BISHOP'S ADDRESS AT CONVENTION 2014

I am grateful to all of you simply for being here.

You presence says there are Nevadans

            who want to be a diocese, want it enough to drive some miles

                        to make a diocese happen.

Usually, the farther the Convention is from a population center,

            the fewer people we have.

But this year, registration has been significantly up.

So thank you for being here.

Thank you St. Barnabas for hosting us.

This has been one of the most effective convention planning committees

            we’ve had.

Thank you also to our Convention Coordinator, Karen Lantz-Feith,

            and to our office staff, Michelle McCarragher and Wendy O’Brien,

            who have worked tirelessly to make this possible.

Several things happened this year that deserve our attention.

For quite awhile, we have felt as if we had a relationship

            with the Anglican Church of Kenya.

 At past Conventions we had presentations on the good work

            we were doing there.

But those presentations did not actually show our diocese

            or our parishes doing anything for Kenya.

Several  of our members were involved

in four non-profit corporations that work in Kenya.

But as a church we didn’t do much.

We sometimes sent part of the collection from Convention

to prevent malaria.

I sent discretionary fund money for seed during a drought.

But there wasn‘t a lot in the way of real support

            by the Church here for the work of the Church there.

This year was different.

A deacon at St. Christopher’s was doing advocacy work

            for the Electrify Africa Bill;

            and she came across the alternative energy strategy of solar lanterns.

For about $10, we could get a solar lantern

            that would give light to a household for a long time.

So we put out a request to parishes for donations,

            hoping to get a few hundred dollars

            and send 20 or 30 lanterns.

To my amazement, the parishes sent us over $14,000,

            enabling us to equip the Church there

            to make a life changing difference for rural villages

                        of the Ukamba Region of Kenya.

Some people who received these solar lanterns

            now give the money they used to spend on paraffin

            to the Church.

One man who didn't go to Church was so touched 

            by our gift of a solar lantern than he has joined the Anglican Church.

Second story.

A few years ago, we started St. Hugh’s Outreach Center in Silver Springs.

We didn’t start it on a shoestring. We started it on nothing.

It is an air plant, depending on donations from the people of Silver Springs,

            the very people we are ostensibly there to help.

It is an unfunded, small, intimate, but lovely human ministry.

One of the donations St. Hugh’s receives locally is free rent

            in  a ramshackle little building.

But this year, we had to come up with $1,400 in back property taxes

            in order to keep the building.

So I sent out a request to the priests to invite their congregations to help.

Churches and individual clergy all over the diocese

            pitched in to help us keep our building.

Trinity, Reno single handedly raised more than enough

            money to pay the taxes.

The other gifts will go to help poor people get by in Silver Springs.

Third story. Bob Green of St. Martin’s, Pahrump

            serves on our diocesan property team.

He was helping St. Mark’s, Tonopah with getting a new roof,

            bringing the electrical system up to code,

            and addressing a few other safety issues.

In the course of working with St. Mark’s,

            Bob learned that they weren’t receiving enough

            in the collection plate to pay their monthly expenses,

            so the priest, Mother Joan LaLiberte, was not just working for free;

            she was paying church expenses out of her own retirement check.

Bob took this matter up with the vestry of St. Martin’s, Pahrump;

            and our Church in Pahrump pledged $100 per month

            to our Church in Tonopah to support operating expenses there.

Last story.

This has been a bad year for us financially.

Income from parishes, is way below budget,

            which is simply because income in the collection plate

                        is down in several of our larger congregations.

So the Standing Committee proposed a budget

            more in line with this year’s income instead of last year’s hopes.

That’s the bad news.

But here’s what happened next.

I recently got a letter personally signed by each member of the Vestry

            of All Saints, Las Vegas.

It said, “We can pay more than you have predicted.”

We can pay $5,000 more next year, so you need to revise the budget.

That still leaves us with a deficit to make up.

Although the $5,000 additional income is good news,

the best news is the generous spirit behind letter.

We have an unusually high assessment on our parishes,

            but we still have an unusually low income.

With rare exception, that’s because the parish income is low.

Of course I wonder what that’s about.

Sometimes we trace our problems to Nevada culture.

There is a little truth in that.

As compared to our neighboring states, we are pretty tight with our money.

Utah is the most generous state in the nation and Idaho is right up there.

But nationally Nevada actually ranks 41^st in charitable giving,

            which is better than I expected.

Our problem may have more to do with our history.

We were a missionary diocese for a long time.

That means we lived off money sent to us from the Church

            in the East until the 1970s.

Even after that we got significant grant subsidies for a while.

It was generous of our East Coast brothers and sisters.

But the downside is we got the notion that it is better to receive

            than to give.

We got a bit dependent, doing more grant writing

than evangelism and stewardship.

Living off the national dole won’t get us by today

and that may be a good thing.

Two stories from abroad.

At Lambeth conference I met Bishop Wannadag

of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines.

I asked if they had a companion diocese.

He said, “We don’t want one. We are ruggedly independent.”

I said, “Then we are the companion for you

              because we have nothing to give.”

That’s how we became partners with the Diocese of Santiago.

The Episcopal Church formed the Philippines

into a missionary district in 1901;

but the Episcopal Church of the Philippines claimed independence in 1990.

They turned down the American money and raised their own.

In the Philippines today, churches sell food from their gardens,

            they keep bees, they manufacture herbal medicines.

