Jesus said, “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.”
Luke 22:27
On June 26th, for the second time in my tenure as bishop, I had the privilege of participating in the election for our church’s presiding bishop. As with the election of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry in 2015, Bishop Sean Rowe was elected on the first ballot.
Throughout this Convention, the bishops have been united in our gratitude and admiration for the five bishops who stood for election as friends and mutually supportive colleagues. And we were more united than we realized in our conviction that the Spirit was calling Bishop Rowe to be our next servant leader.
Addressing a joint body of bishops and deputies, Bishop Rowe called us to be courageous and resilient likening this moment in the Church to his experience growing up in Northern Pennsylvania.
I am from the Rust Belt, and in the economic unraveling that has befallen our communities in the last fifty years, I have been around to see things I love go away. My grandfathers were steel workers, and nearly my entire family worked in industry. In the space of about three years in the mid-1980s, when I was in elementary school, I watched everything I had known evaporate. … People in our region are resilient, but we spent years resisting the change that was forced upon us, wishing things would go back to being the way they had been.
If we are honest with each other and ourselves, we know that we cannot continue to be The Episcopal Church in the same way no matter where we live. To participate fully and effectively in God’s mission we must reorient our churchwide resources—budgets and staff—to support dioceses, where ministry on the ground happens.
I’ve had the sense for years that God has been preparing Bishop Sean for this moment. In his late 40s, he has served longer than most active bishops and he has been a champion of what he calls “experiments for the gospel.” While bishop, he earned a PhD in organizational leadership and development. He has mastered the systems that are in need of reform, becoming the go-to person for church leaders needing help of any kind. As he said at a previous gathering of bishops, “I know where the levers of change are.”
But efficiency is not an end in itself. “Reorienting our structures, our budgets, and our relationships,” he said, “will only matter if we do it for the sake of the gospel.” His is a quiet, deep faith, evangelical in his devotion to Jesus, broad in spiritual curiosity, with a passion for racial reconciliation and justice.
Bishop Sean genuinely sees the good in everyone. He has the relational maturity to work across the divisions and often painful conflicts in our Church, all of which are present at this Convention.
For the sake of the gospel, he exhorted us to seek higher ground: “I ask you to think of this time as a relational jubilee… We must create a beloved community in which we can disagree with each other without shaming, or blaming, or tearing each other apart. Let’s direct our anger at injustice instead of turning it inward on each other.”
Bishop Sean also has a sense of humor, which he uses to encourage us not to take ourselves too seriously, or to point out truths about ourselves that we’d rather ignore. Addressing the bishops as our parliamentarian before we began debating resolutions he said, “Let’s acknowledge that we are all brilliant, so we don’t need to prove it to one another when we rise to speak.” And in his introductory video shown at the beginning of Convention, he quoted Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, “Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.”
As General Convention draws to a close, know that your clergy and lay leaders are representing the Diocese of Washington with distinction. As a team, they are tracking and speaking to significant legislation, learning as much as they can, and listening for the Holy Spirit movement in our midst. Other EDOW leaders are here serving in many capacities and they will return with their own witness to give. Please join me not only in thanking all who serve, but also asking them about their experience.
Lastly, this has been a time of thanksgiving for the ministry of our current Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry. Episcopalians are united in love, gratitude, and awe of his unfailing capacity to inspire us to know, love, and follow Jesus.
In his sermon at General Convention, Presiding Bishop Curry said that as part of his final performance review, he hoped that all Episcopalians would memorize and live by one passage from the New Testament:
Beloved, let us love one another. Because love is of God, and those who love know God. Those who do not love do not know God because God is love. 1 John 4:7-8
He wants us to remember, as part of his legacy, that in whatever we say or do: If it isn’t about love, it isn’t about God.
The service in which the primatial crozier of The Episcopal Church will pass from one leader to the next will take place in November, just days before our nation’s presidential election.
It is indeed a pivotal time. Bishops Curry and Rowe encourage us to find our hope and peace in Christ, and to live with courage. Quoting Thomas Merton, Bishop Rowe reminded us that in times of uncertainty and change, “courage is the authentic form taken by love.”
Together we are learning to be brave.
