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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 202nd 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.
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 2nd 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.
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.
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 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.
February 24-26, 2023. We begin at 7 p.m. on Friday night (after supper) and conclude with a Closing Eucharist at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. We encourage parents to come to the Closing Eucharist!
Current cost is $145 for the weekend. However, cost should never be an obstacle to attendance! The Diocese seeks to partner with local congregations and families to divide the cost as necessary in order to enable young people to attend.
At this time, masks are optional at Diocesan Youth Events. The initial Covid vaccination sequence is still required. The Diocese may revise these requirements based on the public health circumstances closer to the event.
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.
Adults who are bringing youth are not only welcome, but are encouraged to come be part of New Beginnings! In order to get a sense of who is coming, and to make sure everyone complies with the Diocesan Safe Church Policies, we ask adults who would like to come to contact Canon Varner at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org.
Register by clicking here: https://bit.ly/NBParticipants. You will need your health insurance information, basic contact information for participant and parents, and a credit or debit card to pay at least the deposit ($50).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 retreat begins at 7:00 p.m. (after supper) on Friday, and finishes with a 12:30 p.m. Closing Eucharist on Sunday, to which all parents and friends are invited!
Current cost is $135 for the weekend. However, cost should never be an obstacle to attendance! The Diocese seeks to partner with local congregations and families to divide the cost as necessary in order to enable young people to attend.
While we still encourage masking while indoors, the Diocese is not currently requiring it of all participants and staff. Covid-19 Vaccinations are still required at this time. All such requirements are subject to change depending on public health conditions.
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!
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.
“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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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 80th 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 79th 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.
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
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
Register online at http://staugustinesaugust.wixsite.com/staugustineaugusta/ecw
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
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.
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.”
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!
The Reverend June Johnson will speak to us at our Friday night banquet.
The Reverend June Johnson is a native Georgian, born in Albany and currently living on Tybee Island on the coast from Savannah. She graduated from University of Georgia with a degree in Music Education and from Candler School of Theology at Emory University with a Master of Divinity. Bishop Louttit ordained her as a priest in August, 2009. She is married to Kent Failing and they will celebrate their 32nd wedding anniversary in May.
June+ has served three churches in the Diocese of Georgia: St. John’s in Bainbridge (a lovely town with a terrific town square), Holy Nativity on St. Simons Island (a beach town with all the amenities plus HN has a beautiful Christus Rex in their prayer garden) and now serves All Saints on Tybee Island (her home church and a wonderfully annoying and quirky town). June+ says that these are the three best churches in the Diocese and is so blessed to have served in each.
Life on Tybee is hardly slow! In addition to her parish work, June+ serves as a Trainer for LWG, a member of RJGA (Racial Justice Georgia) and is currently the Chaplain for the Diocesan DOK. She also devotes time to the Tybee MLK Human Rights Organization and Forever Tybee (a group working for transparency in city government) and is newly appointed to the Ethics Commission for the City of Tybee. She is participating in a study from the Clinton Foundation for intervention in drug addiction, is active in the Tybee Island Ministers Association. This year Tybee is returning to its traditional Easter Sunrise Service on the Pier – Hallelujah!
With all these wonderful things to do, June+ feels her primary occupation is providing daily and lengthy belly rubs to two rotten spoiled and useless dogs, Marley and Dylan. She believes that there would be world peace if everyone had a puppy or kitty belly to rub every day!
To register please call GeorgeAnne at 912-265-9218
Happening #102 will be held Thursday, August 2 through Sunday, August 4, 2019, at Honey Creek Camp and Conference Center. Staff arrives on August 1. For more information and to register, go here.
New Beginnings #55 will be held September 6 through 8, 2019 at Honey Creek Camp and Conference Center. For more information and to register, go here.
The Winter Youth Event offers youth a chance to come away and rest for a while. In a time when they are often over-scheduled and deeply stressed, this event gives them a chance to play, pray, and just be for a while. The Revs. Joshua Varner and David Rose will be coordinating this event, and will be exploring how we cope with stress, and show God’s grace and love even to ourselves. Cost for this event is $115, or $125 after January 3. Registration is open now at http://bit.ly/WinterYouth2020
Happening #103, Grades 10-12, February 21-23, 2020
Happening is an experience designed by teenagers for teenagers. It offers high school youth a chance to consider the deep questions about God, Jesus, the Church, Faith, Prayer, Love, and more. All of this is done in a way that allows youth to learn from each other, and to experience the love of God throughout the weekend. For more information about Happening, or to apply to serve on Staff, visit http://georgiahappening.com. In order to register as a Candidate (participant) for Happening, visit http://bit.ly/Happening103.
