[Part One] Full Transcript of Kendall Harmon’s Remarks to Vestry of Cathedral Church of the Advent

[Special Thanks to StandFirm Commenters—KYounge1956, Underground Pewster, Martial Artist, GillianC—who nobly provided the transcription of a full hour and a half of Kendall Harmon’s words of wisdom and insight.  Thank you so much!]

Presentation by the Rev. Kendall Harmon to the Vestry and Staff of the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham, Alabama

This document was created by transcription from an audio recording. Speakers are indicated (where identifiable by the transcriber) by prefacing their remarks, thus: (Kendall) for Rev. Harmon, Dean Limehouse, Bishop Sloan.

Dean Limehouse opened with a prayer and then began by introducing Canon Harmon.

Dean Limehouse: I joined Kee Sloan, and Kee Sloan is with us, and I appreciate very much your willingness to be here Kee, thank you so much, I joined Kee a couple of weeks ago with some of the Birmingham area rectors, and we talked about the upcoming General Convention that’s coming up this summer, and Kee encouraged us to begin to prepare our people for some of the things that will be coming out of General Convention in terms of various and sundry resolutions, particularly as it deals with human sexuality issues. And so, with that in mind, I’ve invited the Reverend Doctor Kendall Harmon who is with us for the Lenten preaching series, and many of you I know heard him preach today, and he will be with us tomorrow, also.

But I invited him to address the Vestry, the Wardens, and the staff, and anyone else that I saw who asked me if it would be okay to come, and I said “absolutely.” He was with us this morning at Sunrise Sinners, that’s the name of our Bible study that meets on Thursday morning, and I think about seventy-five of you guys are here. But very briefly, Kendall did his undergraduate work at Bowdoin College in Maine, his Master of Divinity at Trinity and Ambridge and also at Vancouver, he did his Ph.D. at Oxford, he is the Canon Theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina. He is also the Editor of Anglican Digest, and he’s the mastermind, if you would, of the blog Titus 1:9 that receives an amazing number of hits per month, how many hits per month…

Kendall: (interjecting audibly, laughter): I am not going to say on the record, I’m really not…

Dean Limehouse: For years Kendall has been in dialogue with theologian and prelates all over the Anglican Communion. He knows the situation, knows what people are thinking and doing, and he is presently committed to a ministry within the Episcopal Church. As I say he was with Sunrise Sinners this morning, and we did a kind of format that was a question and answer series. It seemed to work pretty well so we thought we’d try that tonight also. So I plan to ask Kendall a series of questions and let him answer. At the end, Kee, I will certainly give you an opportunity to make any comment that you would like to make, and I would also like to make a closing comment, some things that I perceive here in my relationship with Kee and in the Diocese.

So, having said all of that, I am going to step out of the way now, Kendall, and let you step up to the podium, if you want, or you can walk around and pace, or however you’d like to do it. I’ll begin with some questions that you Sunrise Sinners have heard me ask that he’s answered before. Just very briefly, Kendall, tell us about your family, were you brought up in a family of strong Christian faith?

Kendall: No, I grew up in a non-Christian family, was an agnostic in secondary school, and had a pretty dramatic conversion the summer before going to college. Married, my wife is taller and better looking than I am, like most clergy I “married up,” for those of you who know the lives of clergy. I have three children—girl, boy, girl—oldest is a first year student in seminary in Vancouver, Canada, at Regent College, our son’s a junior at Vanderbilt, and our youngest, a daughter, is a freshman at Furman.

Dean Limehouse: Is there a time your life, Kendall, a time that you can point to, when you made a decision for Christ?

Kendall: Briefly, I was a very poorly formed agnostic in high school, and two things happened that shook up my world. One was I read Moby Dick in detail and had to keep a diary and was haunted by Melville’s portrayal of the problem of evil. And then the Glee Club from the {name?} School where I was a student won a grant to represent the United States behind the Iron Curtain in 1977, and as part of that trip we went to Auschwitz. And that was really devastating because I had no way to…, Auschwitz when you see it up front is a very searing experience. I had no way to handle it and so that sent me into crisis, and I met a girl who was a very strong Christian, and she wouldn’t let me go unless I faced into the question of who Jesus was, and I had a pretty dramatic conversion before college.

