Guest Blog by Sam Todd: Sermon given at IONA graduation

Day of Pentecost 2011

NO OTHER PLAN

We celebrate two things today. The first is the seniors’ graduation from the Iona School for Ministry. It is no mean feat. It has demanded astute time management, a devoted determination to persevere, and an eagerness to learn which entails a willingness to be taught – not a quality universal among adults. These adults have been faithful to their vocation and to their assignments.

Each year at this time someone says to me, “You must feel very proud”. Actually I don’t and I have asked myself why. The main reason is that we are celebrating something you have accomplished, not something I have. I am not sure I could have done what you have done with all the other demands upon you. Another reason I am not puffed with pride is the poignancy of your departure. I have become accustomed to your faces. Every other Iona Sunday when you have flown off to your various homes and missions, I have known you would come flying back next month. But now you will not. And I will miss you.

A third consideration which constrains pride on my part is my acute awareness that all we have done, all you have done, is but preparation for the great task that awaits you. Today the preparation ends; the mission remains. Two years down the road if the kingdom of God is being revitalized and strengthened in your locale under your leadership and by your servanthood I shall take tremendous pride in having helped equip you for your ministry.

The other thing we celebrate today is Pentecost which was itself a graduation. Sometimes called the birthday of the Church, it is actually the baptism of the Church. The same Holy Spirit who anointed Jesus at his baptism now anoints the twelve disciples who are, collectively, Christ’s successor on earth. On this day the disciples become empowered apostles, those sent. Our word “disciples” comes from the Latin “discipuli” meaning students. Today the students become teachers and preachers.

St. Luke tells us they began preaching immediately in the native tongues of those present: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Egyptians, Libyans, Romans, Cretans, Arabs. What an incredible spectacle! Did that actually happen? I often wished I could have been there to see and hear for myself until I realized that I don’t know any of those languages; so I still would not have known what was happening. I might have just thought them drunk (v. Acts 2:13-15). What is indisputable is that the Gospel was in fact preached to Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Egyptians, Indians, Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Celts. The gospel was eventually preached throughout South America and North America, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Australia and New Zealand. It is being preached today to great effect in China where the Christian faith may be spreading faster than any other place on earth and producing martyrs as well (v. The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity p. 653).

The apostolic mission is on-going because the entire world must be reconverted in every generation. Each day hundreds of children are born into this world knowing nothing of Christ. “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach except they be sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things “(Rom. 10:14f KJV). The life of the world is still at risk, millions of human souls still spiritually malnourished. The need is the same, the mission is the same, the stakes are the same. Today our graduates receive a certificate of completion. Saturday, God willing, they will receive the Holy Spirit for the office and work of a deacon to be proclaimers, bearers and icons of the glorious gospel.

What is that gospel? We often say with St. Paul that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (II Cor. 5:19). Actually it goes beyond that. For, what is wrought in Christ and by Christ is not merely the reconciliation of a lost love, the restoration of a previous relationship, but the creation of something unprecedented: the union of divinity and humanity. In the 4th century, Gregory of Naziansus said of Christ, “He shares in the poverty of my flesh that I may share in the riches of his Godhead” (Theological Orations 38). In the same century Athanasius put it more baldly: “God became man in order that man might become God” (Of the Incarnation 54). These two statements are so bold, so mind-boggling, so apparently arrogant that we might dismiss them as crazy new age heresy did they not come from the two saints who more than any other were responsible for the Nicene Creed, the very definition of orthodoxy. Actually, St. Peter had anticipated them. Listen to his epistle: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness,… that through these you may …become partakers of the divine nature” (I Pet. 1:3f RSV).

Today, Pentecost, marks the completion of a circle of grace begun with the Incarnation which we celebrate at Christmas when “the Babe …first revealed his sacred face” (Hymn 82:2) but which actually began some months previously with our Lady’s insemination. Of these two bookends, Lancelot Andrewes wrote, “It would not be easier to determine whether is the greater of these two: the mystery of [God’s] incarnation or the mystery of our inspiration. For mysteries they are both. And in both of them God is manifested in the flesh. … Whereby, as before he of ours, so now we of his [nature] are made partakers. He clothed with our flesh, and we invested with his Spirit” (Works Vol. III, pp. 108f).