New Beginnings, like Happening, is an experience led by teenagers for teenagers. New Beginnings allows high school youth to work with middle school youth as they encounter the daily realities of growing up in the 21st century. Youth reflect on their relationships, with God, with their families and friends, with their peers in school and beyond, and more. They support each other in prayer and worship, through small group work, led by high school staff, and by playing and praying together!
Register now for New Beginnings #56! This event, led by high school youth for middle school youth, offers young people a chance to step back from their daily lives and reflect on some of the big issues of life, such as Family, Peer Pressure, Friends, and how the Love God has for all of us is unconditional and everlasting. New Beginnings #56 is open to all youth currently in Grades 7-9. The Lead Teen is Annabel West, of Good Shepherd, Augusta. New Beginnings Co-Coordinators are Allen Lamb, of St. Anne’s, Tifton, and Karen Bell, of Christ Church, Valdosta.
We had hoped to hold Happening #104 in September. However, given the surge in Covid cases caused by the Delta variant, we feel like the better choice is to postpone Happening until November 19-21. This will allow us to prepare thoroughly so that we can hold this amazing event as safely as possible! All vaccination, testing, and masking requirements will still be in place in November (see below for more details).
Happening is an event presented by teenagers for teenagers. It is intended to offer young people an experience of the love of Christ, as shown through the ministry of their peers and adults, in prayer, worship, music, and more.
Please note that in order to keep everyone as safe as possible at youth events, the Diocese of Georgia is instituting the following policies at all Diocesan youth events, including Happening:
All eligible participants and staff must be vaccinated against Covid-19.
All participants and staff must best tested for Covid within 96 hours of the event (this test can be an at-home antigen test or a PCR test administered in a medical setting).
All participants and staff will wear masks while indoors at all times during the event except while eating or sleeping.
Our next in-person New Beginnings event has been scheduled! We plan to hold New Beginnings this coming January and we’re excited! New Beginnings is an event for middle school youth led by high school youth. It offers participants a chance to step away from the challenges of school family, friends and more, and experience themselves as God’s Beloved. It also gives them time to reflect on the role God plays in their lives, in scripture, in community, and in nature.
Participants and staff in New Beginnings play, pray, and sing together, and come away from the weekend refreshed and renewed!
Please email Canon Joshua Varner with your question at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org!
The application to serve on staff is also open! Apply for staff at https://bit.ly/NBStaff.
Participant Registration for Happening #105 is now open! Happening is a weekend retreat for youth, led by youth. Each weekend features youth on staff giving talks that offer their reflection on their lives, their struggles, their joys, and their faith. Small group reflection time allows participants to talk, laugh, and play together. Worship is central to the weekend, and there are times for music and games, and several surprises throughout!
The event begins after supper on Friday night, and ends with a Closing Eucharist, to which family are invited, on Sunday afternoon.
Participant Cost is $125 for the weekend with a minimum deposit of $45 due at registration. However, we do not want cost to be an obstacle to participation, so if there is a need for scholarship assistance, please reach out to Canon Joshua Varner at jvarner@gaepiscopal.org.
For questions about the weekend, please reach out to our Happening Coordinator, Sarah Brittany Greneker at sbsandbach@gmail.com.
You may not like who you’re about to become. – David Brooks
David Brooks wrote an insightful piece in the New York Times recently entitled, “Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too.” He recalls the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and how it created in many people a desire to look only after themselves and what was theirs and ignored their neighbors’ plight. He pointed out that when the pandemic was over, “people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become. It was a shameful memory and therefore suppressed.”
Brooks continues: “Frank Snowden, the Yale historian who wrote Epidemics and Society, argues that pandemics hold up a mirror to society and force us to ask basic questions: What is possible imminent death trying to tell us? Where is God in all this? What’s our responsibility to one another?” In this current crisis those indeed are the questions people are asking. We’re all fearful. I have no doubt it’ll bring out the best and worst in us as human beings. Crises tend to do that, whether we want them to or not.
