Episcopate

The Role of Bishops in a Shared Future

George Sumner, Robert W. Prichard, R. William Franklin, Allen Shin, Katharine Jefferts Schori, Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, Hector Monterroso, Robert Fitzpatrick, Robert C. Wright, Kimberly Lucas, Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, Bonnie Perry, Sean W. Rowe, Cornelia Eaton, Daniel Gutierrez, C. Andrew Doyle, C. Andrew Doyle

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781640655546
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

Top voices highlight important changes in the role of bishop.

Compelling essays, written by bishops, other clergy, and academics from across the Episcopal Church, reflect the breadth of thinking on the history, current state, and future of the role of leadership within the denomination and the wider Anglican Communion. Topics include the transformation of the role over the last fifty years, a review of historic documents on the episcopacy, issues of race and gender, and the definition of ministry and leadership. This volume will be of interest to leaders across denominations as well as scholars.

CHAPTER 1

On the Episcopate

George R. Sumner

Setting Out the Question

Why bishops, beyond the sheer inertia of habit? What are they good for? How has the case for them changed due to the rapidly changing circumstances of the contemporary church? What have our answers got to do with basic questions of identity in The Episcopal Church? These are the questions I want to address in this brief chapter. At the outset, I set as my goal to offer arguments that are equally accessible to readers with various commitments on contemporary and controversial theological issues. I also want to recognize the valid side of the tacitly “congregationalist” assumption in much of our church life: the local congregation in worship, community, and service is most real to most members. It is against this natural sense that the case for bishops must (and can) be made. Of course, I acknowledge that we bishops live up to our calling fallibly; all Christian ministry, lay and ordained, exists under the sign of forgiveness, both offered and received.

The Inherited Nonnegotiables

Let us begin with the features of the episcopate that are inherent to the calling: the nonnegotiables—features that are context independent but not content independent theologically. By this I mean that the office is comprehensible only within the specific tradition of Christian theology, throughout which it has borne certain theological meanings. It does not suffice to offer general reasons for leadership in social, or specifically religious, organizations. While the church can be helpfully studied sociologically, those features particular to the episcopate as a tradition of explicitly Christian leadership are more pertinent. How is the episcopate as a role in the narrative of the church in general, and Anglicanism in particular, to be understood? Going back to basics, returning ad fontes (“to the sources”) is crucial, especially in situations that are otherwise confounding. To change the metaphor, in such a murky moment we most need the polestar.

Bishops, as our ordinal tells us, are “called to be one with the apostles.”¹ In the New Testament, the apostles were witnesses of the resurrection of the incarnate and crucified Jesus.² First then, the office has an inherently Christological center of gravity. We are like the figure of John the Baptist in the great triptych of Gruenewald (itself a product of a time of plague), with his outsized index finger pointing to the cross.³ Because the scriptures are the primary witness to the crucified and risen One, bishops are invariably to be its exegetes as well. Resurrection here is not a symbol for some more general concept, but points to Christ in his specific, narratively derived identity. Furthermore, the Resurrection both anticipates the End and inaugurates his eschatological reign. To be its witness is to point toward the invasion of the kingdom into time and space, the confrontation with the transcendent in Christ. The liminality and the sanctity of the episcopate are derived from the One to whom they point. In his light we are not reducible to managers or church bureaucrats (though we are those too).

Second, bishops remind us that the church is “deep and wide,” by which I mean reaching back in time to the apostles and reaching out in space to the ends of the earth. Bishops are inheritors, bearers of memory, signs for the local church that they do in fact have a wider story, inheritance, family. It is worth noting that with respect to being signs of our inheritance from the apostles, as well as our share in the apostolicity and catholicity of the church, the episcopate in our church claims to partake of a wider Christian tradition. Bishops cannot be understood simply as designated functionaries or religious practitioners of our national denomination. In the same way, our appeal to scripture, our celebration of Baptism and Eucharist, and our recitation of the Nicene Creed make a claim, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, that we stand in a vaster company and are answerable to an older norm. We are, again, doing more than providing administration and leadership for our own membership or implementing our own rules (though we are also doing that).

