Presiding Bishop to church: 'We will fail if we choose business as usual'

By Pat McCaughan, July 07, 2009 [Episcopal News Service -- Anaheim, California] The 76th General Convention can regard challenges as opportunities for "ubuntu" or togetherness, or choose "business as usual" and fail, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told a joint session of bishops and deputies July 7 in the Anaheim Convention Center.

The full text of Jefferts Schori's address is available here.

Bishops and deputies greeted Jefferts Schori with a standing ovation and sustained applause as she began her first convention address. General Convention officially begins July 8-17.

The theme, from an African concept, means, "I can only become a whole person in relationship with others," Jefferts Schori said. "There is no I without you and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us.

"Crisis is about focusing on the most important and most essential things first," she told the gathering. "In the tradition that you and I have inherited, crisis response has a lot to do with caring for the most vulnerable -- who is sick or hungry or dying or grieving? In the kind of crisis called a disaster, it’s about ensuring that people have food, water, shelter and medical care."

Recalling the 1976 General Convention that approved women’s ordination, she said, "We’ll hear echoes of our debates in our conversations as this one, as we consider the needs of the poorest around us and inclusion of those who do not have full access to the life of the church."

In addition to inclusivity and poverty, she cited as crises the financial meltdown and the "great Western heresy -- that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God." In some quarters it occurs through "insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus."

"That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this convention," she added.

"If we want to be faithful we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones. We are our sibling’s keepers and their knowers, and we cannot be known without them -- we have no meaning, no true existence in isolation. We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality."

Jefferts Schori alluded to some 16 proposed resolutions regarding Resolution B033, passed by the 75th General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, which called for a moratorium on consecrating bishops "whose manner of life presents challenges" to the wider communion.

"We may revisit some of the critical conversation of the last General Convention as we consider how the life of this church intersects with the life of other Anglicans," she said.

The economic crises underlies "all the conversation and debate. That we do not have the same kind of financial resources to address them as we had three years ago—that is another kind of crisis both local and global," she said.

But, amid laughter, she added: "However this is not an ... announcement that the threat level has risen from orange to red … (but) a Gospel announcement that ... our mission is to keep traveling, bearing the good news of Jesus and working to transform the world."

The temptation for deputies and bishops will be to see "one small part of God’s mission" as the overarching reason for the church’s existence, she said. But she added that: "the structures of this church are resources for God’s mission but are not God’s mission in themselves.

"The budget and the resolutions we debate here should be about those things that affect the whole of this church and the vision of a renewed creation for all of God’s handiwork," she added.

"This crisis is a decision point -- one which may involve suffering," she said. "But it is our opportunity to choose which direction we’ll go and what we will build.

"We will fail if we choose business as usual. There will be cross-shaped decisions in our work but if we look faithfully, there will be resurrection as well. This is our moment of judgment, our crisis. We can make our decisions in hope, and we can speak the love of God through this church. And we can do it together."

-- The Rev. Pat McCaughan is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Provinces VII and VIII and the House of Bishops.

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