The Annunciation and Pentecost, the two bookends of our celebration of the Incarnation, have heavenly spectators. Some paintings of the Annunciation show the host of heaven peering down as Gabriel accosts Mary and, as Scripture puts it, “she was troubled at his saying and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be”(Luke 1:29 KJV). The heavenly spectators wait with bated breath to see what answer she will make God. Her response was, in John Donne’s phrase, to become her Maker’s maker (“Annunciation”, Holy Sonnet 2).

Today also, legend has it that the hosts of heaven are again peering down, watching as Pentecost unfolds, the archangel Gabriel now standing next to the ascended Christ. As the events end Christ says, “Now it begins”. Gabriel says, “There are not very many of them, Lord”. “They will bring others”, Christ replies. “They have not received a whole lot of training, Lord”. “I did the best I could in the time I had” Christ says; “now they will have the Holy Spirit to guide them”. “What if they fail?” Gabriel asks. “I trust they will not fail”, Christ answers. Gabriel persists, “But what if they do fail, Lord? What is your back-up plan?” Christ says, “I have no other plan”.







Iona School for Ministry graduation, Camp Allen

June 12, 2011 The Day of Pentecost Acts 2:1-21 Psalm 104:25-35 I Corinthians 12:3b-13 John 20:19-23

Hymns:225, S280, 516, 525, S129, Veni Sancte Spiritus, 555

1,225 words

June Calendar

1 7:00 p.m. St. Mark’s, Houston, CF

2 10:00 a.m. Bishop Quin Foundation meeting, Diocesan Center

7:00 p.m. 50th Anniversary Eucharist & Reception, Ascension, Houston

3 1:00 p.m. Texas Association of Healthcare Volunteers, Dallas

5 10:00 a.m. Santa Maria Virgen, Houston, CF

7 1:00 p.m. St. James’ House, Baytown

8 7:00 p.m. The Rev. David Nelson Celebration of New Ministry, Christ the King, Atascocita

12 11:00 a.m. Iona School Graduation, Camp Allen

14-15 Executive Board, Camp Allen

15 6:30 p.m. Grace, Georgetown, Visitation

16 10:00 Church Corporation meeting, Diocesan Center

18 10:00 a.m. Deacon Ordination, Christ Church Cathedral, Houston

19 10:30 a.m. Trinity, Houston, CF

22 6:30 p.m. The Rev. Bert Baetz Celebration of New Ministry, St. Mark’s, Fort Bend

26 10:00 a.m. St. Thomas’, Houston, CF

7:00 p.m. The Rev. Stacy Stringer Celebration of New Ministry, Holy Trinity, Dickinson

28 5:00 p.m. Episcopal Night at the Astros, Minute Maid Park, Houston

29 6:00 p.m. St. Timothy’s, Lake Jackson, CF

Build Up The Body of Love

“Build Up The Body of Love.”

A Sermon
On the Occasion of Celebration of New Ministry
The Rev. David Nelson Christ the King Episcopal Church

Texas George Kinsolving, the second bishop of Texas, in his 1902 missionary sermon at Virginia Theological Seminary wrote these words about the reformers:

[The reformers], you remember, were delegated to remodel and old system which was then, and had been for many centuries, in existence, but which somehow in the lapse of ages had got strangely out of repair, and sadly needed reconstruction. Numbers of her stones had rolled down from the walls of this Zion, and accumulated masses of debris and rubbish were visible on every hand. All things appeared to be crumbling away into decay and ruin; wild beasts of various descriptions had crept through the breaches into the enclosure, and were trampling underfoot the celestial flowers growing within, and making a fearful havoc with the trees and fruits planted in this garden of His by the hand of the Lord Himself; so that earnest and faithful men found it necessary to replace these stones in their former position, to build up again the towers, to remove the dirt, thoroughly renovate the structure and restore it to its original condition. (The Church’s Burden, Section 2, 5)

David and my friends of Christ the King, you have neither as difficult a challenge nor as great a burden in this place.

