Episcopate: The Role of Bishops in a Shared Future

CHAPTER 1

On the Episcopate

George R. Sumner

Setting Out the Question

Why bishops, beyond the sheer inertia of habit? What are they good for? How has the case for them changed due to the rapidly changing circumstances of the contemporary church? What have our answers got to do with basic questions of identity in The Episcopal Church? These are the questions I want to address in this brief chapter. At the outset, I set as my goal to offer arguments that are equally accessible to readers with various commitments on contemporary and controversial theological issues. I also want to recognize the valid side of the tacitly congregationalist assumption in much of our church life: the local congregation in worship, community, and service is most real to most members. It is against this natural sense that the case for bishops must (and can) be made. Of course, I acknowledge that we bishops live up to our calling fallibly; all Christian ministry, lay and ordained, exists under the sign of forgiveness, both offered and received.

The Inherited Nonnegotiables

Let us begin with the features of the episcopate that are inherent to the calling: the nonnegotiables—features that are context independent but not content independent theologically. By this I mean that the office is comprehensible only within the specific tradition of Christian theology, throughout which it has borne certain theological meanings. It does not suffice to offer general reasons for leadership in social, or specifically religious, organizations. While the church can be helpfully studied sociologically, those features particular to the episcopate as a tradition of explicitly Christian leadership are more pertinent. How is the episcopate as a role in the narrative of the church in general, and Anglicanism in particular, to be understood? Going back to basics, returning ad fontes (to the sources) is crucial, especially in situations that are otherwise confounding. To change the metaphor, in such a murky moment we most need the polestar.

Bishops, as our ordinal tells us, are called to be one with the apostles.¹ In the New Testament, the apostles were witnesses of the resurrection of the incarnate and crucified Jesus.² First then, the office has an inherently Christological center of gravity. We are like the figure of John the Baptist in the great triptych of Gruenewald (itself a product of a time of plague), with his outsized index finger pointing to the cross.³ Because the scriptures are the primary witness to the crucified and risen One, bishops are invariably to be its exegetes as well. Resurrection here is not a symbol for some more general concept, but points to Christ in his specific, narratively derived identity. Furthermore, the Resurrection both anticipates the End and inaugurates his eschatological reign. To be its witness is to point toward the invasion of the kingdom into time and space, the confrontation with the transcendent in Christ. The liminality and the sanctity of the episcopate are derived from the One to whom they point. In his light we are not reducible to managers or church bureaucrats (though we are those too).

Second, bishops remind us that the church is deep and wide, by which I mean reaching back in time to the apostles and reaching out in space to the ends of the earth. Bishops are inheritors, bearers of memory, signs for the local church that they do in fact have a wider story, inheritance, family. It is worth noting that with respect to being signs of our inheritance from the apostles, as well as our share in the apostolicity and catholicity of the church, the episcopate in our church claims to partake of a wider Christian tradition. Bishops cannot be understood simply as designated functionaries or religious practitioners of our national denomination. In the same way, our appeal to scripture, our celebration of Baptism and Eucharist, and our recitation of the Nicene Creed make a claim, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, that we stand in a vaster company and are answerable to an older norm. We are, again, doing more than providing administration and leadership for our own membership or implementing our own rules (though we are also doing that).

To call it the episcopate necessarily makes a wider claim and places implied conceptual constraints on us that we may not notice: the doctrine that we have received, to which the ordinal refers, not only is from our own local formulations but also partakes of a wider inheritance of articulated belief.⁴ In a similar way, our invitation to a gathering like Lambeth, while not imposing on us a superior synodical and canonical authority, symbolizes the wider global collegiality that one famous Anglican statement described as mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ.⁵ Though there is in us Americans often the spirit of don’t tread on me, we cannot evade these wider bonds of affection inherent to the episcopal office. To be sure, the episcopate in its rabbinic and exegetical side will lead to disagreement, since the interpretation of the Bible is hardly uniform. At least we can say that the episcopate is an inherited and collegial ministry of fellowship and contention around the Word of God.

Third, the bishop is the chief pastor, though of course we share this role collegially with our clergy in the diocese. Shepherds protect, feed, and guide the sheep. How this is lived out varies by era and area, though the functions remain (and, in the time of SafeChurch, for example, an important aspect of guarding has been rediscovered). These three dimensions, witness to the Resurrection, representative of the church catholic and apostolic, and chief pastor, are true regardless of what the financial, educational, geographic, and other particularities of a diocese might be. Note that this third basic aspect of episcopacy has, in most cases, an element of place—one is a bishop of somewhere in particular. Hence there is inevitably a tension between the localism and the universalism of the calling, between the bishop thought of with their presbyters in one place and that same bishop with fellow bishops from away. And at the heart of the office is that this all-too-human, walking symbol of these wider realities actually shows up, at a parish, early Sunday morning, with hat and stick, a present and embodied reminder of these wider things. Thus, in this distressing time of distance and virtuality, bishops must struggle to continue to be witnesses to the necessarily present and embodied nature of all sacramental acts.

