The Great Invasion of Multi-colored Lobsters and Pentecost

Sermon preached on Pentecost at Trinity Episcopal Church in Midtown Houston Texas, Pentecost, 2015.

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CHURCH: A GENEROUS COMMUNITY AMPLIFIED FOR THE FUTURE Book Launch

On Saturday my new book CHURCH launched.

This first book is a sizable text of over 540 pages; over 30 of them footnotes. It is a historical and futuristic view of the potential God has in store for the denominational Church.

Regardless of denomination, if you are a thought leader, clergy, pastor, deacon, theologian, missionary, a social communicator,or lay leader working on God's mission - this is a book for you. If you are trying to understand the changing context in which we find ourselves undertaking ministry I think you should read this book. If you love the history of the denominational church and are interested in how that history prepares us for our future you will enjoy this book.

You can purchase CHURCH by clicking HERE.

This is the product of my sabbatical and an essential piece of understanding the bedrock research from which our strategic plan has emanated and to where we are leaning. I believe as a friend says - leaders make the future. We must step into our future by taking action today that will help us find our way in world that is volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. With the Gospel in hand, and the Holy Spirit within us, we are to groan towards the future of creation intended by God.

Where the church is not making headway or does not reflect the kingdom we must be willing to change. I find that the denominational church has a tendency to want to be resurrected before it is willing to die. Truly this is the characteristic of human institutions at their worst. But God is calling us forward into a new something that resembles more the kingdom God has in store for all of creation.

My hope is that this text will offer leaven to feed the Church's imagination around the work before us. It is an offering to God and the Church. It is an offering to all those who have lost hope in their denominational church over the last two decades. Most of all, it is an offering for those who deeply desire to be part of what God is doing in the world around us. It is you, the imaginative lover of Jesus, passionate missionary, and worldly pilgrim, whom I hope to engage in a discussion about the future. 

I am ever grateful to my pre-readers across the country, my reviews who have been excited about the text, and Virginia Theological Seminary Press for supporting my efforts. I am also grateful to the Diocese of Texas for the space and support to write the book. 

I hope you, as a thought leader in your denomination, read CHURCH (from VTS Press) then gather a small group of friends together and read GENEROUS COMMUNITY together (from Church Publishing which publishes in October of 2015). 

Together these two books will help create a cadre of leaders, conversation partners, that can help transform your congregation, lead you to plant new missional communities, help you transform the community and context in which you find yourself.

A GENEROUS COMMUNITY: BEING THE CHURCH IN A  NEW MISSIONARY AGE is a brief book of stories and reflections to help create an imaginative synergy between leaders and people who wish to ponder and act upon God's invitation to be at work in the world on his behalf. The book goes deeper with a set of questions, further reading, and opportunities for action which can make a vision of who we are becoming come to life in the midst of the community in which you serve.

I am grateful to Church Publishing for seeing the value of this book as a partner text to CHURCH and for the resources they put behind the effort. I am especially grateful to the Rev. Canon John Newton for assisting me in writing the reflection questions. I am also especially indebted to my new friend and editor Richard Bass who dreamed this dream with me and who did the laborious work of editing down CHURCH. Eager to keep the history and technical information in the hands of denominational thought leaders, Richard saw immediately the gift that A GENEROUS COMMUNITY could have for the parishes across the denominational church. He quickly became an essential team member and I am so glad that Church Publishing saw fit to attach him to the project.

You can purchase A GENEROUS COMMUNITY by clicking HERE.

The Bishop Richardson Society Speech

The Bishop Richardson Society is a group of individuals who have placed the ministry of Christ Church Cathedral Houston in their wills to insure the mission of the Cathedral into the future. A few fun reflections and thoughts were shared thanking those present for making a planned gift.

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Diocese of Texas Vision Presentation at Santa Maria Del Virgen

Presentation of the Diocese of Texas 5 year strategic plan for shared ministry with members of Santa Maria, May 2015

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Theories about Change, Growth, and Mission

Visiting with leaders from around the Episcopal Church working to support new initiatives across the church. Some interesting discussion on TREC, future church leadership models, and growth theories.

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Mother's Day Is Complicated

Sermon preached at Palmer Episcopal Church Easter 6b 2015

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It Is Mother's Day and It Is Complicated

It is Mother's Day and it is complicated. 

Esther Cohen is an author and posted on Krista Tippet's website on Being here. She writes:

What unites us is that every single one of us — and I really mean every single one of us because it’s one of the few things we have in common no matter what in the world we believe or what we look like or where we come from — is that we all have mothers, complicated mothers who somehow or other got us here to Earth. Those mothers had mothers too. 

This fact, this simple basic fact, an indisputable universal truth is still hard to imagine.

The columnist Courtney Martin offers the paradox of motherhood in this article:

On the one hand, I’ve never felt so linked to the rest of humanity. When I birthed my baby girl ...I became a member of one of the largest, most powerful demographic groups on the planet: mothers. (This is not, of course, to suggest that only those who give birth to children are mothers, just that this was the “path in” for me.) While so much separates me from other mothers, there is this sacred something that we have in common, this awareness of the fragility and fierceness of humanity (another paradox), this knowing that everyone on earth is someone’s child... There’s an ineffable recognition there.

It is Mother's Day and it is complicated.

I am the child of a mother, but I will never be a mother. There are still others who feel the pain of living without children. I am keenly aware that relationships between mothers and children are not all pleasant. Some have mothers we might not have chosen or children we might not have wished to have. (You can read Anne Lamott's negative take on Mother's Day here at Salon.) Sometimes our relationships with mothers are as messy as our relationship with God. And there are those who have lost their mothers - giving mother's day flowers and weeks later placing flowers on the coffin. Surely, we must understand the complexity of our relationships with mothers and the complexity motherhood brings.

Like all things there is a shadow side to mothering and motherhood as there is a shadow side in all things.

But let us not defend ourselves against this shadow by shaming others, by confronting, or withdrawing. For character and understanding is not found in these behaviors. Instead we know that by plumbing the depths of something I do not comprehend or pausing over experiences of others that I may not have had is important. It is, after all, in engaging this difference that character and wisdom is found.

There is something here for us as humans, regardless of our experience, something here for us all on mother's day.

Victor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor and Jewish psychiatrist in his famous 1946 book, Man's Search For Meaning, wrote:

It did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life, daily and hourly. (David Brooks, The Road To Character, 22) Frankl believed that life had given him an "assignment."

What then is this task that life gives us and from where does it come?

Let us return to Courtney Martin again:

[In motherhood] the lines of my individuality blur. The scope of my vision expands and contracts, again and again, ad infinitum. I’ve heard the idea that having a child is like having your heart walk around, outside of your body. For me, this doesn’t quite capture it. It’s more circulatory than that — perhaps the blood is a better metaphor ...A pregnant woman’s plasma volume increases by an average of about 1250 ml, a little under 50% of the average non-pregnant volume. [There is a] sense that the very thing that pumps through your veins has been altered, expanded, complicated, well, that never really goes away.

You see, we are connected. Like a mother to child, we are intimately connected. Here is truth, as children we are linked through motherhood itself. We are connected intimately together. This matrilineality of life, this common blood line of interconnectedness yoked through motherhood, this is life, this is reality.

It reminds us that there is no us or them. There is no righteous or unrighteous, no saint and no sinner - there is one family of God.

Jesus himself tried to teach us this very fact in his words and in his actions. He tried to gather us as a family like a hen to chicks. Jesus himself, friend of sinners, sought to connect, reconnect us. He ate with sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, religious leaders, the unclean, the leaperous and fishermen along with the pharisee and holy men of his time. This he said is love, to live as family, to be family together. This is what life asks of you. This is what God asks of you. This is what you are made for - to be family, brothers and sisters one to another.

This is the work of the love we call affection, the realization that we are connected beyond our friendship, passion, and our ability to give. We find that we are linked and in being linked - saint and sinner, sinner and saint - we understand our task.

Through the grace of Jesus who saves us all and who reconciles us to God and one another we understand not only our connectedness but what our connectedness is meant to accomplish. For her is the commandment of life, here is the commandment of love.

To love the one to whom you are bound. To love another spontaneously and without cause simply by our connection. To love and live with regardless and without the rule of merit. To love creatively outside the lines of connection. To build, grow, create real community with the good of the whole family at the heart of our common action.

This is something different than social justice where we call for change. This is life lived in mission to one another loving neighbor as self. This is a way of being made possible by our affection and connection. This is a way of being which transforms our actions.

Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870 calling for a very different Mother's Day that radically called for the transformation of society.

...In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before. 

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. 

...From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. (read the whole poem here)

In this matrilineality, in this connection of blood, we find that we are the brothers to our death row inmates. We are the sisters of the 337,000 who are incarcerated in this country. We are siblings to the 1.5 million who have been deported in the last four years. We are the nieces and nephews of the 412 people killed by police this year. We are the mothers and fathers of the 42 police killed by civilians this years. Those 31,000 people who die from gun violence each year are our kin. We are family to the men and women struggling with mental illness and addiction of all kinds. We are related to the 578,000 homeless men and women in this country. We are the cousins to the 48 million people who live on less than $10,000. This is our family, here is our legacy.

Here we discover the accurate understanding of life's assignment. Here is our understanding of our connectedness. Here our wisdom becomes knowledge and our knowledge becomes action - life's work. Here is our commandment to love more than sentiment, chocolate, and flowers.

"Here is our work to reject our individuality, our tendency towards selfishness, our tendency to believe the world revolves around me. Here is an accurate understanding of our place in the cosmos." says David Brooks of the New York Times (262).

We are invited by Jesus to love one another, to live as sons and daughters of one maker God - here is mother's day and it is complicated. We are to live lives as siblings connected for ever and to build a community that resembles more the family of God and less the kingdom of individuals who offer the culture of this world.

The Dude Abides

Sermon on Easter 5B 2015 at St Davids Austin and Trinity Marble Falls

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The Future of Connection

A talk given at the Invite Welcome Connect conference at Camp Allen in 2015. 

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No Childhood Good Shepherd Here

Sermon preached at Resurrection and St Michaels churches in Austin on Easter 4b 2015.

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A Presiding Bishop to Lead A Generous Community Amplified for the Future

With the Presiding Bishop nominations about to be released I wanted to share some thoughts from my new book entitled Church: A Generous Community for An Amplified Age. This is taken from the chapter on vocations. I believe this applies to the role of the Presiding Bishop as it applies for the local bishop. The community, the meetings, and the structure may be slightly different but the leadership skills needed will be the same.