Right now, I’m no braver than the next person. Recently, all I’ve wanted to do is put on a HAZMAT suit and wait for this to be over. Yet, I’m very aware of my scared, inner child and know how selfish I’m capable of being, especially when it comes to protecting myself and those I love. We’re all tempted, if only in our thoughts, to be Social Darwinists during this time, trying to be “fitter” than the next person so we might survive (even if they don’t). While I’m washing my hands and practicing “social distancing” during this time, might I also be mindful of my fears, set them at least temporarily aside, and practice compassion for my neighbor who is just as afraid?
There’s no way to ensure that we won’t become what we don’t like, especially if we don’t keep ourselves mindful of such a danger. That’s why we must pay attention to our fears and the reactivity inside ourselves. In the fear that pervaded after September 11, 2001, we became overly vengeful. Many Arab-Americans were treated shamefully and discriminated against without warrant. At the time, I was Rector of St. Philip’s in Durham, North Carolina and heard the ugliest words come out of some of my parishioners’ mouths. One wanted to “bomb the hell out of the Arab world and let God sort them out.”
We don’t want to contract a “moral disease” that might eventually be worse than this virus, where we lose our capacity for neighbor-love as we give into our fears. I get it. We’re all scared. It’s probably good to acknowledge that. But we shouldn’t become victims of our own worse impulses. Because on the cross Jesus became the victim on our behalf, we’re liberated from being victims of our sin. He took all our shame on his shoulders. We’re free to love our neighbor even in these trying times. Let’s do that and we’ll like what we’ll become.
Medical anthropologist Monica Schoch-Spana has studied how the 1918 flu epidemic affected Baltimore. It overwhelmed the city’s medical system. There were reports of people desperately begging for help, even trying to bribe doctors for treatment. In one month alone, 2000 people died of the flu. Funeral homes didn’t have enough caskets and when bodies did reach cemeteries, there weren’t workers available to bury them. This all happened, with the ability of 20-20 hindsight, because there was so much pressure on business owners to remain open. People didn’t heed public health experts, which would’ve slowed the flu’s transmission. This epidemic also evidenced people at their best. People sewed medical masks and extra hospital sheets. People shared food. The epidemic also showed the worst in people. Rumors spread that German-American nurses were deliberately infecting people (some things never change) and African-Americans, this being the Jim Crow era, were denied medical treatment.
A classic episode (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”) of The Twilight Zone popped into my head after reading about 1918 Baltimore. It plays out entirely on one block of Maple Street, a peaceful suburban enclave. When all the electricity goes out at dusk, neighbors spill into the street. Soon, a rumor spreads that aliens have invaded and taken over the power grid. Then one family’s house has their power return and they’re accused of being aliens. This being America, people go get their guns. They begin threatening one another. They all stop when someone shouts: “Who’s that?” Down the block, a lone figure walks toward them. Someone yells: “It’s an alien!” Someone then shoots the “alien.” They run to where the “alien” has fallen and discover it was just one of their neighbors coming home. A riot ensues of neighbor vs. neighbor. The camera then pans to a hill overlooking the street. Two real aliens have witnessed the mob. They have a device that’s able to manipulate the power grid. One alien says: “All we have to do mess with their lives and they’ll take care of the rest with their paranoia and panic. We can conquer Earth one neighborhood at a time that way.”
People are beginning to declare “we need to get the economy going again,” something we’d all like to see happen. But those people are using a rather unchristian philosophical ethic to justify doing so. It’s called utilitarianism, which in its most heinous application, is a form of Social Darwinism. It posits that the probable deaths of many elderly and health-compromised people are worth it in the long run; that it’s a sacrifice society needs to make for the sake of us all. Such thinking masquerades as “doing the most good for the most people,” but in reality, it’s just a distant cousin of Hitler’s Final Solution where some are deemed more socially valuable than others.
There are no aliens (Deep State or otherwise) manipulating us. God has given us all we need, and that’s one another, to love and cherish. But we can be our own worst enemies when we give into paranoia and panic. I trust we all will resist with every bone in our bodies this profoundly unchristian ethic. The economy isn’t an idol to be worshiped. Yes, waiting longer to go back to work may deepen the economic hill we must climb later, but we’ll be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without shame or guilt.