To call it “the episcopate” necessarily makes a wider claim and places implied conceptual constraints on us that we may not notice: the doctrine that we have received, to which the ordinal refers, not only is from our own local formulations but also partakes of a wider inheritance of articulated belief.⁴ In a similar way, our invitation to a gathering like Lambeth, while not imposing on us a superior synodical and canonical authority, symbolizes the wider global collegiality that one famous Anglican statement described as “mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ.”⁵ Though there is in us Americans often the spirit of “don’t tread on me,” we cannot evade these wider bonds of affection inherent to the episcopal office. To be sure, the episcopate in its “rabbinic” and exegetical side will lead to disagreement, since the interpretation of the Bible is hardly uniform. At least we can say that the episcopate is an inherited and collegial ministry of fellowship and contention around the Word of God.

Third, the bishop is the chief pastor, though of course we share this role collegially with our clergy in the diocese. Shepherds protect, feed, and guide the sheep. How this is lived out varies by era and area, though the functions remain (and, in the time of SafeChurch, for example, an important aspect of guarding has been rediscovered). These three dimensions, witness to the Resurrection, representative of the church catholic and apostolic, and chief pastor, are true regardless of what the financial, educational, geographic, and other particularities of a diocese might be. Note that this third basic aspect of episcopacy has, in most cases, an element of place—one is a bishop of somewhere in particular. Hence there is inevitably a tension between the localism and the universalism of the calling, between the bishop thought of with their presbyters in one place and that same bishop with fellow bishops “from away.” And at the heart of the office is that this all-too-human, walking symbol of these wider realities actually shows up, at a parish, early Sunday morning, with hat and stick, a present and embodied reminder of these wider things. Thus, in this distressing time of distance and virtuality, bishops must struggle to continue to be witnesses to the necessarily present and embodied nature of all sacramental acts.

Contextual Particularities

It is surely true that context-independent theological parameters can make non-anxious leadership more likely by alleviating the need to make it all up anew. However, we must also bring these features, like bass notes, into relationship with factors that do have more to do with our own twenty-first-century North American context. First, there is the unique history of the American episcopate: an order not derived from its (former) imperial power, with democratically elected bishops exercising authority in synod, and an episcopal house, in parallel with our secular government, that may sometimes act as a “cooling dish” in convention debate. These are features of our own kind of contextualization that are worth noting and protecting. To see bishops as per se elitist may overlook this particularly American contribution.

Second, the episcopate is being exercised in an era of disestablishment and ecclesial marginalization. We are a smaller and less wealthy church, further from the levers of power, in a gradually more secularizing culture than in the past. These trends have been accelerated by the present pandemic/recession. The prescriptions one commonly hears in the face of these challenges are sometimes diametrically opposed. Do we need to become more socially dense, better catechized, more distinct, a kind of liturgical “community of character” (as in the work of Hauerwas and Dreher)? Or is our future more diffuse, localized, and pluralist in expression (Moltmann’s “total ministry” and “emerging” are examples)? Both react to the same seismic shifts, and both may overestimate how much say we have in some of the changes coming our way. The first reaction, for example, would lead one to think we need a more disciplined and traditional form of theological education, and the latter would reinforce the use of local schools of ministry of a more informal kind. But throughout, the challenge of postmodernity—conceptual, financial—faces us all. Differing responses to the same shift have more in common than one would at first see, for in both cases the bishop must find his or her voice in a situation of diminished power of various kinds (and try to grasp the kinds of freedom it allows).

Third, in a visibly fraying society we need bishops with a prophetic edge. We could have a debate about what the theological conditions for such a ministry would be. One might argue that a strong sense of divine transcendence is the main prerequisite for such a prophetic word to the wider culture, since it provides the leverage over the culture’s own assumptions.⁶ Some of the most trenchant social critiques in our tradition have come from theological viewpoints that were less culturally accommodated.⁷ The trick is that the bishop offering critique must at the same time empathize and be in solidarity with their people. At the very least we need to recognize that the relation between this prophetic edge and one’s theology of culture, as well as between the edge and pastoral identification, is not a simple or straightforward matter.

A few years ago, a priest in a suburb told me, “Bishop, we are growing because, more or less, people who come like my sermon, the band, and the Sunday school. As soon as we’re batting one for three, they’re gone to a church down the street. Very few are here because we are Episcopalians.” The market is king! On the other hand, they have come to expect communion every Sunday. The notion that having a bishop is s a part of their ecclesial identity is a work in progress. The American democratic inheritance, functional disestablishment, and the edge are, to greater and lesser extents, what they expect in the ethos of the church they have joined, and they only need to be helped to see how episcopate relates to these too.

