Dr. Kendall Harmon—CLCC Keynote Speech, Part 3: Questions & Answers and the Nature of Hope

[Note: I have updated this post to include the fact that Kendall’s conclusion is on this audio file and in the transcription.]

Kendall speaks a bit more about life in exile and differentiation, then takes questions from the audience.

Q & A topics include:

- The Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter to Bishop Howe of Central Florida
- How Rowan Williams could get the majority of people to Lambeth
- What is the worst form of leadership
- What Wesley and Whitefield have to do with “differentiation” and “structural relief”
- Myths about the Episcopal church

In his conclusion, Kendall speaks of the nature of hope and the character of God.  He also describes one of his favorite heroes, a priest in the Church of England in the late 1700s and early 1800s.  Before you listen, guess why Charles Simeon became a Christian and why his funeral was one of the greatest funerals ever experienced in Cambridge.

Link to MP3 file.

D.L. Moody, as you know a great 19th Century Evangelist, after one of his crusades this guy came up to heckle him about evangelism and just ripped him up one side and down the other, just 15 minutes of on and on, and Moody’s starting to get tired of this guy, ‘cause of the criticism and he can’t get a word in edgewise, and finally, Moody puts up his hands and says, “Hang on a second, what are you doing about evangelism?” And the guy is kind of like, stunned, and he says, “Well, I’m not doing anything about evangelism”. And Moody looks at him and says, “Well, I like my method better than your method”.

The whole point is, I’m not saying, I’m not saying that my ideas about differentiation are right, I’m saying we’ve got to try. Life in exile is a whole new language, and a whole new way of operating that we’ve not learned to do before. But we must do it, and the thing is, it isn’t an option not to do it. If you’re not going Common Cause, and you’re not going to wait for discipline, that I don’t think is ever going to come from the Communion, then you’ve got people on the ground who have families, and they don’t want to raise their kids in a Church that doesn’t know what the Christian life looks like. One of my friends, I won’t tell you which parish, is in the Midwest, where it is mostly Roman Catholics - and he’s getting decimated! He describes people coming to him, and they’d say to him, “Father So-and-so, we can’t do this because we look at the Episcopal Church and they’re endorsing a way of life that we understand not to be Christian. You seem confused about what the Christian life looks like. I can’t raise my kids in an environment like that”. And he says, “Kendall, she’s right”, and my response to him is “Yeah, exactly, you need to differentiate.” Paul Zahl put up a black flag at the cathedral church of the Advent before he went to TESM. One of my friends in my town where I work, they were St. Paul’s Episcopal Church for their entire 230 plus year history - last year he took Episcopal off the sign - it says St. Paul’s Church. Everybody is feeling their way and fumbling their way, it’s not easy, I’m not saying those are the right ways, what I’m saying is that the Global South is pointing the way, the Bible points the way, we’ve got to do this. OK that’s it - now I’ve really made a hornet’s nest now it’s over to you.

Let me first ask, ‘because I told you I love questions - let me first ask for factual questions about some of the stuff I’ve said - in terms of whether anything is unclear, or whether you want more information - so we have some commonality. Is there anything that anyone wants to ask about in terms of “I didn’t understand this reference or that meeting or what happened at DES”, does anyone want to ask a sort of question like this or do you want to go straight to the contextual stuff.?

Yes sir, Mr. Henderson, is it?

Dave Henderson is asking for comment about a letter that the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to the Bishop of Central Florida. The Bishop of Central Florida is having trouble in his diocese because a number of the parishes in his diocese are not feeling like there is enough differentiation in the diocese to survive and John wrote to the Archbishop and said I’m struggling with this can you offer anything to help? And the Archbishop wrote a letter back, and said there are only certain things I can say, there’s other things I can’t say right now and then he says feel free to share this if you want. So John wrote a letter - a public letter to the diocese and quoted part of the e-mail which caused a sensation all over everywhere because a bunch of us got it and put it out on the blogosphere, and I actually called John to make sure the quote was legitimate, before, and we had a conversation, and he read me the letter over the phone, and I thought it was a very significant letter, and he said “I’m planning on making it public”, and I said well I hope you will do that very soon. And he did. It was just a couple of days later - mainly because of pressure from inside the diocese. It’s sort of like one paragraph from the declaration of independence - everybody thought, hey, hang on a second, I want to see the whole thing.

In this letter, what Rowan essentially says is that we’ve got to be catholic in our ecclesiology this is on the ACI side of the spectrum, and this is classic Rowan Williams - Rowan is a catholic, a very strong catholic, by the way. Can I note for you in passing what, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury, he said about the same sex decision is that it is a decision for the whole church - Hello!!! Remember? Not one part of the church unilaterally going off.

