The Bishop’s Address

174^th Annual Convention of the Diocese of Alabama

25 February 2005

I greet you the delegates to this Annual Convention from every part of this great diocese in the grace and peace of our Lord. It is good to be together again as the family of God. In the spirit of St. Patrick’s brilliant Celtic hymn, in all our work and ministry in this convention may

Christ be with us, Christ within us,

Christ behind us, Christ before us,

Christ beside us, Christ to win us,

Christ to comfort and restore us.

These ancient words capture the essence of our faith. Christ is in our midst. We are here to be Christ’s people and to do Christ’s work faithfully, prayerfully, together.

We begin at this convention a celebration of our 175^th year as a diocese of the Episcopal Church. During this year we will give thanks to God for the rich heritage we have in faith and ministry and we will look toward the future to see how God is inviting us to engage the unfinished work of his kingdom which those who have come before us have so nobly advanced. Christ is indeed “behind us” in the story of these 175 years and Christ is “before us” as we journey forward in faith and commitment.

It is wonderfully appropriate that we are hosted this year by three of the newest parishes in greater Birmingham who have recently built fine new churches for the worship of God, St. Francis of Assisi, Holy Apostles, and St.Thomas. Let us say to the fine clergy and devoted people of these parishes that we are grateful for you and your vision for church growth, your good stewardship, and your zeal for God’s mission. We appreciate your warm hospitality in this convention.

It is significant to note that since 1990 this diocese has planted eleven new churches, which now account for nearly 2000 of our baptized membership, we have also established a new college ministry for the campuses in Montgomery during this period of time. This is a vivid witness to our vitality and commitment to spread the Gospel and build the church. We salute the many whose commitment to Christ and whose vision have made this possible. We would not be where we are as a diocese had we not had this kind of conviction and vision over these 175 years.

By 1830 when this diocese was established there were only two existing Episcopal parishes in the State of Alabama, Christ Church, Mobile and Christ Church, Tuscaloosa. There were two clergy and some forty-five communicants. St. Paul’s, Greensboro was soon to follow in 1830. By the time of the election of the first Bishop of Alabama, Nicholas Hamner Cobbs, at St. Paul’s in 1844 there were fifteen parishes, eight clergy and some four hundred and fifty communicants.

We have come a long way since then, now encompassing two dioceses, with some 127 churches in the state numbering over 46,000 members. We have lived through the days of plantations and horses and buggies, the tragedies of slavery and a terrible civil war, the industrial revolution and the coming of electricity, steel, and the automobile, two world wars and a great depression, the civil rights movement, the space age, and 911 - to name only a few. It is remarkable to think what Episcopalians have seen and been a part of since 1830 in this part of God’s world.

The words of the old hymn come to mind, “Through many dangers, toils, and snares we have already come/’Tis grace that brought us safe thus far and grace will lead us home.” It is indeed so. With all the stirrings among us in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion at present, it behooves us to remember this well. We have deep roots together in the Gospel and in the Episcopal/Anglican tradition of the holy Catholic Church. Like the great live oaks of the South we are called to bend with the winds of the times and to be steadfast in faith and love and communion.

To be a Christian, someone said, is “to remember and expect.” In this year of celebration we stop to remember our rich heritage in faith and mission and to give thanks for God’s abundant gifts in our journey since 1830. And we look forward in expectation, expecting God’s further blessings as we embrace the ministry that lies before us in this still young XXI Century.

Bishop Wilmer, our second and longest serving bishop in Alabama from 1862 – 1900, who saw some stormy days in the life of the South and of this church, said in his last address to the diocese in 1899,

Verily, brethren, we have a great mission to accomplish. We

believe without reasonable fear of contradiction, and not in

a spirit of boasting but of devout gratitude to the giver of all

good, that wherever on the Earth there is the highest civilization,

the dearest recognition of the rights of men, the fullest access to

the word of God, and the most sacred observance of the Lord’s

day, it is where the Anglican Church and her daughter in the

United States…predominate, influence legislation, and give

tone to public thought.