Dean Limehouse: When did you first sense a call to ordained ministry?

Kendall: This is a different question for me. When I was in college as an undergraduate, it simply took these two forms:
One is, what do you like to do? I was a chemistry major, almost did a double in economics, but I started liking Christian stuff, I was president of the College Christian Fellowship, and the more I did it, the more I liked it, and the more I liked it, the more I got invited to do other things.

The other thing is, I liked getting involved in Church, and I was involved in an Episcopal Church about 25 minutes from my college campus, one way, where I went with some friends. And I got my courage up and I asked the Rector if I could preach, knowing that he would say no, and he said it was a great idea. And I read Spurgeon and one of the things he says—I mean, he’s very practical—but essentially he says, if you think you’re called, preach to the people of God and see how they respond. It actually is quite important. If you can’t, if you don’t have the lung power to finish sentences, one of the things Spurgeon says, is that you’re probably not called to be in parish ministry, because if you can’t finish sentences—it was an awful sermon. You can’t have a copy. But the people were blessed, and the rector was encouraging, and that sort of started the process.

Dean Limehouse: Now, how old were you when you were ordained?

Kendall: Twenty seven. Five years of graduate school and straight into ordained ministry.

Dean Limehouse: As you reflect back on your discernment process do you remember any particular people that went through that discernment process with you?

Kendall: Well, there was this strange haberdasher guy from Orangeburg, and he and I went through the… believe it or not, in South Carolina we have a weekend of discernment for the Committee on Ministry, called the Commission on Ministry, and Frank and I were on the same weekend at the same time. It was an intimidating experience, but the two of us went through together, so it seems like a land far away and a long time ago.

Dean Limehouse: I was also intimidated. I was with this guy who was an obvious scholar, and I was not a scholar. As I remember I went in after Kendall. He would go in first and answer questions, and then they would ask me to answer the same questions. At any rate by God’s grace we made it through there.

Dean Limehouse: Kendall, you are now a Canon Theologian in the Diocese of South Carolina. What in the world does a Canon Theologian do?

Kendall: Well, some people make it sound like I get shot out of a cannon, and that’s not what it is. Basically it is the chief theological adviser to the Bishop, the clergy, the parishes and the ministries of the diocese, which takes the form that it depends on the diocese and what comes up in terms of what you actually do. It involves a lot of theological wrestling.  One of the things I said this morning is clergy have a lot of theological questions, they also have no one to talk to about them.

I was once, believe it or not, for those of you who know Larry Gibson, this is a funny story, he interviewed me for a job here. We got in a two hour theological fight, which ended with a fight over Calvin’s Institutes, and he called me back thirty minutes later with the reference that proved that he was right and I was wrong. Which I really appreciated. But, that’s not why I tell you the story. What was amazing to me, from a Cathedral Dean as a young ordained person, was he said “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that talk that we had for two hours.” And I was thinking, “boy, who is this guy?” because he went on to say that was the first theological discussion he’d had with another clergyman in over a year, and it was very heartfelt. He loved theology, and he loved to talk theology, he just could never do it. So, I do a lot of that kind of stuff, and I do courses for parishes. C.S. Lewis and an introduction to Christian apologetics is one of the recent ones, things like that.

Dean Limehouse: Tell us briefly then about your ministry as Editor of the Anglican Digest?

Kendall: Well, the Digest is either on people’s coffee table or it’s in their restroom, and people read it slowly, but it has an incredible circulation, one of the most widely read publications in the Communion. And my job, essentially, is to keep it centered, to keep it varied, and to try to provide material that encourages people in what you might call mere Christianity, to quote C. S. Lewis, and it is a very difficult job because the Episcopal Church is struggling in the area of writing stuff that’s actually interesting to read.