ON FUTURE LEADERSHIP


As we look for these leaders, we will be challenged because in some ways they are not like us. Yet we know that the future Episcopal Church is beckoning and calling them into service. It is our work, our vocation, to help call them forward. To say out loud that we need individuals who have the characteristics of the second-curve leader. We must look at the church we have described, and believe lives in our positive future, and we must raise up leaders who are also representative of the great ethnic and social diversity that makes up our context. We need people who come from every kind of background with every kind of skill set. We are looking for mission-focused, entrepreneurial, collaborative, and adaptive leaders. We are looking for people who can see the church that we are seeing. These new leaders believe in and will do anything they can to work towards our positive future of a diverse people of God.

This means that we need leaders who are not only representatives of diverse populations but who are “cross-culturally competent.”[i] Leaders need to be adaptable to shifting ethnic population movement, customs, and social complexity. The younger generations are globally aware and global travelers – even just electronically. This will help them be leaders in the future church. It is important to speak another language, but even that is not as important as being able to be sensitive to the complex social customs of a particular ethnic group. Scott E. Page, director at the Center of Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan writes, “Progress depends as much on our collective differences as it does on our individual IQ scores.”[ii] He believes that crowds/commons that show a “range of perspectives and skill levels outperform like-minded experts.”[iii] Therefore the people we raise up for leadership will need to be able to illustrate in their lives some ability to achieve cross-cultural competency.

The future Church is looking for people who love God in Christ Jesus. They have a deep reverence for the sacraments at the heart of their own lives. They have a sacramental worldview and are able to tell the story of God by using many images and tools. They will be digital natives who are not afraid of the multiplicity of contexts and are able to move in and out of them seamlessly. These future leaders will already be connected and networked through a wide web of social media outlets. They will have an ability to “critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication.”[iv] In other words, they will have the ability not only to navigate but also utilize constantly evolving media. They need to be “new media literate.”[v]

This will mean that we are looking for people who are “novel and adaptive thinkers.”[vi] New situations, new tools, and new cultural shifts in an uncertain world mean that the Church needs to have individuals leading it who can think and develop/create/innovate solutions.[vii] Rule-based solution makers are less effective in the VUCA world. Just as industry will need these kinds of people, so too, the church will depend upon them. In fact, no new church starter should be sent out if they are not novel and adaptive thinkers.

The future leaders will be people who are “socially intelligent.”[viii] Machines, even artificial intelligence (AI), will not be able to assess the emotions of groups.[ix] Teams and collaborations will be essential (even electronic team work now has video that enhances communication). People read people’s faces and situations in a way that today is unmatched by machines. The more we return to an age of living and working in groups/pods the more this social intelligence will become essential. [x]Leaders of the future must be literally able to read the room and use that information for leadership.

These leaders (lay and ordained) will share their story easily and be of interest to their peers and those they engage. People will want to listen and connect naturally – in part because of the three characteristics above. The future Church leaders are trustworthy and accessible. They communicate and collaborate across cultural and ideological boundaries as agents of God’s reconciling love in the face of cultural forces that polarize and divide. They are transparent, but manage to shape shift easily, as they hold to their convictions with clarity of faith, and show a capacity to stay in relationship with many different kinds of people.

The future Episcopal Church leaders are pilgrims. They are themselves making their way through life as seekers. They are authentically on a journey and are interested in their own growth spiritually. These leaders are self-aware of how they are perceived. They tolerate failure in others, they expect to fail themselves, and they are able to talk about failure because they know intrinsically that this is where growth occurs.

These leaders are conveners. They naturally are people who gather others for formation, learning, pilgrimages, studies, conversations, and storytelling. They are able to hand off leadership easily – they share leadership. They build their mini -communities with such diversity that they are always strengthening and gathering for the purpose of the overall health and vitality of the community. They are willing to share leadership but also willing to help do/experience all parts of community life. They do this in person and virtually. They are adept at figuring out the kind of collaboration that is needed, and then the means for making those connections happen. They have grown up in a world of virtual gaming, which mixes real-world parallel play with virtual peer groups. The digital native is accustomed to “immediate feedback, clear objectives, and staged series of challenges.”[xi] The new group of leaders is less limited by time, travel, and the economy, in accomplishing the task. The will naturally work better in groups and they will desire to connect with others for the sake of building stronger teams. They do not see a difference between doing this in person or online. Moreover, and importantly for all supervisors, they are not going to waste their time doing something in person if it can be done just as well digitally. They value their in-person and personal time, and want to use that for themselves.

The leaders of the future will be wise counselors, preachers and teachers. They are able to articulate the deep meaning of things. They do this for religious stories and sacraments. They also do this for secular movies, stories, and for city events. The future will need “sense-makers.”[xii] They are able themselves (before they ever go to seminary) to communicate the Gospel in ways that people and communities find engaging and relevant to their lives: in the pulpit and in personal conversation. Machines and technology will never tell a good story or be able to navigate complex sense-making. Thinking, contemplating, metaphor making, and the sacramental interpretation of life will depend upon the future leaders being gifted sense-makers.

Along with this sense-making skill they will also need “computational thinking.”[xiii] This does not mean that they need to be computers. The amount of information that is traded in a knowledge economy is huge. The complexity of the socialstructured world is illustrated by the variety and number of networked communities. The future leaders, as digital natives, will not see this as strange. They will also be able to “manage their cognitive load.”[xiv] They are able to “discriminate and filter information for importance.”[xv] While the digital immigrants are awash in a sea of competing information bytes, the digital native is able to assess importance quickly, take what is needed, and leave the rest. Those who are able to translate what they see, read, experience, and learn, into abstract concepts and new ideas are the ones who will rise above their generation in leadership.

This means they will also need to be “transdisciplinary.”[xvi] In every axial age, the key people have been those who were not specialists in any one thing, but able to navigate across specialties, piecing seemingly divergent ideas into holistic life strategies, new sciences, and new philosophies. Howard Rheingold, and author, writes, “transdisciplinarity goes beyond bringing together researchers from different disciplines to work in multidisciplinary teams. It means educating researchers who can speak languages of multiple disciplines – biologists who have understanding of mathematics, mathematicians who understand biology.”[xvii] This means we need people who understand church, sociology, culture, history, business, and accounting. It is not that we are looking for people who are experts in everything. We do not need that. Remember these leaders work in commons, networked relationships, and groups. They will build teams of depth. It does mean that we are looking for leaders who are “T-shaped.”[xviii] The people we want to engage will bring a deep understanding of one field but have the ability to speak the language and culture of a “broader range of disciplines.”[xix] It will not be enough to know a lot and be able to put it together in a novel way. In order to truly engage sense-making, the future transdisciplinarian will be able to put the pieces together in the right way so as to make them work. Computational thinkers and transdisciplinarians are the kinds of people the Church will need to help navigate the future mission context.

The future leaders will be people who have a “design mindset.”[xx] The future leader will need to be a person who can look at the task and create a strategy, plan, or ministry to reach the desired outcomes of the mission. It is not just about planting a Christian community. It is about creating a mission in a particular context with a unique combination of people, language, and culture, then after assessing and making sense of it, putting together the pieces to accomplish the goal of a new service ministry or Bible study. They will do this as a secondary act of designing, based upon what they experience and see as needed. The present church simply does what it does. The future Church will depend upon individuals surveying their mission context and then designing the mission to fit it, rather than believing they have the answer to questions that are not being asked or a healthy church for people who do not know they need one. A design mindset looks first and then designs.

Leaders of the future will be humble. They have to be humble in order to tolerate the failure necessary for learning. This will also breed in them a tenacious spirit. Tenacity is not doing the same things over and over again until you accomplish the goal. Tenacity is the willingness to try everything until you are successful. This group of leaders is willing to work hard and spend their own capital in order to achieve their goal. They will use their cognitive surplus to bridge the gaps between where they are and where they believe they (or their community) are heading. This will be seen by many as a deep and abiding sense that they are entitled to very little, but will work hard to experience the creative process. This adventurous, almost frontier spirit, will mean they are vocationally flexible. They enjoy new things and participating in different exchanges and experiences. The future Church leaders, and their families, are willing to move to and go where their interests lie. Meaning, if they are devoted to a missionary opportunity, and there is no full time position, they are more likely to get a secular job so they can make the vision happen, than they are to take a job of less interest because it pays.

These leaders will reshape the nature of the ordained ministry. What seems essential to say is that, as a bishop, I know that looking for all these qualities in any one person, is like looking for the messiah. And, if the leaders of today can raise up such a person, the future Church needs her! Here is the big news though, for Commissions on Ministry, and those who are going to participate in this raising up of future leaders: we are not looking for a person - we are looking for a group. Remember the digital native is a creature of the pack. What we have to do is raise up T-shaped individuals with those Ts fitting together to form a group that will bring all of these skills to the new church. T-shaped leaders are people who have a broad variety of skills with one or two skill expertise. When you put T-shaped leaders together in a group you multiply expertise and cross over skills. The present past Church looks for leaders who are specialists or who can become specialists, and will be solitary leaders. The future Church looks for team members who help build a team that will have a depth of these skills and the ability to scale their other talents with their fellow missionary leaders. This is how the future Church will build its cadre of leaders.

THE FUTURE BISHOP

The bishop in the future Church will continue to guard the faith of the church, but will be more of a hub, than a person who polices the boundaries of the Christian community.[xxi] They will be a unifying figure; at ease with their own beliefs and willing to listen and bring others along. The bishop will be a person who redefines the continuing discipline of the Church. They are wise enough to hold quickly to tradition, but transparently and honestly know that things have not always been any one way. The bishop of the future Church will be present in their communities – churches and wider culture. They will be known more by their geographical area than where their office is located. They will have a see and cathedra[xxii] but they will sit in the midst of their Christian communities and sit within the wider cultural context. They will no longer be associated only within their own church but as a community member who desires the best for the people who live within their diocese – and I don’t mean only the Episcopalians. The people of any given area and of any given denomination will know the Episcopal bishop of the future Church. The bishop will be a celebrant of sacraments in the world and within the community. The bishops of the future will be bishops of the people, and go about with and among their people. They will not be one to stay in an ivory tower or diocesan center. No matter what the administrative call might be, the bishop of the future Church remembers that he or she is to be out and going (as an apostle) to God’s people where they are.

Bishops will see the different kinds of ministers that are needed and will raise up people from every walk of life, and of every profession, to take on the mission of the church. This future bishop will ensure that there are many paths to ministry. They will send people to all kinds of programs and courses. The bishop of the future will place the highest priority on the mission – the criteria being the growth of the kingdom of God and the transformation of the world through the reconciling power of God in Christ Jesus. Therefore they will make the measure of success not one of degrees but on how well the life of the future Church leader accomplishes the work we have discussed throughout this book.