Now, you must admit, those are the words of a convinced Episcopalian! We might hear Bishop Wilmer’s words today as a bit Anglo-centric and perhaps reflecting a little H.M.S. Pinafore English triumphalism, but they undeniably resonate with a passionate conviction that Episcopal Christians are called by God to make a difference and to do significant things in the world.

He concluded his address,

We belong to a branch of the Church Catholic, which is fitted

to do a great work in this age. We are building for God, and we

must expect to meet with opposition and indifference and to

grow faint-hearted and weary. May the blessed Angels who

minister unto the heirs of salvation wake us from sleep.

These words seem as fresh and relevant for us in 2005 as in 1899. This church is still “building for God” and “fitted to do a great work in this age.”

Do you believe that? I hope that you do, or else we are whistling in the wind and the Angels do indeed need to wake us up! The conviction and confidence that who we are and what we do makes a difference, for God and for God’s world, is the foundation of mission. The Word of God in Isaiah said to the people of God, “I give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Jesus echoed these words when he said to his first disciples, “you are light for the world.” These words address us in 2005. This is our charge, our commission, our birthright, to let the light of God’s love and saving grace shine as far and wide as possible through us. We exist not for ourselves but for the world.

I wish to suggest that there are two aspects of this mission that are especially urgent at this time.

First, we are being called to hold up a vision of faith and spirituality for this new age. In the rising tide of secular materialism in the West many have lost their spiritual center and moral bearings and are seeking here and there, like Alice in Wonderland, for a sense of God and of meaning and of moral vision for their lives.

The contemporary Southern writer Tom Wolfe has written, “We live in a society so affluent that even the Sun King would have blinked, but there is often a spiritual void at the center.” We find ourselves in a time of “moral fever…people are desperate for a system of values, trying to find a code they can live by. Somehow traditional religion cannot seem to fill the void for many.”

This is a challenge to us, a gauntlet thrown down at our feet. When I was a teenager the song said, “There’s a whole lot of shaking going on.” Today there is a whole lot of seeking going on. Moral fever leads to unusual and sometimes extreme things, which should rightly remind us of the spiritual hunger underneath them. When Wolfe says that traditional religion cannot seem to fill the gap for many, I take him to mean mainly the traditional Christian churches like ours. I passionately believe that the Gospel, and in our case the witness of Anglicanism, can fill the void. It does fill the void with the amazing grace of God’s love and the vision of the good and the true for human life.

But we must connect. We must get the salt out of the shaker and the light out from under the bushel. We must find fresh ways to offer the riches of the Prayer Book and our deep Anglican spirituality and understanding of the Bible in ways that touch mind and heart. The old attitude that ‘everyone who should be an Episcopalian already is’ won’t get us far in the XXI Century. We need to open wide our doors and our arms and our hearts to the seeking world around us and share the spiritual riches we have been given. We need to be passionate Episcopalians – and that is not a contradiction in terms!

I confirmed a couple not long ago who said to me that they had been looking for this church all their adult lives. They wondered why it had taken them so long to find us. All I could say was, “well, Episcopalians are a little shy sometimes.” God is calling us to be less shy. Ours is a spiritually searching age and we are being called to be meaning makers and grace bearers in new ways. We cannot just sit and wait. We must go and tell.

Secondly, we are a church that holds up reconciliation as one of the greatest gifts and values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” and “entrusting to us the ministry of reconciliation,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians. He was speaking to a congregation struggling early with internal division, which would be the persistent hobgoblin of the church. He knew the power and urgency of the Christian message of reconciliation. Paul was convinced that, as the Windsor Report has forcibly reminded us in recent months, the church is to be “a sign of God’s healing and restorative future for the world.” We are to live in the reconciling power of the Spirit as “a united family across traditional ethnic and other boundaries [revealing] the many - splendored wisdom of the one true God to the hostile and divisive powers of the world.” We are to be an anticipation of the new humanity in Christ, a reconciled and reconciling community that lives at the foot of the cross. This is God’s mission.