In the days ahead we’re all going to get a crash course in Philosophical Ethics 101. Universities and governmental organizations for years have engaged in simulation “games” where people are brought together and asked as a team to make decisions to address a hypothetical crisis. Years ago, I was a participant in such an exercise. The “game” laid out a grave scenario where my team had to decide about who would get aid and resources and who wouldn’t. It is what leaders do in a crisis. It doesn’t do any good to find who’s to blame for the crisis (they’ll be time for that later). As a participant in the “game,” I found my moral convictions based on my faith in God’s Good News in Jesus served me well in how I participated, but that faith also caused me a great deal more anguish than I perceived my teammates were having. Each time we were asked to ration aid we had to show preference to one group over another. We were doing what medical professionals call “triage,” which, if we’re brutally honest, asks humans to behave inhumanely to one another. That’s why it’s important to know where one stands before being thrown into such decision-making. Otherwise one is left to radically utilitarian decision methods or to simply follow whoever has the loudest voice in the room. What I learned from that exercise is that everyone has a moral code by which they make decisions (even if they don’t name it as such), but I should never be under any illusion that their code is the same as mine or that it even remotely reflects the Gospel.
In the COVID-19 crisis, we’re not just at risk for virus exposure. We’re also at risk of moral exposure, or immoral exposure, as the case may be. We’ve already seen great acts of courage and sacrifice by countless health care workers, some of whom have died, sacrificing their lives to save for others. And there are others making lesser sacrifices, but still exhibiting great courage simply by doing their jobs. We’re also being “exposed” to selfishness and greed by those who seem to care more about their personal fortunes than they do about people’s health and safety. For example, employees at a McDonald’s restaurant near San Francisco left their jobs claiming their employer wasn’t protecting their safety. Workers at a Perdue chicken factory did the same here in Georgia. And even though Instacart and Amazon said they were ensuring their employee’s safety, some of them said it wasn’t nearly enough. Some people have even been fired for raising safety concerns. And then there are dangerous crackpots like Alex Jones and Pat Robertson who seek their own personal profit by hawking “snake oil” cures for COVID-19. I don’t know how they look at themselves in the mirror.
Unlike COVID-19, which is too small to see with the naked eye, our immoral exposure will be available for all with eyes to see. Going forward, it’ll be important that we name it when we see it, not for the purposes of shaming, but so that we don’t lose our own moral bearings in this crisis. It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth. Now more than ever, we must insist on the truth. There may be seemingly impossible choices ahead. Let’s hope they’re not like “Sofie’s Choice,” but they will still be stark and painful. Indeed, doctors and nurses in New York are already there. Pray for the moral wisdom of our leaders and our faithfulness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Cross was the loneliest place in the world on Good Friday. A few people were present near the Cross, but only One was on the Cross. Jesus hung there alone. Mother Mary and a few brave souls were there keeping vigil. Everyone else fled the night before. It’s the loneliness of the Cross we should see today. It had to be that way. Humanity could not save itself. Only Jesus alone, who was fully God and fully human, could save us. Jesus took on the loneliness of the Cross so we might not have to. Because we couldn’t. We couldn’t bear it. He bore that loneliness so that we would never be alone again, left to our own devices.
And yet, people are lonely, or at least many people report they are. And apparently, it’s as deadly as COVID-19. Ezra Klein, writing in Vox, recently reported on the health outcomes of people who describe themselves as lonely. He wrote: “Social isolation has been associated with a 50% increased risk of developing dementia, a 29% increased risk of coronary heart disease, a 25% increased risk for cancer mortality, a 59% increased risk of functional decline, and a 32% increased risk of stroke.” And that doesn’t even include the mental health risks. Scientists in dozens of studies have found a “consistent relationship between social isolation and depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.” While we’re in this time of “physical distancing,” we need to look out for our neighbors, making sure they aren’t “social isolating.” Their physical and mental health depends upon it, now more than ever.
Kathy Mathea sings of going “through life parched and empty,” all the while “standing knee deep in a river and dying of thirst.” The vivid irony of being thirsty while standing in water should wake us up. Even during this time of physical distancing, you and I are standing knee deep in people who would care for us, if we’d let them. Are we too afraid to ask for help? Are we so fearful that others might see us as weak, if we admitted out-loud we can’t go it alone? Is having our vulnerability exposed too high a price to pay? The legendary John Prine, who died this week of COVID-19, wrote of such lonely, fearful people in his song Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrows):
You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there Wrapped up in a trap of your very own chain of sorrows
Jesus became lonely so we’d never have to be alone. The “traps” we’ve created for ourselves don’t need to keep us “prisoner.” We don’t need to stay stuck in our “very own chain of sorrows.” Jesus hung on the Cross to liberate us from such deadly shackles. That’s what you and I need to share with others, rather than, as some of our fellow disciples do, lecturing them about their faults, threatening them (“You better get right with God!”), or perniciously judging them. None of that’s helpful. Never was. Never will be. No one I know is desperate for more judgment (we get plenty every day). We want to know we’re loved, that we matter. Lonely Jesus dying on the Cross was God’s eternal declaration that we’re loved, that we matter. Please share that Good News.