In reprise, those abiding features mentioned earlier ought to be entailed in all churches: Christology, apostolicity and catholicity, and koinonia are not our own possessions. So bishops are servants of things that are of the esse, and precisely as they faithfully subserve these, they show bishops to be of the church’s bene esse.⁸ In other words, the people in that suburban church tacitly expect certain things that make their gathering a church, and they may come to see the benefit of this particular kind of symbolic person who is responsible for ensuring that first things stay first, that birthrights not be sold for bowls of lentil stew. Maybe, culturally, they can come to imagine me, at least, to be “spiritual quality control.”

With every calling comes a concatenation of trials and challenges. Given this mantle and context, it is not hard to locate the pitfalls, some of which I have already mentioned.⁹ In our time, partisanship tinged by anger is an obvious risk. Our culture turns everything into an individual commodity, even as it valorizes novelty. The workaholic is not rare in the episcopal ranks; feeling the lack of time to study and read we may have brought with us from the presbyterate too. Sometimes we forget that the symbol that we embody precedes and exceeds us as individuals, though this ought to be a relief. For example, nearing retirement, we, like all pastors, wonder what it has amounted to and whether it was enough—the challenge of ego integration.¹⁰ As to this last test, we must by grace grasp at the conclusion that our calling is by its nature a handing over to us and from us for a time, of testimony, symbolic personhood, and shared pastoring. Retirement is the gift of seeing how little of it is ours. All the aforementioned challenges grow directly out of the intersection of the enduring nature and the present context of this calling.

As an addendum, we can readily find all these apostolic elements and contextual features named or implied in our own ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer of 1979. The preamble to the examination¹¹ comprises all three of the perennial callings of the bishop, while what we have called contextual particularities have left fingerprints in the subsequent interrogation in the sharing of the “government of the whole Church,” “the support for all the baptized in their gifts and ministries,” and in the “stirring of conscience.”¹²

Where Does All This Leave Us?

One common thread throughout this account is inheritance, which does not exclude contestation or tension. Another is the challenge that the retrieval of the abiding meaning of the episcopate offers to contemporary construals of the episcopate as a leader/administrator of a nonprofit, say, or only a representative of a particular American, twenty-first-century denomination. While these are true, they are not enough either to sustain us or, by God’s grace, to renew our church. The thread running through this whole account is what I would call the indirect pertinence of the office. By this I mean the episcopate’s essential difference from the local pastorate, not just in order of magnitude but also in purpose. The bishop points away toward Christ, upward to the mysterious reality of the Resurrection, backward and outward to the apostles and our fellow churches of the nations, to the midst of society, toward features of society we may wish to avoid seeing. In each case being a contributor toward a surplus of meaning is inherent in the job. While the bishop may have a burden to worry over the perplexities of our cultural moment in many ways, this here-and-now edge is not blunted but enhanced by the office’s more distant provenance and its oblique nature. The bishop learns to come alongside his or her larger flock, but as a living symbol of attention to these wider referents. In a moment in which our life may be consumed by immediate worries of survival, the retrieval of the episcopate in its indirect pertinence, ironically, may never have been more important.

CHAPTER 2

The Transformation in the Role of Bishop in The Episcopal Church since 1965

Robert W. Prichard

Introduction

In the years following the end of World War II, the bishops of The Episcopal Church took on an expanded role, which might best be characterized as CEO and evangelist-in-chief. It was a position predicated on growth in numbers and resources. After a period of stagnation in population and church growth during the interwar years, America was experiencing a baby boom, rapid growth in new suburbs, and a surge in church building. New Deal high school construction and the post–World War II GI Bill enabled former members of the military to enter college, swelling the numbers of the college educated, the demographic group in which The Episcopal Church and other mainline Protestants had traditionally been the most successful.¹ Since clergy were recruited from among college graduates, this growth in college population also presented the opportunity to find an adequate number of candidates for ordination, something that had troubled mainline denominations throughout their history. At the same time there was a revival of interest in religion, spurred on by such evangelists as Church of England preacher Brian Green (1901–1993) and Baptist William Franklin (Billy) Graham, both of whom were gathering large crowds to hear their preaching by the late 1940s. The nation was full of opportunity for church growth.

Bishops who ...