You need to know unequivocally that I very much support the Windsor Report and am committed to following its recommendations in the life of this diocese. Bishop Andrus and I agree that it is a brilliant statement of Anglican theology and ecclesiology as we understand it. I believe that our church and the larger Communion should follow its wisdom and I will work toward that end.

Windsor’s immediate recommendations provide a promising way for us to work through our disagreements at present over issues of human sexuality. You will be given today a short teaching paper containing my thoughts and convictions on matters of sexual ethics today, which I hope will be helpful to us in the diocese at this time when many questions are being asked.

The Windsor Report’s longer term recommendations about new structures and a possible Anglican Covenant need more work before they might be adopted for churches of the Communion. While they are on the right track, I believe, the report’s sometimes centralizing tendencies need further discussion and moderation. But its steady emphasis on our communion and interdependence and on the bonds of affection and mutual loyalty that we share as Anglican Christians throughout the world, and the consultative processes that support them, is essential. The Windsor Report offers us an opportunity to renew the Anglican Communion as an instrument of God’s mission. But we must be well aware that it will take considerable time for the report to be received and processed in our church and in the larger Communion. We need to exercise patience and restraint as this process unfolds.

The greatest value of the Windsor Report may be that it speaks eloquently to us of God’s gift of communion in the midst of a time in which a disturbing spirit of polarization seems to be spreading in our society and world. The media now tells us that we live in red states and blue states, that we are pro-this or pro-that, and we are this or that viewpoint in the culture wars. I fear sometimes that we may become red and blue churches. Polarization may sell newspapers and fuel political campaigns but it is spiritual poison for churches and communities.

We know something far better than this, don’t we? Our ministry is Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. On the cross our differences have been transcended and our walls of division broken down by the radical forgiveness and mercy of God. If we were all perfect and all alike and all righteous we would not need reconciling. It is well to remember that the church is a hospital for sinners not a fortress for the righteous. “No one is righteous, no not one.” As the poet Rilke once wrote:

We all fall.

This hand here falls.

Look it’s in everyone.

But there is One who holds this falling

Infinitely, gently in his hands.

Christ came to reconcile us by the cross because we are sinful people, because we are different and have conflicts, because we are broken, because we cannot save ourselves. This is the great gift that we as Anglicans have to offer to a modern, inter-connected world struggling to live with vast differences. We have been reconciled. So Paul could write “In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” That is the news the world is seeking. It is the good news we have to give.

In our own church lately we need to confess that we have allowed ourselves to become far too focused on issues and on who is “right” and who is “wrong.” This is not the Episcopal or Anglican way. The church, of course, must always be discerning through scripture, tradition, and reason, the truth of God and, in the words of Acts, what seems "good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” But our particular charism in the Church Catholic has been for centuries our comprehensiveness, our tolerant spirit, and our generosity and gentleness of mind in handling the truth of God, which can encompass wide differences of opinion for the sake of Christ. This is because we, at our best, are so profoundly rooted in the expansive love of Jesus that as Jim Fenhagen once said we can be “firm at the center and soft on the edges.” We know that we are saved not by our rightness but by the righteousness of Christ. We believe that in some incomprehensible way God loves us all, and that God needs us all and needs us all together. We know that it is all grace.

In an increasingly polarized world our Anglican tradition has much to offer, as a deeply Christ-centered church where we draw circles not lines in the sand and where we build bridges rather than walls. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie once said when asked if we actually need a world-wide communion, “Yes, I believe we do because Anglicans believe in the one holy and apostolic Church of the creed…because we live in one world created and redeemed by God...because it is only by being in communion together that diversity and difference have value. Without relationship difference divides.”

Let us be a church where all persons can see the face of Jesus and know in our fellowship the grace and love of God. We will have different opinions on issues from time to time, but we are one in Christ and in the communion of his Body. We will sometimes differ in theological viewpoint and social convictions, but we are one in the faith, doctrine, and worship of the Book of Common Prayer. We will vary in cultural contexts and ministries, but we are all one in mission, God’s mission for the healing and saving of the world.

