I find the use of the Commission on Structure quote taken out of context to be offensive -as tho they don't care about mission and the use of a proof text from scripture to support the PB and +Sauls POV even more so.
Sauls wants to take the fiduciary responsibility away from the Executive Council and given to additional committee - persons to be named (chosen how?) Trustees, to use GC to build Habitat houses (how is that focussing GC?) and to spend more money on a Special Convention to re structure in hopes of saving money. There are some good ideas in this proposal. Hope to hear from the people (our representatives) who have also been working on this.

I think this:
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/mission/what_we_talk_about_when_we_tal.html

This, too:

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/mission/mission_in_your_own_words.html

It seems to me that this is blurring those three areas of Structure that we actually deal with: the General Convention, the Staff and Ministries at 815; and the Mission of the Church. (Sorry, I am more and more uncomfortable with this "mission of God" language -- I think it sacralizes our work in a way that both falls into hubris and ironically lets us off the hook. God has given us a mission -- and it is now ours to make it work or not. That is how we should understand Tikkun Olam.)

Tobias, I think those are very useful distinctions. Thank you.

Whoa! That's one sexy headline!

Heidi Shott

Thanks, Jim. Frankly, I think the mission of the church takes place almost entirely at the parish level, and is best served when the diocese and national church provide support and resources. John Maury Allin used to talk about 815 as "a service center for the church" and I think his successor(s) lost sight of that. Maybe it is time to recover that wisdom.

I've never thought of "governance" in terms of mission. I'd be happy if GC were a bit smaller, more efficient, and only amended the constitution, canons, and BCP. Period. ("horrors")

I have been asked on twitter by an English acquaintance whether the sudden new emphasis on the name "domestic and foreign missionary society" indicated that we wanted to plant Episcopal Churches in other countries. I said no. But I do wonder about the sudden promotion of the name. It won't play externally. So I assume it is intended for internal consumption.

Tobias: I too find your distinctions useful. And I think you mentioned elsewhere that they came from discussion among your own diocesan deputation. I hope that those discussions are taking place in all deputations. "Adaptive change," if it is to happen, needs to generate from deliberation and consensus at all levels. Perhaps ironically, the model of General Convention is what gives voice to all of those levels of activity. I hope we hear soon from the "many other dedicated, committed people throughout the church." That would include a lot of groups (including CCAB's) not yet heard from because of the timing of the "bluebook" or maybe even because of the lack of a forum. So far the public discussion seems dominated by management (another irony). Here "polity" may be as glib a notion as "mission," but the broadness of our governance makes us distinctive.

The presentation seems pretty sensible to me, especially when +Sauls talks about streamlining services and purchasing.

This may not be the best proposal for reform, but I've come to the conclusion that some major structural reforms are going to have to happen, both in the larger church and the individual dioceses, if TEC is to survive. So I say let's take a risk and do it.

Above all, I would love to see TEC start to think of itself as a missionary society. Or at least a denomination that is united in mission, and not just in liturgy.

Stacy Sauls explained at the Executive Council meeting of October 2011 that he has asked the staff to stop referring to themselves as the "Church Center" staff and to refer to themselves as the "DFMS" staff to reflect that they work for the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (dba The Episcopal Church). His point is to emphasize the mission focus of the staff's work, not only to the staff themselves, but also to others who presumably will now refer to the staff as the DFMS staff.

Bishop Jefferts Schori at the Executive Council meeting of January 2012 pointed out that Jesus is the center of the Church and not the location at 815 Second Avenue in New York.

I think that language does matter, and I find the above two instances to be helpful.

However, in the Diocese of Colorado where I live, our bishop has asked the staff and everyone else to refer to the staff and the offices where the staff are located as the "Bishop's Office." Some of us find that problematic, because there is definitely a strain of clericalism here, and it feels like there can be no other vision of the church's mission except for that of the bishop.