Dean Limehouse: Do you have people send you things that you can use, or do you find it difficult to come up with enough material?

Kendall: No, way more things than I can use. In fact, one of my editorial policies that I had to come up with is, I am not going to contact you to tell you that I’m not going to use your stuff, because I ran into so many people, first they sent it, then they called and sent constant follow-ups until they figured out whether I was going to use it or not. And I had so many people doing that I couldn’t even think straight. So I will only contact people if I am going to use it, which made it easier. But, yes, I have a lot of people who send stuff, and, unfortunately, 90% of it is not good, as far as publication. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just very, very maintenance oriented and ordinary. “The liturgical color is green.” “This is the apse.” “We appreciate people who give money to St. Swithan’s.” I mean that’s not heretical. But it doesn’t promote any Gospel energy. I certainly don’t agree with everything that ends up in Anglican Digest. But it’s Anglican. It should be centered in center of the faith.

Dean Limehouse: Kendall, how would you presently describe Anglicanism in North America? That’s a big question. I know it, and I expect a big answer.

Kendall:  Well, it’s nice that you’ve raised the bar, brother. I will say a few things about this. You may want to ask follow-up questions. You can probably tell by my training, I’m an ideas person, and a history of ideas person, and kind of a big-picture person,  so I’m going to try to get at some of this from the perspective of sort of a larger picture, and I would say this about the Episcopal Church.

First of all, in a Communion of seventy to eighty million Anglicans worldwide, we’re the most out of step with the rest of the Communion, in theological terms. We could debate that, but arguably the one that is engaging culture in such a way that culture gets an awful lot of the attention, but also a lot of the truth, and the Gospel gets more lost, in the process of trying to make it relevant. So we are the most enculturated and least Gospel-looking Communion of the 39 member communions in the world wide Anglican Communion. And that has been a process that has been unfolding over a long period of time.

It has lots of causes, it has to do with theological education, it has to do with the 1979 Book of Common Prayer that nobody wants to talk about.  I know this is a Rite I parish so those may not be fighting words for you, but the ‘79 Prayer Book is not something that I feel was an entirely positive introduction, theologically, to our common life. And it sticks out like a sore thumb in the history of all the Prayer Books in the Anglican Communion. So, we started theologically going off the rails and then in the process of doing that, we went through a series of dramatic decisions having to do with cultural change, which got us a lot of attention and a lot of press, and it eventually led to the issue of, at a practical level, there was a lot of experimentation in the Episcopal Church which a lot of people weren’t aware of in other places.

We really became a church of dioceses and a church of individual parishes. In spite of all our rhetoric to the contrary, we are a very congregational church, and a very diocesan church, and we have increasingly very little in common in our common life. For those of you who know Anglican documents well, you may know something called the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. It’s got four things that it says characterize what Anglicans think are kind of central: the Creeds, the Word of God, and one of the things it says is the Bishop locally adapted, and of the things that are in there, basically, we’ve lost all of them except the Bishop. And I know the Bishop is here and I don’t mean this about him personally but one of the tragedies—the reason I mention this is because you can actually see this—is what is going on in the Episcopal Church right now, is Bishops are actually trying to hold their diocese together by the sheer force of their own will, because it’s the only thing left of the four pillars of the Quadrilateral to try to hold it together. And what you have is, really dramatically tragic events with Bishop’s marriages breaking apart, Bishops shooting themselves, Bishops getting caught in affairs, multiple Bishops retiring way too early, in fact this is almost an epidemic right now in the Episcopal Church. And no one is noticing this, but it’s very hard to be a Bishop because nobody, you and I included, we don’t have the power to hold the church together by the strength of our own will.

So there’s a huge individualism in America that’s driven the Episcopal Church into a very individuated set of parishes and dioceses, and what that leads to is a lot of variation in local practice. And so, when you had women’s ordination, there was variation in local practice, but when you got to the issue of same-sex unions, and clergy who were involved in same-sex unions, there was enormous variety of practice and there was a “wink, wink, nod, nod” perspective at the national level where stuff went on that was never agreed to at a national level at the General Convention, but it went on because local practice became very adapted and also very disconnected from the rest of the church.