Resurrection isn’t resuscitation. It isn’t returning to life from death. It’s coming into a whole new life. That’s the promise of Easter. Jesus promises us new life through resurrection, but not through a reworking of the old life we now have. It’s not just our old lives made better. What an amazing promise that is, because I don’t need my old life reworked or made a little bit better with a nip here and a tuck there. There isn’t enough “spiritual plastic surgery” Jesus could possibly do on my old embodied life to fix it up perfect. And I’m not only referring to my old football knees when writing that. I’m talking about the whole enchilada of who I am. It would take Jesus an eternity to fix all that and he still might run out of time.
So, I don’t need improvement or enlightenment. I need resurrection. And so do you. What Jesus promises us is just that: Resurrection to a whole new life. That’s a promise worth contemplating right now as we shelter-in-place. While we don’t know exactly when, the time will come for us to resume our everyday lives once again. What part of our old life do we want resuscitated? There are probably some aspects of our lives B.C. (Before COVID-19) that we’re eager to resuscitate (and should) when the time comes. We all long to hug our friends and family, to gather for worship with our sisters & brothers in Christ, and to have the opportunity once again to serve, hands on, our neighbors in need.
There are, however, other aspects of our lives that probably aren’t worthy of resuscitation. Those things need to stay dead in our tombs. As we burst forth from our physical distancing graves, what will our resurrections look like? When we rise from the grave of COVID-19, will we simply be resuscitated back to those old patterns of anger and bitterness that trapped us? Or, might we envision ourselves resurrected to a new way of being in relationship with one another that leaves buried our old resentments and fears? In this very special, unusual Eastertide, what if we trusted Jesus to pull us out of our graves to new life and not merely to a resuscitation of the same old, same old?
God makes that same offer to us as the human family. B.C. we were, as a society, buried in the grave of extremes. We’d anxiously fly back and forth between panic and neglect. We’d panic about what was happening around us, and then racing to the other extreme, we’d neglect to do anything about what was happening. For example, when there was yet another mass shooting, remember how we’d bewail the tragedy, offer our thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families, and then promise to have a conversation about gun violence? We’d go into panic mode, but then when our attention spans were diverted by one thing or another, we’d neglect to change anything about that evil. As Pete Seeger sang: “When we will ever learn?”
Maybe A.C. (After COVID-19) we’ll embrace resurrection to the new life Jesus promises? Maybe we won’t settle for the mere resuscitation of our old selves? As my Mama used to say: “Wouldn’t that be somethin’?”
In 1954, research psychologists heard about a cult leader who was prophesying the end of the world on December 21st of that year. Apparently, the cult leader had received messages from another planet that gave her a heads up for that date. So, pretending to be true believers, the researchers infiltrated the group to study how the group would respond, when, let’s say, the world didn’t end when the cult leader said it would. Their hypothesis was that the followers wouldn’t abandon their leader when she proved to be a charlatan. Rather, they’d find rationales and justifications for her mistake and afterwards they would even deepen their trust in her as their leader. And that’s what happened. They had invested their lives in her being right. They couldn’t begin to think otherwise. Later, when another cult leader, Jim Jones, went even more wrong in Guyana, the term was coined: “They drank the Kool-Aid.”
In 1960, English psychologist Peter Wason was the first to use the term “confirmation bias.” It’s a psychological condition that leads us to hold fast to false beliefs even when the overwhelming evidence indicates we shouldn’t. In the midst of “confirmation bias” we’ll not only discount evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we’ll also search out any information that confirms what we already believe. So, when we’re trapped in such bias, we’ll first discount what contradicts our beliefs and then we’ll go to great lengths to find information that undergirds what we want to believe. We drink the Kool-Aid.