From where I serve, which is at the parish level as a catechist for confirmation, at the diocese as a member and the Secretary of the Standing Committee, at the province as a member of provincial council and provincial anti-racism network coordinator, at the churchwide level as an Executive Council member elected from Province VI, and at the ecumenical level as the elected representative from Executive Council to the Church Council of the ELCA, I have a unique vertical view and experience of The Episcopal Church.

I am deeply concerned that a complete flattening of the church structure that eliminates the councils of the church found in the General Convention structure would cause a new and different kind of dysfunction where diocesan bishops gain more power than they already exercise and where the laity become disenfranchised and reduced to mere recipients of whatever vision is dished out by diocesan bishops.

I agree that the General Convention structure needs some work like streamlining and more flexibility like fewer permanent CCABs and convening some CCABs when they're needed.

I agree that the General Convention structure encourages more resolutions than make sense, but I strongly oppose disenfranchising deputies and individual bishops from proposing resolutions and deferring only to dioceses and provinces, which would be a major shift to giving an inordinate amount of power to the diocesan bishops alone. In many dioceses, like Colorado, the diocesan bishop exercises considerable influence over whether or not the Standing Committee and Diocesan Convention even consider resolutions to the wider church.

Lelanda Lee, Member of Executive Council and General Convention Lay Deputy 3, Diocese of Colorado

Lelanda, you are a better person than I am. I think language does matter and what is being done here is a) creating a class of insiders who use the awkward name; b) covering it with silly, even insulting theology (everybody who needed the presiding bishop to tell them that Jesus and not 815 is the center of the church, please raise your hands); c) creating the impression that something called the DFMS exists apart from the Episcopal Church, needs its own governance, should relieve Executive Council of some of its duties and be led by somebody at 815, or Jesus Center, or whatever we will be instructed to call it in the future.

One good way to make change happen is to behave as though it already has. The PB and the COO are already behaving as though they have the authority they hope to claim in a canonical, and, who knows, perhaps constitutional way when this is all over. Hence the ridiculous canonical citation in the letter accompanying this video. There is nothing in the canons that authorizes the PB to spend church resources to push a legislative agenda that, in the end, will centralize power in the office she currently holds.

The church has shown Bishops Jefferts Schori and Sauls astonishing deference to this point, perhaps because the PB is quite popular, and because the need for reform is broadly felt. But they have pursued this proposal as though the elected lay and clergy representatives of the church do not matter--and indeed can be treated with what in any secular setting would be recognized as disrespect. It would be nice to have a conversation about reforming the church--but anyone who thinks that what we are currently having is a conversation is kidding themselves.

Jim--I appreciate your concern that these proposals could concentrate power in fewer hands and dilute the authority of the laity. Distributed power and democratic process are in our church's DNA and are ideals worth fighting for.

But. Many people seem to agree that the church has become unwieldy, pouring money into structure and governance at the expense of mission (whether that mission is supporting parishes or doing things in the world).

Take the CCABs. There are so many of them, they spend a lot of money meeting, they write reports every three years, but their real-world effect is mostly negligible in my experience.

Are there proposals that could offer needed reform, but also maintain distributed power, lay representation, and democratic process?

Jason Cox

This is what i wrote to the HoBD list.

I watched the whole thing and found it problematic.

The most problematic for me was the PBs comment (at about 5:10 into the video) that localities cannot see the whole picture at all or well at the local level.  So we need big picture people.  I'd be interested in examples of how the national level folks have done this big picture stuff well or at all.  VIM, Decade of Evangelism, 20/20 all stand out as failed vision from a national level.  People in New York have no better view of the whole picture than people in San Diego and I have no experience of anyone there ever asking what the picture might look like here.

To Bishop Sauls I need to say that is no reason to send resources upstream so that you can send them downstream.  We can equally as well minimize our carbon footprint by totally removing program as a responsibility of a centrist group, focusing only on the reduced governance and administration that would require.  Do nothing more at the national level than canonically required, leave the rest to us.  