Contextual Particularities

It is surely true that context-independent theological parameters can make non-anxious leadership more likely by alleviating the need to make it all up anew. However, we must also bring these features, like bass notes, into relationship with factors that do have more to do with our own twenty-first-century North American context. First, there is the unique history of the American episcopate: an order not derived from its (former) imperial power, with democratically elected bishops exercising authority in synod, and an episcopal house, in parallel with our secular government, that may sometimes act as a cooling dish in convention debate. These are features of our own kind of contextualization that are worth noting and protecting. To see bishops as per se elitist may overlook this particularly American contribution.

Second, the episcopate is being exercised in an era of disestablishment and ecclesial marginalization. We are a smaller and less wealthy church, further from the levers of power, in a gradually more secularizing culture than in the past. These trends have been accelerated by the present pandemic/recession. The prescriptions one commonly hears in the face of these challenges are sometimes diametrically opposed. Do we need to become more socially dense, better catechized, more distinct, a kind of liturgical community of character (as in the work of Hauerwas and Dreher)? Or is our future more diffuse, localized, and pluralist in expression (Moltmann’s total ministry and emerging are examples)? Both react to the same seismic shifts, and both may overestimate how much say we have in some of the changes coming our way. The first reaction, for example, would lead one to think we need a more disciplined and traditional form of theological education, and the latter would reinforce the use of local schools of ministry of a more informal kind. But throughout, the challenge of postmodernity—conceptual, financial—faces us all. Differing responses to the same shift have more in common than one would at first see, for in both cases the bishop must find his or her voice in a situation of diminished power of various kinds (and try to grasp the kinds of freedom it allows).

Third, in a visibly fraying society we need bishops with a prophetic edge. We could have a debate about what the theological conditions for such a ministry would be. One might argue that a strong sense of divine transcendence is the main prerequisite for such a prophetic word to the wider culture, since it provides the leverage over the culture’s own assumptions.⁶ Some of the most trenchant social critiques in our tradition have come from theological viewpoints that were less culturally accommodated.⁷ The trick is that the bishop offering critique must at the same time empathize and be in solidarity with their people. At the very least we need to recognize that the relation between this prophetic edge and one’s theology of culture, as well as between the edge and pastoral identification, is not a simple or straightforward matter.

A few years ago, a priest in a suburb told me, Bishop, we are growing because, more or less, people who come like my sermon, the band, and the Sunday school. As soon as we’re batting one for three, they’re gone to a church down the street. Very few are here because we are Episcopalians. The market is king! On the other hand, they have come to expect communion every Sunday. The notion that having a bishop is s a part of their ecclesial identity is a work in progress. The American democratic inheritance, functional disestablishment, and the edge are, to greater and lesser extents, what they expect in the ethos of the church they have joined, and they only need to be helped to see how episcopate relates to these too.

In reprise, those abiding features mentioned earlier ought to be entailed in all churches: Christology, apostolicity and catholicity, and koinonia are not our own possessions. So bishops are servants of things that are of the esse, and precisely as they faithfully subserve these, they show bishops to be of the church’s bene esse.⁸ In other words, the people in that suburban church tacitly expect certain things that make their gathering a church, and they may come to see the benefit of this particular kind of symbolic person who is responsible for ensuring that first things stay first, that birthrights not be sold for bowls of lentil stew. Maybe, culturally, they can come to imagine me, at least, to be spiritual quality control.

With every calling comes a concatenation of trials and challenges. Given this mantle and context, it is not hard to locate the pitfalls, some of which I have already mentioned.⁹ In our time, partisanship tinged by anger is an obvious risk. Our culture turns everything into an individual commodity, even as it valorizes novelty. The workaholic is not rare in the episcopal ranks; feeling the lack of time to study and read we may have brought with us from the presbyterate too. Sometimes we forget that the symbol that we embody precedes and exceeds us as individuals, though this ought to be a relief. For example, nearing retirement, we, like all pastors, wonder what it has amounted to and whether it was enough—the challenge of ego integration.¹⁰ As to this last test, we must by grace grasp at the conclusion that our calling is by its nature a handing over to us and from us for a time, of testimony, symbolic personhood, and shared pastoring. Retirement is the gift of seeing how little of it is ours. All the aforementioned challenges grow directly out of the intersection of the enduring nature and the present context of this calling.