It is imperative for us in the Diocese of Alabama and the Episcopal Church to get unstuck from dwelling on the issues of the day and to get on with this work. Our convention theme is “175 years: Forward in Mission.” Forward has been our way in Alabama since 1830 “through many dangers, toils, and snares.” Forward is our way now. I believe with Bishop Wilmer that we have “a great mission to accomplish.” Let “building for God” be our constant theme and joy.

Consistent with this theme the most challenging item being placed before us at this convention is the resolution of our Diocesan Council recommending that we undertake a capital campaign in this 175^th year. In accordance with the resolve of our last convention your Council has caused a feasibility study to be completed, which reports that we have the estimated potential to raise as much as $5 million to fund key parts of our vision in the strategic plan for mission we adopted two years ago. The priorities that have risen to the top in our many conventions across the diocese and in the Council are land acquisition for planting 7 new congregations during the coming years, the building of a new chapel and needed undercroft meeting space at Camp McDowell, facilities for Iglesia Episcopal de la Gracia, our Hispanic congregation, and start-up funding both for an African American/Black Belt Missioner and a comprehensive communications program for our diocese. The Council has unanimously recommended that we undertake a campaign to fund this vision.

I believe that these are urgently important and compelling goals for us in order to keep the Diocese of Alabama one of the strongest and most mission-minded dioceses in our church. If we are to keep our recent pace in planting new churches we must acquire land far in advance in the right places, and have start up funding. Our host churches St. Francis, St. Thomas, and Holy Apostles demonstrate how important and promising this is for the long term health of this diocese. Camp McDowell badly needs a larger chapel up the hill where we can gather for worship, with ancillary meeting space in the undercroft for large groups. We must find ways to minister more effectively among the African American and Hispanic people in our midst, and we must communicate better and make the Episcopal Church more known and inviting in our part of God’s world. Many of you have had a part in discerning these needs and visions. I embrace them most enthusiastically and hope that you will do so as well.

We have not had a diocesan-wide capital funds effort since 1986. Raising such a significant amount of money doubtless will be challenging. It will require leadership and the steadfast commitment and generosity of all our parishes and people over the next several years. Such an effort does seem to give us a wonderful way to offer our thanksgiving to God for these 175 years of mission “not just with our lips but in our lives,” and an opportunity to embrace the future with renewed zeal for building for God. I trust that you will consider this proposal carefully in this convention and be sure that we are willing to support and work vigorously for what we may approve.

On Saturday, October 29 at Camp McDowell we are planning a day of diocesan celebration of our 175^th Anniversary. We will worship together, celebrate the stories of our churches, feast and be merry together, and hopefully break ground for the new chapel. I hope that you and as many of our people as possible will be present and join in a great day of diocesan celebration as we “remember and expect” together. Spread the word.

As your tenth bishop I am deeply thankful for this diocese and for God’s abundant blessing among us since 1830. You are a faithful and gifted community of Christian people and parishes who I have come to love dearly and admire during my nearly nine years with you. I am proud of you and especially the gracious and faithful way you have journeyed these challenging days.

We are greatly blessed by Mark our very fine Bishop Suffragan, who is doing very creative ministry among us and is much valued in the larger church as well, and by Sheila and there daughters. We are gifted with a community of devoted and learned priests, a splendid new cohort of deacons encouraging us to even greater service in the world, and our excellent diocesan staff, all of whom I am deeply privileged to work with in this great part of God’s vineyard. We are blessed by a community of laity across this diocese whose love of the Lord Jesus Christ, whose generous stewardship, and whose commitment to mission are among the strongest anywhere. Our ministries among our youth and college students and our steadfast outreach to those in need and to the world are vital and healthy. We have much to be grateful for to God and to the many who have come before us since 1830, on whose broad and faithful shoulders we stand.

Christ is indeed “behind us” and “before us.” Let us remember and expect. We are building for God and marching in the light of God in the challenging days in which we are called to live. Bishop Gray of Mississippi said to his diocese in 1963, “these times were made for us and we were made for these times.” Those are words worth taking with us into every parish of this diocese in 2005.

Let us seize these times bravely and confidently as we go forward in mission with gladness and singleness of heart.

And may God bless and keep you always.