As I stand here and address this 222nd Diocesan Convention I’m aware of the great march of history that these meetings have represented, and how little of that history I share with all of you. Just two weeks ago I was in an upper room at St. George’s school sitting with a host of bishops nervously waiting for call to start the procession into the main room. Walking into that space was an experience that I’m still processing, and one that I expect I’ll be reflecting on for a long time. It was the culmination of over a year’s discernment on both of our parts and the beginning of what I pray will be a long and happy shared ministry together.
I’ve been here in the state for three months as of this morning. For most of that time I have been learning about you, about the history and traditions of the diocese and about the amazing resources that you share and that you are. I wish I had the ability to tell you how extraordinary you all are, how inspiring your passion for God is and how much affection people have for all of you across the Episcopal Church. But I’ve gotten to know you all well enough in this short time to know that you’re already wondering who I’m talking about when I say this, and just what it is that I’d be going on about.
While this year of search, discernment and transition is growing to a close, I don’t think that the processes that brought us all to this moment have ended, and I don’t imagine that they will any time soon. There’s much we need to learn about each other, and more importantly, there’s much we need to learn about the world that is changing at an ever increasing pace all around us. I hope you’ll agree to keep walking with me on this journey, keep struggling to hear that still small voice of the creator that fills all of creation, and continue to have enough faith to believe in an exciting future in spite of the so many very real fears that confront us.
I do have one special request. I’ve been a bishop now for just under two weeks. As you listen to what I say this morning, and as you seek to tease out any hidden meanings, I’d ask that you keep in mind that short two week period. There are things that are still very new to me. Like being called “bishop”… I keep looking around to see who’s come into the room when people say that. I know that I will make mistakes in the first year, and that I will do things that will be interpreted to mean something that I didn’t intend them to be. And I expect you might do the same with me. That you will say things and do things that I will misunderstand. We both bring a lifetime’s worth of experiences with the church and with other bishops, to this new relationship or ours. Perhaps if we can both keep in mind that we’re all new at this, we can try hard to see what is happening and not read into a word or a moment more than is really present. This is a spiritual discipline I mean for both myself and all of you; and it’s something that I’ve learned is an excellent for all groups of people entering into new relationships with each other - both in parochial ministry and in everyday life.
At any rate, I’ll try and I hope you will too.
I have so many thank you’s to share that if I tried to just mention every one by name, we wouldn’t be out of here until next week. It’s been an amazing year and it’s been filled to the bursting with amazing people. My first contact with the Diocese of Rhode Island came when Lora MacFall contacted me to say that my name had been nominated as part of the bishop search and that if I was willing, she had some questions she’s like me to answer. Little did I expect where that would lead. And little did I expect how much respect, gratitude and even awe I now hold in my heart toward her. I suspect that the entire search and transition committee would join me in all of that. But Lora would be very quick to point out that she was not alone in the task that you all undertook, and so I want to say thank you both personally and on behalf of this entire convention to everyone who was a part of the search and transition process - as a member of the committees, as someone who helped out in a specific way or was willing to enter into the discernment process as a fellow participant. Thank you for all the late nights, the difficult decisions, the faithful actions and willingness to open yourselves up to God’s action in our community.
I want to say thank you as well to all the people who participated in the ordination service two weeks ago. I have heard again and again from people that it was a moving, beautiful and deeply prayerful experience. I know as a liturgist that such things don’t just happen. There were months of planning that went into the event, there were thousands of volunteers and tens of thousands of hours of work that made it possible for everything to seem to happen so effortlessly.
Thank you!
You should know that the Presiding Bishop remarked repeatedly on how well organized the whole event was and how thoughtfully prepared the liturgy and participants were. Thank you to the many people who traveled from across the country to be a part of the day, and who made the event a memory that I shall cherish the rest of my life. Thank you to my new colleagues in the house of bishops who made it here on that holiday travel week. And thank you to many musicians, acolytes and clergy who participated by offering their special gifts in service to our diocese.
The Presiding Bishop, in addition to praising the work of the Transition committee, was also clear that we all owe a debt of thanks to Bishop Wolf and her staff for the work they did to make this entire transition go as smoothly as it did. As one who was intimately involved in this process, I can testify that the 12th bishop was determined that the 13th bishop would have full access to whatever he needed to get started in this new ministry as quickly and as effectively as possible. Likewise the diocesan staff has been wonderfully helpful in making this transition work. From little things like making sure I knew how to find my way around the state to big things like helping to figure out how to get Linda Grenz on the staff as quickly as possible.
Just as I owe thanks to the diocesan staff, I owe thanks to the entire diocese. You all have welcomed me and my family warmly into yours. I have been stunned by the warmth and generosity of your welcome. You have made it very hard for me to believe in the myth of the taciturn yankees of Southern New England. The people I have met have been hospitable, generous, kind, and funny. I’m grateful that I am going to get to spend a very long time in your company.