So, what happened was, eventually, one of the clergy that was involved in a same-sex union was eventually going to get nominated for Bishop. And this was happening while most people in the country didn’t realize the Episcopal Church had anyone in most dioceses who was in a same-sex union being ordained. So the reason why 2003 was such a big deal—and for those of you who don’t know, there were 363 credentialed media at the Minneapolis General Convention in 2003—it was a circus. The second week, the second day, I went across the hallway to the bathroom from the floor of Deputies, which is the laity and clergy side of General Convention, and I never made it to the bathroom, because I was surrounded by so many media who wanted to ask me questions. I mean like 25 of them in a circle, that’s the kind of environment it was.

But the reason that happened is because all of a sudden, at a sacramental level, something that happened that everybody noticed (because Bishops are noticed everywhere, right? You ordain a Bishop not simply for a diocese, but for the whole church, that’s part of our theology) and all of a sudden the fact that this individualism and enculturation had been going on all over the church got noticed by a lot of people who didn’t know that it was happening, and they had no idea that this had been going on, and they felt like they had no say in the process that had led to it, and this is crucial, there was no doctrine backing it up. We did something in practice that we never approved doctrinally.

So, we did something through the back door, that we never agreed to think through on the front end. And we were in great disagreement in terms of our doctrine. So 2003 was a very dramatic event. It caused a split, not simply in the Communion, but also in our own Province. And this leads me to answer your question.

Where things are now is essentially three places, I would say. One is, and I say this with a heavy heart, the theological traditionalists or conservatives, my own terminology I prefer, for those who know my blog, is reasserters—those who want to reassert the truth of the Christian faith into a contemporary context, people at Nashotah House and Trinity Seminary, people like that, people like myself, South Carolina, I won’t speak for Frank, but people like that—for the most part, the best leaders of that group have left the Episcopal Church over the process of the last seven to ten years. And they are now, really for the first time, outside of the Episcopal Church, but nevertheless seeking to be Anglican.

That has led to two dynamics, both of which are important. One is they are no longer in the Episcopal Church but they still have to function as Anglicans, so they’ve had to figure out a way to do that. They’ve done that by linking themselves to other Communions in the Anglican Communion, places like Nigeria, Rwanda, and other places. But they’ve also had to found a church and figure out how to live together. And one of the things I say to my friends who get frustrated with what’s going on is, for those of you who’ve ever started a family or a business or a church, it’s hard. It’s very hard to start anything that has real significance and weight. You have to write your own rules. You have to come up with your own modus operandi.

And, if you’re following what’s happening, what you’re seeing is the conservatives who have left, now that they’re out, and their identity was defined in part by what they were against as well as the Gospel they were for, trying to figure out how to live together, and how they should live, has actually been harder than they thought, and they’ve actually started to divide among themselves. And so, one of the current tragedies is the group that has left looks very American and very Protestant and very chaotic. And that just has to owned on the front end. I wish it were different, but they are having a hard time cohering and working together. And that is a problem not simply for them, but also for the other conservatives in the Episcopal Church, because they have said, essentially, “this is the faithful way to do this and you need to come join us.” And I just need to tell you that, in all sorts of ways, and I say this with a very sad heart, it’s not attractive. They’re really struggling. So that’s one side.

The other side is, as a result of the success of 2003, a series of changes have come on the back of that, and the conservatives that have left have changed the power structure even more at a national level, and so the people who lead the Episcopal Church are the ones who really believe in the new sexual theology and the new, more universalizing theology at a national level, and they are in almost every position of power that matters. And therefore, they’re in a position to continue to change the Episcopal Church in ways that move it farther away from traditional Anglicanism as far as the rest of the Communion is concerned.

