Letter from The House of Bishops

Dear people of God: 

Grace and peace to you in Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Introduction

The bishops of The Episcopal Church gathered from March 17-24 at Camp Allen Conference Center in Navasota, Texas. Our gathering included 122 bishops and bishops-elect, representing 89 dioceses and special ministries across 17 countries and territories. As we conclude our meeting, we give thanks for the mutual affection and fruitful collaboration we experience during our time together, and we renew our commitment to bear witness with clarity and unity to the transforming power of the Gospel.  

Reflections from our meeting 

Our gathering was focused primarily on the challenges and opportunities before us as a church. We welcomed 12 representatives from Episcopal seminaries and local formation programs to engage in thoughtful dialogue about the state of theological education and our need to better integrate traditional and innovative modes of discernment, recruitment, and training for future clergy and lay leaders. We explored possibilities for expanding the work of church planting and the redevelopment of existing congregations. We reflected on our relationships within the Anglican Communion, including discussion of The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals and expressed our concerns regarding the urgency to change the definitions and structures of the communion. We rejoiced in the election of the Rt. Rev. Alba Sally Sue Hernandez Garcia as primate of the Anglican Church of Mexico. Finally, we issued a courtesy resolution celebrating the installation of the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Dame Sarah Mullally as the 106th archbishop of Canterbury. 

While engaged in this important work for the church, we gathered each day to pray for the church and the world. We prayed for a swift conclusion to the armed conflict with Iran; the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Myanmar; and all hostilities across the globe. We prayed for peace in the Holy Land, for Archbishop Hosam Naoum, the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, and for all those living in the reality of violence in that region. We prayed for healing and reconciliation among the nations of the world, that there may be justice and peace on the Earth.  We prayed for those who are victims of injustice and discrimination, terror and war, and the pervasive degradation of human dignity. We prayed for strength and courage to continue the robust and tangible response in our respective dioceses to the myriad and varied challenges before us. And yet, in the face of these challenges, we are not without hope. 

A word of hope

We find our hope in God’s promises as made known to us in the words and actions of Jesus Christ. Christian hope is the sure and present confidence, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, that suffering is not the end. Hope is the stubborn trust that God is not finished. Even in the shadow of the cross, God is already at work, bringing life out of death. 

This promise of hope is central to the story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45). Jesus stands before the tomb of his friend, surrounded by grief and despair, and a community aching for his intervention. It is precisely in the moment when all hope seems lost that Jesus speaks the Word of life. There is hope because “even in death, Lazarus has access to the voice of life.” Jesus, the Word of God, commands Lazarus to “come forth,” and that same divine Word immediately calls the gathered community to “unbind him and let him go.” 

In our present moment, in a world ravaged by war and the degradation of human dignity, Jesus is still speaking the Word of life. There is hope in this moment, because even in the face of grief, death, and despair, we have access to the voice of life—the voice of the One who calls us to participate in the Gospel mission of unbinding those who are held captive by the bonds of injustice and ensnared by the cords of corruption and oppression. We do not raise the dead; God alone does that. But we are summoned into the tender, deliberate work of unbinding, of participating in resurrection by loosening the grave clothes that still cling. 

It is in this hope, as those who have received life and heard the voice of life, that we go forth in faith to bear witness to the resurrection, to unbind what is still bound, and to trust in Christ’s promise to make all things new.

As we prepare to celebrate the Paschal feast, with the hope of the resurrection ever before us, may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Why I Support the House of Bishops Pastoral Statement

I. The Apologetic Task Before Us

When the House of Bishops speaks, it does so within a tradition that takes seriously the burden of public theological speech. Anglican theology has always insisted that belief is never merely propositional; it is performative. What we say shapes what we do, and what we do reveals what we actually believe. 

The pastoral statement issued from Camp Allen is therefore worth defending on its own terms, as a theologically coherent, apologetically responsible, and institutionally necessary act of episcopal witness.

I want to be transparent about my reasoning. I support this statement because it does what Anglicanism has always demanded of the church in a fallen world: it refuses the twin temptations of despair and false optimism, names the particular wounds of a suffering people and creation, and grounds its public speech in the grammar of resurrection rather than the grammar of political ideology. This is not a simple thing to do, and we ought to recognize what the bishops got right.

II. Hope Is Not Optimism

The statement’s theological center,  its account of Christian hope, deserves careful attention. The bishops write that “Christian hope is the sure and present confidence, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, that suffering is not the end.” 

This is a claim that can sound, to uncharitable ears, like consolatory fantasy. The apologist must resist that misreading and defend the epistemological seriousness of resurrection hope.

Anglican theological realism, as I have articulated it through the frameworks of Embodied Apologetics and elsewhere, insists that the resurrection is an event with ontological weight. It is not a metaphor for human resilience. It is the ground condition that makes any claim about the world’s ultimate meaning intelligible. 

When the statement says that God is “not finished,” it is making a claim: that the telos of creation is secured, that history is oriented toward a terminus that transcends the mechanisms of violence and power, and that the church’s confidence in this telos is what licenses its particular way of inhabiting the present moment.