What Rowan’s extreme frustration with the American Church is that they’ve set any chance of this new theology backwards 20 years, because the way we’ve done it has been so counterproductive that we can’t even have a constructive theological debate, and Rowan thinks the debate needs to happen. Now he wrote one essay where he gave a different answer than I would give, but he was just wrestling with the possibility of it. But Rowan is really frustrated because now the possibility of engaging this the right way, he feels like the Episcopal Church has taken that away from him and the rest of the Communion.

But in this letter, Rowan says, basically, that the heart of catholic ecclesiology is that the Bishop and the diocese are the main unit of the church, and what he says is the main source of identity for the church. And see, this is important because he is trying to address the issue of differentiation. And what he’s basically saying is, “You are clearly an orthodox bishop, you need to say to your people, their main identification in the Church is in and through you and the diocese, therefore they need to feel comforted.” And what he goes on to say, and this is where it got endless speculation in the blogosphere and elsewhere, he went on to say, I really feel like the diocese is much more significant than the national church which has a way of being a sort of artificial construct that he is not sure is super helpful in terms of a primary source of identity. And that also is classic Rowan Williams I could just hear him - you know I studied with him at Oxford in graduate seminars I mean, that’s classic - he’s sort of thinking out loud. I think that’s a very vital question to ask. You need to know enough about the history of the Episcopal Church to know that it’s only in the 1920s that the Presiding Bishop becomes a differentiated office from diocesan leadership. Before 1920 the presiding bishop was a serving diocesan bishop who happened to be elected to be a serving diocesan bishop and also the presiding Bishop. It wasn’t a separate ecclesiastical office. So the modern national church idea in the Episcopal Church is actually relatively recent, even in our own history. And there is a lot of artificiality about it right? Think about it - in a diocese, in South Carolina, if you make a major capital improvement program, you need to petition the Standing Committee for ecclesiastical permission to undergo your capital improvement process because you are a parish that exists as a member of the diocesan family. There is no equivalent whereby a diocese decides to build a conference center, build whatever, that the diocese then has to ask the permission of the National Church - that doesn’t exist, because the whole way our history has evolved is very based on the diocese. The national church is the one who has been saying in the last 15 years “the diocese is the main unit of the church”. Now they’re in trouble because they want that to be true except when there are dioceses that don’t work the way they want them to work. [laughter]

I think it reflects a correct catholic ecclesiology and I think it reflects the possibility of one way that Rowan might be thinking to head forward, which is maybe he’s going to differentiate different dioceses and different bishops in terms of his finalization of the Lambeth invitations. That’s certainly the way the ACI wants to take it. My problem with that is Rowan’s modus operandi is not to rescind things that he’s already offered, and those invitations already stand. The other thing which I haven’t said, that you all need to know if you don’t know it and that is the whole structure of the Communion is massively centered on American money. I wish that this were otherwise, but this simply has to be faced. The Anglican Communion Office is the key interconnecting mechanism of the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Communion office is funded mainly by the Episcopal Church. We could debate the specifics, but roughly 30-40% of their annual budget, we fund. If you don’t think that the people in that office know that afterwards I’ll sell you a bridge to Haiti. They are hugely beholden to the American church, and the problem is that the way the communion operates it infects Lambeth and therefore it infects Rowan. They are determined, at the ACO to have the Lambeth Conference, because it is one of the main reasons they exist - to put on the Lambeth conference. So they are determined to put on the Lambeth conference. If they lose American money, it is going to be very hard in the future to put on the Lambeth conference and therefore to justify their own existence. So they’re hugely motivated to be sympathetic to the Americans and Rowan is also aware of the money issue, and the ACO is pressing him farther than he would like to be pressed, and he’s been deciding by not deciding, and what that means is the ACO gets more power acceded to them by default than they should have - and Rowan keeps not deciding.

The ACI position on the invitations is, “well Rowan gave the invitations but they’re preliminary.” Well, we don’t have a lot of time, and what’s interesting now of course is the Lambeth Conference is ending up looking worse and worse, because now you have the Bishop of Utah, on the sort of liberal side right near the Presiding Bishop and saying, “Well, I don’t really think we should go to Lambeth either.” Now you’ve got Nigeria and Uganda making clear that they’re not going to Lambeth, and you have Utah making clear that she doesn’t think that she should go to Lambeth, and it’s this early. So Rowan - this is the interesting part about not deciding, having to face the fact that you get the decision made for you. Right now what Rowan is heading into is a Lambeth which will not be a Lambeth for the whole communion. Which is not what he wants.