I want to take a moment to thank the people of Arizona too. So many of you have asked me how the transition of moving from Arizona to Rhode Island was going, worried that I was going to be surprised by the cold and the rain. The people of Arizona know that it was actually the other way around. Moving there six years ago, I had to learn to manage with the heat, the dust and a much spicier menu than my PA dutch palate was used to eating. But they welcomed me into their community and put up with my very eastern ways. (Apparently most people don’t wear blue oxfords and dock-siders in the desert…) When I told them that I had been elected to serve as the 13th bishop of Rhode Island, they were as generous in saying good bye as they had been in saying hello. The cross I wear around my neck is a present from that congregation and some of the vestments that I was presented with at my ordination were purchased for our use by their donations.
Finally, in this long list of thank you’s I want to thank my family, my daughter Kenney and my wife Karen. It’s no small thing to have to uproot your life because someone you love has been called by God to serve in new place and in a new way. But that has happened six times including the initial trip to seminary. Karen and Kenney have handled each of the transitions in a way that gives witness to their deep faith in God and their willingness to answer God’s call to them.
I’m sure by now a number of you have wondered about my vision for the Diocese of Rhode Island. It’s a question that I expected to be explicitly asked by the search and nomination committee and one that I recall coming up as part of the walk-about interviews last spring. My answer now is the same as it was then. I’m not convinced that it is proper, much less effective, for the two week old bishop of a diocese to tell the diocese where they are to aim themselves. I just don’t believe it is effective at the diocesan level because I’ve not found it to be completely effective at the parish level as I’ve participated in early stages of transition.
Rather I believe it is important for the leadership of a community to learn to listen to the diverse voices within a community and then to reflect back to them what is being heard. Once the community recognizes their own voice - as their leader expresses their hopes and dreams as a people - they are ready to do the work of planning how to achieve what they are describing.
I do have some areas that I believe we must focus on within our diocesan life. As you’ve probably already noticed, I hold leadership development among the young people of the diocese to be a high priority. I also believe we need to be even more effective in communicating to the people of this state than we already are. But those are my personal goals and things that I will work to support during my time as your bishop.
But the vision of the diocese is yours to determine.
So in the coming year or so, I hope you will see me doing a lot of listening. I probably won’t be doing all that much talking. That can be unsettling if you’re not used to it. I’ve seen communities become concerned that there’s a hidden agenda since they don’t see one being revealed as quickly as they’d like. But I think it’s important to remember that you and I have time. God willing I’ll be your bishop something like the next 15 years, perhaps more. We don’t have to do everything overnight. We’re blessed to be in a place where we are, for the most part, not being dictated to by a series of urgent crises demanding a response. We are in a place where we can be strategic in our decision making, and I think it’s important for us to appreciate what this means.
So how will I listen? You have my email address: nick@episcopalri.org - or Nicholas or bishop or whatever else you can find on the web. They all work, and they all come directly to me. I do want to hear from you - particularly those of you in this room today. You are the elected and ordained leadership of the diocese and in my servant ministry among you, I need to hear your voices.
But it’s not just email. I’ll be trying to show up in your parishes over the next few years. Sometimes just to spend time with you. Sometimes as part of a formal visitation. Sometimes because you’ve invited me and I want to make that a priority. And I’ll try to hang out with you at coffee hour, and before and after the service. Talking directly with the people we serve is one of the best parts of being a member of clergy, and I don’t intend to miss out on the good stuff.
A number of you have contacted me on Facebook and on twitter. I’ve already gotten a reputation as being the “digital bishop” or the bishop of social media. (Remind me to say a special thanks to Bishop Kirk Smith for that… heh.) I do all that to be accessible to you. But I do it just as much because I want to hear your voices as much as I can. And I want to hear the voices of the other people in the state - the people who are not part of the Episcopal Church but who are searching to hear the Good News that God loves us and that God has been faithful to us even when we didn’t always reciprocate.
And then in the next couple of years, I’m going to start reflecting back to you what I’m hearing. And asking you to tell me if it seems genuine. And then together we are going to figure out what we need to do to get to where we believe God is calling us to be.
I admit that there’s one common thing I’ve been hearing already - and which I’m already ready to reflect back to you. And that is your concern about the future of St. John’s Cathedral church in Providence. From the moment it was announced that I had been nominated, I’ve been asked what was going to be done about the Cathedral. When the services at St. John’s were suspended last spring, the number of questions increased. And after I was elected, it’s been hard to have a conversation, an interview, or even just walk along Benefit Street in Providence, without having someone ask me about the Cathedral. As I’ve started to spend Sunday mornings with you, or meet clergy and leaders at deanery events, the same question is raised.
So, I get it. This is a big concern for all of you.