Yet it is true that there is work to do.

You exist for God.

You exist for the world around you.

You exist to glorify God and to make his name known by transforming the lives of the people around you.

You must indeed rebuild the mission of this church out into the world.

You have a solid foundation in Jesus Christ.

You have a sure footing given to you by the people through their labors during the transition time.

But together you are charged to renovate and build up, stone by stone the mission of Christ the King to the community of Atascocita and Humble which surround you on either side.

The work is clear. This congregation exists not for the benefit of itself; not for the benefit of the Episcopal Church or the Diocese of Texas.

This congregation exists for the clear work of glorifying God in worship and mission.

On Sunday you are to offer praise and prayers to God. You are to serve all those who come to you.

You are to: build a goodly community of fellowship; a community that cares for the old and young alike; a community that prays for its members and for the world; a community that offers healing.

Christ the King is a sanctuary from the world. It is a pilgrim’s way station as all pilgrims (known and unknown) make their way in their daily life lived with Jesus.

The rest of the week this place is to be used as a mission point from which your people and you leave and go out into the world. It is good for the doors to be open to all people but they aren’t coming to find you. You have to go out and find them.

You are to be like Jesus looking for the lost sheep of Israel; the people of Zion.

Today in Holy Men and Holy Women we remember Roland Allen. He is the great missiologist and missionary to Northern China and Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century.

When describing the Pentecost moment and the missionary repercussions he wrote:

They [the apostles] preached as men who were convinced that the need of [people] could be satisfied only in Jesus Christ. “There is none other name under heaven given among men,” said Peter (4.12), and St. Paul’s preaching was that “by him every one that believeth is justified from all things…” To read Acts with understanding, we must know, with the real knowledge born of experience, that the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Incarnation and the Passion, the Spirit given at Pentecost, is the answer of God to a real need of the world, that is of every single soul in the world; for in the Acts these two meet, the redeeming Spirit and the utter need, and it is the redeeming Spirit that reveals the utter need. (The Ministry of the Spirit, Roland Allen, 1960, 38)

The reality is the world is in need.

I love the world of technology but the world is not in need of more technology.

I love music and rock and roll but the world is not in need of more rock and roll.

I love the world of shopping and clothes and design but the world is not in need of more things to buy.


The world is not in need of some old idea of church…that crumbling constantinian church that Texas George recalled, but of a vital living missionary organism that is one with the community in which it finds itself.


Christ the King began its life at the end of the high watermark of the church 1977. We are not living in a church that existed in the 1970s or 80s but one that must reclaim from the past a new missionary spirit for the foreign culture in which we find ourselves.

The world needs people who:

Love others

Care for others.

Need and welcome others.

Who listen first.

From Ephesians: Build up the body in love…

Love God and love neighbor. We do a good job at loving God, we do a good job at loving ourselves, but we have not mastered the loving our neighbor part…We are so intolerant we have difficulty loving if people aren’t like us, don’t agree with us, don’t look and act like us….

As Paul warned us of just this challenge in the emerging church of Rome: “Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarrelling over opinions.” (Romans 14.1ff)

Yes David, you and the congregation in this place have a good foundation – solid bedrock. But you must move outside this place and space and become involved in the community around you.

The rotary, clubs, neighborhood civic associations, and schools are all places waiting for Christ the King missionaries. David, you are going to have to lead your people and let your people lead you out of this place into the world in order to show and be one with the people you are given charge over.

You see you are not given to this church. You are not this congregation’s rector you are the Episcopal Priest, missionary, and shepherd over the whole of Atascocita and when you have than in hand you can begin to work on Humble.

David, lift up your eyes and see the world is in need of Jesus and those who love and follow Jesus. They are waiting on you and your people.

Our scripture from Ephesians reminds us: You are given the gifts to do this work.

Don’t be tempted to look this way and that way for some new solution, some new church program. Love people and invite their gifts forward.

Don’t flip this way and that… but be decisive and make mistakes, make glorious mistakes.

Not from burying your gifts and treasures but by flinging wide the seeds of the Gospel’s gifts.

You see we all have much to offer.