The bishop of the future church is a bishop who is himself or herself a second-curve leader with all of the criteria and characteristics we have already discussed. They are people who work with other bishops of the same kind to move the future Church and its vision forward. The future bishop represents well the best of leadership throughout the ages and is always willing to be a prophetic voice. Yet the bishop of the future is not one to shake his fist at the wider world. No. The future bishop is willing to offer leadership to change those institutions that must be changed. This kind of a bishop is willing to work hard to make change happen in those areas of the culture where change is needed. Words without deeds will be a foreign concept to the bishop of the future Church. This bishop is a bishop of hope.

The future bishop believes in the positive future of the Church they serve. They believe that life and vitality are present and they offer a living vision of a living Church to their people. The bishop is willing to work towards that vision, making hard decisions along the way. The bishop believes. The bishop joins God on God’s pilgrimage to reconcile the world. The bishop is always willing to serve and figures out ways in which the most good can come from the church’s presence in any community. The bishops find joy in upholding and supporting the many ministries of their diocese. These bishops of the future love their work and would do nothing else. They thrive in a sea of challenge and are excited (which shows) by the prospect of making a difference.

The future bishop lives a particular and disciplined life. He or she is faithful, and continues the practice of studying. The bishop knows the scriptures and the life of Christ and the saints well. The bishop is also willing to seek revelation and vision from other sources because the bishop knows that God in Christ is present in the world too – drawing the world into communion. It is important for the bishop to study the world and to know and understand the forces at work and the people behind them. The bishop is therefore willing and able to speak the language of their mission context. They are able to proclaim a vision of the Gospel of Good News of Salvation to their people, in a language and using symbols and images they understand. The bishop speaks as one of the people and is able to move the hearts of men and women for the work of ministry.

The future bishops will accomplish this work because they will support all the baptized to be sure. This bishop, though, must be connected in ways unseen since the early days of the Church. They are known, and they know their people, and those who minister to them. They are able to be continually in touch, and through this connection, build-up the wider community. The bishop is a unifying pastoral presence for the people entrusted to their care. Through the network of relationships, with the bishop as the hub, the internal life and ministry of the church, its members, the secular leaders, and those who are seeking are all connected into a much broader family of God which is greater and stronger than any particular group that gathers on any given Sunday morning. It is in this way that the bishop is able to marshal support for those who need it, those without a voice, and those without a community. The bishop of the future Church will no longer be given authority or be considered a prince of the church because of station. The bishop of the future Church will be the chief servant of all, the friend of many, and will receive leadership because of her humility and careful guiding hand. The bishop of the future Church is seen as the shepherd and spiritual guide of her people. This will all be done, not by lording power over those in their care, but rather by working with them.

---

[i] “Future Work Skills 2020,” IFTF, 2011, http://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/SR-1382A_UPRI_future_work_skills_sm.pdf

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] BCP, 517ff. Adapted.

[xxii] A cathedra is the bishop’s chair in the cathedral

God has chosen solidarity with us so then with whom shall we show solidarity?

Who are Christians to be in solidarity with? And what does solidarity look like?

Hundreds of Baltimore clergy linked arms and took to the streets this week in an effort to restore peace amid the unrest caused by the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, April 19. WBAL reporter Deborah Weiner described the remarkable scene. “These are the church leaders who are putting themselves in harms way to end the violence … they are linked arm-in-arm … one gentleman is in front in a wheelchair.”

This was a sign of solidarity for peace and transformation.

Weiner continued: “I asked the clergy what they thought of the State of Emergency that the Governor declared. They said there has been a State of Emergency way before tonight in Baltimore City, an emergency in poverty, lack of jobs [and] disenfranchisement from the political process.”

In an editorial, The Baltimore Sun called on “the thousands who have already marched in peaceful solidarity with the Gray family’s cause, and the many thousands more who have silently supported them, to take back the movement, to drown out those few who choose chaos over order.”

Gray, a 25-year-old black male, died of spinal cord injuries following his arrest by the Baltimore police department. The city was already in the process of dealing with broken relationships between police and the community in the shadow of allegations of police brutality for years. Statistics show that a black male is four times more likely to be shot by police than a white male in Baltimore. Many people, including good police officers doing their duty, have been injured.

Violence and looting is wrong and unacceptable in any situation, even as a reply to injustice.

But let’s acknowledge that this is not an isolated event. Let acknowledge that this riot, this curfew is about more than one confrontation between police and one man. This event is about more than what happened in Baltimore. This event is more than violent anarchists using a situation. In this day and age that might be a comforting thought.

Too often we tend to be cause-and-effect thinkers when it comes to issues of race and violence. Baltimore Councilman Nick Mosby suggested that racial and societal healing can only happen when we stop narrowly focusing on the latest victim and begin to think more deeply about the way we continue to avoid the hard work of what it means to be a civil society that benefits its people.

I was moved deeply by Mosby's belief that the violence experienced in Baltimore this week is not primarily about Gray’s death, but rather the fruit of decades of growing anger and frustration over a system that has failed the city’s largely black, urban population. The violence and looting are symptoms of much deeper, and systemic issues that leave privileged groups in power and other folk perpetually at a disadvantage.

The social determinants of violence are clear. (See previous post "Prayer for the United States".) Violence is linked intimately to a lack of education and economic opportunity.

We would be naïve to think that society affords all of us the same opportunities. For some people--perhaps even most people--options seem perpetually limited. Some people take one step forward only to find the systems they must deal with day in and day out push them two steps back. This creates a deep sense of anger and frustration, which breeds violence.

The question then becomes--at least for me as bishop--what is the Church’s response? How do we understand our vocation to strive for justice and to respect the dignity of every human being?

How do I understand the gifts I have been afforded and the opportunities I have been given, knowing the reality for many others is not the same. I have to pause before speaking and ponder my place in this conversation. I must address squarely the racism that has benefited me. I must not be afraid to own my opportunities, safety nets and benefits. I can choose to get angry and reject this reality by being defensive. I can chose to ignore it. But what happens if I, as a Christian (Episcopalian and Anglican), chose to live into my baptismal covenant.

First, we must refuse to cast blame, which is an instinctive response to feel more comfortable. Brené Brown defines blame as the discharging of emotional discomfort. By casting blame, we distance ourselves from responsibility and we wrongly assume that nothing we do helped to create the unfair systems. It is what St. Paul called “the powers and principalities” that breed violence, division and a consistent gap in opportunity between whites and non-whites.

If we are blaming someone else for the violence and racism in our world, we are part of the problem, for in blaming we fail to see our deep interconnectedness as human beings and how our behavior and thinking always creates the behavior and thinking of everyone else.

Second, we must work for political change without naively assuming that political change will bring deep healing. We cannot ignore the fact that some policies leave certain groups of people at a perpetual disadvantage. We must be thoughtful about working to bring change to the political arena in a way that does not cast blame or settle for quick-fixes.

Third, we must engage society faithfully around these issues. As James Davison Hunter notes, the Church’s chief task is to be a “faithful presence” in society. Jesus just called it being salt and light. Perhaps this means mentoring a child at an underprivileged school or getting involved in an organization that helps create jobs. But if our presence is to be effective, it will entail personal sacrifice. Perhaps what is so appealing about blaming others and advocating for political solutions doesn’t require us to actually get bruised and bloodied as we work for transformation and change. I don't actually have to get to know someone different than me or care about the things they care about.

The way of Jesus is the way of the cross, with bruises and blood. The measure of our faithfulness as the Body of Christ is never whether we inflict bruises (on whoever we are convinced is to blame) but whether or not we love people enough to receive bruises. Think about it. Jesus’ commitment to the truth didn’t lead to someone else’s death, but rather to his own.

The question then is how are we supposed to die, be uncomfortable, let go of past behaviors so that others might have life and have it abundantly. The mere existence of racism or another’s impoverishment calls us to personal transformation.

Fourth, we must be realistic about the deeper problems that persistently create violence, which is not a lack of education or economic opportunity alone. These are symptoms of the much deeper problem: sin. Sin is what allows me to believe that unity is rooted in skin color and not grace. Sin allows me to think that I am entitled to what I have because I have worked hard. Sin allows me to think that I exist apart from you and that there is such a thing as a “pure victim” apart from Jesus Christ.

As Bishop I am mindful of how deeply sin dwells, not just in society, but in my own heart. But I am also confident and hopeful because I know the power of God’s reconciliation, which for me is not some lofty idea but a theological truth. From a Biblical perspective, it is not so much that we need to be reconciled with one another, as it is that we are reconciled already–with God and with each other–as an act of sheer grace.

God has chosen solidarity with us so then with whom shall we show solidarity?

As Christians, we do not need to bring the Kingdom of God to earth. We just need to wake up to the great theological truth that in Jesus Christ God’s Kingdom is already here. It is a Kingdom that celebrates diversity of every kind. People from “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” are part of God’s Kingdom (Rev 7:9). It is a Kingdom where Freddie Gray and the Baltimore police department already stand together reconciled under the foot of the cross, and where violence gives way to economic opportunity for all as “swords are beat into ploughshares” (Isaiah 2:4).

Our vocation as Christians is simple. We are to make real social change happen and to be a sign that points to God’s all-inclusive Kingdom where all people have access to education, health, relationships and meaningful work. This will in-turn repair the unjust structures within society.

But let us not forget that real and lasting growth begins at the root. Transformation happens when we (as individuals) work on the sin that is in us and seek to live differently. Transformation happens when we see ourselves as members of the one, reconciled human family and begin working to repair the unjust structures within our own heart.

So let us chose solidarity with Freddy Gray because black lives matter. Let us chose solidarity with our black brothers and sisters because of our past and our potential future. Let us chose solidarity with the people of Baltimore who seek to be a better city tomorrow.

I also stand in solidarity with God and I will show this solidarity by working for the greater good because all lives matter, and how we live matters, long before the living is done.

You Shall Be Witnesses of the Second Adam

Sermon preached for Easter 3b, 2015, at St. John the Divine Houston, St. Mary's Lampasas, and Holy Spirit, Waco.

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Rise Up Whoopin and Hollarin

Sermon preached on Easter 2015 at the Great Vigil at Canterbury A&M. Here is a video of Ray singing:

Rise Up

 

 

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The Real World and Clergy

I recently heard these words about the clergy, “I don’t want [spiritual] direction by some pious fool who doesn't know what real life is about.” 

Sometimes I hear that there is a difference between Church, the life and ministry of clergy, and the REAL WORLD. This is what I say when I hear words about how clergy don’t know what real life is about. 