Notice how I said that. They would argue that their motivation is that they’re trying to be Christian, and trying to get the Gospel to the culture by doing this. They believe that they’re honoring Christ by doing this. But they’re moving in more and more innovative ways, and I would want to question how Christian those ways are. But they see them as Christian, and so, as we approach this General Convention, that train is not stopping. And this is important for people to realize, that the Episcopal Church is not stopping from continuing in the broad theological direction where it’s continuing, and what that means is it’s not really primarily about sexual morality, it’s really about an emphasis on universal faith, and therefore the distinctiveness of Christ and His sacrifice is being lost.

There’s something in the Episcopal Church, I don’t know how well you all know this, called the Communion of the unbaptized. Are you familiar with this at all? I prefer that language, some people describe it as “open communion,” but I don’t like “open communion” because there’s another “open communion,” which is the difference between the Roman Catholics and the more Protestants who have open communion to which anyone who is a Christian can come.

What I mean by communion of the unbaptized is parishes that, as a practice, encourage anybody, no matter what their faith, no matter where they are spiritually, to come forward to the altar rail. So, if I took you, I won’t tell you which parish, but this is the invitation in one of the Episcopal Churches nationally right now: “Whoever you are, wherever you are on your spiritual journey, I encourage you to come forward to gain strength and consolation as you walk along the way.” That’s the invitation to communion at an Episcopal Church. You notice that the Trinity, in fact anything even Christ-oriented, is gone.

Now what you need to know, the reason that I bring it up, is that practice, which is (a) against the historic Christian faith, and (b) explicitly against the Canons of the Episcopal Church, is incredibly widespread, in multiple places in the Episcopal Church, not simply at a parish level, but in some places at a diocesan level. And the reason I mention that is that’s an example of the loss of Christian distinctiveness. I mean, if you have people to a family meal and they don’t even have to have a relationship to the family, you’re beginning to lose your sense of identity in terms of what a family is.

So that’s an example of the kind of thing that’s happening more and more. So this is not simply going to be about same-sex unions, and that gets most of the press, but it’s about things like marriage, about liturgy, it’s about the relationship between Christianity and other faiths, it’s about the distinctiveness of the cross, and it’s about the communion of the unbaptized. And the train is moving ever more strongly at a leadership level in that direction.

And then the other thing that is going on in the middle of all that is incredible corporate institutional deterioration. You need to be aware of the fact that the Episcopal Church at a national level is in terrible shape as an institution. It’s not being talked about, it’s not being owned, it’s certainly not something that gets mentioned by most of the national leadership in most of the national settings. But it’s a fact!

Over the last ten to fifteen years our average Sunday attendance—these are statistics that people in parish ministry use, that they consider meaningful (do you all know what I mean by average Sunday attendance? So, it’s not how many people Cathedral Church of the Advent claims to be on the rolls, but if I took an average Sunday and looked at how many people were actually in worship, that’s actually a good meaningful measure of the sort of “core” of a congregation) we claim right now about 2.2 million members, in terms of our membership. That’s down from 3.6 million in the late mid-1960s.

But here’s the thing that you need to know. Before General Convention 2003, we had about 860,000 average Sunday attendance, and we claimed about 2.4 million members. We now claim 2.2 million members, but what you need to know is our average Sunday attendance is below 780,000. And if you know how parish ministry works, people will tell you your honest, real situation in parish ministry is your real membership is double the amount of people that you have on Sunday morning. So if have 500 on Sunday morning, your real members that are actually connected in some meaningful way is about 1,000. So I’m in a parish of about 500, we have about 200 and some at worship. That would be fairly normal. Which means that if we claim 2.2 million members, and we have 760,000 average Sunday attendance, you know that we really don’t have 2.2 million members, that’s a hugely padded number.

But notice, in the last ten to fifteen years, depending on which statistical measure you want to use, we are down fifteen to twenty per cent. Now if you were in a business, if you were in a stockholders meeting, annual meeting, there would be questions that would be raised if your business was down fifteen to twenty per cent in a short period of time. In some dioceses its thirty per cent, and these are diocese where, in many cases, the general population is growing.

