EPISTLE TO THE NEVADANS
What Is A “Diocese” & What Is It For?
Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I have been writing monthly letters to the
Episcopalians in Nevada for some time now, but this is the first time I have
sent it to each of you directly. I am writing to you in this way because many
of our congregations do not have newsletters or any good way of sharing my
messages with you.
But what is the point of the messages at all? It’s basically
about getting to know each other. I don’t expect you to read every word I
write. The delete button is a perfectly legitimate way to conserve your time
and attention. But I want to send some thoughts your way in the hope that from
time to time you will look at them, and that we might better find each other as
fellow travelers on life’s way and work together for some part of
God’s mission in Nevada.
In this first letter, I will tell you how I
understand a diocese and what it has to do with your life. I am a bit of
a theology wonk. So bear with me. It has to do with God. The Trinity means that
God is a unity in diversity and diversity in unity. God happens in
relationship.
We are called to be godly, so we are called
to have our own unique identities but to be in relationship with each other. In
fact, we can’t truly become ourselves except through the push and tug of
relationship with other people. God’s mission draws us together. “Once you were
not a people, but now you are the people of God.” 1 Peter 2: 10. Individuals
who were not previously connected establish human, personal ties while they all
share in God’s mission.
Neurologically human beings are wired to be
in relationship with each other. There is an exciting new field of research
about that. Some of you might enjoy looking into it. Click HERE to view one web site on the
subject.
Or to learn more, the best book about this is Daniel Goleman's Social
Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. But it’s really just common
sense. “People who need people are the luckiest people.” We learned that from
Barbara Streisand. It’s true. It isn't easy, but it’s true. God
designed us to find him and love him, not in abstract ideas, not in caves on
mountaintops through esoteric exercises, but in each other, in the mix and
muddle of daily life together.
God puts us together in natural ways.
Families share DNA. Neighbors live side by side. People who have the same
political opinions or interests form parties and fans of the same sports teams
watch games in each other’s living rooms. All of that is good and natural, even
godly. But in the Church, God brings together a wildly diverse assembly of
people who might not naturally be friends. In Romans, Paul considers the
relationship between Jews and Gentiles to be as unnatural as a wild olive
branch growing on a cultivated olive tree. But he says God grafted Jew and
Gentile together in the Church. Romans 11. Just so, God has called us together
into a holy friendship - not always an easy friendship, not a natural
friendship, but a godly friendship rooted in our faith in Christ.
So what is a diocese? It is a network of
relationship among congregations, just as congregations are networks of
relationships among individual Christians. The principal cords of the network
are caring for each other, wishing each other well, even willingness to help
each other to play our different parts in God’s mission.
A diocese is first and foremost a web of
caring. It is only minimally an authority structure. It is an authority
structure only insofar as necessary to hold some bond of unity, to preserve our
identity as Episcopalians. But the Episcopal Church’s rulebook (the Canons and
Rubrics) allows a great deal of diversity in the practices of congregations. I
have very rarely had to tell a congregation it needed to make a change in order
to be legitimately Episcopal. 20 times as often, I have been asked by people in
congregations to tell them “my policy” on this, that, or the other thing, and
have replied that it is their decision to make.
Authentic relationships cannot be coerced.
The business of the diocese is to provide opportunities for parishes to
cooperate, to do things together. Our Epiphany project with Luci Lanterns is a
small but quite lovely example. We invite each congregation to take up a small
collection, then we pool those gifts to buy solar lanterns we, as the Diocese
of Nevada, can send to our sister, the Diocese of Makueni, Kenya, so that
people in rural villages without electricity can have light at night.
It is also our mission to help each
congregation know something about the wider church. We are part of The
Episcopal Church, a denomination with a presence in all 50 states and - I bet
this will surprise you - 15 other nations. Our largest diocese is Haiti, with
an average Sunday attendance (in 2008) of 16.600 people. We have congregations
in Central America, continental Europe, and in Asia.
The Episcopal Church, in turn, is part of the
world wide Anglican Communion, made up of 38 “Provinces” - The Episcopal Church
is one Province. In addition, we are “in full communion” with several other
denominations including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the
Moravians, the Old Catholics, and the Philippine Independent Church. Full
communion means among other things that our clergy are also their clergy and
vice versa.
Our church is a rippling out of concentric
circles of relationship. The farther from the center you get, the more
different we are. Yet, we are all connected. We all care about each other. We
all support each other in God’s mission.
In one of our congregations, some members are
careful to give their gifts in ways to make sure “the
diocese” doesn't get any of their money. But when another church down
the highway needs to be painted, they get it painted. The money is a medium of
caring, like the chemical base that contains medicine. What matters is the
medicine. What matters is the caring.
Our relationships in the Diocese of Nevada have not
always been smooth. We are after all “battle born.” We have hurt each other at
times and no doubt will hurt each other again. We have scars. But by the grace
of God we do care about each other. We do work together for God’s mission. We
preach the gospel and administer the sacraments. We feed the hungry, clothe the
poor, and visit the prisoners. We do it at vast distances from each other,
separated by 154 mountain ranges, but bound together by the love of
Christ.
Blessing Always,
Bishop Dan
2 comments:
Just me! Sometimes we are like over-powered by doubts because we lack chance to see each other and grab the openness to know the heart and mind so be affirmed that indeed we both love the same thing and wanted to achieve things that glorifies the Lord, and so we'll be blessed by grace. To wait and see is like waiting for disability to come and the Spirit 'get bored' and the human spirit detached from human cry to build life of the threatened by what element (offensive to God's love)? It is alarming to satisfy that way, scary to be contented to not productive. But that's not the spirit of Episcopalianism I thought, the call, if we allow God to speak in our mind, is very high time to fly high the Episcopal banner: in the business of God's love and to establish "brotherhood" for all. We I thought we must go beyond what freezes us, as the world is moving, we are seems dead if stuck, because new idolatry of things is always alive. We cannot afford to lose the meaning of our existence.
Just me! Sometimes we are like over-powered by doubts because we lack chance to see each other and grab the openness to know the heart and mind so be affirmed that indeed we both love the same thing and wanted to achieve things that glorifies the Lord, and so we'll be blessed by grace. To wait and see is like waiting for disability to come and the Spirit 'get bored' and the human spirit detached from human cry to build life of the threatened by what element (offensive to God's love)? It is alarming to satisfy that way, scary to be contented to not productive. But that's not the spirit of Episcopalianism I thought, the call, if we allow God to speak in our mind, is very high time to fly high the Episcopal banner: in the business of God's love and to establish "brotherhood" for all. We I thought we must go beyond what freezes us, as the world is moving, we are seems dead if stuck, because new idolatry of things is always alive. We cannot afford to lose the meaning of our existence.
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