The clergy I know work over 50+ hours a week – many more than 60. They are not compensated fairly for their level of expertise but do it out of a sense of calling and devotion to God’s people.Clergy labor under the stresses and strains of a job at the crossroads of business, religion, spirituality, and public speaking. They take potshots from members of the church about how this or that was not quite good enough; meanwhile, they manage crisis after crisis. Their families at times are poorly treated by members of the congregation. Mothers glared at for noisy children, parishioners yelling at spouses because something the priest said or did. Yet, clergy walk with people through cancer, fevers, illness, deaths of beloved parents, suicides, and the death of a child. They have stepped bravely into the midst of family crisis often times taking arrows from the very people they are trying to help. They try and broaden their people's horizons on issues affecting the culture while being told they are heretical or having their job threatened. They have fought against racism and all manner of evil at great personal cost. I know many who have sat in hospital rooms with parents holding dead infants, sat at the bedside of a dying parishioner who had no family, and pulled over at the roadside to pray and help a stranger. I know still others who have gone into battle with their brothers and sisters in foreign lands. Clergy have called together communities to rescue people from slavery, to feed the poor, and to give voice to the voiceless. I know clergy who have heard literally thousands of 5^th steps, confessions, and lies - and they have kept the faith. 

So this is what I think. If anyone knows about the real world it is the clergy person, the deacon, the priest and bishop, only they can be foolish enough to have faith given everything they have seen and experienced. They not only know what real life is about, they have committed their whole life to walking with people through it regardless of what it brings, regardless of the faithful and the faithless, and regardless of where it leads.  So today, in this real world I live in, I give thanks for the men and women with whom I get to share this life of ministry.

Christ is Risen...forever and forevermore

Preached Easter Sunday, Year C, Christ Church Cathedral, Houston, 2010.

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Easter Sermon: Go to Galilee

Preached at Christ Church Cathedral, Houston Texas, Easter 2011.

It was a wonderful service with baptism.

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Reflections: The Broken Man and his Breaking Cross

Sermon preached on Good Friday at Christ Church Cathedral Houston 2015.

Click here for the link to the sermon.

This Shattered Man on this Breaking Cross

Good Friday Meditation

An essay I recently read entitled “Reflections” contained this paragraph:

“I move away from him again, my hip hitting the side of the table and knocking the mirror to the floor. We both watch it slip from its place on the table, and its ear-splitting crash bringing us to a standstill. Neither one of us looks away from the glass on the floor. One piece captures my teary face and another has caught his; it looks just as broken as the glass that portrays it. The other pieces show images around the room: gray bed sheets, blue curtains, my bare legs. Everything is shattered.” (Caisa Doyle, Reflecting our Greatness, 2015, 16)


The cross is a mirror.

Knocked to the floor. We watch it slip. We watch him slip. There is an ear splitting crash. We are stopped – all movement -all creation brought to a standstill.

We wish to look away. We cannot look away. The brokenness of the cross and him upon it draws us deeper into its embrace.

Look away to what, after all, our brokenness? Our pain? Our suffering? The suffering and pain we cause others?

So we look. We watch. We listen. We imagine. And we know. The cross is there – shattered – and we are shattered too.

One part captures our teary faces, one part captures his, still another our splintered family.

Another part discloses the brokenness of our relationships, perhaps with a family member, a loved one, a friend, a brother or a sister.

Still another shard of cross exposes our broken relationship with God – God’s broken relationship with us.

This piece of true cross depicts the distance between us while that piece over there unveils the reality we are bound together in this mess.

We see in the reflection the brokenness of our world and our society where the powerful and their power are protected and once again the weak and vulnerable are preyed upon.

We see clearly in the cross how our actions of consumption and desire affect and break the lives of men and women elsewhere.

We see the breaking cross under the weight of division between black and white, gay and straight, conservative and liberal, rich and poor, between the man and his spouse, the mother and her son, the son and his daughter.

We see it all here. We see the generations of grey reality which is our reality. We see what is normal and plain unmasked as broken - not right.

Here he is laid bare, and we are laid bare.

We cannot look away. We see that we are as broken as the broken man and his breaking cross.

Everything shattered.

Yet here in the brokenness is something else altogether.

It is also a view of reconciliation.

Here in the shards of the cross is a seed planted.

Here too is atonement.

Here is the beginning of redemption.

Yes, here are all our plots unmasked – to kill God and stand in his place.

But, here too is God Standing with the victim.

Here is God with the suffering.

Here is death defeated.

Here our pretension to the throne and godliness is defeated.

We are out flanked, not by power, but by complete vulnerability.

Here is the revelation that God reaches out to us - vulnerable. God says to us we shall belong together and to one another. We shall have love. This cross shall be the cross road which links heaven and earth – you and me.

We shall see in its shards both the brokenness and our redemption.

For we long to be loved and belong.

We long to love and provide belonging.

So we see here in this broken man and breaking cross is an image of belovedness, the complete giving over of one’s self for another, vulnerability, and perfect invitation.

We see here, in this brokenness, both our sorrow and our joy.

And it speaks to us of the reality of love.

For where we love there is great sorrow.

Where we are vulnerable there is pain.

Where we are broken there is redemption and recreation.

Here as we halt, as we stop, we see truth then – that in this brokenness there is also great love.

They are mixed together as wine and vinegar.

There is no redemption without the broken man and breaking cross.

There is no love without pain.

There is no Easter without the cross.

The deeper the pain and sorrow the greater the container is hollowed out so it may be filled again.

The empty vessel burrowed by this pain and this sorrow is such that it can contain all joy and all love.

So it is that we too are hollowed out, bored out, carved out on this day, in this hour. For here we are also made to hold a great love – a great joy.

Kahlil Gibran was that Lebanese artist, poet, and writer. A literary and political rebel in his home country , he became popular in the 1930s in the west and again in the 1960s counterculture. He is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. He wrote a poem entitled On Joy and Sorrow – and l leave a portion of it with you to close our Good Friday meditation.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your table, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

The School of Rock - I mean the School of Atonement

Sermon on the Atonement and an invitation to experience Holy Week again for the first time. Palm Sunday - Trinity, Galveston.

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The Beloved Community of John and the Symphony of Engagement

Sermon preached on 5.b Lent at Good Shepherd in Austin. With a shout out to The Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl (PZ's Podcast) Rudolf Otto and Miester Eckhart.

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Thoughts on the Future Diocese and Future Wider Church Structure

This week I have been invited to participate in the ACTS 8 Discussion. ACTS 8 says this about itself: 

The Acts8 Moment is a Missionary Society made of lay and clergy members of the Episcopal Church. 

Vision statement: Proclaiming Resurrection in The Episcopal Church.
Mission statement: Changing the conversation in The Episcopal Church from death to resurrection; equipping The Episcopal Church to proclaim resurrection to the world.

Acts 8 Guiding Principles:

• We follow Jesus, guided by the Holy Spirit, grounded in prayer, scripture, and worship.
• We challenge The Episcopal Church to proclaim the good news of Jesus in effective ways.
• We encourage and equip local missionary communities.
• We carry out our work with hope, optimism, and good humor.
• We consistently and transparently communicate to achieve dialogue across the church.

Find out more here. This week they are asking for pieces about the nature of the structure of church. Hey have posed these questions for thought:

What is the mission of the (Domestic and Foreign) Mission Society (of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America) or whatever you currently insist on calling it? How should it be structured to serve its mission?

What follows is an excerpt from a new book due out in May called: Church: A Generous Community Amplified for the Future. It is written from the perspective of the Episcopal Church and is offered as my thoughts on the nature of structure. As a chapter it naturally depends on arguments made previously in the text but I think it gives a good sense of what I am thinking about the future structure of our organizations.

Future Diocese, Future Wider Church

“No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational

policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic

incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.”

William S. Burroughs, Ali’s Smile

      At the core of a missionary Episcopal Church is a bishop serving God’s people and  undertaking service and evangelism for the sake of reconciliation. The only reason to have a diocese is to help organize the mission of a particular area, and to stay out of the way of a living Church making its missionary journey. The only reason to have a wider church organization is to organize the mission for a particular region. Everything else is extra. This has been the essence of our structure and it continues to be so today. Sure, we can add a lot of other things to it. Those who are the elite power brokers in the organization will tell us that their parts are also essential.  This is not true, though. It is a lie one leader tells its Church citizens in order to maintain their place in power. The Church would continue to make its way in the world without all that we pretend is necessary. Our structures have been and forever will be a utilitarian exoskeleton for the real work of God’s Holy Spirit. What we know today is that this skeleton and all its scaffolding and framework which we have so labored to construct no longer works. It no longer protects us. It no longer enables us to be agile in the culture. It no longer supports the mission efforts of our Church. The present church is organized to operate in a context that no longer exists. The same pressures that all major manufacturing companies and institutions face in this time period are the same pressures the church faces.

      Companies as large organizations for a single purpose have existed to minimize transaction cost. They were created in order to buy at quantity and buy down cost of production. Their mission was to create a smoother transaction and delivery. Their massive mechanical production lines cut down on mistakes and saved time. Every cog had a wheel, every wheel had a person to man it, and the machine was well oiled, competition was low, and life in the corporate world was good. Over the last ten years though, the corporate world has been restructuring. Vision and mission work in the boardrooms have been undertaken to rethink whole companies. Mergers and acquisitions, increased resource sharing, and building mammoth organizations, were all for the sake of increased control and decreased risk. The world of business and the machine of the company have radically changed in the new world of communication and technology. The shift from manufacturing things to an information economy, and the rise of local makers in their garages, where the hobbyist competes with the professional, has changed almost everything. The legacy of the twentieth century is the last vestige of a modern machine era with companies and organizations that look like and work like the era from which they came. They have too many interests and too much capital tied up in the wrong things to make the shift easily. So these modern companies are struggling with purpose and they are not easily finding their place in the market around them. The church organization (diocesan and church wide) is no different.

      Frederick Hayek was an Austrian born British economist who lived through most of the twentieth century. He argued that the centralized economy could not exist because of the impossible need to control things. Not unlike Nassim Taleb, he understood that the health of society was not dependent on large organizations that are actually more fragile, but on smaller ones that enable a better more disbursed economy. In part, Hayek simply believed in the freedom of individuals to create, market, sell and disburse goods in a much more efficient and free manner. The centralized organization and economy required too many controls over the whole economic and social state. He used a term called catallaxy to describe a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation" as the primary means of economic vitality. The Nobel Committee used his argument for self-organizing systems in their press statement awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1974.[i] Hayek believed in a spontaneous order within economics that was not unlike the development of language within society. Centrally planning an economy is impossible because society itself is inherently decentralized, and would need to be brought under control. While Hayek was looked at as having missed the boom in large corporations and the economic entanglement of government and business in the middle of the last century, he is now being turned to again as the new information economy and maker movements are beginning to mimic his catallaxy theory.[ii] What Hayek intrinsically knew is that the power of innovation in the hands of the people will beat the centralized organization.[iii]

      We are today departing the mechanistic age that brought with it huge complicated bureaucracies.[iv] Margaret Wheatley writes, “We now speak in earnest of more fluid, organic structures, of boundary-less and seamless organizations.”[v] The Church is a whole system. It is a network of individuals who are seeking and learning – it is a learning organism. People in their basic nature are self-organizing.[vi] They do it in different ways but they connect and create society naturally because we are meant to live in community with one another. The foundations of the new infrastructure for the Church will be built upon the self-organizing, self-learning, socially structured mission context in which we find ourselves.[vii] The reorganization will be a catallaxy.