As an addendum, we can readily find all these apostolic elements and contextual features named or implied in our own ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer of 1979. The preamble to the examination¹¹ comprises all three of the perennial callings of the bishop, while what we have called contextual particularities have left fingerprints in the subsequent interrogation in the sharing of the government of the whole Church, the support for all the baptized in their gifts and ministries, and in the stirring of conscience.¹²

Where Does All This Leave Us?

One common thread throughout this account is inheritance, which does not exclude contestation or tension. Another is the challenge that the retrieval of the abiding meaning of the episcopate offers to contemporary construals of the episcopate as a leader/administrator of a nonprofit, say, or only a representative of a particular American, twenty-first-century denomination. While these are true, they are not enough either to sustain us or, by God’s grace, to renew our church. The thread running through this whole account is what I would call the indirect pertinence of the office. By this I mean the episcopate’s essential difference from the local pastorate, not just in order of magnitude but also in purpose. The bishop points away toward Christ, upward to the mysterious reality of the Resurrection, backward and outward to the apostles and our fellow churches of the nations, to the midst of society, toward features of society we may wish to avoid seeing. In each case being a contributor toward a surplus of meaning is inherent in the job. While the bishop may have a burden to worry over the perplexities of our cultural moment in many ways, this here-and-now edge is not blunted but enhanced by the office’s more distant provenance and its oblique nature. The bishop learns to come alongside his or her larger flock, but as a living symbol of attention to these wider referents. In a moment in which our life may be consumed by immediate worries of survival, the retrieval of the episcopate in its indirect pertinence, ironically, may never have been more important.

CHAPTER 2

The Transformation in the Role of Bishop in The Episcopal Church since 1965

Robert W. Prichard

Introduction

In the years following the end of World War II, the bishops of The Episcopal Church took on an expanded role, which might best be characterized as CEO and evangelist-in-chief. It was a position predicated on growth in numbers and resources. After a period of stagnation in population and church growth during the interwar years, America was experiencing a baby boom, rapid growth in new suburbs, and a surge in church building. New Deal high school construction and the post–World War II GI Bill enabled former members of the military to enter college, swelling the numbers of the college educated, the demographic group in which The Episcopal Church and other mainline Protestants had traditionally been the most successful.¹ Since clergy were recruited from among college graduates, this growth in college population also presented the opportunity to find an adequate number of candidates for ordination, something that had troubled mainline denominations throughout their history. At the same time there was a revival of interest in religion, spurred on by such evangelists as Church of England preacher Brian Green (1901–1993) and Baptist William Franklin (Billy) Graham, both of whom were gathering large crowds to hear their preaching by the late 1940s. The nation was full of opportunity for church growth.

Bishops who were able to manage resources to establish new congregations, expand educational ministries, and recruit talented clergy led the way in what would become one of the largest periods of numerical growth in the Episcopal Church. The methods of such bishops were seen as models for others. Bishop Richard Emrich (1910–1997) of Michigan lectured about his fund-raising and founding of new congregations in the suburbs that increasingly appeared on the outskirts of large cities. Henry Louttit (1903–1984) of South Florida acquired a reputation for a rate of church planting that at one point approached a new congregation a month. John Hines (1910–1997) in Texas was also a leader in establishing new parishes in the suburbs; he was active in the formation of new church primary and secondary schools, and a new theological seminary (the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest). Dioceses electing new bishops sought candidates with experience in large congregations or in national or diocesan staff positions, those experienced in domestic or foreign missionary work, or clergy possessing a record of writing and teaching.

The national church budget was indicative of national priorities. The budget adopted by the General Convention for 1956, for example, was divided into five categories, of which foreign and domestic missionary work received the lion’s share ($4.921 million for 72 percent of the total budget), followed by education and promotion ($1.102 million or 16 percent). Smaller amounts were allocated for training centers and other activities ($125,436), cooperating agencies ($50,800), and administration ($132,633.33).²

The location of the 1955 convention—Honolulu—was indicative of another direction of change, which would grow more important in the following decades—a slow dismantling of segregation. Protests by Black Episcopalians had moved the meeting, originally scheduled for Texas, to Hawaii to allow integrated dining and housing during the convention.³

An Abrupt Shift

The strategy of the early postwar years was appropriate for the baby boom years of 1946–1965. However, the birth rate slowed around 1965, and the earliest members of the baby boom generation reached college. The arrival of a large young generational cohort on the scene contributed to a change that was taking place in the nation at the time. These younger Americans of all races brought the skeptical eye of youth to the efforts of their elders and demanded immediate change in what they saw as the errors of individuals and society at large, such as denial of equal rights for racial minorities and women, government policies that did nothing for the poor, the Vietnam War, and economic cooperation with South Africa. Those calling for change at times turned violent, as in the urban riots of the 1960s. Counterviolence, which included political assassinations, bombings, police violence, and the killing of four student demonstrators at Kent State, was even more marked.

