Notes from the Archbishop of Canterbury's presentation at General Convention
Opening remarks by Bp. Greg Rickel - introducing guests, etc.
Opening remarks by Bp. Greg Rickel - introducing guests, etc.
Quick note on Wed. Morning. Yesterday was the longest first day of Convention that I’ve ever experienced. I suppose that’s a good thing. Last Convention - in Columbus - we effectively ran out the clock in the end by not attacking the work we had before us agressively in the beginning of Convention. By the time resolutions with any substance started making their way out of committees and on to the floor, we were well into the second week. Many important resolutions simply didn’t come up for vote or discussion because of the time we spent deliberating the big resolutions regarding the commitment of the Episcopal Church to the Anglican Communion.
Not so this time apparently. We’re already holding hearings in the Communications committee regarding a number of resolutions. The big issues of the moment for us is the proposed plan to move Episcopal Life from a monthly cooperatively published newspaper format to a hybrid online and quarterly magazine format. We’re holding hearings on that tomorrow afternoon and will hopefully get it out to the floor by Sat. That’s important because it has budgetary implications. It could cost us between half a million and a million dollars a year according to some folks to decide to continue things the way they are…
Did have a chance to meet up with old friends yesterday. Had a visit with Bethlehem Deputation, got to see Bishop Paul Marshall and talk about how things are going back east. Sounds like they’re managing to keep on doing the work of the Kingdom in that diocese.
Karen and Kenney spent the day doing the Theme Parks. Apparently the big deal yesterday was that Kenney found the one and only “Owl” pin (my favorite Disney character) in the whole of Disneyland. So now I’m proudly wearing my Owl pin for all to see. Grin.
In terms of the mood of Convention - I have no idea. Things are spinning up so fast I’ve not really had time to have more than briefest of conversations with folks about anything other than the weather. The one thing I’m hearing from folks is that they are recognizing the crisis moment facing the Episcopal Church. (In terms of membership and money.) What I’ve not heard is any coherent response. Hopefully that will emerge.
But I’m not particularly worried. If it doesn’t emerge from General Convention (and I’m not optimisitic), I think is emerging now from the grassroots of the Church.
We just need to be able to recognize it...
Karen, Kenney and I spent last night at Disneyland. We had a blast. I finally got to visit the park for the first time in my life. I'd been reading about it since I was a child but I've only been out to LA a few times in my life and Disneyland never really figured in my plans before.
I was watching the fireworks finale at the end, marveling at the choreography between the explosions and the music. I noticed the way that the songs quoted just enough of the various Disney movie dialogue that you were immediately taken to the same emotional space that you were in watching the movie. It was masterful manipulation. All the chicas and chicos were hugging, the children were in awe and the parents were misty eyed. (Except me of course... I always respond to emotional manipulation by getting fiercely analytical. It's a problem I have...) It was a brilliantly done bit of stagecraft with a final message that, if you just wished hard enough, and believed in yourself, you could anything you wanted.
Which isn't true of course, but it's a lovely bit of American mythology.
What really took me back though was the realization of how much better the smart folks of Disney were at presenting their message than we in the Church are at presenting ours. Would that we would commit to doing such a good job in our proclamation that people would stand for hours just to get a good view of the 10 minutes sermon...
Might make situations such as we're facing in the Episcopal Church right now be a thing of our past.
We made it to Anaheim in more or less one piece. The most exciting part of the trip was watching the temperature drop from about 113 F as we crossed the desert between Phoenix and Los Angeles to about 84 F as we descended down to sea level and arrived in Anaheim. (For those of us who have grown accustomed to the summer heat of Phoenix, that’s a pretty big shift.) My wife and daughter are now snuggled under double blankets in our hotel room.
We met up with my sister-in-law who lives here in California last night and went on a walking tour of the Convention Center complex. We walked down the long promenade in front of the building and suddenly saw the entrance to Disneyland across the street. A quick confab and a tram ride later and there we were in Downtown Disney.
I’ve been in Downtown Disney in Florida before. (We spent a week in Disney World three years ago as one of our few big vacation trips.) I was surprised at how similar this one was here in Anaheim, though it was admittedly smaller and more intimate. The crowd density was about the same.
What struck me though was the contrast between what I’m here to do and what the setting is that we’re attempting to do it in.
The single largest issue according to the people of Arizona that is facing the Episcopal Church is our lack of obvious commitment to the world’s poor. The lack of commitment is seen by most in the Episcopal Church’s budgetary change for the coming three years to remove the agreed upon 0.7% of the total budget to be spent in support of the Millenium Development Goals. I’ve gotten an endless stream of mail asking me and others from the Arizona deputation to work to restore that funding.
(To be fair, the Executive Council and the Presiding Bishop’s staff are arguing that the funding is still in the budget and always has been, it’s just not being broken out explicitly. I and others are responding that the point of the MDG’s is to increase the level of funding not to identify funding that’s already being spent…)
So there I was walking down a street filled with expensive disposable commercial trademark characters thinking about that controversy. I was wondering what it would be like to take the intellectual enterprise and obvious project management skills that created this street full of temples to world commerce and consumerism and use those powers for good.
I don’t know that the Disney imagineers and marketers would be able to solve the world’s problems, but gosh, I imagine they’d find it a much more fulfilling task to try to do that rather than to sell another character-branded widget.
Sort of shame that we as a church have lost the bully pulpit we once had to say that in a compelling way to the community.
Maybe the Episcopal Church (and other churches) might think less about accounting issues and more on how to regain the moral voice and suasion that we once had in society.
