. At last count, 802 deputies (clergy and lay) representing 107 dioceses were seated. My committee worked long hours on registration day, and then every day of sessions, as deputies checked in and alternates and deputies switched in and out. With shortened time frame and increased Covid restrictions, I knew this Convention would be different, and it was. Having been a deputy before, I missed the expanded worship services, the fellowship gatherings, the exhibit hall, and the in-person legislative hearings (and the snacks at the tables!). We still gathered together to accomplish the necessary tasks required by our constitution and canons. In spite of the differences between this Convention and others, great work, positive changes, and history-making elections were the result.

Pictured: The credentials for Liz Williams that designated her as a deputy and gave access to the convention center and the floor of the House of Deputies.

To view all of the resolutions that were part of this year’s General Convention, you can find them in the virtual binder here.

For a bird’s eye view of the convention, read this article by Episcopal News Service.

June 8 2022

Annual Retreat Agenda

To Print please copy and paste to your own document.

2019 ECW AND DOK ANNUAL RETREAT & MEETING
DIOCESE OF GEORGIA
AUGUSTA CONVOCATION
ST. AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY & CHURCH OF OUR SAVIOR

This event will be held on Thursday, April 25, 2019

4:00 – 6:00 ECW Board Meeting at St. Augustine’s

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

These events will be held on Friday, April 26, 2019 at St. Augustine’s

8:00 – 9:15 Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:30 – 9:45 Worship
10:00 – 12:00 Thistle Farms and Healing Oils- Rev. Becca Stevens
12:00 – 1:00 Lunch in parish hall
1:30 – 2:30 Drinking Tea in Community – Rev. Becca Stevens
2:30 – 3:00 Break and shop at the Thistle Farms table!
3:00 – 4:00 The Bazaar Model of Service – Rev. Becca Stevens

These events will be held on Friday, April 26, 2019 at Church of Our Savior

5:00 – 6:00 The Order of the Daughters of the King Spring Assembly–Stuart
6:00 – 7:00 “Gathering” at Our Savior – casual dress
7:00 – 9:00 BBQ Dinner with Keynoters The Rev. Becca Stevens and The Right Reverend Scott Benhase

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

These events will be held on Saturday, April 27, 2019 at St. Augustine’s

7:30 – 8:30 Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:30 – 8:45 Worship
8:45 – 9:45 Business Meeting
10:00 – 11:50 Workshops (10:00 – 10:50 and 11:00 – 11:50)
12:00 Noon Eucharist, Installation of officers, Celebrant-Bishop Benhase
1:00 Box Lunch in Parish Hall (or To Go!)

June 8 2022

Registration Form 2019

Episcopal Church Women Retreat & Daughters of the King Spring Assembly
April 26 – 27, 2019
Augusta, GA Hosted By the Augusta Convocation
Registration

Registration includes breakfast and lunch
Friday, Saturday, Retreat, Reception and Banquet $70.00
Friday: Retreat and Banquet $65.00
Friday: Retreat only $55.00
Friday: Reception, and Banquet Only $40.00
Saturday Only: $25.00

Guest may register at the same price

Or mail application and check made out to St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church ECW to:
Linda Sigg, St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, 3321 Wheeler Road, Augusta, GA 30909

Name: __________________________________________________________________

Home Address: ___________________________________________________________

City, State, Zip: ___________________________________________________________

Church: _________________________________________________________________

E-mail: __________________________________________________________________

Phone: __________________________________________________________________

Choose 2 workshops. All workshops will be offered twice.

____ Growing your ECW Ministries ____ Healing Herbs of the Bible

____ Spirituality: Dust Bunnies and Hating Fly Fishing ____ Easy Yoga

Are you a voting delegate? ____ Yes ____ No

Are you a member of The Order of the Daughters of the King?____________

Questions: Linda Sigg: sunflowerllinda@gmail.com

Accommodations:
Home 2 Suites by Hilton,
3606 Exchange Lane,
Augusta, GA 30909
706 738 8787

ECW Group Rate $119.00 for King or Double Queen +tax
Group code for calling the hotel directly is ECW

Springhill Suites by Marriott
1110 Marks Church Road
Augusta, GA 30909
706 396-6600
ECW Group Rate $105.00 for King or Double Queen +tax

A complimentary hot breakfast is offered onsite at each hotel. The hotels are located of Wheeler Road, not far from St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. Reservations need to be made by March 31. If reservations are after that date, call the hotel and ask for the ECW rate.

June 8 2022

St. Ruth Byllesby Chapter Collects Bras

ECW/Daughters of the King Welcome Thistle Farms

This year the Episcopal Church Women’s Annual Retreat in Augusta’s theme is The Way of Love. Participants will learn about sharing God’s love for those in recovery from the sex trafficking trade. The Rev. Becca Stevens, well known advocate for women, especially women leaving the trade, will be the keynote speaker. Stevens and women from her ministry, Thistle Farms, will be at the retreat throughout the weekend.

The Saint Ruth Byllesby Chapter of The Order of the Daughters of the King® will be sponsoring a bra drive to benefit Free The Girls, an international non-profit that helps women leaving the sex trafficking trade, especially in the poorest areas of the United States, to gain financial independence and social reintegration.

By donating new or gently used bras, participants provide a chance for change. These survivors of human trafficking start their own businesses selling bras in their local second-hand clothing markets while they recover and build a new life. “We accept both new and gently used bras of all sizes and styles, including sports bras, nursing bras, and camisoles.”

June 8 2022

Pearls & Pyjamas Agenda

Meeting called by Cristy Jordan, President

Attendees: Women of the Diocese of Georgia

10:00 – 11:00 AM	The Order of the Daughters of the King Suzanne Harrow, President, Presenter Angel Bernier, Zoom Host	Break Out Room 1
10:00 – 11:00 AM	Card Making Craft Cristy Jordan, ECW President, Presenter Margaret Jordan, VP, Zoom Host	Break Out Room 2
11:30 – 12:30 PM	Social Hour/Lunch Bring your own and let’s eat together	Main Zoom
1:00 – 2:00 PM 2:00 -2:45 PM 2:45 – 3:00 PM 3:15—4:30 PM	Words and Worship The Right Reverend Bishop Frank Logue The Reverend Terri Degenhardt, Chaplain, Host Keynote Speaker The Reverend Kelly Steele Special Guest ECW Annual Business Meeting See agenda at www.ecw.georgiaepiscopal.org	Main Zoom Main Zoom Main Zoom Main Zoom

Additional Instructions:
Please stay muted except during discussions. Thank you!

June 8 2022

An Acceptable Time: A Celebration of Women’s Ministries