From Paul’s letter to the church in the midst of Ephasus:

4.7 But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.

8Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on … he gave gifts to his people.’

What are the gifts for?

12to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

Rolland Allen believed that the congregation and the community in which you find your ministry has all the gifts needed for ministry.

Out of an assurance of God’s abundant provision, the church claims and believes that God provides in all of us the gifts need for the fulfillment of God’s ministry in every context.

The devil and your ego are liars David; and evil will whisper in your ear that you are the only one here with vision.

You are the only one here who can do and ever does anything. You will hear the whispers of a Gollum like voice that will challenge you to see preciousness only in your ideas and words and deeds. And if you listen to these lies and untruths you will find yourself alone in an empty church.

Lift up your eyes and see that God is providing.
God provides. God is providing to you all that is needed.

You need not hold the vision alone.

You need not carry the burden alone.

You need only but ask and it shall be given. You need only knock and the doors of people’s hearts will be open unto you.

These are good people. And they are waiting to be led and invited into ministry alongside of you.

These people are God’s people here and throughout Atascocita. God is their shepherd.

Jesus is their Good Shepherd.

I have been given oversight of this flock and so these people are entrusted to me and tonight I entrust them to you.

As the service says, “These are signs of yours and my ministry in this place.”

When you stand at the altar you do so in my place.

Take care of God’s people. Take care of my people. Take care of our people.

They are good people. Follow them out into the world of their lives and make your missionary field in the spaces in which they travel during the week.

Visit them in their homes. Visit them in their work places. Ask them their story and seek to understand the vision God gives them. Listen to them and invite them into the work the church is given to do.

David, lead these people with all their gifts in changing the world around you.

Lead these people by loving them first and by loving the world around you.

Lead these people in the mission of Christ, rebuild the connection between this church and the community which surrounds you.

Lead these people with all the gifts God has given.

Promote the body’s growth.

Built it into a body of love.

Let me end where I began with Texas George. He writes in his concluding remarks to those priests to be, clergy and missionaries gathered before him:

Therefore, come up to the help of the Lord; to the help of the Lord against the mighty. The work may be slow and arduous, but in God’s time, in His way, and by His means, victory will crown our efforts in the end. “Come it will, and come it must,…. what a joy and privilege to feel that we can, indeed , help in such work and do battle for Christ and serve in His army and share in the ultimate triumph of His glorious cause. The vision comforted St. John at Patmos, when he saw the Holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven from God, having the glory of God. St. Augustine gazed with rapture upon the same entrancing sight while the Roman Empire was crumbling to pieces around him and the Voice of God whispers to our souls, even as we speak, and bids us gaze in faith upon a like vision and even while we look it may cease to be vision by becoming transformed into a consummate reality.

David, where you have the will, where God gives you a vision, may God give you the grace and power to help as a privileged missionary to make it real in the lives of the people of Christ the King and Atascocita.

Memorial Day Prayer

ALMIGHTY God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead; We give thee thanks for all those thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence, that the good work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen. (BCP, 1928)

C. Andrew Doyle, D. D.

IX Bishop of Texas

Sent from my iPhone

VTS Service For Mission Service 2011

I was invited to give this year's mission of the church address the night before graduation. Please find below the address. We were blessed to receive an inspiring graduation address the next day from Bishop Curry which I will see if I can get a copy to post.

The Lemhi Pass is at the boarder of Montana and Idaho.  There is a wooden fence there, a cattle guard crossing, and a logging road. One arrives there by way of the Missouri River from Fort Benton to Fort Peck Lake and the Lolo trail.  And, when you stand there it looks as in many ways it looked when he stood there on the morning of August 12, 1805.  It is pristine.

With friends nearby he made his way to the top.  He described the event clearly in his journal.  He wrote: "We proceeded on the top of the dividing ridge from which I discovered immense ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow."

Meriwether Lewis was the first white American to look on Idaho and the great northwestern range; the first to take a step out of the Louisiana territory onto the western side of the Continental Divide.

In that moment one can imagine two great worlds colliding.  Two thoughts happening at the same time; neither one fully formed.  