Kirk Hadaway, who works at the national church office, is a statistician. They have a website and I encourage you to go to it. He just made a presentation to Executive Council. If you have time all you have to do to see what I’m talking about is go through the presentation that he made to Executive Council, I link to it on my blog. The statistics are mind-boggling. What he essentially says is, we are deeply diseased and unhealthy as a group, at the level of funerals, at the level of marriages, at the level of adult baptisms, at the level of church schools, at the level of worship attendance. We are in precipitous decline, the only question is the rate at which we are declining. And there is no willingness to engage this at a serious level.

So, behind the scenes what is going on is, there is a deterioration of money and there is a deterioration of morale. Already, a few of the smaller dioceses are teetering on the edge of needing probably to merge with bigger dioceses. For those of you who have been following the news, that’s already started to happen in Wisconsin, you’re going to see it happen in Kansas, it may happen in other places. That’s a result of the kind of weakening that we’re seeing.

And the other thing is that, and this is very sad, the national leadership feels very threatened by this group of Anglicans that have left the Episcopal Church, who are claiming the franchise. So they feel like you’re in their town, and you’re claiming the Coke™ brand, but you work for Pepsi™. And so, as a result of feeling threatened they have pursued a policy of aggressive lawsuits at enormous cost in financial and personal terms, but also in an incredibly punitive way toward those involved. Again, this is not being talked about, but the reason for this is they want to make sure to wipe out the threat of the possibility of another Anglican franchise within the American space that actually looks coherent. It’s far from clear that it would be coherent, but they want to eliminate that threat before it has a chance, as it were, to get out of the starting gate of the race, and one of the ways to do that is to get involved in punitive action. And when I said punitive action I want to make sure to put flesh on this, I mean punitive action.

And, again, this is all behind cloak and dagger, and not talked about, but are you aware that the Episcopal Church issues subpoenas to lay people at their door? Are you aware that the Episcopal Church, when they sue people, not simply sues them, but goes after every possible asset that they can? One of my friends is in the Diocese of Ohio, and he was involved in a lengthy lawsuit with the diocese there, and he lost his building. He’s a very godly guy. He came to the settlement with the lawyers and the Episcopal Diocese and handed over the keys to the building, and he thought he was done. He’d been involved in this for years, enormous sums of money involved. And when he looked across the table, the lawyers for the Episcopal Church were looking down, no longer making eye contact with him. And he was informed that they were going after back assets of material that they claimed was theirs after the lawsuit. So, having won the lawsuit, and having won the building, they were now going after additional assets.

One of the Episcopal Churches leading Treasurers in the City of El Paso is being sued by the Episcopal Church for fraud. He was in his living room with one of my friends with his wife in tears because, among many other things, if you are an accountant, which is what he is, in a city, and you’re being sued for fraud, it’s not good for business. This is the kind of thing that’s going on behind the scenes, so it is a very precarious and fluid situation with three different groups: the national leadership group that’s got a theological orientation, a group of conservatives who, for the most part, have left and the sort of people like Frank and I that are the remnant, who are still in the Episcopal Church, and then an enormous number of people who have varying degrees of awareness of what’s going on who are kind of lost like deer in the headlights.

One of the amazing things about what’s going on is how many clergy are living out the book of Judges in their own ministry right now. They have no idea what to do. Every one of them is adopting their own strategy, and they are just trying to make their way in some way, coping in their own local context, and their approach is as varied as their context. In Colorado, this is happening, in Kentucky this is happening. But one of my friends was talking to me the other day on the phone, and he said “Kendall, why can’t I get any of the clergy on the phone?” And I said, “They’re hiding.” And it’s true. They don’t want to talk to anybody because they feel like they’re working for Coke™ and Coke™ has become Pepsi™. And that’s a very hard thing when you’re working for the company, that you feel that they’ve lost their brand identity. But they are attached to the company, and their family is attached to the company in terms of their future. So it’s a very difficult thing because laity and clergy go through it at different levels and the clergy in particular, are vey lost, and in a lot of pain, and in a lot of book of Judges behavior at a local level.

