On General Convention resolutions and our priorities

A plea to keep the main thing the main thing

It’s a commonplace that budgets are moral documents. The idea is that how an organization or nation or individual spends money often tells you more about their commitments than their publicly expressed values. In the world of the labor movement, stories of progressive-coded companies or organizations fighting attempts at unionization that would require them to pay their workers more are so common as to be a cliché. But even in cases where there is a less glaring contradiction between stated and expressed values, it's been a helpful heuristic for me: to understand a given organization, don’t look at what they say, but how they choose to allocate scarce resources, be that money or something else.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as the Episcopal Church’s General Convention approaches. I think that an analysis of the Episcopal Church’s budget with this approach would be a worthwhile endeavour. Indeed, Fr Everett Lees has begun this work, pointing out that we spend a whopping 60% of our national church budget on governance and administration, far above typical nonprofit guidelines. But I don’t think it only applies to budgetary matters narrowly. Time to consider legislation is incredibly precious – after all, GC only meets every three years! – and so it seems to me that considering how we choose to spend that very limited amount of time tells us a good deal about what we as a church actually value and prioritize.

And if this is so, then I worry that we have really lost the plot.

The Rev. Scott Gunn has been doing excellent work blogging his way through the proposed GC resolutions over at his blog, Seven Whole Days. I encourage you to go read them, especially if you will be attending General Convention. As I’ve spent time reading Scott’s work and the resolutions on the General Convention website itself, I have been increasingly disturbed by the mismatch between the matters that should be of greatest urgency to our church and the things upon which we are actually focusing.

Let me explain what I mean.

Our church has no fewer than 36 resolutions to be considered which involve making statements on matters of public policy. These come out of Committees 6 and 7, which deal with Social Justice and International Policy and Social Justice and United States Policy, respectively. Some 13 of them deal with the Israel/Palestine conflict specifically, and the scuttlebutt is that these will be highly controversial and take up a good deal of time. We will devote many resolutions, and by all indications spend a good deal of legislative time, to various public statements the church will make about this or that political issue. But I have to confess that, besides making us feel good about ourselves for taking a stand, it is unclear to me what any of these statements actually accomplish. It is not clear to me that anyone pays any particular attention to the Episcopal Church’s political statements one way or another, especially since these statements generally confine themselves to expressions of condemnation or solidarity, expressions of what they wish governments would do, without any additional action. Take, for example, the Episcopal Church’s resolution about the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement. Leaving aside whatever one thinks about the merits of BDS, it is noticeable to me that the resolution simply “recognize[s] the legitimacy of BDS and express[es] its solidarity with it.” It doesn’t, say, direct the national church to divest from any investments in the occupied territories. Now, I will confess that I am not sure that spending a lot of time on political resolutions with more teeth would be particularly helpful. But arguing over dozens of resolutions that simply express that a few thousand Episcopalians like or don’t like a thing seems like a remarkable waste.

[Edit: I want to make clear, in a way that I fear the original piece did not, that I think that the current war in Gaza and the long history of Palestinian displacement and oppression are issues of tremendous moral concern. I am appalled by the evils committed by the Israeli government and armed forces over the course of this war (and those committed by Hamas, of course, but I am a US citizen and the US government is only supporting one of those two). I am just profoundly unconvinced that passing resolutions that ‘endorse’ or ‘condemn’ or ‘express solidarity’ or ask the US government to do something without any other action accomplishes anything substantial. The US government will not close Guantanamo Bay or prohibit assault rifles because the Episcopal Church has said that it should.]