The first thought had to be the disheartening sight.  Imagine "the shock, the surprise," John Logan Allen, historiographer and author, muses, "for from the top of that ridge were to be seen neither the great river that had been promised nor the open plains extending to the shores of the South Sea…the geography of hope [gave way] to the geography of reality."  

The whole journey to find a western portage that one might travel from East to West across the United States by boat was a failure.  

Everything he was sure of finding was not only not there it was never to be.  The dream that had framed one year of study, preparation, and two years of travel across country to this pass was over.

The second thought was the sight of the great empire of the Americas. In that moment he took in with one measure from the east and all that lay behind him to the west and all that lay ahead the wealth and abundance of the new territory and the even greater spectacle of fertile land that was becoming the United States.  In an age where transportation, energy, and food had not much changed since the Greeks Meriwether Lewis saw in its rawest form the wealth of a quickly forming nation that we were to become.

In that moment the reality gave way to a geography of hope.

Two thoughts not fully formed but coexisting.  The momentforever changed who we were and were to become as Americans.

Two thoughts not fully formed; existing together at the same time.  

We arrive at the coordinates of our Gospel and find ourselves firmly planted between the mission of Jesus and the mission of the disciples.

In John's Gospel, chapter 12 beginning at the 44th verse Jesus offers words not dissimilar to Moses as he prepared to leave his people. When Moses had finished speaking the words andcommandments God had given him, when he had completed his work in bringing the people out of Egypt and through the desert years to the very edge of the promised land he says:

Take to heart all the words that I am giving… give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law. This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess.

As we read and listen to Jesus' words in the Gospel of John werecognize the completion of his mission.  Jesus has glorified God, and he has loved all those given to him until the very end.

To those who received the light in darkness he was living water in the desert.  He was The Good Shepherd to all who followed.  He called Nicodemus to come along; he healed the blind man. He raised Lazarus. He finished his work of bringing the people to the very edge of their journey from creation to the crossroads of salvation history.

The law they were to live was one of love; they were not to possess a land but be missionaries of the Gospel in all lands.

As the disciples listen I imagine that they hear Jesus speaking and experience the fullness of God's presence.  He is for themthe shekhinah of God.

Perhaps they understood as Jesus speaks these words that he is the rock from which flowed living waters in Moses' desert, he is the manna which fell from heaven, he is the one upon whomIsaiah's eyes must have glimpsed.

As Raymond Brown, the New Testament scholar writes in his seminal work on John:

The great exhibition of the enduring covenant love of God in the OT took place at Sinai, the same setting where the Tabernacle became the dwelling for God's glory.  So now the supreme exhibition of God's love is the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, the new Tabernacle of divine glory.

John's Gospel testifies that some were struggling to understand, as humanity tends to do.  Still others experienced, saw, believed, and followed. Perhaps they had a glimmer that Jesuswas himself God.  Certainly this is how John and his community would come to understand him.  Jesus was the fullness of God, the glory of God.  He was God incarnate.

From chapter 1 verse 14 of John's Gospel: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."

"If you believe in me you believe in the one who sent me."

"If you see me you see the one who sent me."

…[And] we have seen his glory, the glory of an only Son coming from the father, filled with enduring love.

As we think of this testimony, the testimony of scripture, the whole of salvation history we have a glimpse of what Ernst Käsemann, twentieth century theologian and New Testament scholar, meant when he wrote: "the flesh is not simply anincognito through which men must see; rather the glory of theword keeps breaking through the flesh in the miraculous works which can be seen."

The miracles, the teaching, the multiplying and breaking of bread is revelation that God is present in creation.

The earliest witnesses understood that this Jesus was very Godof very God. This Jesus was and is the architect of Salvation history, molding it, and shaping it.

Jesus' words in this passage reveal the continuum of a Gospel story woven in a tapestry of relationship between God and God's people, their covenant and their community. At once we see the Abrahamic family of old and the renewed expanding missionary family of God.

Jesus has opened up to us not only the communal relationship with God ad extra but a divine relationship as intimate as Jesus himself possessed with the Godhead; and with all humanity.

Having one will with the Father, Jesus came into the world to save creation and humanity with it. This was Jesus mission.  It is the apostolic mission.  It is our mission.