My heartbreak - I’ll just say this personally about Rowan; I thought about writing a letter - my heartbreak is that I actually think that Rowan can get the majority of the communion to Lambeth if he simply does this: if he says, “I rescind the invitations of those bishops who as a matter of diocesan policy allow for public same-sex blessings.” I think there are 20 to 21 of them by my measurement. It isn’t all that I would want, if I were setting it up. It isn’t all that I think it should be, but if he did that I’d back him 100%. And furthermore, if he did that he’d get the majority of the communion to Lambeth - including the majority of Americans I think, because they’d be in a real pickle, cause a lot of them like having tea with the Queen. [Laughter] They do! They really do.

Other questions? Yes sir.

—One thing I didn’t say about Rob O’Neil is that Rob has worked really, really hard to never take a stand and maybe David’s a better person to speak to that…

—Is this the Rt. Rev Rob?

—The Rt. Rev SIR.

—I’m sorry - the Rt. Rev. Sir. Forgive me - no, I think that one of the things that many of us have attempted to elicit from Rob is “if THIS were to happen, what would your response be”, or “if THAT were to happen, what would your response be”, and he refuses to ever respond to hypotheticals. What it does, it postures him, it puts him in a position, he thinks, of security, regarding - that he’ll be on the right side whatever happens.

K: Right, and as I pointed out at dinner last night, all he’s doing is modeling the heart of the model of diocesan leadership in the current House of Bishops, I mean I could give you oodles of other examples of diocesan bishops functioning exactly that way. I mean, that is what people think a diocesan bishop should be doing, deciding by not deciding, and being everybody’s friend, and “can’t we all get along”, and being an effective ecclesial bureaucrat, and keeping the conversations going, and keeping the trains running on time - as if that’s what the church exists to do! Leadership from either side has been whittled away, and you get these mediocre ecclesiastical bureaucratic managerial pastoral types, and when they have to lead they lead by not leading because they’re afraid that they’ll alienate somebody, and you all need to know, if you don’t know, that’s the WORST form of leadership actually. It honestly is. This is part of what happened with the previous bishop - if you don’t say where you stand; actually you end up getting everybody mad at you. Its not as though - see this is not deciding is a decision. Then you get everybody mad. Because at some point, as a matter of principle - all I can say to you is that - first of all Rob is not going to have that luxury, I don’t think, after 2009 - that’s point one. See this is the thing - “I’ll just wait, and ..”. Well, sorry, time’s up I mean - the thing about the power structure is that the train is not stopping at this station. See, everybody’s missed this, especially among my friends who are kind of the modern institutionalists is, “Ok, now we can all breathe, yeah, we’ve been through 2003, OK, so we’ll all just sit here, we’ll just kind of consolidate.” Consolidate my foot! It’s LGBT - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender - do not kid yourself there are bisexual liturgies out there. I had a whole discussion with a bisexual at the 2003 General Convention about this very issue, I said to her, (she knew who I was, she knew I was somebody that she could talk to), I said to her, “what would a church that blesses the possibility that bisexuality is a created order look like?” She was a lesbian, she had a relationship with a woman that lasted about 8 years, now she’s married to a guy - and that was her story. What she said to me was, “what it means was if I told you I was a lesbian you’d bless my union, but if I later told you that I shifted you’d allow me to end that and then later get married.” And then I started to try to wrap my mind around what a church would look like where you tried to embrace that officially, and I got very sad very quickly. I mean, that’s just nuts! What in the world does that mean? I mean, you need some kind of divorce ceremony - that’s meaningful for the first, except it isn’t marriage, so you’ve got to have a dissolution ceremony or something - I mean, the point is - ah, and there’s a new prayerbook - so Rob is trying to stand in place and say, “well we can consolidate”, and the ground is moving underneath his feet and it isn’t going to work. But the other thing which I will say, and this is part of the tragedy of the conservatives’ failure - failure to differentiate has failed to bring the system the cost(?) that it needs in order to ask questions - there is a conservative reason why the national leadership isn’t more self-critical, it’s because we failed to properly bring the pressure that needs to be brought by differentiating. And you all have to find a way, I mean Rob O’Neil has to be - there must be hard questions asked. And one of the things you could think about saying is, from now on, at every public meeting, one of our membership is going to publicly ask you to publicly declare yourself on this question. You could tell him that up front. Now, he may choose every single time not to, but you’ve set him on notice and that is a way of differentiating. You’re saying, the status quo is unacceptable to us, we want to know where you really stand, and we’re going to put you on notice publicly, every time we get the opportunity. If I’m right, and you live this out faithfully, Rob O’Neil should get madder at you in a year than he is now. It’s not because I want him to be mad, it’s because that’s what differentiation does. The reason Nebuchadnezzar put those guys in the fiery furnace is because he was so firing mad he was furious, he wanted to kill them - because they wouldn’t capitulate. And that’s what differentiation does, and it’s actually important. So, I have no idea how you go about doing that, but I do think that’s Rob’s strategy, but he doesn’t have that luxury, time is not on his side. [Unintelligible comment] Right.