One early casualty of this changing mood was mainline church attendance, which began a long period of decline that has continued to this day. Church leaders recognized the need for new models. Under Presiding Bishop John Hines, the General Convention began a shift away from the priorities of the previous decades—foreign mission, suburban church planting, Sunday schools, church primary and secondary schools, fund-raising and tithing—and focused on empowerment for minorities (the General Convention Special Program), liturgical reform designed to make worship more contemporary, and institutional reform.

The role of bishop changed accordingly. Among the new emphases were new understandings of the relationship of bishops to the liturgy; to the recruitment, deployment, and discipline of clergy; and to prophecy and social justice. Bishops both led the way and reflected these new understandings.

Bishop as Chief Liturgical Officer

The liturgical reform that culminated in the adoption of the 1979 edition of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) redefined the role of bishop in relationship to the liturgy. The ordination rite and the rubrics of the previous edition of the Book of Common Prayer (1928) and the canons of the church had focused on the role of bishop as the one to ordain and confirm; the 1979 prayer book expanded that role to become chief liturgical officer of the diocese. A new line in the examination section of the ordination rite explained that the bishop was called to provide for the administration of the sacraments of the New Covenant.⁴ A new rubric in the baptismal office explained that the bishop, when present, is the celebrant, and is expected to preach the Word and preside at Baptism and the Eucharist.⁵ A parallel rubric added before the Eucharist explained that it is the bishop’s prerogative, when present, to be the principal celebrant at the Lord’s Table, and to preach the Gospel.⁶

Two elements contributed to this expansion of the role of the bishop. The first was the liturgical movement, best represented in The Episcopal Church by the organization known as Associated Parishes. Supporters of the movement looked back to the church of the third century as a model. That church, they understood, survived, and grew despite persecution, setting a model for the modern church, which was in an increasingly secular society. They believed that the three orders of the ordained ministry and the laity all had important roles to play in the liturgy, and that Baptism and the Eucharist were best understood as corporate events of the whole community of God. The Standing Liturgical Commission, on which members of the Associated Parishes were heavily represented, drafted new rubrics for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which identified the specific roles for bishops, but also for presbyters, deacons, and the laity.

There was also a practical reason for the new rubrics about bishops. Some parish laity and clergy objected to the 1979 prayer book and to the two trial books that preceded it—Services for Trial Use (the Green Book of 1971) and Authorized Services (the Zebra Book of 1973). The contemporary language would come to be a particular target of opposition led by a new Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer (1971).⁷

The new rubrics, which were clearer about the role of bishop in worship than the canons of the church at the time, made it possible for bishops to insist on the use of the new liturgies.⁸ Exercising that authority was not always easy, however. At least one of the bishops of the Diocese of Virginia in the 1970s took to carrying a case of prayer book excerpts of the services of Baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist in the trunk of his car during parish visitations, in order to counter rectors who explained that they did not have copies of the trial liturgies or the 1979 prayer book and would thus need to use the 1928 edition instead.⁹ Bishops tried other approaches, such as asking for advance bulletins for their visitation services (and correcting them where needed), establishing diocesan liturgical commissions to advocate appropriate use of the 1979 prayer book, and creating guidelines about such issues as rites of initiation. Bishops were able to use their role as celebrants during diocesan conventions and parish visitations to model ways in which they believed the services in the trial liturgies and the new edition of the prayer book should be used.

This was not, of course, the first time that bishops played a key role in directing liturgical use. Bishops had been active in that role in the liturgical fights of the post–Civil War period, but they had gradually retreated from directing parish use as the result of an inability to control the ritual changes introduced by innovative parish clergy.¹⁰ The liturgical activity of bishops of the 1970s was not simply a return to the behavior of that earlier period, however, because of an important change. The General Convention of 1967 had amended Article X of the Constitution to allow a period of trial use prior to the adoption of a new edition of the prayer book; before that time proposed texts could be studied but not used until adopted on second reading by the General Convention. As a result, bishops found themselves in a twelve-year period in which parishes were in the position of choosing between the use of different authorized liturgies.¹¹ It was a situation that called for episcopal leadership.