This matters apologetically because despair is never an intellectually neutral posture. Despair is always already a claim about the shape of reality. It says: the world is structured in such a way that suffering is the final word. The bishops’ statement refuses that claim, and it does so on grounds that are theologically defensible, not merely sentimental. The resurrection names an interruption of the closed causal order. If that interruption occurred, then despair is simply wrong about the architecture of reality, however plausible it feels from within the thickness of grief.

The Lazarus narrative the we drew upon is precisely a staging of this argument. Jesus does not arrive before the death. He arrives into the full reality of it, the stone, the stench, the four days, the inconsolable sisters, the community’s exhausted grief. Anglicanism has always insisted that incarnation means precisely this: the Word enters the wound, does not circumvent it. The hope the statement proclaims is therefore a hope that has looked at the tomb and named it a tomb, and still speaks the Word of life. That is the only kind of hope worth defending.

III. The Anglican Communion and the Demands of Institution

The statement references the bishops’ discussions of the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals and expresses concern about the urgency to change the definitions and structures of the Communion. 

I want to address this directly, because I know it is a point of anxiety for some of our clergy and lay leaders.

Anglican institutional framing required taking seriously that the Communion is a real body, with real relationships, real history, and real theological disagreements that cannot be dissolved by procedural creativity. The current proposals emerging from within the Communion represent genuine attempts to address the fractures that have developed over the past two decades. Our concern about those proposals is not reactionary defensiveness. (You can read my response as part of a collection of essays.) It reflects a theologically grounded worry: that structural changes undertaken without sufficient theological consensus risk institutionalizing division rather than healing it.

The Anglican tradition has never understood itself as a confessional church in the narrow sense. We do not define communion by subscription to a precise doctrinal formula. We define it by participation in a shared life of prayer, scripture, sacrament, and episcopal order. When proposals emerge that would formalize a two-tier or differentiated Communion, they cut against something deep in the Anglican theological imagination: the conviction that koinonia, genuine communion, is not a legal category but a sacramental one. 

One cannot legislate a way into fellowship. You have to pray your way there, eat your way there, suffer your way there together.

I believe it is right to name this tension publicly. The task here is to defend the caution against the charge that we are simply protecting institutional interests. The argument is precisely the opposite: the concern for the Communion’s definition and structure is a theological argument, rooted in Anglican sacramental ecclesiology, about what the church actually is and how it coheres.

IV. Prayer for Specific Conflicts as Deep Theology

Perhaps the most work in the statement is the least glamorous: the simple act of naming specific conflicts in prayer. The bishops prayed for Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Holy Land. This specificity is theologically significant, and it deserves defense.

There is a persistent temptation in ecclesial public speech toward what I would call the abstraction of compassion, speaking of suffering in categories so broad that no particular body is implicated, no particular political reality is confronted, and no particular prayer can be prayed with any concreteness. We resisted this temptation. We named names for all of us to pray for.

Anglican moral theology, grounded in the tradition of Hooker and the Caroline divines and running through the social theology of the twentieth century, has always insisted that the body matters. The particular body, in the particular place, suffering the particular wound. 

Charles Gore’s incarnational ethics, Michael Ramsey’s theology of the cross as social event, the whole Anglican tradition of engaging empire and war from the ground up, all of this insists that generic compassion is not yet Christian compassion. Christian compassion is always specific.

The prayer for the Holy Land deserves particular note. The statement names by brother Archbishop Hosam Naoum and the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East. This is an act of communion: it says that the suffering of our brothers and sisters in that region is our suffering, that their reality enters our prayer, that the Body of Christ does not have a geopolitical exception clause. 

Together, as Anglicans, we must say plainly: there is no intellectually coherent way to hold an incarnational theology and simultaneously refuse to name where the Word has become flesh and is suffering.

The prayer for a swift conclusion to the armed conflict with Iran likewise reflects moral reasoning. I am aware that some will read this as a political statement masquerading as prayer. That reading misunderstands the relationship between prayer and politics in Anglican thought. Prayer is never politically neutral, to pray for peace is to make a claim about what God wills for human ordering. We do not adjudicate the geo-strategic questions. We do not tell heads of state what to do. We do what bishops have always done: we speak from within the community of prayer, from the vantage of resurrection hope, and we name suffering and pray for its end. That is not political overreach. That is faithfulness.

V. Why This Statement Merits Support

I urge the clergy and lay leaders of the Diocese of Texas to receive this statement with theological seriousness and episcopal loyalty, and to understand that these two things are the same thing. Theological seriousness requires us to think through the statement’s claims, not merely applaud them or dismiss them.

The statement is honest about the shape of the world, clear about the ground of Christian hope, courageous in naming particular wounds, and theologically anchored in the resurrection as the condition of possibility for all the church’s work. It reflects the Anglican tradition at its best: taking the world seriously enough to name its suffering, and taking God seriously enough to believe that suffering is a word penultimate to resurrection.

We are a diocese that has staked its mission on the conviction that the church is called to go deep, form well, and engage concretely with the world God so loves. This statement calls us further into that same conviction.

The Rt. Rev. C. Andrew Doyle

IX Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas