David Brown, Alice Cotten, Jane Gordon, Bobbie McGuire, Margaretta Yarborough, Rev Tammy Lee, Richard Schori Rev Michael Singer, Bishop Rob Skirving, Rev. Caleb Lee, Rev. Matt Overturf, Rev. Jon Sargeant, Rev. Ashley Simpson, Emily Gowdy Canady, the congregations of East Carolina, and Sara Tavela
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Letters to the Editor
DIOCESAN DIGEST
Send letters to the Editor to communications@dioceseeastcarolina.org Fall 2024
Celebrating Bishop Rob Skirving’s 10th Anniversary
Explore a celebration of photo memories from the last ten years
2024 Special Convention Overview
Learn all about the business of special convention and what’s ahead
The Search for Our 9th Bishop of East Carolina
Hear from Bishop Skirving and the President of the Standing Committee
Stone Upon Stone: A Pilgrimage to England’s Cathedrals
Walk with the pilgrims of St Paul’s, Beaufort as they travel in England
Ordination Joy
See our newly-ordained priests
November 8, 2024 marked exactly ten years since Bishop Skirving was ordained bishop here in East Carolina, and what follows on the next pages are some of the visual memories from the last ten years Our hearty congratulations go to Bishop Skirving for a decade of dedicated ministry and faithful leadership here in the Diocese of East Carolina. Happy 10th Bishop-versary, Bishop Skirving!
2 0 2 4 S P E C I A L
BISHOP ROB SKIRVING CALLS FOR HIS SUCCESSOR
Dear Friends in Christ,
At November 16th’s Special Budget Convention, held online, I announced that I have asked our Diocese’s Standing Committee to begin the process that will lead to the election of my successor. It is my hope that the 9th Bishop of the Diocese could be elected and ordained by sometime in mid-2026
By mid-2026 I will have served in ordained ministry for forty years, including almost twelve as your bishop In my heart and soul, I believe that the people of this diocese deserve to have someone new as their bishop, someone with more energy than I am currently able to bring to this role. I will be ready to retire by then, and to give priority to the needs of my family, and to some hobbies and interests that have too often been set to the side Who knows? God might even call me to live into my baptismal and ordination vows in some new and interesting ways.
The Standing Committee, led by the Rev. Michael Singer, will work with The Episcopal Church’s Office of Pastoral Development to engage a search consultant to support them in developing a robust search process, holding an election, and supporting the bishop-elect’s transition into this new role Along the way, the Standing Committee will endeavor to communicate regularly and effectively with the people of East Carolina. Please hold the members of the Standing Committee in your prayers as they take on this important leadership responsibility on our behalf
Between now and the ordination of my successor, I will continue to work as hard as I can to provide faithful and healthy episcopal leadership for the congregations, ministries, and people of the Diocese of East Carolina. With the support of the Executive Council and the Standing Committee, I will work with Diocesan House staff and others to set priorities for the transition period ahead that will best contribute to helping this diocese welcome its next bishop
During my time as your bishop, I have learned more deeply than ever that God provides for the Church everything we need to be able to live fully into our call to be the Body of Christ in our own time and in our own place. In a world that too often speaks in terms of darkness and despair, may our work in the months ahead bear faithful witness to God's love for us and for all people, even as we face the challenges and opportunities of transition. May God bless us richly in this next season of our life together.
Yours in Christ,
Our Search for the 9th Bishop
By Rev. Michael Singer, President of the Standing Committee
Change is constant in life: entering a new school, a new relationship, a new job, a new boss, moving to a new town, retirement, new friends. It seems that just when things get comfortable, or you know what to anticipate, along with that transition comes change.
Transition is true for the life of the church. Each year around this time, parishes elect new lay leadership, in the form of vestry elections. You finally have someone chairing an important committee, and another chair decides it’s time for them to step away. When you may least expect it, the rector informs the vestry that they’ve accepted a call to a new parish.
In early August, Bishop Skirving phoned me and asked if we might soon meet. We met the following week at St. Paul’s, Wilmington, where he informed me, as President of the Standing Committee, that he had been thinking increasingly more often about retiring and would like to retire within two years. The whole diocese was informed of the bishop’s action at our special convention in November.
We as a diocese are moving into a season of transition. The Standing Committee has been meeting since mid-November to plan the way forward for our next Bishop. With the assistance of Bishop Todd Ousley, from the Office of Pastoral Development in The Episcopal Church, we recently entered into an agreement with Dr. Blanca G. Silvestrini to serve as our consultant for the bishop-election process. She brings knowledge and experience to the process. Dr. Silvestrini’s primary role is to advise and assist the Standing Committee, the Search Committee, and the Transition Committee as we discharge our various responsibilities in the election process and the consecration of the Bishop Diocesan.
We have been meeting for weeks now and have set an ambitious timeline. It is our plan to do the necessary work in order to elect our next bishop at Diocesan Convention in late fall of 2025, with a consecration date of spring 2026. In order to accomplish this goal, we will need the assistance of many people who have a variety of gifts.
Our first task is to select members of the Search Committee. We are planning to have 12-15 people serve on this committee. The Search Committee will conduct surveys and interviews. It is our desire to have members who are good listeners, people who can elicit information from others, then organize and synthesize the learnings from a wide variety of sources.
We need individuals who are well organized, focused individuals willing and able to take on tasks and complete them on time. We need individuals who do not have an agenda and who don’t wish to serve or represent a particular group or ideology. From now until January 6, 2025, we are soliciting individuals to self-nominate or nominate someone who shares these skills and more.
Duties of the Search Committee will be to seek input on what qualities, gifts, and leadership style we seek in our next bishop; who are we today; and where do we wish to be in 5 years after the bishop is consecrated. The Standing Committee will hold listening sessions, led by Search Committee members in Lent 2025. These will be groups meeting in parishes, at deanery meetings, clergy gatherings, with diocesan staff, with Trinity Center staff, and more. This information and more will be compiled into a profile that accurately describes the diocese and articulates a call for the next bishop.
A Search Committee retreat, with our Consultant and the Standing Committee, will be held February 1, 2025. This means that Search Committee membership will be selected by mid-January. The Search Committee Chair will set the dates for all future meetings.
Once the profile is complete, it will be posted online, and the Search Committee will receive names of candidates for approximately 4 weeks. Then, using a variety of screening tools–OTM Profile, written essay questions, and Zoom interviews–a discernment retreat will be held here in the diocese where the Search Committee will then evaluate those questions and discussions.
Following the posting of candidates, there will be a twoweek period of time to nominate individuals by petition. It is the Standing Committee’s hope that the list of candidates will be presented to us by summer 2025.
In mid-February of 2025 the Standing Committee will put out a call for those who might wish to serve on the Transition Committee. This committee will be responsible for the meet and greets of the candidates in selected geographic places in the diocese with their spouses or partners in the early fall of 2025. This will be an opportunity for members of the diocese to meet the candidates and learn more about them.
Other work to be completed by the Transition Committee will include: overseeing the gifts for the new bishop-elect (funds for worship clothing, cope and mitre, pectoral cross, crozier, ring, rotchet and chimere); selection of a church or venue for the consecration; arrange for the bishop-elect’s smooth transition into the diocese: help finding a home, if there are children, getting connected to schools, etc. The Transition Committee will be the largest committee with various smaller committees working all at the same time. They will also work with the Standing Committee in having a meaningful celebration of Bishop Skirving’s time with us.
This is not an exhaustive list of the work of the Standing Committee, Search Committee, or Transition Committee. We will share a more detailed timeline in the near future.
This process of discernment over the next several months needs your prayers. Pray for members of the Standing Committee, the Search Committee, and the Transition Committee that we are open to hearing God’s voice during this process, that the Holy Spirit may lead us to find a new bishop who will shepherd us into the future. In addition, keep also Bishop Skirving, his wife Sandy, and the Skirving family in your prayers as they transition into a season of retirement.
A COLLECT FOR OUR BISHOP SEARCH
Gracious and loving God, guide the hearts and minds of those among us who will search for a new bishop to lead the Diocese of East Carolina, that we may listen carefully to discern your will and call a bishop who will love and serve your people in all the communities of this diocese and lead us forward in new ways in our ministries and service to you, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
By David Brown
We had just come from 10 days witness to the majesty of what “stone upon stone” can do for the soul, the spirit and the mind’s eye in the form of English cathedrals built in the same grandeur in teeming cities and tranquil crossroads across the country.
There in Mark’s gospel on the second Sunday back home was the truth about permanence: “As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’
Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’”
For many of the “16 little pilgrims” from North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as our clergy host greeted us every morning, it was not the methodical building up and the centuries standing tall but the swift, terrible moments when the Luftwaffe visited St. Michael’s Church, Coventry in November of 1940.