By the 1990s, bishops faced a different challenge. While two decades of episcopal leadership and the departure from the church of die-hard supporters of the 1928 prayer book assured the place of the 1979 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, a growing number in the church were calling for further revision of the prayer book, particularly in relation to gender. The General Convention authorized a new series of trial texts—Liturgical Texts for Evaluation (1987), Supplemental Liturgical Texts (1989), Supplemental Liturgical Materials (1991), and the Enriching Our Worship series (six volumes from 1998 to 2009); it also undertook frequent revision of Lesser Feasts and Fasts and the Book of Occasional Services and authorized the publication of liturgies for same-sex unions. Unlike the earlier period of revision from 1967 to 1985, this process of trial use did not result in the adoption of a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer; thirty-five years after the publication of Liturgical Texts for Evaluation the General Convention of 2022 will continue the consideration of whether and how to revise the Book of Common Prayer of 1979. Bishops have an important leadership role in the introduction and management of parallel trial liturgical materials for which there is no evident terminal date.

It is perhaps not surprising that by the early twenty-first century some in the church were making a broader claim for the liturgical role of bishop than that laid out in canons or the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. Bishops, according to this view, could authorize textual changes and practices not found in the Book of Common Prayer and the canons of the church. Successive bishops of California, for example, supported liturgical changes introduced at St. Gregory of Nyssa, an innovative congregation that sought to differentiate itself from other Episcopal churches. An early publication from the congregations explained that

Whereas established congregations usually employ the new rites [in the Proposed Book of Common Prayer, which would become the Book of Common Prayer in 1979] to continue a Latin or English style of Anglican liturgy, St. Gregory’s will choose forms that emphasize our continuity with Jewish and early Christian prayer life, which is the deepest core of our tradition. First of all, we will recover the congregational character of Jewish-Christian worship and will borrow appropriate usages from Byzantine and African Christianity to express this character fully.¹²

The congregation set a model for liturgical experimentation on a parish level. Many clergy elsewhere followed suit, emulating and in some cases exceeding the changes made at St. Gregory’s. Clergy made revisions in the Eucharistic Prayers, replaced the Nicene Creed with alternate texts, and used prayer books from other parts of the Anglican Communion. A justification often made for this process was that the replacement of discrete items in the liturgy did not endanger the integrity of a common structure. This, however, was not always the case. By the 1990s St. Gregory’s and many other parishes were reversing the basic ordo of the Episcopal liturgy by inviting the unbaptized to receive the Eucharist. Some made this change with the acquiescence, consent, or active support of their bishops.¹³ In 2012, the General Convention stepped in, adopting a resolution from the convention’s Committee on Evangelism declaring that The Episcopal Church reaffirms that baptism is the ancient and normative entry point to receiving Holy Communion and that our Lord Jesus Christ calls us to go into the world and baptize all peoples.¹⁴

Liturgical innovation by bishops was often supported by appealing to sections of the Constitution and canons from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An introductory note titled Concerning the Service of the Church, first introduced in 1892, had allowed a bishop authority to set forth such Form or Forms as he shall think fit for Days of Fasting and Thanksgiving, appointed by the Civil or by the Ecclesiastical Authority, and for other special occasions for which no Service or Prayer hath been provided in this Book. Such a provision was appropriate for occasions like Independence Day or Thanksgiving, for which Books of Common Prayer prior to 1928 made no provisions. The note further allowed the bishop to authorize parish clergy to use devotions constructed from material in the Book of Common Prayer, provided Morning and Evening Prayer had been or were to be said.¹⁵ This provision would, for example, allow a parish priest to construct a service based on recitation of Psalms and the reading of collects, something that parish clergy occasionally were doing on Holy Week.¹⁶

In 1904 the General Convention adopted on second reading an amendment to Article X of the Constitution related to missions to the non–English speaking. The addition, which was placed at the end of the article, declared that "nothing in this Article shall be construed as restricting the authority of the Bishops of the Church to take such order as may be permitted by the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer or by the Canons of the General Convention for the use of special forms of worship."¹⁷ An accompanying canon 42 on the Authorization of Special Forms of Service, which was also adopted in 1904, explained what was meant by special forms. The forms were different from the devotions that had been identified in the earlier prayer book note; these were translations for congregations worshiping in other than English for whom there was not yet an authorized edition of the Book of Common Prayer in such language.¹⁸

The expanded claim of some contemporary bishops to issue and permit worship in forms not authorized by the General Convention is certainly understandable