      The reorganization will be brought about by a mutual adjustment of the meet-ups, un-conferences, community websites, and crowds that make up the future Church.[viii] Because of our innate ability to have our own biases within the structure, it is difficult to see this self-organizing as anything other than fringe movements. However, they are quickly becoming the mainstream. The Church will have to make a conscious shift to engage at the many levels where it finds its citizenry. The mission organization of the future no longer outsources to a structure or bureaucracy the work that individuals can do for themselves. The professional elite mission organization is now in the hands of a new citizenship that is eager to innovate for the sake of the Gospel of love and reconciliation.[ix]

      The present church is just now taking its first messy steps upon the new journey that is leading to the future organization. Everyone has a part in the change. The change is happening, and as the reorganization begins the question is: how will each person act and react in the midst of variation from the norm, chaos, information overload, entrenched behaviors, and new ways of doing Church?  The Church is a vessel of a wily Holy Spirit that is moving and creating. The Church is an organism characterized by probabilities and potential.  It is an organization to be sure, but organizational thinking in the past has tended towards a mechanistic and deterministic strategy. In today’s culture such organizations are fragile and failing. It is weakened by the VUCA world around it. The future Church will be a Church that possesses tremendous tensile strength, a capacity to grow, to be autopoietic, and to adapt to its new mission context. It must do this because it is always and everywhere made up of people who are not living in a diaspora, but in the midst of the mission context itself.[x]

      The Episcopal Church is organized by diocese, and it also has a church-wide structure. We have a way of doing mission together – an economy. Aristotle was the first to use  the word economy. He used it to describe “the art of household management.”[xi] Aristotle was trying to explain the way markets worked and drew parallels between the smallest organization and the largest. Originally the term diocese itself (Gr. dioikesis) meant the economy or management of a household.[xii] In Roman law, a diocese was a geographic region dependent upon a city for its administration.[xiii] We might remember here how Ambrose was the governor of the area that included Liguria and Emilia, but he lived in Milan. This is an example of how a diocese is dependent upon its city for administration in the Roman system. Circa the end of the third century, Emperor Diocletian designed twelve dioceses, twelve great divisions, and established them in the empire, and over each he placed a vicarious or vicar.[xiv] It was into this Roman society and form of government that Christianity grew – adopting its terms and organization.

      In the beginning there were no particular rules for the organization of the church. It was autopoietic in nature. It was in fact a self-organizing system of communities that were created by the movement of the Holy Spirit, and the spreading of the good news of God in Christ Jesus. The first organization we see deference to the Apostles and their successors. As the Church grew there seems to be some further deference given to the local apostles or apostolic connections. For instance, we see early on James, the brother of Jesus, who is connected with the church in Jerusalem. Most likely the first communities were connected with Jewish communities and synagogues in the cities. They would be organized as such until being kicked out sometime after 70 C.E. There were also societies and other rural movements, as we have previously discussed. The new gentile Christians created communities of their own. We see evidence of this throughout the New Testament. A new Christian might then join a neighborhood community nearby. Most scholars believe that during this nascent beginning of the Christian movement, there was not a lot of organization to be administered. An Apostle during this time or apostolic leader would have simply overseen the community life – this would have been his domain of authority. Like St. James in Jerusalem, we see Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna emerge by the end of the first century as having some organizational authority over the Christian community in these townships. At this time we still don’t have any formal authority over a jurisdiction or its administration. The diocese in these first years does not really exist. The mission of the Church is purely an act of an apostolic leader and growing community. The church is like a grape vine. Christ is the stem, the people are its branches and it is bearing much fruit. (John 15.1-8) There was a great dependence upon the Holy Spirit and its movement upon the Church of the day. We should not overly organize the metaphor that Christ gives us, because for over one hundred years the church quite literally was not much of an organization, and was much more an organism.

      In the Church’s second century, as we have already seen in discussions about the Didache and the Apostolic Constitutions, there is a growing set of rules and expectations about the ministry of the Church and a natural turning to the apostolic authority (the bishop) for the oversight of how people come into faith, the administration of the sacraments, and the general teaching of the Church. By the middle of the third century each Christian community of any means had a bishop at its center. At least in the East, these places with Bishops in residence were called the diocese.[xv]

      We also know that these bishops and their dioceses seem to have grown up around communities of size and in urban areas. There were bishops in the country districts as well and in smaller towns. These were rural bishops called Chorepiscopi.[xvi]  They would eventually be merged into the then more formalized diocese as time passed.[xvii] In Egypt alone by the fourth century there were over one hundred bishops and jurisdictions. This was seen by the list of bishops attending the Council of Alexandria.[xviii] At the same time, the western and northern regions had fewer bishops, and they were more spread out with wider dioceses to oversee.[xix] By the fourth century (about the same time as the Diocletian changes) the diocese and its supervision more closely resembled the Roman government structure. Most cities had a bishop and a territory with boundaries. Not everyone thought this was how it should be. St. Innocent, in 415, did not share the idea that the Church should follow the exact boundaries of the state. Nevertheless by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the local bishop operated within a diocese that closely resembled the same boundaries defined by the state. The bishop was responsible for the economy of the church for that region. When it was changed by the Roman state, the Church would respond by making modification.[xx]

      After settling into this habit of mimicking state geography and organization, it (dioceses?) remained largely unchanged. The bishop was supported by a host of presbyters/priests and deacons. New churches were founded and bishops were put in place to oversee their growth and ministry. The evolution moved from every church having a bishop to the bishop having oversight of priests and deacons, overseeing the local work at the church where the bishop was not present. The role of the bishop shifted from being a leader of a single church to being a geographic apostolic representative.[xxi] It is clear, throughout the writings of the pre-Reformation period, that the purpose of the bishop and the diocesan organization were for the mission of the Gospel.

      When the Roman Empire fell at the feet of the invading armies, much of the society turned to the organized Church for support. Bishops Leo I in the fifth century, and Gregory I in the fifth century, were statesmen and public administrators, raising armies, taxing, and overseeing the mission and teaching of the Church. The civil society in the east was stronger politically, and so the bishops did not take on the same powers as in the west. In the west this trend of bishops as a mix of religious and civic authority continued. In many western states the bishops served as chancellors and heads of the court. When we think of the theological education throughout this time period, it is not surprising that the clergy tended to be well educated. The Lord Chancellor of England was almost always a bishop up until the dismissal of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey by Henry VIII.

      How a diocese was created, the purpose of the diocesan structure, and the administrative work of the bishop were in large part the same throughout the time of the Reformation and into the post-Reformation period. The Church of England, among other churches, sent clergy over to the new colonies to oversee the mission work and to serve as chaplains to the colonists.

      Prior to the American Revolution, The Church of England in the colonies was linked to the diocesan leadership of the Bishop of London. The tradition imparted to the colonies was largely one of an established Christian culture and society where the domain and control of the bishop with his clergy was seen as an ordinary part of both religious and civic society (this being an artificial boundary that they would not have understood). The work of the church was to help govern, to oversee the moral discipline of the people, and to help generally improve society.[xxii] After 1702, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) began missionary activity throughout the colonies. On the eve of the American Revolution, about 400 independent congregations were reported throughout the colonies, with over 300 clergy – most of whom were loyalists to the British Crown.[xxiii]

After the American Revolution the English Church pulled back its mission efforts and the Church looked towards other countries for support. It is important to understand that in this time period the Church of England in the Americas almost died. Because of the varying kinds of churches that had been created across the colonies, the DNA of the American Episcopal Church was not yet set. There were small conventions that met. They gathered local congregations and their leadership together to discuss the issues of mission and organization. There were no bishops. These conventions argued over the importance of having bishops, the nature of the church, and the importance of clergy. In the end, the Episcopal Church in Connecticut elected Samuel Seabury as bishop in 1783. He sought consecration in England but because of The Oath of Supremacy[xxiv], he could not be ordained. So the Church turned to Scotland, and he was ordained in Aberdeen on November 14, 1784.[xxv] Seabury was to be "the first Anglican bishop appointed to minister outside the British Isles".[xxvi] One year later, the American Episcopal Church was ordaining its own clergy.

      The fledgling Episcopal Church gathered representatives in its first General Convention in 1789, with representative clergy from nine dioceses meeting in Philadelphia to ratify the Church's initial constitution, thereby becoming the first Anglican Province outside of the British Isles.[xxvii] The Church took on governance that mimicked the new country, and ordered itself in a democratic federalist structure. The church was to be, for the purpose of mission, a constitutional confederacy of interdependent dioceses.[xxviii] It was to be called the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society and it began its first foreign mission in Texas and the West. The challenges in governance in this new era were unity in the face of major differences on liturgy, and tensions between clergy and lay authority. The new Church also struggled with the creation of a prayer book and specifically how were bishops to relate in the wider Church organization. It also faced an important goal of spreading the Gospel across the western frontier. It would resolve most of these differences becoming a strong, powerful, and influential church by the twentieth century. It was the self-organizing of the new Americans that sought to establish and continue the practices of the Church of England in this newly formed country. In the absence of a hierarchy and structure, the people gathered and organized themselves for mission.

      America grew and changed over the next century, and the Episcopal Church changed with it. The industrial revolution had a profound impact upon business and corporations. It had an impact upon the Church as well. There was a mutual shared leadership between the wider society and the Episcopal Church. Membership included J. P. Morgan, Astors, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, and Henry Ford.[xxix] These were not always the best examples of Episcopal citizenry. The Church was intermingled with the largest number of leaders in business and banking across the U.S. with its influence continuing into the twenty-first century.[xxx] The twentieth century would be the peak of the Episcopal Church’s self-confidence. It focused its governance on becoming the unofficial national church-- all the while it was engaging in mission in Haiti and all over the world. It was the height of the industrial age, and so the Episcopal Church with its industrial leaders formed itself through further governance standardization. It was concerned with the work of the modern corporation that was command and control, centralization of mission and ministry. The growth of program and administrative bureaucracies would be the hallmarks of this period of organizational change. After all, the Episcopal Church had become one of the largest protestant denominational churches. Membership grew from 1.1 million members in 1925, to a peak of over 3.4 million members in the mid-1960s.[xxxi] This included the dioceses in the U.S. and a multinational mission field that stretched across the globe. In 1930s the Church went through an organizational change, and prayer book revision. The organizational change placed within its governance structures the denominational paradigm of big church with a franchise approach to mission both domestic and foreign.[xxxii]

      By the 1960’s the Church had moved into a central Church Office and had a Presiding Bishop CEO model. While the church focused upon racial equality and social justice, the model of governance shifted, as did the governance structures of large successful corporations, and the state, to a form of regulatory agency.[xxxiii] Cultural upheavals, disagreements about women’s ordination, the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy, and continued liturgical revision marked this period. The end of the era, when the world listened to the Church, has meant a lot of time spent at every level continuing legislation in convention that goes largely unheard in wider cultural circles and social context. The new media environment has tended to keep the dysfunction and disunity of the Church on the front page, while the profound impact it is having in terms of social engagement and service is relegated to the back page, if covered at all.

