07.05.12
“Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!”
Mother Robin posted this dispatch on the Diocese of Spokane’s convention blog:
Yesterday, both houses—the House of Deputies (clergy and lay) and the House of Bishops (yes, bishops!) seated together heard pre-convention addresses from Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Shori, and from Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies.
Bishop Katharine, speaking first, called us to unity in mission, “the beating heart of God.” She bid us be open to the breath of God in our deliberations and beyond, a breath which sometimes comes as the joy of “first breath,” after a baby’s whack on the backside—a breath of newness. Sometimes we experience God’s breath as “rescue breathing” offered at what might be at the end of life—when it’s important just to relax and receive it. Both are breaths which beget other breaths: the breaths of beginnings, and they come at different times in our life.
In the spirit of this breath of newness, Bishop Katherine calls Episcopalians, throughout the church’s 16 nations, into service of God’s reign on earth, uniting not only across national and political boundaries, but across the divides of varying understandings of what it means to be church. Only when we work together are we as strong as we can be: “We’ll never be who we were created to be if we use only the fingers of the right hand or only the fingers of the left hand”—we need both hands to do God’s work in the world.
President Anderson charged us to remember that in our current configuration as the institutional church, we have not done all we can to enfranchise persons across the spectrum of gender, color, age, or order of ministry—too many are left out, power is not shared equally. As we consider how we might reconfigure our church governance structure to be more agile, more responsive to the changes of a society hungry for the healing word of Jesus, Anderson urged us to keep in mind how we might better equalize power in our infrastructure.
Read more here: gc2012.spokanediocese.org/
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