His remarks on combined purchasing power would have had more credibility had the DHP actually done what it promised to do in creating one massive risk pool. I do not need, nor want to have people in New York choosing what papers I have to print on.

It really seemed like a hard push to get us to buy an Edsel.

// I would add here that this entire project can produce none of the proposed changes until 2018 unless they come to GC 2012 with proposed Conctitutional and Canonical changes. Should that happen we would know that this is a top down putsch.
We are not actually stuck till 2018 since we, GC, can simply reduce the budget so it only covers canonically required functions and leave money in the hands of localities.
Furthermore, there is nothing in our structure that prevents our "big picture" people from showing nimbleness right now. Nimbleness other than this proposal to truncate participation locally to concentrate it centrally.
Bp. Sauls, frankly, skates close to prevarication when he says that he only proposed a resolution. His resolution postulates a Special Convention, as he then says.
So can we wait till 2015 or 2018 to make changes? Probably not. We can make changes in 2012.

Michael Russell
Rector All Souls'
San Diego C4 2012

Jason, I am all for streamlining the CCABs. Fewer would probably be better. But I don't think halving the current number would have much impact on the budget or church. Also, we don't need a special convention to do that. It would take a long time to pay for itself.

Mike, Bishop Sauls original proposal to the budget group he was part of (I forget the name but it was a committee of GC) was written entirely as a series if canonical changes. The budget group wouldn't go for it so he end ran the process and went straight to the HoB. Now he's got the resources of the General Convention budget to push an agenda that marginalizes General Convention. I don't see how we can have a honest conversation until he and the PB are called on this.

So, I guess my questions are: 1) what are the other proposals for restructuring the church? and 2) is there any way of restructuring that won't put more power in the hands of fewer people? It seems to me that any decision to shrink or modify GC necessarily assigns power to fewer people than had power before.

I'd also like to point out that for those of us who operate on the margins of TEC already, changing one set of distantly-removed delegates for slightly fewer distantly-removed delegates, or changing convention from every 3 years to every 5 years, doesn't really seem like that big of a deal. But waste of resources does seem like a really big deal.

Scott, I appreciate your outsider perspective on this.

There are other resolutions, some passed by diocesan conventions, some that may come from the Standing Committee of Structure, but they haven't received this kind of visibility, because the resources of the church haven't been used to publicize them. I am in hopes that eventually we can have a real conversation about the pros and cons of various schools of thought on the issue of restructuring.

To your larger point, I think power can be exercised by fewer people while preserving our polity, but I don't think it can be done if the House of Deputies meets less often and the Executive Council no longer acts as the GC between conventions.

As far as frequency of meeting goes, it would be very difficult to make progress on something like LGBT issues, to take just one example, with a convention that met every five years.

I hate to say this, but the more I hear and observe and the more I witness the decline in our Church, the more I am beginning to realize that 815 is becoming irrelevant to the survival of the Episcopal Church. Being aware of the dynamics of organizational change, this is fascinating to watch but as the Body of Christ disheartening to endure.

blgriffith - please sign your name next time you comment - thx. ~ed.

As an individual Episcopalian COMPLETELY outside of the “big church” process, I find it unhelpful that TEC released the video without context, saying only that it “is being shared pursuant to Canon I.2.4,” blah, bishop lead blah develop policy blah strategy blah.

What is the context of the video presentation? What is its relevance as a new initiative, or in response to discussion at general convention? Who were the bishops talking to in the room? Where were they? When was it? There’s no date, location, or context – none in the press release, or in the video itself, or in the ENS post, or on Vimeo. Aaargh.