Photo Credits: Alice Cotten, Jane Gordon, Bobbie McGuire, Margaretta Yarborough, and Rev. Tammy Lee
More to the point, it was the extraordinary life- and faith-affirming days that quickly followed the attack.
In the fires burning as the 14th-century St. Michael’s Coventry came down where preceding churches had fallen in conflict before it more than 450 lives and 4,300 homes also were lost in the raid its provost gave voice to the imperative that this be the site not of defiance and retribution but of rebuilding and reconciliation. People worshipped in the ruins on that Christmas Day, determined that faith and hope would be Coventry’s calling card. Two charred Medieval timbers had fallen to the stone floor in the shape of a cross, and another cross of happenstance formed when three nails fell similarly. The modern Coventry leans in on those ruins today.
“The dynamic depicted here with the old, bombed-out cathedral and the new, modern cathedral side by side is a visual reminder that if that community can forgive, we all can, ” said Liz Colbert, a traveler from Raleigh.
“It is a crusade as necessary in today’s time as ever, ” added Sarah Jo Safrit of Beaufort.
The Oct 10-20 tour sprang from St Paul’s Beaufort and included parishioners from Rev Lee’s former parish in Chapel Hill and another brave soul who took a chance on a journey that appealed to the better angels of her spirit.
The visits to Salisbury, Wells, Christ Church Oxford, Coventry and Norwich in breathtaking fall weather started in the splendor of a mid-afternoon festival Evensong recognizing the lord mayors of the London boroughs in Westminster Abbey. Westminster had been seen in full two years earlier along with Winchester, Canterbury, Ely, St. Paul’s and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. More than half of the travelers returned from the previous trip.
Half of us climbed the tallest Medieval structure in the world, the tower at Salisbury with its 404-foot spire One of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta is at Salisbury for a remarkably private viewing. The group went inside the stonemason’s workshops at Salisbury and the stained-glass shops at Wells.
We made a separate pilgrimage to the seclusion cell of Julian of Norwich, an anchoress of the Middle Ages, whose writings called the Revelations of Divine Love are the oldest known works of a woman in English.
“Each cathedral showed us something incredibly unique that opened to us not just the architecture but the stories behind the building.” The Rev. Tambria Lee said. Her co leader, Adeline Talbot, remarked that the journey was “ a deeply meaningful spiritual experience that was powerfully magnified by these glorious sacred spaces. ”
Both leaders were intentional about including with each of the cathedral’s histories the mission statements and active ministries in each of these places. “What happened in the name of Christ is as important as what was physically built to the glory of God,” said Lee
At each stop the pilgrims were invited into “the rhythm and pattern of daily worship Morning Prayer and breaking bread together, through Evensong and Evening Player as opposed to a mere tour,” Lee said. “We traveled the paths that the angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven walked before us. ” Jane Gordon, Senior Warden at St. Paul’s noted that she “ was profoundly moved by the stillness and quiet of the very early morning walking toward morning prayer and communion on the Salisbury close, the beauty of the cathedral standing regal in the fog, with the moon hovering above.”
In the words of the theologian Brian McLaren, “We make the way by walking,” most of us five to eight miles a day on this venture in faith. The pilgrims were greeted along the way by many local clergy including Bishop Anthony Ball, Canon Presenter at Westminster; Coventry Dean, The Vy. Rev. John Whitcombe; and Father Richard Stanton, Rector of the Church of St. Julian. A small army of passionate local guides made each place come alive.
Near the end, we brought the journey to a striking modern conclusion with Sunday morning worship at Coventry 1962, its towering clear rear windows harboring etched angels a looking-glass to reconciliation.
Then finally, the long walk to witness the clarity of Julian of Norwich, who left these words:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
UPON Stone STONE
ORDINATION JOY
THE REV. MATT OVERTURF
THE REV. JON SARGEANT
THE REV. MATT OVERTURF
DECEMBER 6, 2024
The Rev. Matt Overturf was ordained at St. Anne’s, Jacksonville on December 6, 2024. Congratulations and blessings on his ministry!
THE REV. JON SARGEANT
DECEMBER 8, 2024
The Rev. Jon Sargeant was ordained at St. Mary’s, Kinston on December 8, 2024. Congratulations and blessings on his ministry!