Young people from the finest universities in England used to catch the vision of traveling to the poorest parts of the world in hopes of serving the poor. Maybe the foot-soldiers of coroporation motivated consumerism might convinced to do the same thing.
A few folks have asked me if it would be possible to be notified automatically via email whenever a new post is made here at Entangled States.
Looking for the General Convention Guide in good ole PDF format, suitable for reading on all sorts of devices?
If you'd be more interested in the Adobe AIR version...
Well, you'll find that here.
It's useful to have at any rate - it has the calendar of events and the daily legislative schedule.
Quick note as I’m finishing up packing up my "office" for the trip to Anaheim.
It turns out that pretty much all the big publications that deputies will need access to on the floor can be downloaded to be stored on a computer. The Blue Book and the Bishop's and Deputies Handbooks are online from the General Convention website. The Report of the Church Pension Group, with the additional information about the proposed resolutions to this coming Convention are found on the CPG.org website here.
Don't forget to grab a copy of the proposed budget here.
And the latest version of the draft schedule appears to be posted here.
PRO TIP: Check out Evernote if you have a blackberry or an iPhone as well as a laptop. You can store any or all of these documents on your laptop and have them synced to your PDA. Very useful to be able to add notes and have the full document available to you no matter where you are. I've been using Evernote for a few months now and I've found it invaluable when I'm traveling.
So, I’m just checking to see if I have my software configured properly. As annoying as it many bugs are, I still keep coming back to MacJournal to write my longer blog posts. It’s a great little program for writing while one is offline - and since there’s very little connectivity on the floor of the House of Deputies during General Convention - that’s how I’ll be writing down most of my observations.
Once you get back to a place where there’s a wireless signal, it’s a simple thing to upload the new entries. I used this package to write up my “live-blog” from the floor of convention the day that the new Presiding Bishop’s election was announced. I managed to be one of the first “eye-witnesses” to get my post up following the house’s motion to go into recess that evening.
The down side of the software is that it’s still rather clunky. It’s meant more for writing up a personal journal or diary than it is for blogging. And for posting links to other sites, or for quoting blocks of material by another writer, it’s missing a lot of the regular functionality that a dedicated application like MarsEdit includes.
But for longer pieces that are written in my own voice, it’s still my favorite. It has a nice full screen mode where you basically turn off all the computer distractions and just focus on getting your words down on the screen. It’s a lot like sitting down to a blank piece of paper on a typewriter. Which, as I recall, was one of the best parts of writing; at least for me.
So, if you’re reading this, you’ll know that I’ve got it working. And I’ll be planning on using it from the floor of Convention.
Watch this space as they say.
I quipped the other day that I’m starting to think about the General Convention in Anaheim pretty much all the time right now. The start is less than a week away as I write this, and things are heating up a bit.
There are a couple of important things that I really think we’re going to need to ask ourselves, and they’re not things I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere. 1. Is it possible for the General Convention to set policy for the Episcopal Church? Certainly the Convention is charged with creating changes to the Constitution, Canons and worship life of the Episcopal Church, but is it realistic to believe that Convention can find a way to manage the tactical day to day operations of the Episcopal Church. Lots of deputies attending General Convention believe that it can and should have responsibility for that level of management. And yet for the last nine years, the one constant refrain I’ve heard is the frustration of the Church Center staff with the actions of General Convention and the folks of General Convention being frustrated with the actions of the Church Center staff. Many of the Church Center staff were members of Convention or active in the Episcopal Church’s interim bodies before they were appointed or hired to their present positions in the Church Center. So it stands to reason that they shared the same frustrations that so many have on the outside of the staff. So, since most of the Church Center folks I’ve talked with now are frustrated with the Convention folks, I’d be very curious to hear what sorts of experiences they’ve had which have changed their minds. I’m not at all convinced that such a large body at the Episcopal Church and/or General Convention can really manage itself by the direction of a once every three year convention. I’m thinking that even Executive Council is too large to be very effective - and they are maybe a 1/10th the size of Convention and meet something like 3 times a year. Decisions just need to be made too quickly and second guessing everything by outsiders isn’t really helping. The result seems to be that we spend a great deal of time being frustrated with each other and watching mutual trust erode. It’s the eroding trust that exacerbates the situation and makes it generally so bad that people who are competent in their positions either refuse to apply, or when hired quickly decide that this is simply untenable and quit. I’m thinking that Convention needs to set broad policy and get out of the way of the folks being charged with implementing that policy. Which is how things work when they work well... 2. Have we become so addicted to fighting amongst ourselves in Convention that we’re going to unconsciously find conflict when there really isn’t any present? I’m seeing signs that this is unfolding in front of us as we prepare for the opening gavel next week. Most of the angry conservatives have left. The folks who remain who are conservative are loyal Episcopalians and have, as yet, not prepared any real agenda to attack with at Convention. And yet friends of mine on the Progressive side are acting as if these remaining conservative voices need to be fought against with the same sort of vigor as they used in years past. Those who would really swing back to a provocation are now gone - for good or for ill. Those who remain are here to witness to what they believe but have no real expectation of being successful anymore. Dan Martins has something to say about all this here. With the absence of the true opposition to progressive voices, I’m watching the House of Bishops be deputized to fill the vacancy in the rhetoric of those on the progressive end of the spectrum. And I’m thinking that it’s happening not because the House of Bishop’s are really the bad people they’re being portrayed to be, but rather because we’re all so used to the conflict that we’re going to nominate someone to be the opposition no matter what the facts are... Which is probably not a healthy way to do things.
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