Curious to find out more, and reading in the notice on episcopalchurch.org “The Governance of The Episcopal Church: This information is another in an ongoing series discussing the governance of The Episcopal Church,” I looked on episcopalchurch.org for information on governance; I looked for any other part of an ongoing series; I found nothing. I’m still at a loss for the context. This video cannot stand by itself, and it can’t be seen clearly from a lowly member of the church as part of a larger context. It’s almost as if TEC staff just spit it out; bluuugh, can’t prepare for it, can’t stop it, out it comes, splat. Be inspired? Nope, not me. After a fair 45-minute listen, and additional digging, I remain confused about the context this press release comes from and the particular direction it is supposed to take us. And context and direction are things I seriously need to see from the “big bishops” in my “big church.”

TEC staff seems serious in asking, “how do we reform to reflect where our heart is?” and “how do we BECOME a domestic and foreign missionary society again?” Perhaps a good approach would be to start such serious questions by presenting mission-focused, mission-initiating communication. I would have much more confidence in my “big church” making “big changes” if they released information in a proactive way, making an effort to connect to me, rather than just dumping stuff (like this video and press release) out to me.

I find it somewhere between circular and silly to suggest that our church governance structures spend too much energy on governance.

Cursillo is great at putting on Cursillo weekends. Habitat for Humanity is great at building houses with volunteer labor. But there's only one body we've got to set policy and budget for TEC, and that's GC. GC has interim bodies because:

a) we want our governance structures to be responsive to our changing world -- which, rather inconveniently, tends to have massive global events happen more often than once every three years, and sometimes happen in winter, when GC is months away from being able to respond; and

b) we're blessed with people who have particular expertise, passion, and a sense of vocation to an area that GC thought was so important that BOTH bishops and deputies thought a CCAB should be formed around it. It is awfully convenient to have this 'blue book' thing to distill for both Houses the fruit of about 2.5 years of prayer and study.

I've never heard anyone who's actually served on a CCAB characterize the work (and yes, it's hard work that doesn't pay a dime) as a sort of churchy dinner salon to yap about topics.

I believe we need a mechanism to revisit regularly whether interim bodies we've created have accomplished their purposes and can dissolve, and we need to simplify and fund the process of creating lean ad hoc task forces to respond deftly to sudden developments.

Bishop Sauls' PowerPoint presentation distorts the picture by drawing a false contrast between governance and mission (governance is what ensures that funds collected for mission actually go there, for example). It also lists a bunch of temporary task forces that sunset as soon as they report and committees of Executive Council that cost the church nothing in themselves as if these were using the resources of, for example, the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music.

It's not just treating apples and oranges as equivalent; it's like pretending that papayas, power drills, and poodles are equivalent.

Bishop Sauls makes some excellent points, but I think the kind of reforms he's talking about are in some ways not nearly radical enough. They come entirely from people within current governance structures. We need to bring in the voices and expertise of people who have been sustaining effective and creative communities based mostly on horizontal networking for decades.

If that's going to happen, it seems that it will have to be via initiative from (surprise!) mostly laity working alongside clergy and bishops who have maintained contacts with folks on the cutting edge of communities such as that for the Ubuntu operating systems for computers and perhaps the Occupy movement, among others.

Sure, let's think about radical transformation. Bishop Sauls' proposals seem at this point to be more about subtracting from existing structure than about empowering larger horizontal networks, though. I think a lot of it suggests movement in the direction precisely opposite from where effective change movements are going, and far away from what we need.

But Bishops Sauls is just one guy, albeit a brilliant and cool one, IMO. Time to bring in a large number of perspectives from people seriously experienced in mapping assets (not just money, but talent and time) and figuring out how to leverage them with the communications media we've got to make a real difference.

That's my pennies' worth at the moment. I am open to persuasion otherwise, but for now, I say that we haven't thought seriously, creatively, and prayerfully enough about WHERE God is calling us to just sprint off with neither cloak nor sandals.

And we already have a blue-ribbon commission on how we might best structure the church. It's called the Standing Committee on the Structure of the Church. Creating an additional body that doesn't have a substantially different charge strikes me as wasteful, and doing so in the the name of slimming structure strikes me as hilariously ironic.

Blessings,

Sarah Dylan Breuer