—I think he is hoping, I think to end it up in a position, that after 2009, where he can wash his hands of any personal conviction regarding these issues, and then fall back on the institution, on his institutional commitment as a bishop….[unintelligible] and discipline of the church at general convention has pronounced on him

K: Can I also mention in passing for those of you who want to study this, because another part of the challenge of this is that this isn’t the first time in church history that this problem has arisen. Think about this - think about the way that Luther had to conduct himself early on. Many people forget about this - Luther didn’t stand up one day and say, “Oh, I’m leaving the Roman Catholic church - bye”. He didn’t do that. He had to engage the current structures, and find a way to differentiate himself. And it was a slog, and he had to do all sorts of weird things, like hiding out in a castle with a very unlikely person for a very long period of time - which got a whole lot of people even madder at him. But the point is that - and the other one I would mention is the Methodists. I live in a diocese where George Whitfield was sent out from St. Phillips Charleston because he was publicly indicted for three offences - two of which were “praying in public” and “enthusiasm”. I sometimes say to people, “The Episcopal church indirectly caused the Great Awakening” - because the diocese of South Carolina helped send out Wesley and Whitfield because we were so unwilling in the current structures…but the point is that, the reason that happened is because those guys tried to come into the existing structure, showed up at St. Phillips, and then didn’t do what anybody else did from the pulpit. Which is why St. Phillips got so mad, and said, “You’re never preaching here any more”. In which case they said, “Fine, we’ll go out in the fields”, and they went out in the fields! And you can just hear the people in the back saying, “penalty flag” - we don’t have any canons - you can’t preach in the field - it doesn’t say you can do that! They’re trying to differentiate - I think there are resources to mine in the early Methodist stories and history, and the early Reformation stories of some of how you can try to do this. You look at Wesley, you look at Whitfield, you look at Luther, they’re trying to differentiate, and they’re also trying to find structural relief. There’s all sorts of structural things that are happening in both movements to try to find a way. They don’t find it easy, and they get attacked all the time, but they’re not doing business as usual.

Yes sir -—My main conviction is that time is running out for the orthodox. You see, if resolution doesn’t come before Lambeth 2008 then there is no hope ... you in SC are a little more insulated from it , but we just saw it today, each go-round, each church that leaves, it gets harder and harder for the ones that stay it’s getting uglier and uglier - you don’t want to be the last ones.

This is one of the sections of Jeremiah that I wanted to get into but didn’t have time to get into - it’s the issue of time. One of the other areas of confusion in Jeremiah is with time. Time is very elusive in that book. His ministry is fifty years - total. Most people forget this. He talked a long time before the Babylonians came through the gate, but what’s so difficult is - how do you know when there’s a warning when’s the fulfillment of the warning…I mean, Jeremiah doesn’t show up and say, “the Babylonians are coming”, and then say, “in six months”. See, he didn’t know that, and they didn’t know that. What he said was, they’re definitely coming. And this is another piece of this - time is elusive. I do not know how the issue of time is working out. But definitely I fee acutely that the shifting of the sands under means that our future becomes more difficult as the time works itself out. The way that that works out in SC, and you all need to know this if you don’t is, I have no confidence we could ever get another bishop confirmed. And after 2009, there’s no way in creation that we will get a bishop confirmed. So it’s all well and good to say, well, we persevered up to this point, but we have no future as a diocese in terms of electing a bishop whom we want to be approved by the existing structure - and that’s what you’re talking about - is that it isn’t going to stay the same, and the power is shifting increasingly in one direction. You’re right, and it has to be faced. But my problem is solving it by leaving, especially in the short term - part of the other thing that I didn’t say, you probably picked up on this is - I’m afraid that by leaving or by waiting too passively, what’s really going on is we’re trying to run away from being purged by having to go through it. Because you see if you leave, there’s a whole series of existing relationships and accountabilities by leaving that go away. That’s one thing that leaving ...leaving reduces accountability in the short term as you begin to start another structure. And I’m afraid on both ends we’re trying to elude God’s desire to change us. So as much as I try, I can’t find a way to say, “Since it’s getting worse, therefore we have to go Common Cause”. But like I said, other people are making different decisions and I back them 100%. I mean John Guernsey’s my friend, so… I’m trying as best I can, and I’m not unwilling to acknowledge your point publicly, you’re absolutely right. One of the pieces that’s out in the past week by Louie Crew, who is an acquaintance of mine, sort of my nemesis in the Episcopal church - he has put out a preliminary analysis of the people who have been elected deputy for the 2009 General Convention and surprise, surprise - no surprise to me - less people that voted against New Hampshire, and more people who voted for New Hampshire are coming to 2009. That’s what you’re talking about.

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