      The Episcopal Church, like every large denomination, has decreased in numbers and programs, while not drastically reorganizing for the new mission context or evolving needs of the church and mission it is meant to serve. The bishops and their clergy are inundated with organizational requirements that are artifacts of a bygone industrial era. The focus on hierarchy, structure, and governance that is modeled on a corporate reality that is now over 80 years old no longer works. There is a growing disconnect between those who lead and the grass roots movements of lay mission and service. The Church is still mired in culture wars, wringing its hands over shrinking attendance, and trying to save itself by better budgeting in the wake of shrinking resources. The present past Church organization that exists today continues to look back in an attempt to sustain aging structures, force uniformity over unity, and create diversity by legislation at conventions.

      The Task Force on Reimaging the Church (TREC) was created to help guide the church through a new time of reorganization for mission. They released this statement regarding the current state of Church governance: “Yet this ‘national church’ ideal did not stand the test of time, and reductions in the centralized staff and program began in the early 1970s. Since then, The Episcopal Church (like many denominations) has sought to exert influence over congregations and dioceses through church wide regulations, even as the trust that once bound Episcopalians together across structures has eroded.”[xxxiv] TREC then posed these questions: What does a 21^st century missionary Episcopal Church need from its church-wide organization? What functions and activities should best take place at the church-wide level, rather than regional or local levels? What should be funded through a centralized budget? What should be mandated for all congregations and dioceses, and what should best be left to local discernment and discretion? Who should participate in what kinds of decisions? What primary challenges can a church wide organization help The Episcopal Church address?”[xxxv]

      The organization at the diocesan level and the church-wide level does not serve the new mission context well. In the Diocese of Texas, we recently embarked on a time of reflection and thinking through of our diocesan canons. The unified voice of the committee was summed up in the words of Bishop Harrison who said to our Executive Board, and to me, “The canons describe a Church I no longer recognize.”

      The problem with our current situation is that we can see on the one hand that our organization does not work. On the other hand we are invested in how it works now. The problem remains that what we are most afraid of is how change will affect us as individuals, our power, and our authority. Michael C. Jackson, in his text Systems Approaches to Management, writes, "The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - need not be signs of an impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity."[xxxvi] With an understanding that the church-wide organization and the diocese have always found a creative way to undertake its mission, we look from the past into the future.

      Let me introduce you to the Coasean ceiling, the Coasean floor, and scalability. Every, and I mean every, organization and institution has operating costs. The church has an economy, an operating cost that is real - time, money, and energy. The Coasean ceiling is the point above which the transaction costs of managing a congregation, a diocese, or a church-wide organization prevent it from working well. The Coasean floor is the point below which the transaction costs of a particular type of activity, no matter how valuable to someone, are too high for the congregation, diocese, or church-wide organization to pursue. Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase, in his 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm” introduced the world to this key to economic viability.[xxxvii]

      The Dutch East India Company was chartered in 1602. It is truly the first organization of its type to figure out how massive scale creates an ability to work between the floor and ceiling. By keeping prices managed within the market, so they are not too high for people to actually purchase merchandise, while at the same time lowering operational cost, the institution itself can increase profits and share of the economy. The Dutch East India Company did just that. They created organizational structures that managed the operational cost between the floor and ceiling.[xxxviii]  As other companies followed suit, and their industry grew, new corporate models of the church went along too. Recently, I read the book by Simon Winchester entitled Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. In it, he made a side comment about how the missionaries followed the trade industry. The growing corporation model influenced the Church, along with its missionary movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Accessibility, scalability, and manageability were all part of the diocesan infrastructure concerns for the church as they were with any business. Intentionally or subconsciously, the church has been, for the most part of the last two hundred years, managing to keep its diocese – its economy – within the floor and ceiling Coase describes.

      Managers manage the corporate model by helping to build scalability within the organization. Scalability is when the corporation is increasing its reach while doing so at a minimum cost, thereby increasing profits. It is the way of the corporate model. We cannot imagine a Church organization that does not think in terms of managing its economy. We are consistently managing salaries, income, and service to members and to the world. We are managing the Coasean floor and ceiling. When you sit at a vestry meeting, talking about the budget with a Starbucks coffee in your hand you are an example of how this model has affected both industry and the Church.

      In his book, Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff makes the case that “corporatism” has colonized everything. The corporate DNA has saturated our language, our institutions, our non-profits, and our media.[xxxix] The Church in the mid-twentieth century with its mission expansion, growth in programing, growth in staffing and growth in average Sunday attendance was an era of scalability. It was a time when the Church, like every other organization, grew. While many will claim a lot of reasons for the shrinking size of the Episcopal Church in our time, the reason may be as simple as the fact that we have not changed our organization to match the changing missionary context, thereby keeping our economy operating between the floor and ceiling. Technology leader, lecturer, and consultant Clay Shirky points out that it is the same for everyone. It happens all the time. "[Every] institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma--because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs."[xl] Our dilemma came when we did not keep our focus on the mission, and instead shifted our focus to the organization itself. We have tried to manage ourselves out of the current situation by shrinking our budgets and doing less with less. We turned inward and tried to accomplish keeping everything the same but just doing it for less. Meanwhile the growing cost of doing business kept rising.

The nation’s economy affects everything from the salary of clergy, the giving of parishioners and the budget of the congregation. We looked at these economic effects in chapter two but it is important to have a quick review as we examine the interplay between local congregation and wider Church organizations. What we know is that an overall picture of inflation reveals an average annual inflation rate of 3.22%. This has essentially doubled every 20 years in the last 100. Therefore, an average congregation in the Episcopal Church operating between the Coase’s floor and ceiling has to maintain 64 people every Sunday and an average pledge of $2,491. It cannot lose any members (or their pledges) and it has to add one individual/family every January, which immediately pledges the average amount in order to keep up with the operating cost on a pure inflation model. If a pledging member dies, gets angry, or moves away, then the church must replace two pledgers. This is an impossible task given the shrinking average Sunday Attendance and budgets over the last 50 years. Now add to your mental picture of this difficulty the increase in diocesan and church-wide askings.

      Historically, the bishop and the organization have been responsible for the administration of the Church’s mission. The local diocese and church-wide organization has not paid any attention to the congregations’ operating revenues, and their floor and ceiling. Instead they have continued to increase the cost of doing business. Yes, the money has increased, but it is inflationary. The percentages of the diocesan and church wide askings have increased too. Having built program staffs, ministries, committees and commissions, the dioceses also have faced financial crises. This has affected the wider Church organization. We have seen percentages of shared giving up to as high as 21% of income from parishes. This has drained money from the local mission field and moved it up to the wider church structures. No business continues to increase its overall revenue while shrinking the cash in hand to do its work at a local level.

      Think of franchising for a minute. The franchise model works this way: You pay an upfront fee for the organization’s business strategy, marketing strategy, operations strategy, and the use of its name. That's pretty much what franchising is -- you are establishing a relationship with a successful business so you can use its systems and capitalize on its existing brand awareness in order to get a quicker return on your own investment. You are using its proven system and name, and running it by its rules. You are getting supplies with a recognizable name at a lower cost because the franchise itself manages the floor and ceiling for you. You are allowed to put your franchise in a location where the franchise believes you will do well and where  will be customers. I say all of this because it is important to understand one very basic fact: the diocese and wider church are to do everything it can to make their local churches successful given their missionary context. Any organization that continues to take more and more income in the face of less and less money with higher cost of doing business is essentially cannibalizing its own organization. Since the 1960’s the Episcopal Church, and almost every other denomination, operating in the present past, has effectively mismanaged the Coasean floor and ceiling of its economy.

      In order to do its work in the current mission context, it is the responsibility of the mission institution (the diocese and wider Church) to create a shared ministry model that is focused on the local Christian community and its efficient and effective mission work. Over the last 30 or more years, diocesan and wider church leadership have continuously abdicated their responsibility and scapegoated congregations as the primary reason for the failure of mission. In an Episcopal model, it is the responsibility of the Bishop in conversation with the wider Church, to lead the change needed to affect new mission revitalization. The future Church must understand its responsibility, theologically and historically, for the economy of the spiritual household, and must be engaged in a dynamic local partnership with its clergy and congregations/communities.

      The future Church will invest in the mission success of its congregations. It will lead with vision and build unity by understanding the shared interests and needs of the organizations under its care. It will created process and procedures that are limited to the needs and success of the local mission context. Always remembering that the local Christian community exists purely for the sake of the reconciling mission of God, the diocese and wider Church will be there to support and help. The future Church must understand that it has to support the local community by doing those things that only the local community cannot do for itself. Many diocese and church wide organizations believe that this is an additive process. The local church cannot do something, so the diocese will do it, and we can all participate. Here is an example: The local church cannot support the program of the lollipop guild, so the diocese picks it up and supports it and budgets for it by using gifts from all the churches/communities for its underwriting. This is well and good in a program model. This is how it worked in the present past Church. The future Church will ask if the lollipop guild is necessary for the success of the mission in the local context and if it is, the wider church underwrites it, and if it is not necessary for the success of local mission, the wider church will not fund it. The future Church must understand it is responsible for multiplying and spreading efforts on the ground that effectively enhance the mission of service and evangelism. If the ministry does not directly enhance the local mission, it will not be taken on by the wider diocese and not funded.

