Closing remarks to the Convention: Bishop Curry

In John’s gospel, Jesus told us, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly”. We don’t have to look any further for a mission statement for the church. Sam Wells writes: “Ministry involves building up the church to embody that abundant life.” Jason writes in “Northern Lights”, “The God of the Bible intends to bless the whole world. Yet he’s committed to doing so through a specific people. God has no gifts that are unmediated. They always come through others. God chooses one people - the church - through whom to bring God’s new creation.” Paul tells us, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

As I’ve watched you this past day and year, I know how much we love our church communities. It is easy to see our churches embody salvation for all of us in Jesus. Yet, we have to keep reminding ourselves they don’t exist for us, but for all the people who are not yet our members. When I visit you on Sundays, you’re all working to carry out the ministry of reconciliation, embody abundant life, make the love of Jesus visible, tangible and real, to be a beacon of hope in your particular context. As we follow Jesus, we want our churches to outlive us and flourish until Jesus comes again. We pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit always to discern what God is doing around us and where we’re being led. I know you do that all the time, because you tell me about it when I visit you. To do that, it has been helpful to organize around those four areas I mentioned yesterday in an effort to build up our ministry together this next year. I’m going to give you some very specific things I want us to do.

1. Leadership Development:

1. We are going to encourage and test a pilot program to prepare a cohort of lay preachers and worship leaders. Working with the Commission on Ministry we will begin working with eight participants this month.

2. We will offer two cycles of the Bishop’s Advisory Commission process to allow for more capacity to support participants interested in discernment.

3. Continue Explorer Days and raise the visibility and understanding of ordained ministry.

4. Full steam ahead on building a network of potential clergy across the Church.

5. Offer training for clergy to focus this year on support of preaching.

6. Provide resources to bridge gaps in resources that we see across your churches, especially in our vulnerable communities.

7. Explore the development of cooperative ministry networks in the Black Belt and in other areas where full-time clergy leadership may be shared with a group or pair of congregations. We have already started doing that, and have had two meetings.

2. Congregational Vitality:

1. We want to come alongside three parishes that may benefit from team guidance and planning, and continue our Outreach/Mission grants to stimulate new ministry for outreach to the world. How can we use our entrepreneurial spirit to be with our communities?

2. Build a team of consultants within the diocese who can assist parishes in community engagement assessment, planning to stimulate new ministry. We want any plan we make to be tailored to the particular congregation’s circumstances, because we want to remove barriers to vitality.

3. Encourage experimentation wherever God raises it up: maybe we could call it the “Ministry of Trying New Things.” The goal is to make us more and more comfortable with experimentation and even failure and starting over. We’ve heard about the Yellow Church, Dungeons and Dragons, Choral Scholars, a fair for disabled children, Bible club, blessing boxes, beans and rice…and I’m sure there is more. What if we look at combining forces, team ministry, trying something for six months and sharing the results. Ask yourself how your church was started and I bet you’ll find that many were offshoots of another community – an example is that All Saints was started by some folks at St. Mary’s. Think about the idea of sending a team of people to begin something new somewhere.

4. Assist congregations with technology, website building and social media strategy. If we are currently managing your website through Digital Faith, we will recreate your website, and include support for streaming, content, and a membership to Caffeinated Church.

5. Offer a combined administrative, formation, planning retreat for small church vitality to help discover ways to come along side each other.

3. Racial Healing:

Earlier this year, the Task Force on Becoming Beloved Community, organized after our last convention, completed their work. Building on the good work of the past 25 years, they recommended the following:

1. Establish a more robust leadership team that works yearround for the Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage weekend.

2. Merge the Taskforce for Becoming Beloved Community with the Truth, Justice, and Racial Reconciliation Commission to create a single group working together to promote racial healing, reconciliation and justice through education, truth telling and pilgrimage. The Task Force also recommended we create a study center at Church of Good Shepherd in Montgomery to encourage and support pilgrims visiting Civil Rights sites that offers teaching, speakers, historians, and researchers. As I told you last year, Good Shepherd is already a Civil Rights trail site in Montgomery. I will appoint an advisory board in the next month to help me create a vision for the work of the Good Shepherd Center in collaboration with the people of Good Shepherd. We have some facility planning to do. I will also ask the Montgomery convocation clergy to form a consortium with the assistance of the Rev. Kelley Hudlow and consider how they might work together to support this ministry.

3. In March the Diocese will sponsor a day-long training event for 50 parishes interested in racial reconciliation training. We want each of you to send two representatives to a program called Courageous Conversations to facilitate formation at parish level.

4. We’ll also complete a website dedicated to Becoming Beloved community.

5. Finally, I will explore the development of a prayer garden in Hayneville in cooperation with the city and county leadership to offer a more formal place for prayers for the Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage.

4. Camp McDowell:

1. We will continue our listening process leading to the formation of a search committee and the selection of an executive director.

2. Continue to develop a planning process, deferred maintenance plan and strategic vision for the future. Working with our talented staff and their leadership, we will help position God’s Backyard so it may function as the resource for our common life of ministry, Christian formation, Care of Creation and service to the Church, Alabama and beyond.