Unsurprisingly, we also have a great number of resolutions about liturgy. Granted, this relates to the heart of our life as a visible church, namely, the public worship of God. What’s more, our constitution (rightly, in my view) requires us to deal with most liturgical matters at the level of General Convention. So General Convention will probably always be spending time dealing with liturgy. And to be clear, some of these liturgical resolutions are substantive and deserve careful attention. But note that we have a full 21 resolutions – around half of the resolutions that deal with liturgy – that concern various amendments to our sanctoral calendar. I don’t mean major feasts of the church here, but rather our ballooning number of optional commemorations remembering this or that Christian worthy. Now, for those for whom some of these newly proposed commemorations are particularly important, we already have provisions in our prayer book for commemorating past Christians who are not on our official calendar; there is nothing stopping a given community from celebrating xyz person anyway. But instead of just letting this happen, a lot of resolutions – and likely a lot of time – will be devoted to minor calendrical tweaks. Perhaps this is because some hope that the calendar will do important identity-formation work for Episcopalians. I’m not sure this is such a good idea, but more importantly I doubt that the calendar actually works this way. Frankly, I strongly suspect that outside of monastic communities and daily eucharist parishes, few laypeople or even clergy will encounter these changes. Are they actually worth the time that they will likely take?

If we will be talking a lot about what we wish that various national and international bodies would do (with no particular way to make them do it) or about various calendrical changes (which most people won’t notice), what won’t we be talking about? Well, if the number of resolutions is any guide, we won’t be talking much about evangelism, discipleship, or congregational vitality in the face of church decline. By the numbers, there are two – 2! – resolutions that deal with evangelism, five dealing with congregational vitality, and six dealing with formation and discipleship. This means that there are fewer resolutions dealing with evangelism, discipleship, and congregational vitality at our upcoming General Convention than there are about Israel/Palestine – or, for that matter, than there are about our calendar of commemorations. Let me repeat myself: despite the fact that the Episcopal Church has very little capacity to do anything about the horrific war in Gaza, there are fewer resolutions dealing with evangelism, discipleship, and congregational vitality at our upcoming General Convention than there are about Israel/Palestine.

I find this deeply alarming for several reasons. First of all, if Jesus’ words in Matthew 28 are anything to go by, making disciples of Jesus – that is, sharing the Gospel so that the Spirit makes new Christians and working to help existing Christians deepen their life of faith – is our reason for existence. It is why there is a visible church. It is our duty and our joy to share the good news of the salvation that Jesus won for us so that people may be led to the worship of God, both in our public worship and in all parts of their lives, now and for eternity. This is the whole point. Even if our churches were full of people and our institutions were healthy on every level, I would hope that evangelism, discipleship, and vitality would be prioritized when we meet together to govern our common life, because these are (or should be) at the heart of what we do.

But of course, our churches aren’t full of people and our institutions aren’t healthy. The Episcopal Church is in rapid numerical decline, a decline hastened by the covid pandemic. White mainline Protestant congregations have, as I’ve written, a well-known discipleship problem. We, on average, pray and read the Bible and view faith as important much less frequently than Black Protestants or evangelicals. Research about the Episcopal Church specifically has shown a pronounced lack of spiritual vitality, and a dissatisfaction about that lack on the part of our parishioners (see, for example, this from RenewalWorks). If there were ever a moment to be focusing on the core elements of what we do, to emphasize the essentials and let fall things that, while good in themselves, are not so essential, it would be now. But there is very little evidence that this is what we will do. I expect that we will be like the Anglican Church of Canada, which spent so much time at its last General Synod arguing over the primate’s retirement and an Israel/Palestine resolution that a proposed resolution on evangelism ran out of time to be considered.

Frankly, it is hard not to feel that this is a statement of the values and priorities of our church. It is hard not to conclude that we would rather discuss our public policy preferences or fiddle with the liturgy than actually address the crisis in which we find ourselves. It’s an overused metaphor, but the image of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic really does come to mind. And more basically even then taking our crisis seriously, it’s a matter of keeping the main thing the main thing. At level of revealed preferences, we sure seem to care far more about taking the right social justice line on xyz matter (no matter how irrelevant our taking that line is!) than about sharing the good news about Jesus to those who do not know it or deepening the faith of the people in our pews. For once, faithfulness to Jesus and pragmatic attention to the future of our institution go together – and for some reason, we are choosing neither! This is not good! I fear that, like the lukewarm church in Laodicea, we are risking being cast out of the Lord’s mouth.