      The future Church will be fully aware of the trends we have been talking about and will focus on creating Christian communities that engage the amplified individual. The structures and the governance of the overall organization will be attuned to the trajectory of the “personal empowerment” trends.[xli] The customization that all individuals are used to will be the same customization the diocesan structure must be attentive to. There will be an expectation that a one size fits all program model is not acceptable. The future diocese is aware that interactive media (from Facebook to games like Call of Duty), conscious economic social power (online giving and tweet donations), new commons for shared experiences (foreign missionaries and flash mobs) are all key ingredients to the new amplified church citizen’s world. Just as they are constantly placing themselves and their experiences out in the world, they too expect the organizations they are part of to give them space for mass conversation that participates in organizational direction. These are qualities that are expected from the organizations they interact with - both big and small.[xlii]

      The qualities that have emerged in our discussion about the culture and mission context are: self-agency, self-customization, self-organization, and self-learning. We are clear that we are in midst of a massive shift from digital vs. physical, to the digital and physical becoming enmeshed. We know that everything will be tagged so that amplified individuals will be able to find and discover the world around them. These digital natives are our parishioners and our neighbors.[xliii] We know that The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring are only two examples of how amplified individuals and super connected communities will mobilize for the common ideals in the future. Self-organizing mobs are going to become more and more common. Whether networking for politics, to raise disaster relief funds, clean up the community, build something, or discuss a book. Such connectivity will bring with it the power to shape economic markets, politics, and relationships within real-time communities.[xliv] The future Church organization will be accustomed to dealing with how the amplified individuals meet-up and accomplish tasks and set goals. The future Church will know that regular swarms and mobs are the new teams. It will be immersed in and uses the crowd list/friend list and has discarded the Rolodex. It must be aware of how quickly “dark mobs” might emerge and move against the best interest of the organization; therefore, it will be prepared to deal with this eventuality through communication strategies that link the diocese, parishioners and their broader networks together. The Church will understand that such eventualities are an opportunity to be grasped and not something that can be prevented. These are going to happen and the Church must be ready to use these as a teaching moment. The future diocese will engage in the merger of art, gaming, and social structures across physical and digital space – using this as only one of the many mission contexts in which it dwells. It will be involved in creating navigation tools for the complex media environment, personalizing technologies of cooperation and networking, and leading/pushing communication of information and knowledge. Community commons building and connections to any place, any time, learning hubs will be part of the diocesan work.

      The church hierarchy in the present church will be challenged to understand that people are directing their own gatherings, and that they are not necessarily going to show up because a program is offered. Gathering is now an option that comes when like-minded individuals create a common space to achieve a common goal. The future church will have to grasp the idea of ministry with people instead of to people. The future diocese will aid congregations to become savvy swarm and mob builders, intimately linked to the broader community and the community conversation. With new technologies evolving, the future church will take the opportunity to better network around skill sets, gifts, and leadership traits across friend’s lists. The future church will returned to an era of being a link, a connection, and a bridge, in a society which values connecting interests with real world tasks and needs.

      The future Church must take advantage of the new networking potential of a socialstructured world in order to catapult itself forward into the new missionary age. Yes, like every other modern organization, our economy has been disrupted. The prime cause is the new advent of a self-organizing world – the same thing that is our link to the future. The socialstructured world changes everything, and it changes the possibilities - redefining floor and ceiling of our household economy. Social tools drastically reduce transaction costs. The new tools will be used by the future Church to capitalize on loosely structured groups, to build cohesive strategies where it can no longer afford to have oversight by the full-time ordained.[xlv]

      In other words the future Church will beat the Coasean floor by allowing loosely structured groups to self-organize without the transaction cost associated with the large program church of the past. By harnessing the interest of its membership, the future church must figure out that it can structure and govern itself more effectively, thereby leaving dollars in the local context for mission. It can do this by having clear boundaries around the community and the mission projects. It will make joining and participating in the work of the church easy, ensuring that the work that is being done is providing some form of personal value for the individuals involved. The future Church will use these self-organizing groups across the community, building cells of support for congregations and communities. This subdivision and multiplicity of small working mission groups increase the antifragility of the overall organization. Shirky says, "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The act of choosing to spread widely enough and freely enough creates a power law distribution. This explains, among other things, the dynamics (and ultimately the success) of tools like wikis where there is a disproportionate amount of participation by an extremely small percentage of the overall users, while the vast majority contribute little or nothing.”[xlvi] Essentially what the future Church will do so very well is to build an overall collective intelligence in every area of mission, such that there is energy, innovation, and collaboration across the whole network of members and neighbors, thereby harnessing the power of a large group of individuals.[xlvii]

The future Church will have, diocesan leaders, structures and a church wide support system that are essentially built upon the people’s interests and talents that it seeks to serve. The network of the baptized and their neighbors is the network that undertakes the ministry of organization. James Surowiecki points out, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, that “large groups of non-experts are capable of coming up with wiser solutions that small groups of experts.[xlviii] We, as Episcopalians, believe in the movement of the Holy Spirit and the ministry of all people to work together to accomplish God’s mission. This is a piece of our non-negotiable understanding of what it means to be an Episcopalian. Surowiecki’s research reveals that in fact this belief is not simply a unique Episcopalian-ism but is the very nature of society. Study after study reveal that “naïve” or “unsophisticated” individuals can and will organize in order to accomplish complicated, jointly advantageous goals, though in the beginning they may not be unified or have clarity about the goals themselves. Human beings, regardless of background, can gather and self-organize and move towards a common goal adeptly and quickly.[xlix] The future Church must believe this to be true theologically and must enact it throughout its structure and governance. Holding on to one of the most essential DNA ingredients to our Episcopal way of undertaking our mission – the collaboration of the people of God, the future Church has undermined the specialist theology now gripping the church, and will free itself to once again take on the work of God’s people together.

      Did you know that over 10 billion people participate in the creation of a “living earth simulator?” The idea of Swiss scientist Dirk Helbing, the simulator uses the wealth of crowd support to understand how the world works and avert potential crisis. The project website (http://www.futurict.eu) states: “The ultimate goal of the FutureICT project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience. The living earth simulator uses information from scientists, techno files, and others to build a real-time understanding of the world.”[l] This is one of the most amazing projects I have encountered in my research, and it illustrates how complexity is not limited by crowd participation. The better-known Wikipedia uses about 150 people and thousands of volunteers to build its database. Yes, as it has problems with facts, its accuracy continues to grow and its wealth of information is astonishing. These platforms are creating projects and hubs within the wider information network that engage and enable greater participation by interested people. They reach far greater numbers of people with their participatory commons. These creative commons, Gorbis writes in The Nature of the Future, enable organizations to be guided by their leadership and those who are members of the community in ever-new ways.[li]

      The future church will depend upon its leadership, and whole community, to help minimize transaction cost of planning and coordinating activities, by using crowds. These crowds will have some particular qualities to them. The crowd structure will be made up of friends of Jesus, and collectively united around the Episcopal Church vision. The future Church will be technologically savvy. It will develop a standard of quality that reflects the context standards of the day. The future Church will be engaged in helping manage supply chains. It will be collaborative in all things. The future Church structures will be an enmeshment of hardware, software, and people – it will be amplified like its users. It will be characterized by antifragility through a structure that is at once unified, but more often characterized by the diversity of networked communities. It will be focused tightly on the ability, need, and goals of the local congregation. The future Church will be reflective and continually seeking knowledge about its performance and how it can improve its mission support at the local level; and, where it is in error, it will reform itself. Finally, it will have the characteristic of affiliation rather than obligation.

      There really are only a few things that a future church will need from its diocesan or church wide structure. The local Christian community will need support for their clergy and leaders to help them lead and undertake their mission locally. The local mission will need the unifying voice of the wider Church to help produce and expand the vision and mission of the Episcopal Church, so that seekers may find representative materials that direct and connect individuals with communities. The local mission will need the purchasing power of the wider Church. The local congregations will need client support for basic business services. Local leadership will help in navigating health, wellness, and insurance in a new age of health care. The wider Church will keep resources locally by spending appropriate resources on governance and structure.

      The structures of the future will be judged based on how well they support the local leadership – clergy and laity. The wider church structures will be tasked with making formation at every level accessible, shareable, and useable. Formation is a lifelong process for every person. In the self-learner world, the church must recognize that it needs infrastructure enabling the self-learners to discover more about God, themselves, and the Episcopal community around them. The diversity of types and sizes of communities across the Church will mean that it will be the Church structure’s responsibility to help build the technological infrastructure for this work.

      Accessibility for all members and their neighbors will be essential. The information must be shared freely. The present past has certainly been characterized by an age of suspicion and a lack of desire to share widely. The future Church is not only known for its ability to find good quality information but is also known for its willingness to share with others. This will require pushing the edge of translation and provision of information about our church in multiple languages. Useable information at the local context is essential for the first two ingredients to be of any use. The present past church is consistently looking at providing information it believes is important to share. Frequently, this is not the kind of information people need and it is rarely laid out in a way that is useable. The future Church must build a useable fount of information which can be searched, sorted, and retrieved, and of a high quality so that it is desirable to share. No single church can provide this platform; therefore, it falls to the structure of the local diocese and wider church to provide it, because it is essential to everything – service, evangelism, stewardship, and connection. You can see this already at work in the LOGOS project. (http://vimeopro.com/epicentervideos/logos/) The future Church will have more of these projects built and organized for church wide use.

      The future diocese will lead in communication strategy. The present past diocese and church wide structures spent money on program ministry offices and groups, the future diocese and structure use the lion’s share of their dollars to fund communication. They will be the leaders in software and network tools. They will be the leaders in providing Internet driven means for pushing information and shaping stories. They are also watching for the cutting edge in communications. The diocese of the future is constantly testing new communication tools and seeing what will work the best for individuals. It will provide training in communication and will help the amplified members of its congregations become better communicators. Money must be spent on front facing websites and technologies that will help connect seekers to local congregations.

      The future Church will be responsible for creating training for its clergy and leadership that meets the characteristics above. It will be the leadership’s responsibility to make training available for all people in accessible languages for the raising up of a crowd of Church workers who are eager to take on the mission of God in their local community. The future diocese will be responsible for helping fund, and hold accountable the training organizations and institutions that prepare ministers. Where there are none, it will work with crowds to source and create needed training. Where it exists, the future Church will hold it accountable to producing clergy and leadership at the local level. Resources will shift quickly over the next ten years to an investment in local training of every kind. It is the future diocese and the wider church’s responsibility to provide localized clergy training, so that time and energy are not taken out of the mission field. Moreover, the training for the laity on how to do the work of the church will be essential. The future Church must have: in its tool bag videos and online classes on how to be a pastoral visitor, a lay reader, Eucharistic visitor or chalice bearer, how to run small groups of various kinds, how to serve on a vestry, vestry best practices, how to start up a service ministry, and a host of other raw materials that take the pressure off the local congregation when it comes to providing quality training. This will free up time at the local level to do ministry and allow further lay involvement in the teaching and sharing of the Gospel at every level.

      We have talked about the work of unity and having a unifying vision of the future Church and its beliefs. A key piece of the work is for the wider Church and the local diocese to construct platforms for the sharing of this information. It is the wider church’s responsibility to nurture the network nodes and hubs, for better crowd and self-organizing tendencies of the new mission context. Gorbis wrote, “Organizations are: building social production platforms to reinvent themselves, extend their capabilities…expand[ing] internal pipelines, generating engagement, reaching out to new markets and audiences”[lii] The future diocese and wider Church structures will figure out how to crowd source everything from discernment for future leaders, placement of future congregations and communities, to planting of new service ministries. The future diocese especially will use the vast wealth of energy, talent, and on-the-ground information to guide its mission strategy. No longer is it a bishop, or maybe a priest, looking out and seeing that something needs to be done. The future Church will multiply its ability to move and grow and respond by increasing participation on a grand scale. The present Church has spent the last decade building connections. The future Church must harness those connections for the purpose of God’s mission.