Today you heard about a resolution to begin a communion forest ministry aimed at planting a tree in honor of baptisms, marriages, births, and confirmations, as a symbol of the new life those milestones represent. The idea is explained in the resolution and actually began at the Lambeth Conference. Reforesting the earth is simply good creation stewardship.

Finally, yesterday you heard that I have asked Diocesan Council to explore the results of a feasibility study for a capital campaign. I hope I will have the results of that study by Pentecost. Here’s why I believe we need a campaign.

First, the next five years of our ministry, emerging from Covid, virtual life, demographic changes, and shifting educational processes require us to respond with intention and focus. In some dramatic ways, God is renewing us and restoring us. For the sake of building and nourishing vibrant churches outside our larger population centers, we will need ways to consistently support those less populated areas of our state. Many of those churches are the glue that holds communities together. As we discern what God is doing we’re attempting to stay nimble and keep up with the Holy Spirit. Building and encouraging a stronger network of faith communities, both large and small, that make Jesus’ love real in their contexts is our mission.

I want us to be able to offer competitive, gap funding, support for facilities and people, music, technology, education. I want us to build stronger youth and campus ministry efforts. If we build an endowed support fund we can provide stable funding for smaller, vulnerable communities for many years into the future.

Camp McDowell would be part of the campaign, particularly the more unattractive infrastructure projects like the septic system in lower Camp, Epps Hall, Cabin renovation and Stough Lodge. Summer Camp is our foundation and an enormously powerful path to Christian formation that was once was used three months a year, but now is used 12 months a year. But before I get too far ahead, I want to see all the results of the listening sessions to define next steps.

I do believe If we leave the financial challenges for a later time, then the next Bishop will need at least five years to get ready for it, added to my tenure and it would then be ten years before we attempt to build up the Church for the future. Finally, we need a planned-giving strategy and option that can be widely shared. If we can build support, even when it is realized in the future, we can provide for thriving ministry for our babies and their babies 100 years from now.

I hear from many “Bishop, we want younger people in church.” So do I, but I want us to take care of whomever God sends us. And I know you are doing that. I’ve been reading about how ministry to young people seems to thrive, and what I know is that young people are attracted to real people who share their real life experiences of Jesus. How can we make it a habit of sharing what Jesus is doing in our lives? Maybe that’s the first place to begin.

I realize these are not easy things to pursue. But they are God-sized goals, and worth our best efforts, our money, our Spirit and our heart. We’ll all have time for questions when the feasibility study for the capital campaign is complete. In the meantime, I ask your prayers.

Last but not least, some may wonder, why are we interested in pilgrimages? Well, there is a place in the gospel where Jesus offers the lame man beside the pool of Bethesda a chance to get into the water. Jesus asks him, “Do you want to be healed?” When we go on a pilgrimage, we explore and enter into the story that’s already been lived once. Visiting and rehearing the story then becomes a spiritual path, a chance to get into the water. In doing so, we open ourselves to deeper understanding and healing.

So when we travel the Civil Rights trail and we hear stories of what happened in the bad or good days, even if we were not there when the events occurred, as we think about our faith and listen for the voice of Jesus, something in us will heal. As our young preacher told us this morning, she didn’t know if her prayers healed her mom, but she did know her prayers healed her. We begin to understand our own place in the story. We’re reconciled to God and each other in small steps just by making the journey and asking ourselves the questions.

We have been given the heritage of the Civil Rights struggle as our home base. I think we are called to be part of that heritage as ministry for those who are coming to visit where we actually live. We’re in the midst of watching God reconciling loads of people to each other and themselves. He’s drawing them to him through the pilgrimage. Grace abounds.

Yes, these are God-sized goals, but Jesus has great expectations and a big job for us. After all, to those of you who are preaching Sunday, he calls us “salt and light”, capable of saving and leading the world. Jesus loves us and believes we can live the way he did. Jesus gives us an extravagant love aimed at making God’s kingdom real. He gave us himself, completely and we can’t really afford to do less.

In this exciting and dynamic time, God is leading us and God will show us how to navigate it. After all, the Church belongs to Jesus.

If you sense some urgency in all these ideas and dreams, you are correct. As far as I can tell, the Christian faith was born in urgency. It was and still is life and death stuff. Paul used athletic metaphors about running races, or battle images about wearing armor and fighting the good fight to communicate that God’s call is not optional. The world around us is not always a hopeful, serene or loving place most days. But we live among all that with a kind of hope that can’t be defeated, a kind of light that can’t be overcome. When we share it freely, God’s work with us becomes visible and lives are transformed.

To borrow from Sam Wells, “we are a community of hope whose ambition is no more or no less to be a blessing to others, and to help them bless others, and so imitate the action of God in Christ and anticipate the kingdom.”

Please feel free to send me your ideas, in email or otherwise. Our job is to take the next step and do the next right thing. I am encouraged by the words Paul tells the Philippians, “I have no doubt that the One who started this great work in you is faithful to complete it.”

Thank you for your attention, your prayers and your love. As we close out our time together, I remain blessed to be your Bishop and I hope very soon, I see you at church.