Now, to be fair, it is possible that questions of evangelism, formation, and congregational vitality are less amenable to being addressed by legislation than the liturgy, say. There is definitely more that we could say about them than we will, but this may be somewhat true. And there are things other than these three topics that are of urgent importance; Title IV reform is, I think, extremely necessary for our church. But goodness: I suspect our time would be much better served by making the resolutions we can about these central matters and then cutting a day of legislation to offer workshops where the clergy and lay leaders of consistently growing congregations share their experiences and offer best practices. Incidentally, the Task Force for Reimagining the Episcopal Church (TREC) proposed this way back in 2015; like most of TREC recommendations, it was ignored. Or, for that matter, GC itself could be radically slimmed down, reducing itself largely to maintaining the institutional life of the church and addressing liturgical matters, with the money saved funding a few church planters or research on effective revitalization or what have you. But instead, we are spending a lot of time and a lot of money to bring people together to pass resolutions on matters that don’t matter very much.

I know that there are so many Episcopalians who are far more concerned about questions of evangelism, vitality, and formation than our General Convention schedule suggests. If any of you reading this will be at General Convention, I implore you to make sure that the resolutions on these questions get discussed with the seriousness they deserve – even if it means we spend a little less time on the calendar or on public policy resolutions.

More broadly, I think that this reveals a challenge for all of us: how can we make our structures, at every level of the church, better serve the Gospel? It is tempting, I think, to default to cynicism about the work of national church governance, to see it as a distraction from the real work that happens at the parish level. Don’t get me wrong: a certain degree of cynicism is warranted. I confess that I am rather less confident about the capacity of our national church structures to drive renewal than I once was. We do, after all, have nearly three times as many proposed resolutions about various public policy issues at our next General Convention than about evangelism, discipleship, and congregational vitality combined. But, as I said after the last General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, I do think that our national and diocesan structures have an important role to play in the future of our church, and our current period of institutional transformation might mean that there are opportunities to restructure our common life in ways that actually support evangelism, discipleship, and congregational vitality. What would it mean to put the Gospel at the heart of our common life? I want to find out.

I want to conclude by quoting from my piece about last ACC General Synod:

I want to say this to clergy and lay Christian leaders involved in governance in Canada and beyond: We can live differently than resigning ourselves to managing an institution in precipitous decline while tiptoeing around the reality of that decline. We have something more exciting than passing resolutions that accomplish very little while ignoring the elephant in the room of coming collapse. In the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we have something transformative, exciting, worth staking your life on! This has been one of the most precious consolations of the summer in Wittenberg for me: the reminder of how profoundly exciting the Gospel is! Jesus is so very loving, so gracious to us. We worship such a good God! What a privilege to get to serve him as a minister!

It’s not that we have to orient church governance towards the Gospel or have to engage in real discipleship or evangelism if we want our church to survive. No! It’s that because of what Jesus did for us, we get to use his person and work as a measuring stick for how we order our ecclesial common life, we get to invite those who know him and those who do not into ever-deeper relationship with him and each other. This, it seems to me, is a reason that enduring the unglamorous work of church governance in struggling institutions is thoroughly worthwhile: because it too can be about Jesus and how our church might more abundantly and boldly proclaim the saving Gospel. And my hope for all of us is that God might use us to make our governance much more clearly oriented towards Jesus, not least so that we can find real joy and even excitement in the work.

As I prepare to return to Canada and my service in the Canadian church, I want to keep this question that emerged so powerfully from my studies this summer front and center: how can I foster in myself and others in our church a real excitement for the Gospel, and order all of my work in the church towards its proclamation? I’ll be excited to continue that conversation with you in the coming weeks and months.