Good morning, and welcome to New Brunswick. I’m delighted to be here with you at this first Executive Council meeting of the triennium. Thank you for the time you have spent preparing for this meeting and traveling, and for offering your gifts.
It might be an understatement to say this has been quite a week. My term as presiding bishop began last Friday, we celebrated with what I think was a creative and joyful investiture service on Saturday, and then we awoke to the news that President Trump has been elected to another term as president of the United States. It’s been a week.
As I wrote to the church yesterday, regardless of our political allegiances, we must remember that God has called The Episcopal Church to seek Christ in all persons and to serve Christ in all persons. No matter the party in power, we are one church, and we will continue to fulfill our baptismal covenant by proclaiming in word and example the Good News of God in Christ, striving for justice and peace among all people and respecting the dignity of every human being. This is our call, our pledge, our covenant.
In the face of this news, the staff and people of Episcopal Migration Ministries are a top priority. We are committed to working with the new administration to advance policies that follow the teachings of Jesus by supporting the most vulnerable among us. And we know that the successful bipartisan federal program by which our church has resettled more than 100,000 refugees and immigrants since 1988 is likely to face drastic cuts, as they did in 2016. We will advocate relentlessly for Episcopal Migration Ministries and our work there, and the dignity and rights of all of God’s people—and we know we need to be prepared for what may be ahead.
During our orientations, we talked about Executive Council providing board-level oversight and strategic guidance. These significant challenges to Episcopal Migration Ministries will be work we need to address in the months ahead, and we expect to have more to say at the February meeting. That meeting, by the way, will be at the Maritime Center in Maryland, not in Chicago. We definitely want to go to Chicago, but not in the winter. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Another priority that will occupy a good deal of our attention both at this meeting and in February is our work to define mission strategy and align the church center staff with that strategy. This is the work that was set forth by Executive Council in 2023, and since mid-September, we have been working with the Compass team at Insight Global to gather the data that we need to engage this realignment which has been directed. Tomorrow, three members of the Compass team will be here to give us an overview of the data they have collected and ask you to participate in an exercise that will help us refine our vision and our roadmap for achieving it.
Then a final priority that I want to raise today since you will hear more about it when the Joint Budget Committee makes its presentation tomorrow: You may remember that Resolution D022 of last summer’s General Convention asks the Standing Commission on Governance, Structure, Constitution and Canons to create a task force on the General Convention legislative process.
President Ayala Harris and I hope that this group can go beyond looking at legislation and give us an opportunity to form several cross-functional teams of staff, deputies, bishops, and other leaders to take a look at all aspects of the General Convention. We need to have a productive conversation about how we want to create a convention that works for the church that we are today, and I’d like to begin that work as soon as we can and test some of these new ideas in 2027. We’re hoping to get started at the upcoming interim bodies meeting when we will have a chance to work with the Standing Commission on Structure, Governance, Constitution and Canons, and we’ll plan to have a focused conversation as a board, as an Executive Council, about it in February.
At this meeting, thanks to the leadership of Katie Sherrod, we’re going to return to a custom from a bygone era of Executive Councils. It used to be that members of Executive Council wrote a letter to the church at the end of each meeting, kind of a newsletter as it were, summarizing the work and hopes for the church. Katie has generously offered to revive these letters and work with a small group to create them, and I am looking forward to that result, so thank you for being willing to do that.
I hope that as we begin this work together, we can find more simple ways like this to build community in service of our ministry to the church. The day I was elected in June, I asked bishops and deputies to think about the time between then and November as a kind of relational jubilee, a time of letting go of the resentment, anger, and grudges that have too often weakened the leadership of our church, and to look for new ways to work together and to be pulling for this mission, which is now more critical than ever.
I truly believe we made progress on that score in the last four months, but you will not be surprised to know we have not finished the job; there’s always more to do. So I hope that you will extend this season of relational jubilee and allow it to infuse our interactions with one another at this meeting. I hope the way that we treat one another here can be a witness to the power of the Good News of God in Christ, and we can build up the relationships for leading the church. And I hope that where we are divided, we can find courage to forgive one another and begin again, for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Let us pray:
O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