And that brings us to the poor souls who recently gathered at state capitals to protest state government’s restrictions on physical distancing and businesses. Those gathered flaunted the norms put in place to protect them and their fellow citizens from viral spread. Many gathered believe the virus isn’t as deadly as scientists are saying. It’s just an excuse for the government to take away their rights. People, of course, are welcome to put their own lives in danger, but what about the people they might infect? Their right to have what they want ends when exercising that right could put other people in harm’s way. But they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. Then came the tweet responding to these protests: “save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” How does protecting public health during a pandemic threaten anyone’s 2nd Amendment rights? The answer doesn’t matter to the Kool-Aid drinkers. It’s feeding their bias and the tweeter certainly knows that.
Expertise in infectious disease and epidemiology isn’t a matter of biased opinion. It’s science. Scientific research doesn’t always have answers, but scientists pursuing answers do so on the basis of verifiable studies, historical patterns, and tested outcomes. A man at a protest in Kansas said he wants to get business open again. He says he follows “all sides of the issue,” but he worries “in general, we are hearing the science-only side.” What other side should there be in a viral pandemic? For those who have drunk the Kool-Aid, facts don’t matter. They may “feel” a certain way about the scientific facts of this virus, but how they “feel” about those facts is immaterial. The virus just is and our opinion about it doesn’t change its ongoing infection rate and death toll. I don’t like the current situation any more than the next person, but for heaven’s sake, let’s heed the public health experts. And let’s not drink the Kool-Aid.
To believe in this livin’ is just hard way to go – the late, great John Prine
On this Mayday, a traditional day throughout the world for workers to celebrate their lives, their livelihoods, and their right to earn a safe, decent wage, it’s appropriate for us to reflect on the nature of work during this pandemic. Those who can telecommute (like me) and still maintain their livelihoods have had it relatively easy. It’s been frustrating and, at times, boring (“There’s no way I’m watching Tiger King, dear”), but whatever frustration and boredom we’ve experienced is hardly noble or sacrificial. Medical professionals, police officers, EMTs, grocery workers, delivery drivers, and other essential workers have been putting themselves on the line for weeks on end. And my complaints are as small-minded and petty as they seem.
In Georgia, businesses are now allowed to reopen, even those that can hardly be labeled essential to our health and safety (tattoos anyone?). We should realize the outcome of the decision to lift many pandemic restrictions won’t be evenly felt among our people. Those who have the luxury of working remotely won’t return to in-person work. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic: “Those who can telecommute, who can shop online, or who work for health-conscious employers like public universities will be better positioned to minimize their exposure than those called back to work in factories, plants, and delivery services. The economy will be further divided along its widening class fault: those who can control their contacts with others, and those who cannot.”
As infection rates and deaths rise in the coming weeks, the Governor is gambling people either won’t notice or they’ll conclude it doesn’t personally affect them. The U.S. data shows that 27% of those killed by this virus are African American, and yet they comprise only 12% of U.S. population. The CDC reports 50% of all virus deaths in Georgia are African American even though they make up only 30% of the state’s population. Also, statistics clearly show that people who work outside their homes are getting infected at a much higher rate than those who have the luxury of sheltering-in-place. They’re also disproportionally lower income, like grocery workers. And since Georgia hasn’t expanded Medicaid coverage, many don’t have health insurance. As Georgia opens back up, CEOs will telecommute, but their secretaries and those who clean their offices won’t. Reopening before the infection rate peaks, according to the CDC, will certainly cause higher mortality in Georgia. We don’t know yet just how much higher. The Governor’s gamble isn’t with my life or the lives of people who have my privileges, but with people’s lives whose type of work gives them a higher likelihood of infection.
We’re about to see an example of what ethicists call lifeboat ethics, where some people get a place in the lifeboat and others have to swim on their own. The Governor’s decision de facto classifies some people as less worthy to be in the lifeboat than others (i.e., privileged folk like me). Jesus tells us in Matthew 25 that God will judge the nations by how they treat what he calls “the least of these,” that is, the poor and the less powerful. God will judge us if this gamble with other people’s lives causes more poor and marginalized people to get sick and die.
Ahmaud Arbery should still be alive and with his family. But he isn’t. On the afternoon of February 23 of this year he was jogging, as was his custom, in Satilla Shores neighborhood of Brunswick. While jogging, two men approached him in a truck, believing he fit the description of someone they’d seen on a surveillance video who might have engaged in criminal behavior in the neighborhood. And here’s where we need to exercise empathy for Mr. Arbery or, to put it another way, place ourselves in his shoes. Imagine you’re jogging where you regularly jog and two men, who you don’t know, follow you in a pickup truck trying to stop you. They don’t appear friendly. They aren’t the police. And they have guns. So, you try to avoid them by jogging in the opposite direction. But they cut you off. What do you do when you have nowhere to run to get away from these strangers? My hunch is you would “stand your ground” and defend yourself, if possible.