Everyone who comes to church brings something to give

– money, food, clothing, whatever they have.

Independence isn’t a matter of nationalistic pride.

It’s that they want their people to experience the full joy

            of Christian faith.

Their members are far more joyful, far more committed,

            and far more passionate about faith than we are.

That happens when we trust God, let go of possessions,

            and give our time, talent, and treasure to God’s mission.

Second story.

Recently, the President of Taiwan spoke to our House of Bishops.

He thanked America for 20 years of foreign aid

            that helped them become an industrialized nation.

But in 1965 that aid stopped,

            and Taiwan set a goal to stop being an importer of compassion  

            in order to become an exporter of compassion.

Taiwan now supports needy children in developing nations

            and provides the very best disaster relief services.

They have come to the rescue in the Japan, in Haiti, and around the world.

The Taiwanese have learned the joy of giving.

Sometimes the clergy shortchange our people,

            by not teaching financial faith, gratitude, and generosity.

These are really two challenges with one solution:

            First, we need to fund the mission of spreading the gospel

                        in a place that needs grace worse than it needs water.

            Second, we need to show our people the freedom and joy

                        that come from living by faith rather than fear,

                        from gratitude rather than resentment,

to put a point on it: from giving to God’s mission.

The hard thing about church in Nevada is the high percentage

            of assessment on parish income,

            which still produces a shoestring austerity budget for the diocese.

If this is a zero sum game, we are stuck in that forever.

We need to reduce the percentage of the assessment.

There are theoretically two ways that can happen.

Restructuring of the Episcopal Church could reduce the amount

            of money the diocese has to pay New York

            and we could then pass that savings on to parishes.

 But it looks more likely that restructuring is going to hit an iceberg

            over typical churchy power struggles.

So I don’t think we can count on the East Coast to help.

The other is that we could grow stewardship in the parishes.

If total parish income goes up, we can take the assessment

            further down,  which will help parishes even more.

Could that happen in spite of our history of dependency

            on mission support from other dioceses?

Could we learn to support ourselves

            like our companion diocese in the Philippines does?

           

In 2013, Nevada had the largest representation of any diocese

            at The Episcopal Network for Stewardship conference in Salt Lake.

This year, we sent 9 people the 2014 Conference in Atlanta,

and many more participated by live streaming

            at All Saints, Las Vegas, St. Paul’s, Sparks, and St. Peter’s, Carson City.

In 2014, we had good participation at Stewardship workshops

            in Sparks and Las Vegas.

We will repeat that workshop in Las Vegas next year,

sharing costs with the Methodists.

 We are learning about stewardship here in Ely today.

Next year 5 of us will attend the Project Resource Conference in Denver

            to learn how to improve giving in our diocese.

All of this points to a deep culture shift in our diocese.

Nevada is growing up into mature faith.

Stewardship is part and parcel of the larger project

            of education that forms people as disciples of Jesus.

In order for congregations to fulfill their mission,

            attract and retain people, and demonstrate that they

            are doing something worthy of the people’s support,

            they have to offer formation programs.

Churches with Christian education and formation programs

            are consistently better attended, better funded,

            and get along with each other better than those who do not.

This year, several of our congregations have either begun

             new formation programs or expanded existing ones.

St. Michael & All Angels is now offering instruction

            in basic Christian teachings using the Animate series.

Grace in the Desert has several groups learning basic discipleship

            through the Pro-Claim series,

            which was also used this year at Holy Spirit, Bullhead City.

Trinity, Reno teaches the Ignatian Exercises and has a book group,

currently studying Richard Rohr’s Great Themes of the Bible series.

St. Paul’s, Sparks also has a book group as well as a lectio divina Bible Study.

Christ Church, Las Vegas has just started a new EfM group.

Other parishes have programs as well.

These are just a few examples of congregations engaging

the mission of forming disciples of Jesus in new ways.

For the first time in several years, a Nevadan will attend

the Western Christian Educators Conference at Zephyr Cove.

There are two connections between Christian Formation

            and our survival.

The first is that if we do not engage in formation, we will not survive.

The seconds is that if we do not engage in formation, we should not survive.

We are here to learn as individuals, as communities, and as a diocese

            (which is a community of communities).

We are here to learn how to become followers of Jesus.

If we do that, we’ll be just fine.

Unless we do that, we are wasting our time.

But it is not enough to tell congregations to offer formation programs.

We have to offer guidance and inspiration.

So we are priming that pump.

We shifted money from several things we’d been saving for,

            we allocated our rental income from the old St. Stephen’s,

            and we used a gift from one of our members

            to hire a Canon For Congregational Vitality.

Canon Catherine is coming to help us figure out what kind of formation

            will be most effective in each of our different communities.

Last weekend, we commemorated St. Francis,

            but I wonder if we remembered what his life was really about.

Francis came back from war -- broken and needing healing.

So he went looking for God in the ruins of a little church, San Damiano.

God healed him by giving him a mission.

God said, “Francis, rebuild my church.”

So Francis gave up all his worldly possessions

 – not some, not most, but all of his worldly possessions --

and devoted himself to a capital fund drive.

The first thing Francis did was rebuild a down-on-the heels little church.

The second thing was to form a community of fellow believers.

The third was to hit the road sharing the good news of Jesus

            with people who called themselves Christians

            but who hadn’t really gotten it.

I wonder, as the Diocese of Nevada lives into the coming year,   

            what we might learn from the example of Blessed Francis.