And the most common concern I hear raised is that people don’t feel that they were given a chance to participate in the decision making process. For some the news that the Cathedral was going to have its services suspended came as a complete surprise. For others it was a disappointing but not surprising announcement even if it the timing was unanticipated. And for some, who did participate in the decision making process, there’s surprise that any of this was a surprise.
The upshot from where I stand, is that the process by which this particular decision was made did not have much buy-in from the community. And that is why the community (both of the Cathedral itself but also of the diocese and the neighborhood around St. John’s) is struggling to understand what happened.
The good news is that the way the decision was made has left us an opportunity to revisit it - though to be honest the challenges facing the Cathedral are in some ways greater now that it has stood vacant and unused for the past six months.
But we can revisit the decision, and hopefully construct a different kind of process that will allow us to have a greater participation and buy-in once it comes to a conclusion.
So, all that said, with your consent, I am calling for the creation of a special ad-hoc task force to look at the ministry and property of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Providence with the goal of reporting back to the 223rd Diocesan Convention a set of options for that convention to consider. I would hope that the committee to be made up of clergy and lay leaders of the diocese, of the former members of the Cathedral community and of the wider community of Providence would describe each option and list as much as possible what resources would be needed to act on any one of them. I envision a task force of something like a dozen people who would report regularly on their progress and process to Diocesan Council during the next year. I would like to present a list of names for the Task Force to the Diocesan Council for their consent at their January meeting.
At the presentation of their report, the task force will be disbanded. This is a different group than the existing Chapter of the Cathedral - which was appointed to a two year term this past July by Bishop Wolf, but which to my knowledge has not subsequently met. It is different than the Cathedral Corporation, who held the endowments of the Cathedral prior to returning them to the Chapter. But I expect that the task force will include members of the Chapter going forward.
A relatively well know Chicago politician has been known to remark that it is a shame to ever waste a moment such as we have arrived at with the Cathedral. It seems to me that we are given the gift of an opportunity to learn a new way to make decisions as a community going forward. And that opportunity is too precious a thing to not be taken seriously.
I hope that you will not object to this proposal, and that in about a year’s time you will be ready to make some hard decisions about how we are going to use the assets that have been given to us in our moment of leadership to continue to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus as we move forward into the three hundredth year of ministry at the corner of Church Street and North Main.
There was another common question that I was repeatedly asked during the walk-abouts at St. Andrew’s last May. That was what I would do about allowing for a generous pastoral response to people in same-sex relationships who are active in the Episcopal Church, and who ask for the Episcopal Church’s blessing on their intention to live into a covenant of lifelong, monogamous, mutual loving relationships. I said then that I intended to vote for such legislation at General Convention this past summer, and given that it would be hypocritical for me, should I be elected bishop to block such blessings going forward.
I was indeed elected, and I did intend to vote in favor. But the vote came to the House of Deputies days after I resigned my seat in that body and had been seated as bishop-elect in the House of Bishops. But both houses of General Convention did vote in the affirmative by significant majorities to approve the provisional use of blessing liturgies for, in case of Rhode Island, same-sex couples entering into civil partnerships here in Rhode Island or a marriage in one of our neighboring states. I am going to give permission, indeed I have already done so in one case for a couple desiring a ceremony later this month.
But my giving of this permission represents a significant change in policy for the Diocese of Rhode Island. While Bishop Wolf did vote in favor of the blessing liturgies at General Convention, she did not allow such services to take place. That means that we don’t have the infrastructure that I believe we need to have moving forward. Because of that, I am going to create a small task force to work with me in December and January to quickly create guidelines for use by congregations in the diocese who wish to offer this pastoral office to their members.
There are a few questions that need to be decided. How do we make the decision that a parish would like to offer this ministry? I would strongly urge, in fact I have already required, that the vestry or bishop’s committee pass a resolution expressing their support of the offering of blessings to be communicated, along with a letter from the rector or priest in charge, before the first blessing takes place. No priest is required to perform a blessing service, and the legislation enacted at General Convention was very clear that there must be no penalty for a member of the clergy who’s conscience will not allow them to do so. Similarly, because the blessings take place in the context of a worshiping community, it seems important to me to know that the community in who’s presence these blessings are going to occur is committed to supporting the couple.
If a parish and priest decide to take up this ministry of blessing, what expectations should we as a diocese place upon those coming seeking the blessing? What requirements should there be for pre-blessing counseling? What requirements are most helpful in the case of a prior divorce? What resources shall we provide if there are children who will be living with their parents in a civil partnership? What extra legal resources must we be careful to discuss with the couple, given the present difference between civil partnerships and marriage here in Rhode Island, and in Federal law?
