Executive Council opening remarks

Presiding bishop’s opening remarks to Executive Council

I’m going to talk about the kinds of mission we’re engaging in and beyond the Church, and where in recent months I’ve been particularly asked to enter into this work.  I’m going to frame this in the context of the Five Marks of Mission, both as a witness to how they shape the work that my office is called to attend to, and as a kind of accountability exercise.  None of us is called to do all of the work, but awareness comes from paying attention to how we and our communities are involved.
1  Proclaim the good news of the kingdom is the First Mark of Mission

That’s the basic work of the church – holding up a vision of God’s dream for all creation – a world living in right relationship with God and neighbor, so that all people live in peace because there is justice.  That vision prompts movement toward the reign of God that’s more particularly addressed in some of the other Marks, but I think relationship-building belongs here – especially when focused on developing shared understandings and strategies for moving toward that dream.

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2013/06/08/presiding-bishops-opening-remarks-to-executive-council/

House of Deputies President Gay Jennings addresses Executive Council

In her 1998 book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris writes about learning to believe:
Perhaps my most important breakthrough with regard to belief came when I learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of my disbelief and my doubts as I was of my burgeoning faith. This new perspective also helped me to deal with my anger over the fact that churches, as institutions, so often behave in polarized and polarizing ways. I found an unexpected ally in Fr. Martin Smith, an Anglican monk, who wrote in an issue of Cowley, his monastery’s newsletter, that ambivalence is a sacred emotion. Restating in spiritual terms Keats’s definition of ‘negative capability,’ he wrote that he finds

“a widespread need in contemporary spirituality to find ways of praying and engaging with God, our selves, and one another that have room for simultaneous contradictions, the experience of opposite emotions. We need to find the sacredness in living the tensions and to admit how unsacred, how disconnecting and profane, are the attempts at praying and living while suppressing half of the stuff that fascinates or plagues us…We can connect our own fear of death and the unknown,’ Smith writes, ‘with the institution’s dread of the new.”[1]

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2013/06/08/house-of-deputies-president-gay-jennings-addresses-executive-council/