So those are the three groups, and that’s the lay of the land, and where it goes far be it from me to predict. I have some ideas, but I would only speak tentatively. But that’s where it is right now, heading in to General Convention.

Look at that face. {Kendall laughs}

Dean Limehouse: Well, Kendall, what keeps you, ...it sounds that I guess, one reaction I had to say, one of the questions I have here is given the fact that the Episcopal Church is gaining in its momentum for revision, and I’ve had Katharine Jefferts-Schori tell me personally, to my face the one opportunity I had to speak with her, for a quick five minutes here while she was in Birmingham, she’ll admit that revision is gaining momentum, and in light of that, what motivates you to stay within the Episcopal Church. Is that because there is no other place to go, or do you find a legitimate ministry within the Episcopal Church? That’s one question, and the second half of that is where is your hope then in light of this dismal report?

Kendall:  Well, Frank and I have been friends until this moment, but the questions have gotten too hard, so I’m going to send you all home.

No, I’m kidding. Let me say this in answer to the first good question, there are two principles to try to hold fast to. One is what I would call evangelical, or Gospel, truth, and the other is Catholic order. And Anglicanism at its best tries to balance those two and hold onto the two of them together. What you have going on right now is, as a result of what they feel is a loss of evangelical truth, a number of conservatives have left the Episcopal Church. The difficulty is they’ve done that at the expense of Catholic order, and they are experiencing disorderliness. The Episcopal Church has order, but it is losing, and we could debate the extent of this, or has lost, evangelical truth.

And so, you get these two worlds where you want order and you want truth, but if you choose one, you feel like you have to choose one over the other. And what has to happen is you have to balance those two things in your own context and try to be faithful in your own way.

So to answer your question directly for myself, I have said, I get asked all the time, I’m sure you’ve heard that my Bishop is tired of being asked but he still answers the question he gets asked everywhere he goes in the diocese, “are you going to stay in the Episcopal Church?” or “When are you leaving the Episcopal Church?” And all I can tell you is I am going to stay with my diocese. And we are in a very precarious position because we are under a lot of hostile assault from various parts of the Episcopal Church. But we are trying very hard to stay together as a diocese. We’re about 30,000 people. We have 73 to 76 parishes and missions, and I’m very sorry to say we finally lost our largest parish.

But the rest of us are still together, and we’re trying hard to cohere. So, all I can say is, as a body, we’re going to try to respond as a body, and if the body feels, say, forced out (I’m just speaking hypothetically now), I would go with them. I mean I would try to stay together, but that’s where I am. I’m in South Carolina, I’m with the Bishop that I’m currently serving with, I’m with my friends.

That’s not the context of Church of the Advent, nor my friends in other dioceses, in other parishes, in other situations. So what you have to do is work it out and remember Paul’s dictum in Romans “let every person be firmly convinced in his own mind.”

What I said to the prayer breakfast, I will also say to you because it’s very important to me, and that is, the principles to live by, I mean where we are, brothers and sisters, we’re back in exile. This is a period of judgment and exile. It’s happened before, it will happen again. The difficulty is most of us don’t know that part of the salvation story. We don’t read Jeremiah, and Daniel, and Ezekiel, and we don’t know very much about what they had to say.

Those are the books, believe it or not, where we need to spend most of our time. If you read Daniel, especially what you will see is two things happening. One is there are four dimensions of Daniel’s life when he’s in Babylon. Some things he compromises over for the sake of where he is. He compromises over language, and he compromises over local custom and clothing. Very interesting.

But there’s other places where he will not budge. In his identity as someone who is a child of Yahweh. Those places are, fascinatingly from my perspective, food (his diet), and worship. And, of course, it’s worship that ultimately gets him tossed into the lion’s den. So what you see Daniel doing is these two things: he is seeking to be faithful to the truth that he’s received, on the one hand, and he’s differentiating himself from what he feels is false doctrine and false living, in the context in which he finds himself.