Many of the questions have been anticipated, and resources are provided in the official materials approved at General Convention. In addition, the Diocese of Rhode Island is part of Province One of the Episcopal Church and many of our sibling dioceses have had long experience with answering these questions and have shared that experience with us already. So the time to create the guidelines shouldn’t be longer than a month or two I would imagine. And again, in keeping with the recognition that Diocesan Council is the Diocesan Convention meeting in recess, I would like to bring the guidelines that are created to Council for their approval. Having received that approval, I will authorize them to be used by any parish or mission that formally requests to do so.
For those who have waited so long, I apologize that you must wait just a little while longer. But I believe it is important that in a matter like this that we have a chance to have a broad a consultation as possible (albeit quickly). I’ve only been your bishop for two weeks now, and as I mentioned, this represents a significant change in policy for our diocese. But if there is a pastoral necessity that arises here or there in the next two months, I will be happy to talk directly with the responsible clergy directly. As I mentioned, I have already done so.
On the topic of clergy… I have begun a conversation with the members of the Commission on MInistry. There are, as you might expect by this point in my address, going to be some changes in the process we use to discern ordained ministry and in the way it is expressed in the Diocese of Rhode Island. The first and most immediate is that I will be talking with them about guidelines for the recruitment of more deacons to serve in our parishes and ministries around our state. We will be talking about what the ministry of deacon might look like here in Rhode Island and what it is we as a people need to be able lift up women and men to serve as exemplars and living icons of servant ministry in our midst.
We (the COM and I) have already committed ourselves to a conversation about the ministry of the priesthood in the 21st century as well. While the classic vision of parochial ministry will still be with us, and still be an important part of our common life, there is a need for new forms and new sorts of preparation for priestly ministry in Rhode Island. And as we begin to share consensus on what that will be, we will need to begin to recruit new leaders who we believe have been uniquely gifted by God for that new sort of role.
I expect we will be issuing new guidelines about the schedule and structure of the process of discernment for ordained ministry as well. I believe the most effective discernment of ministry takes place in the person’s local community with their local clergy and fellow parishioners. I believe we will move toward a strengthening of that role going forward.
You should expect to hear news from my office in the next months about the ministry of the existing deacons of the diocese. I believe the Episcopal Church, particularly in Rhode Island, is poised to enter a period of growth and expansion. Indeed I am already hearing from a number of you about new people expressing interest in your communities, in growing children’s formation programs and in crowded worship spaces. Hallelujah! We will need workers to go into the vineyard as quickly as we can find them. But it would be shame to miss opportunities because we didn’t believe we had the resources we needed. I am hoping that the deacons and I will come to a common mind on how to respond to this need in the short term.
Like I said, stay tuned.
And finally, a common question I was asked prior and immediately following my consecration was “What do you want us to call you?” My response has been that I don’t have a particular title in mind, but that I’m fascinated to discover what the community will bestow upon me. Well that question seems to have been quickly answered. Bishop Smith called me the “Digital Bishop” in his sermon at my ordination, and local news and radio reporters have picked up on that theme. I was titled the “tweeting bishop” by Channel 12 in their promo the other evening of a TV interview I did with them on my use of social media.
Digital Bishop and Tweeting bishop were not exactly the titles I had expected, but he who opens his mouth… must abide by the decisions of the community.
So if that’s how I’m to be known for the moment, then I intend to embrace the implications. I do think we as a people must learn to be able to share the gospel with people around us in a way that shows them the same dazzling richness of God’s love that brought each one of us to this particular place. As a few people have quipped, “your tweet today might be the only gospel someone will hear.” Or your Facebook status, or blog post, or newspaper article or…
This is true for the clergy of the diocese in an obvious way simply by virtue of their having been set apart for the service of the Gospel. But it is just as, if not more true for the laity of the diocese because their voices have a unique power to speak to their neighbors without the overlay of stuff that often drowns out the voice of the clergy. I know for me it was the witness of my close friends that brought me back into the church when I was a student in Delaware all those years ago.
I’m hoping that in the coming years we will all build on the excellent foundation that has already been laid here in the Diocese of Rhode Island and continue to find new and compelling ways to share the Gospel with our neighbors. It’s not all social media you know. I’ve seen people use yard signs, use church socials, use beach cleanup events, use softball leagues, and even use coffee and donuts to effectively share the good news.
We are all called to be evangelists, and we all have exactly what we need to do what God asks of us. It’s going to be different for each one of us, but if we are faithful, we will be doing God’s will. We will share the vision of God’s dream for ourselves and our neighbors. We will take our place as missionaries and emissary’s a new and glorious way of living - and we will be doing this at a particular moment in history that I believe needs our voices as much as any we have experienced in our state’s history.
Thank you for calling me to labor beside you in this work. Thank you for gifting me and this community with all we will need to do what the tasks that God has set us to doing. Thank you for being courageous enough to live lives that witness to the hope that is in all of us.
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