The language of sending in today's text is clearly one which echoes all of John and the missionary imperative breathed uponthe first disciples.  From John 20:19-23:

Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you."

Jesus has been sent as the incarnate Word, he has enacted the word in preaching, feeding, healing, and he is now passing it to those who would dare to follow him and model the same behaviors. It is as if Jesus is saying, "The Father gave me this life giving commandment of love. I give it and entrust it to you."

He speaks this commandment that we may more than immolate and admire, but rather that we might incarnate in our own word and action the very presence and glory of God in the world.

As our sacred story tells us, Jesus offers a vision of mission to Philip in John 14:12:

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…

Jesus called the disciples by name, and showed them a manner of life, which brought light and abundant life into the world.

We are heirs and benefactors of their testimony.  Preached and formed into community life throughout the emerging missionary church of the patristic era.  We stand today as the next generation of missionaries of the unique Gospel proclamation of Jesus Christ.

We are to glorify God, and make Gods deeds known, and share the good news of salvation.

Like Meriwether Lewis, like the ancient Hebrews on the edge of the Promised Land, like the disciples on the edge of missionwe the Episcopal Church are becoming something new.  We are being transformed and forged in a fiery furnace of sweeping change.  

We hold in our hearts two mission models not yet fully formed and yet coexisting.  The past with its structures for ministryexists alongside the future pregnant with all that God intends for us in mission.

The first model is our idea of Church. We currently conduct ourmission out of an age old exchange model based upon communal and long held assumptions about a culture that dates to the middle of the last century.

What is our mission imperative in this model?

For the most part we as Church have maintained the belief that those who are called by God to be Episcopalians will find us.  

We have believed that once they were inside our doors they would stay because of our awesome liturgy.

We have believed we are friendly enough to keep anyone who truly gets to know us.  

We believed that better stewardship campaigns would cure our financial problems; always hoping this year'sexplanation of why people should give more will work.

We believed that someday we would have the right priest,and then we will grow again to a size that will allow us tocare for our deferred maintenance.

We believed if we just solved the issue of the day one way or the other we would surge in growth.  If we were just true to the past…or if we were just true to the future….

We believed if we just preached well, ran a good vestry, meeting, went to the hospitals, wrote a good monthly article that was just spiritual enough we would inspire and fulfill our vocational oath.

We are treating the symptoms of a much larger system failure.  Tinkering and propping up a church model that is no longer relevant is not only a waste of time and resources it is sinful as we are called to be missionaries in our contemporary context.

Continuing to be church and depend on this ministry model leads to closure.

As Harvey Cox, author and theologian, expressed in his musings on the secular city, "The failure of modern theology[we might add church] is that it continues to supply plausible answers to questions that fewer and fewer people are asking."Not unlike the twentieth century, we are largely continuing to answer questions and problems from a period that no longer exists. For a culture that no longer exists, from pulpits that look out over empty pews.

We can see clearly where we are.  

At this same moment the reality of our geography is giving way to hope.

You and I stand on the edge that divides the modern age fromthe new millennium; we stand at the edge of a new missionary age for the Episcopal Church.

We have been born into a church that needs entrepreneurial evangelists; who see, believe, and create.

We are to make Christ known and to change the world by loving God and neighbor – not as we meet them at coffee hour if it isn't our turn to be ushers -- but out in the world of our daily lives.  And there to make such a convincing witness in word and action that those who are seeking may be drawn into the family of God.

As a quote from William Temple, the 98th Archbishop of Canterbury, reminds us:

Evangelism is to so present Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit that [people] might come to trust Him as Savior and serve Him as Lord in the fellowship of His church.

This is our mission, and we are to do it through the virtue of caritas, the living out, the practice, of a church peopleimmersed in a culture of a living and present God.

We are to do the radical work of forming more Christians who are uniquely Episcopalians.

We must participate in the transformation of the world around us – our environment, the economy itself, and the societies of our neighborhoods and cities.

People's lives must be better tomorrow because our Episcopal Church is there proclaiming and enacting the Good News ofJesus Christ and Salvation today.