And what we have to do, and all of us will find individual and different ways to live this out, is try to live that out faithfully in our own context. What we’ve done, you probably know this, in South Carolina as we feel the national church has moved farther and farther away from Christian truth, we have felt that we need to move farther and farther away from their move away from the Gospel. So we’ve had to do more, and more, and more differentiation to keep our Gospel identity. We’re trying to live into what Daniel is saying. We’re finding that increasingly difficult.

Now, where is my hope? Well, I don’t know how you’ll feel about this but Jeremiah is one of the most hopeful books in the Bible. In fact, one of the most famous Bible verses about hope, which is on posters and on people’s walls, and sometimes even in their notebooks as one of their favorite verses, is actually from Jeremiah, and it’s from the twenty ninth chapter. “I know the plans I have for you says the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” It’s a remarkable verse of scripture and people love it, but what they fail to remember sometimes, at least I feel they do, is where it comes. That is something that Jeremiah says to the people of God in exile.

And here’s the thing that is crucial about that verse, I’m answering your question about hope, I promise. The difficulty when you are in the midst of a period of loss, and this is true of all grief, the difficulty with grief, it took me a while to fully understand this at pastoral level, grief is brutal always, but the bigger the grief, the more brutal it is, because it feels like it has no edges, it feels like it has no end, you can’t get your arms around it in any kind of a meaningful way.

And so, you have to realize, I mean, think of Jeremiah, they lost their worship identity, they lost their main worship place, the temple, they lost their country. I mean, you talk about loss, that’s a lot of loss. And so, what you feel as the result of a loss that great is “I’ve had a great loss, I need to have great compensation.” Right? That’s the instinct. And it’s very understandable, right? I lost the temple, I’m going to rebuild the temple. They’re in no position to do that. But you can understand emotionally and personally why they want to.

And Jeremiah says something that is remarkable in the twenty ninth chapter. He says the opposite, he says “you’ve experienced a great loss. The way forward is to be faithful in small things, because by being faithful in small things in your own local context, God will build the future and the hope that He has for you.” So here’s what he says at a practical level in chapter twenty nine, in the midst of that verse I quoted to you: “Build houses, get married, raise faithful children.” I mean, talk about dinky. “Hey, what do you mean, we lost our temple, this is terrible.”

You think about that story, when they return, which is, if you know that story, seventy years later it is only because of the faith of those parents and those marriages and those children that they had a faith to return with. See, it only seems little to us because we’re looking at it from our perspective. But to God, faithfulness in little things is never a little thing, but in a time of judgment and exile it’s absolutely crucial. And that is where I find hope.

I find hope in the individual ways in which, in a time of great chaos, people are seeking to be faithful and creative, and courageous for the sake of the Gospel in small good things. And that is enormously encouraging.

When I talk to Vestries I sometimes do something fairly mean, which is I start a sentence and then I don’t end it, and I ask them to fill it in. And the sentence is this: “The most important thing I can do as a Vestry member of this parish is ________.” I love doing this. And you get every answer, you know “be a good faithful steward,” right? “Go to worship on Sunday.” All this kind of stuff. And I almost never get the answer that I’m seeking, which is this: “to be faithful to Christ in my own life and grow in Christ myself.” That is to say the most important thing for a Vestry member to do is to be alive in their own faith and to be growing in their own faith, because that is what they bring everywhere, no matter where they are.

And you would be amazed at how many people in times of crisis and exile get dislodged from the absolute priorities. That’s why marriages crack up. That’s why people lose their faith. That’s why people lose their way. I have a lot of friends who are going through those things right now, and it makes me very sad, but I tell all the time “pay attention to your marriage,” “pay attention to your own prayer life,” and what I see is individuals and parishes in unlikely places in unlikely ways being faithful. And all I can tell you is, I have no idea how, but I believe that the future of Anglicanism in North America out of this current apparent chaos is going to come from those acts of faithfulness and the faith that comes with it as it’s passed forward. And the hard part is that I’m not going to be able to control what that looks like.