Bishop's Letter: March 2007

March 22, 2007

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,

At the just completed Spring meeting of the House of Bishops, the episcopal leadership of our Church has gathered and struggled diligently and prayerfully to come to a common and honest understanding of who we are as a community of faith at this time when we yearn to move forward living in genuine and generous relationship with our sister provinces in the Anglican Communion. The conversations and discussions were thoughtful and deeply respectful, reflecting not only the widely differing perspectives and gifts God has called into this Church, but also a mutual cherishing of one another that gave glimpses of God’s divine cherishing of all creation. This was essential work because as a body, just as individuals, in order to respond to the other we must understand, accept, and articulate who we are ourselves.

During all of this work, my prayers were filled with images of each of your congregations, of lay and ordained leaders offering yourselves with profound fidelity to Christ’s service, and of the staggering multiplicity that is who we are as the Diocese of Ohio. The composite image of these prayers is breathtaking to me. We are old and young, poor and rich, female and male, white and black, metropolitan and municipal, straight and gay, low church and high church, catholic and evangelical, traditional and progressive, liberal and conservative.

In my prayers you came to me as high-school students on a damp, cold night during the Spring Youth Event, energetically confronting racism in yourselves and our society. You came to me as a group of evangelical and charismatic congregations whose witness and surrender to Christ is an inspiration. You came to me as college students giving your vacation time to mission work on the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast. You came to me as a dozen and a half gay and lesbian clergy, almost all in deeply committed and sustaining partnered relationships, leading some of the most vital and healthy congregations of the Diocese. You came to me as a group of retired bishops and priests who bring wisdom, continuity, and a confidence in God that is born of years of experiencing God’s fidelity to the Church. You came to me as diocesan committee and commission members willing to imagine what God may be dreaming for this Church to be twenty-five years from now, and striving to discern how to grow, give, and serve our way into that beginning today. You came to me as the hundreds of candidates for confirmation, reception, and reaffirmation whom Bishop Bowman, Bishop Williams, and I have greeted on visitations, in your radically differing perspectives and in your common commitment to Jesus Christ and this Church.

In those prayers I was convicted, again and again, of my role and responsibility, reflected in my coming at the back of the procession, to secure and protect the place of each of you as God’s precious gift to the body of Christ, to make certain that all of us find ourselves together there.

After church on the Sunday that fell in the middle of our meetings, Bishop Bowman, Bishop Williams, and I visited the George H. W. Bush Library on the campus of Texas A&M. It is an impressive museum, as well as the repository for all of President Bush’s papers. We spent a good part of the afternoon there, taking in the exhibits and recalling the many extraordinary events that took place during that period of our nation’s history a decade and a half ago.

Among the documents on display was a letter written by the then President to Saddam Hussein dated January 5, 1991, some ten days before the United Nations’ deadline for the Iraqi army’s withdrawal from Kuwait. It was a final plea for standing down and avoiding what would otherwise be inevitable and wide scale bloodshed. One paragraph in particular caught my attention. It read in part, “You may be tempted to find solace in the diversity of opinion that is American democracy. You should resist any such temptation. Diversity ought not to be confused with division.”

Given where that day fell in the middle of the hard and humbling work in which we were engaged, there is little wonder why those lines held my attention so long. The power of evil ceaselessly puts before us the temptation to mistake for division the rich diversity that God inspires among us. And it does so because it knows that divided from one another we are divided from God, and divided from God we are nothing. The tempting of our Savior that we have replicated during Lent was just that, the power of evil’s last effort to separate Jesus from humanity and from God. It was its last attempt to divide God’s own diverse and comprehensive self, which “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation” is able to do. Likewise the temptation to mistake diversity for division is powerless to separate us from one another and from God, unless we give it such authority.

The most recent round of conclusions to which we came at Camp Allen and the documents that represent them are articulations of who we believe we are as The Episcopal Church, in all of our conflicting complexity. They were not arrived at unanimously. They do not reflect a single mind. But they do reflect a single heart and an unflagging desire to be one, both in the breadth of this Church and in the Church beyond us. Whether that challenging complexity represents diversity or division has everything to do with how you and I respond to it. I urge you to read these documents. There are three “mind of the house” resolutions, one of which invites the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates’ Standing Committee into a deeper and face to face dialogue with our House, one of which urges the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church to act in concert with our identity as an interdependent and self-defining member of the Anglican family of Churches, and one of which endorses a statement of who we are as this Church. As well, there is an important “Message to God’s People.” Each can be found on our web site (Mind of the House, Message to God's People).

It is essential that we understand what these documents are and what they are not. Already, some in both the secular and religious press have tried to interpret and define them as statements of separation or division. They are not. They proclaim The Episcopal Church’s unfailing commitment to serving this broken world together with our Anglican sisters and brothers in Christ, in the missional relationship that we have shared for generations. They also explain that The Episcopal Church is a complex and diverse body, so well reflected in our own Diocese of Ohio, and that it is essential to protect the precious and democratically governed diversity that God has drawn together in us, if we are to take our place, in all humility, in the fellowship of Churches with whom we share our Anglican descent. We can not genuinely be this Church and be governed by a primatial authority beyond us. It is neither permitted by our Constitution nor faithful to who we are as God has formed us.

I continue to believe that we are all part of this Church because God has called each of us here, knowing full well how difficult that complexity will be for us. I believe that is how God is challenging and leading us into a unity that is as comprehensive and self-giving as God’s own love. And I pledge to you that I will continue to do everything in my ability as your Bishop and brother in Christ to protect and assure your place in this Church we both love.

Gratefully,

The Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, Jr.

Bishop of Ohio