We must engage in a redesign from the bottom up and realign our church mission with the realities facing the communities in which we find ourselves.  

Global and local mission in the new millennium will flourishwhen it is the sacramental vessel which gives life to people, their community, and the environment in which they live.  We must reinvest in real community and individual and environmental transformation.

We have the opportunity in this new missionary age to re-engage.

The world around is hoping for partners who will join in providing healthy, fulfilling, life giving, and dignity bound ministry to the communities we share.

The world is looking for partners interested in building sustainable lives in sustainable communities in a green creation.

The world is looking for partners who will nurture relationships with people who live in community together. Getting to know our neighbor, their names, and their challenges and helping one another to have a better wholesome life is the work of the church.

I have a vision, a particular hope. I imagine an Episcopal Church immersed in the word and the community of the world; binding together the reign of God with the creation of God.  This is the church's mission. This is what it means to be the incarnated body of Christ, the family of God, in the world today.

Our mission is the "`Entire practice' of signs, images, and actions with nothing in isolation…fundamentally a "performative" faith of the imagined and acted out incarnation of God's community."  We experience Jesus, we see Jesus, and we act making Jesus Christ real in the world around us.

We re-present Jesus to the world around us.

In this missionary model we measure our work in the world and not our work on our church campuses. In this missionary model we measure our work every day of the week and not only on Sunday morning.

The church must engage in mission on every street, in every courtyard, in every corner of the city.  We must engage missionat the front door of our churches, in the suburbs, in the urban spaces, and in the online plugged in world of the internet. The boarders of church mission encompass the whole of culture.The new missionary age is at once macro and micro-cosmic in nature.

"…Every work of true creativity – doing justice, making peace, healing families, healing individuals, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom for those who are voiceless and powerless: is a missionary witness to the living God  They are as N. T. Wright says, "signposts of hope."

We have a mission, the same mission.  We have the same mission in Texas, in California, and in Maine. We have the same mission in Puerto Rico, Taiwan, and Africa.

We have a vision and must reclaim our public voice assertingthat our world and its societies is a place where the livingresurrected God dwells.  We are missionaries of a God that is seen and experienced through Jesus and through the actions of Jesus' followers.

John Milbank, the Anglican theologian, cautioned in his book entitled Theology and Social Theory: "[We] must recognize that the church has thus far failed to bring about salvation…and instead has ushered in the modern secular - at first liberal, and finally nihilistic-world.

If we are to reenter the world as missionaries of the living God we must move beyond the theologies that have given us the modern era with its lack of meaning, moral relativism,disconnected virtue, and violent division.

If we are to claim a church in mission immersed in the culturewhere the living God is present we must engage the world, the civic society, and the political order.  

We must model this in the sanctuary and in the public square. We must be virtuous citizens and not fearful disciples hidden behind locked doors.

The God of our proclamation is a God who encompasses all difference and binds us together in one family in this world - now.

We are to be prophetic in the world, out narrating the world's nihilism and emptiness. The God we proclaim is a God who is incarnated in the earthiness, the fleshiness, of the culture. We must claim and speak, in word and with words, the powerful transformational message of creation, incarnation, resurrection, and transformation.

The church must lead an exodus from meaninglessness, disconnection, and division which permeates our cynical world.

The church must engage in the action of following and acting out, and making real salvation.  

We must be fearless in taking our place in the public square throwing aside the notion that religion and faith is a private matter.  Through invitation, partnership, and participation we must venture into public place and space and use them asvenues for liturgy and life.

It is true that for some the culture may always be a symbol of evil, corruption, and decay.  But for others, and especially for the Episcopal Church in mission, the culture is a symbol of life, human cooperation, human potential, the ever expanding family of God, and corporate salvation.  

You stand on the edge of a new missionary age. May you have undaunted courage and be entrepreneurial evangelists.  May God who gives you the sight and vision to take your next stepsgive you the geography of hope to believe in Jesus Christ, connect you intimately with God and give you the power and grace to be missionaries in a world filled with potential, creativity – a world that is abundant in life and in love - aworld filled with God's presence a world which is your mission field.

Page |