The recently released video of the altercation shows one of the men in the bed of the pickup truck and the other outside the truck confronting Mr. Arbery. Again, put yourselves in Mr. Arbery shoes. You don’t know these men. They aren’t police officers. And they have guns. One comes at you. You have no idea what this about, but you’re a young black man and these two white men have guns. You know the history of how these encounters have gone before. Is it any wonder why Mr. Arbery “stood his ground” to defend himself when approached by strange white men with guns? The video shows Mr. Arbery struggling with one of the men trying to take away his shotgun. Shots are then fired. Mr. Arbery tries to get away, but he’s mortally wounded and falls to the ground. That’s where the video ends.
And what transpires afterward makes this tragedy all the more bizarre, but historically predictable. The police don’t even arrest the two men who were involved in the killing of Mr. Arbery, pending a full investigation of what happened. They just drop it. No arrests. But wait: The two white men were the aggressors (by their own account). They sought out and confronted Mr. Arbery. They came at him with guns. He had done nothing wrong. And now he’s dead. Due to this incident getting some attention, it now appears the local prosecutors are going to convene a grand jury to investigate. Two and a half months after the killing, they’re now going to have a criminal investigation.
To be sure, all the facts aren’t known. I’m not rushing to judgment. I’m not suggesting these two men should be convicted by any court, especially the court of public opinion. But seeing the video and reading the two men’s own account of what happened (which doesn’t align with what’s on the video) should lead anyone, especially law enforcement and prosecutors, to have serious doubts that no crime was committed against Mr. Arbery. What’s clear and indisputable is that Mr. Arbery didn’t deserve this fate. Two white men, acting as vigilantes, killed a black man they thought might be someone who looked like someone they’d seen on a surveillance video. And the authorities file no criminal charges? And some white people still wonder why black people don’t trust the justice system. This is why.
In spite of ourselves, we’ll end up a’sittin’ on a rainbow Against all odds, Honey, we’re the big door prize.
– The Legendary John Prine
This past Tuesday, Kelly and I celebrated 36 years of marriage. And although we’ve been married continuously for 36 years, we’ve had many marriages during that time. No, I’m not hinting at some previously unacknowledged polygamy (although I think historically the Mormons had it backwards: In polygamy, women should be the ones with multiple spouses). All I’m noting is the reality that our marriage hasn’t been the same one during that time. Indeed, no marriage can be. When our marriage was a “baby,” we had babies. As our marriage became a “teenager,” teenagers infested our house. And now, our marriage is approaching “middle age.” We’re no longer new at this. We’re entering the mature years of our covenant together.
Anyone married for a long time knows they’re in many different marriages during their married life, because they haven’t been married to the exact same person all that time. Yes, in one respect, they have, but it’s also true the other person has matured, learned new things about themselves and their relationship with the world, and through the day in and day out of marriage, has become a new, and perhaps a better, human being as a result.
Although we have different marriages during our marriages, it’s actually an aspect of a marriage’s “sameness” that allows for the possibility of becoming better human beings. If we came home each night to a totally new spouse (a warped Ground Hog Day), then we’d never have the time or space to really know one another, and in the process, know ourselves in a more honest way. Each night, we’d have to do the dance of courtship, wondering if the other person noticed the piece of lettuce stuck in our teeth or if our underarms didn’t smell quite “fresh.” It’s the sameness of marriage that gives us the time and space to get through all that so we might become new and different.
When we first say, “I will” at the church altar, we may be ignorantly thinking “I can.” That illusion gets shattered pretty quickly when we learn how hard it is at times to live with one another. Marriage, maybe more than any other relationship, helps us learn what God intends for us through the imputation of the grace given in Jesus. By grace, we receive undeserved mercy and hopefully from that we learn how to share undeserved mercy to another soul. Mercy (which is grace operationalized to another) is a virtue that needs cultivation. Where best to cultivate it than between two sinful people who’ll at times behave in selfish, petty ways? Each time we receive mercy, God gives us an opportunity for renewal, so that we may forgive and love one another more deeply.
So, since I’m in constant need of mercy, I’m thankful to have had so many different marriages. By the grace of God, Kelly and I have been able to love ourselves through each one. I hope we have many more marriages ahead.