      The operating costs of doing present past church are far beyond the ceiling, and stewardship no longer covers much of what we can do, so we have turned inward. Outer mission of service and evangelism has all but dried up in the present past Church. Today new life and many new models of community are beginning to emerge. They are using different capital and budget processes to fund mission - bring down the cost. It is the work of the future diocese to create further an operational economy for the business side of the mission model. This means that the future diocese will build purchasing cooperatives for electricity, office products, technology, and computers. The future diocese will ensure that every parish is plugged in with touch screens and high tech cable optics to provide accessible online connection between church leaders, communities, and resources.

      The Rt. Rev. Brian Prior, of Minnesota, did just that in his diocese, working out a grant process and deal with Best Buy (a locally owned corporation) to wire the diocese. Every diocese of the future will be released from people’s cast-off 5-year-old computers, and will use the most up-to-date cloud technology and hardware to present material and resources to their people and neighbors. The diocese of the future will figure out new economic models for starting congregations, allow for bi-vocational planters, and find more diverse community start up strategy. We know what the future looks like in terms of church plants. It is the future diocese that will take those models and create easy to use plans, strategies, and step-by step manuals. Every community can begin another community. Small batch communities will spring up all around as our churches are freed to do mission. Every community can begin a service ministry with their neighbors. Every community can rethink its connection to the community. The future diocese provides the guiding support for this work. The diocese will bridge the gap for the start-up’s space needs: by negotiating for the new community public space usage, finding office space and build-to-suit leasing options, by decreasing the cost of erecting a first building (like the new model church in the Diocese of Texas which costs $500,000 and seats 190 people), and by networking diocesan-wide crowd funding. The future diocesan and church wide structures will use their collective power to buy down operating cost for the purpose of increasing mission dollars.

      The future diocese will be a clearinghouse for congregational leadership support regarding business services. The cost of doing business, and the complexity of business with banks and auditors, are expensive. Meanwhile, transparency and higher standards of reporting will increase. It is my belief that in the future, the Church will have to prove its non-profit status to the government for purposes of showing that it contributes to the community. We already see these battles taking place. On an annual basis in Texas, hospitals have to show that their community benefit is equal to or greater than their tax relief in order to maintain their nonprofit status. I think the same types of reporting will increase across the country for any organization wishing special options regarding tax status. Fraud within the non-profit community is also raising standards, and even Congress is concerned about governance issues within the non-profit sector. The future diocese will provide client services to its member churches and communities by building capacity through shared business service applications. It will build banking templates for budgeting a congregation’s finances. It will negotiate and build unified accounts with payroll companies that ensure all employees are paid through the same service at a cheaper rate. It will create unified investing co-ops, enabling larger, more complex investment strategies for large and small endowments. It will deploy a unified audit so that congregations of different sizes can have excellent governance regarding their funds. The future diocese will centralize services for banking, and deploy advocates from diocesan centers that can help run the business part of a local church’s operations. It will provide coaching that is provided online, via real-time video, and onsite that will improve the best business practices of any given congregation. This will free up time and money at the local level for mission work. Fund management is one of the most vulnerable places within the overall financial system of the Church, and the smallest congregations are some of the most vulnerable. Liability and legal counsel will be part of the service work of the wider Church, as will disaster response and crisis management. Similar to the financial client service packages, these too, will be areas where collaborative networking of resources will benefit the whole organization, if successfully underwritten by the whole and then shared.

      We already do joint health insurance coverage on a diocesan basis. The last few decades have been marked by the increase in the cost of health care. Most of the focus has been on providing inexpensive coverage to clergy and their families. This has been done, in large part, by sharing cost with the clergy, and building larger pools of the insured in order to diversify the actuarial tables and create a less vulnerable health care cost pool.  The future diocese must recognize that tinkering with formulas and money are not the only way to have a healthy and effective clergy and leadership team. Therefore, the diocesan-wide structures will work to create well communities of clergy, their families, and all individuals under their care. Church wide leadership has to help the individuals it employs to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This will mean advocating for rest, time off, and sabbaticals. It will mean working to ensure regular check-ups, exercise, and nutrition.

      The future diocese and church wide structure will also deal with the issues of governance.  The present past church is heavily invested in governance. In my opinion, too much money, energy, and time is spent on ineffective governance and outdated structures of the church.  We spend an inordinate amount of time passing resolutions created by a few people, and then voted on by a few people, which in the end has little or no effect in the halls of government. Our governance is today ineffective at bringing about social change at the highest levels of our society, and we continue the masquerade that these resolutions that impact social change. Meanwhile, we have abdicated our real work at the local level of service and evangelism. Regardless of how much we like winning legislative debates, these debates and the policies and unfunded mandates that often accompany them, do not create changed hearts. In fact they make more fragile systems with a false sense of uniformity. They don’t serve the mission of reconciliation well.

      We have the best scientifically managed system of governance that you can buy - if you live in the nineteenth century. The last reform of our governance structure was undertaken in 1930 under the leadership of Episcopalian George Thurgood Marshall - and it failed. Robert Haas, former CEO of Levi Strauss, describes the potential of our world of governance as an opportunity for change. With semblance of hope he offered, in a 1990 interview, “We are at the center of a seamless web of mutual responsibility and collaboration, a seamless partnership, with interraltionships and mutual commitments.”[liii] To do governance as a seamless partnership is to undertake the true Episcopal ideal of mutual and collaborative work on behalf of our neighbor. This is to do real justice work hand in hand with others, around shared and potentially transformative service ministry. Sir Isaac Newton’s science, and later the Industrial Revolution, created an opportunity for entrepreneurs to give birth to a governance structure that mimicked what they saw in the mechanical innovation of their time and in the science of their age.[liv] Wheatley writes, in her book The New Science,  “Marrying science with the art and craft of leadership was a way to give more credibility to this young and uncertain field. (This courtship continues today in full force, I believe from the same motivation.)”[lv] Wheatley believes that the new science of quantum theory teaches us that the self-organized system is one that is playful and free. It is a system where everyone has a chance to participate and have a voice. Self-organization is a key ingredient to all life. Yet, instead of creating chaos, organisms have a peculiar kind of life together that is mutually supportive and communal.  Humanity can work the same way – its governance structures can work the same way.[lvi] This is of course the model for an antifragile style of governance. Gorbis in The Nature of the Future writes, “Our technology infrastructure, the new levels of data and information at our disposal, and our urgent need to create new patterns of governance in line with today’s level of scientific knowledge make it possible…to restore the democratic process to ‘we the people,’ to make the policy process more deliberative, more democratic, and more transparent.”[lvii] The task for structures in the future will be less about command and control and more about invitation and making space for freedom and creativity. Success will be gauged on how well the structures return the work to the people at all levels of the organization – broadening participation. Future Church governance will have been transformed from the work of the few on behalf of the many to the work of the many.

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[i] .” Nobelprize.org. September 10, 1974.

[ii] Anderson, 143.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Wheatley, New Science, 15.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Gorbis, 210.

[viii] Gorbis, 210. Hayek’s means are listed by Gorbis in The Nature of the Future. The nature of Catallaxy used here is from Hayek’s work. Hayek, F.A. Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 2, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 108–9.

[ix] Gorbis, 210. Adapted from Gorbis’ thoughts on the new economy and organization.

[x] Wheatley, New Science, 15. Adapted.

[xi] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans J. A. K. Thomson, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004) 32.

[xii] The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Diocese,” (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909). http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05001a.htm

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, s.v. “vicarious” (Stuttgart, 1903) V, 1, 716.

[xv] Op cit. “The Apostolic Canons (xiv, xv), and the Council of Nicæa in 325 (can. xvi) applied this latter term to the territory subject to a bishop. This term was retained in the East, where the Council of Constantinople (381) reserved the word diocese for the territory subject to a patriarch (can. ii). In the West also parochia was long used to designate an episcopal see. About 850 Leo IV, and about 1095 Urban II, still employed parochia to denote the territory subject to the jurisdiction of a bishop. Alexander III (1159-1181) designated under the name of parochiani the subjects of a bishop (c. 4, C. X, qu. 1; c. 10, C. IX, qu. 2; c. 9, X, De testibus, II, 20).”

[xvi] Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Chorepiscopi" (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1913).

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Dwight Zscheile, “Episcopal Church in context, Episcopal structure in Context, Rethinking Church wide organization in a New Apostolic Era, ” doi http://www.provinceiv.org/images/customer-files/ZscheileSynod.pdf

[xxiii] David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr., The Episcopalians (New York: Church Publishing, 2004), 52.

[xxiv] An American, Seabury was not willing to take an oath to be loyal to the king.

[xxv] Robert Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Publishing, 1999), 88.

[xxvi] Arthur Carl Piepkorn, Profiles in Belief: The Religious Bodies of the United States and Canada (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 199.

[xxvii] Episcopal Ministry: The Report of the Archbishops' Group on the Episcopate, (London: Church House Publishing, 1990), 123.

[xxviii] Zscheile.

[xxix] Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 264ff.

[xxx] B. Drummond Ayres Jr. "The Episcopalians: an American elite with roots going back to Jamestown,” The New York Times. December 19, 2011.

[xxxi] Prichard, 313.

[xxxii] Zscheile.

[xxxiii] Ibid.

[xxxiv] “Identity and Vision – Draft,” Reimagine The Episcopal Church Task Force, http://reimaginetec.org/identity-and-vision-draft

[xxxv] Ibid.

[xxxvi] Michael C. Jackson, Systems Approaches to Management (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2000), 77.

[xxxvii] Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no 16 (1927): 386-405. As quoted in Gorbis, 32.

[xxxviii] Ibid, 33.

[xxxix] Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back, (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011). As quoted in Gorbis, 33.

[xl] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, (New York: Penguin, 2009), 21.

[xli] 2008-2018 Map.

[xlii] Ibid.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] Ibid.

[xlv] Shirky.

[xlvi] Ibid.

[xlvii] Gorbis, 30.

[xlviii] James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random House, 2004). As quoted by Gorbis, 30.

[xlix] Surowiecki, 137.

[l] Gorbis, 110.

[li] Ibid, 113.

[lii] Ibid, 30.

[liii] Robert Howard, “Values Make the Company: An Interview with Robert Haas,” Harvard Business Review, Sept.-Oct. 1990, 133-144.As quoted in in Wheatley, New Science, 158.

[liv] As quoted in by Wheatley in NS, 159. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtoniansim (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995).

[lv] Ibid.

[lvi] Ibid.

[lvii] Gorbis, 118.