SEIZE THE EPISCOPAL MOMENT: An Emergent Manifesto of Hope for the Episcopal Church

[Karen Ward]

I have written this little paper along with Rev. Don Schell (one of the founders of St. Gregory's of Nyssa Episcopal Church). We offer it as our small contribution to moving the conversation of emerging mission forward in the Episcopal Church. It is written for diocesan Bishops and Commissions on Ministry, as food for thought and action that might help us seize the 'Episcopal Moment' and better participate in God's future and mission with hope.

Download SEIZING THE EPISCOPAL MOMENT and use in any way helpful for you.

Cheers

[Denise Yarbrough]

Karen -

I have just read your paper and will take more time to fully digest it and respond. I find much of what you suggest exciting and actually tracking some of what we are doing here in Rochester in a seminary program we have created with the local ecumenical seminary that is now offering an Anglican Studies Certificate and moving more into distance learning as a way to accomplish seminary education for "non traditional" students. I would note that even some of the older seminarians cannot and do not do the traditional, three years full time seminary training anymore given the changes in our culture. I'm wondering - to what extent is there room in the emerging church movement for folks over 40 who happen to find it exciting and innovative and creative to be part of what goes on? As an old woman of 53 I am very intrigued and energized by what I see in the emergent movement but don't feel particularly welcomed when I read material that seems to want to restrict this way of doing and being church to the under 40 crowd. Again, I am going to use your paper and your suggestions in much of the work I do here both at the diocesan level and at the seminary and will probably want to engage you more in conversation as time goes by.

Thanks for your hard work on this.

Denise Yarbrough

[Otis]

Hey Karen,

This was brilliant! I feel like it is more evidence that we can do this. Very very insightful AND practical

Otis

[Drew Downs]

I look forward to it!

[Karen Ward]

One more revision of the paper is happening now to add in a few more insights such as the ones above. It will be republished after a pro copy edit from someone from Baker Books within a week or so.

Cheers

[Richard Laribee]

To Paul and Donald:

Please continue this conversation out in "public." It is very helpful for others (oh, ok, perhaps just me) to be able to evesdrop. Both of you are making helpful observations, raising helpful questions, and offering helpful arguments. Please keep pressing this discussion.

Grace and peace,
Rick

[Donald Schell]

Paul, I hope you know how much I appreciate your helping St. Gregory's remember its primary grace is as an ordinary congregation, an ordinary Christian community. From present perpsective it may not be evident how consistently we worked toward that 'no big deal' simplicity of vocation through the congregation's founding years. We've talked how we worked to shape St. Gregory's language talking about the congregation, our relationship to the bishop, to the diocese, and the wider church, and you do know the steady push we made to keep us, clergy and laity directly involved with diocesan programs, projects, and governance. I also know there were times when we, consciously or unconsciously, fell to glorying in difference, uniqueness, or purported specialness. That's a dilemma of trying to hold true to offering vision and purposefulness; we certainly tried to correct ourselves when we heard St. Gregory's setting ourselves apart or above other congregations.

There was something else happening and I think it matters, not just to this story but to our church's practice of new mission and innovation. St. Gregory's full story includes real instances of our diocese and church manifesting the immune system response that healthy institutions naturally go to facing the new and unfamiliar.

I've just come across Clayton Christensen's organizational research and theories on sustaining and disruptive innovation. Healthy organizations foster steady sustaining organization. And the most vital organizations know that certain kinds of innovation and outreach needs protection (or at least separate nurture) to thrive. Christensen tells the story of the collapse of Digital Equipment Corp, the world's premier maker of minicomputers. They were known throughout the industry for powerful, continuous innovation of massively powerful small computers. They and their market agreed that the kind of computing NASA, General Motors, and the U.S. government needed to do was well worth the $250,000 price tag on the computers and the extensive training it took an engineer specialist to operate one. DEC completely missed what was happening when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began building a $500 small computer in a garage. A dozen years later DEC was dead. The laptop computer, like church mission to people who haven't been part of church, launched a new conversation, created a new market, triggered an avalanche of collaborative innovation and the laptop toy offered massive computing power to a public that DEC never imagined would ever want or need a computer.

Christensen contrasts Toyota's development of the Prius. Work within existing structures? Toyota knew that they needed their very best and most imaginative engineers to work on the Prius project and that those engineers - the internal combustion guys, the battery guys, the brake guys, all had a clear, massively supported mandate and culture to support sustaining innovation where they were working. So Toyota uprooted them and set the Prius development project completely outside the usual lines of authority and in a special (flexible) accountable relationship to the company's hierarchy. They did that for two generations of Prius development because what Christensen calls 'disruptive innovation,' venturing into new territory, new relationships to the wider world, new mission needs a significantly different kind of space and less structure than good sustained innovation. The Prius project is now being folded back into regular Toyota structures. That piece of disruptive innovation was massively successful, and for sustained development, the larger organization can now embrace and support the new thinking because its new sense (and how it relates to older technologies) is evident.

Christensen's analysis helps us see why the COM structure, just a generation old and invented by radicals to democratize the vocations process got co-opted to sustaining innovation before it had done its disruptive work. Some of our bishops are noticing that the structure is only advisory to the bishop and are asking whether they can do a Prius project alongside of it for mission. To me that makes very good sense.

I look forward to continuing this conversation. What you see of the present is essential to telling the whole truth. I hope I can make some wise offering from remembering what went before.

love,
donald

[Richard Laribee]

Thanks, Karen!

[Karen Ward]

That was a typo. It is NPR. I will correct it. thanks and distribute away!

[Richard Laribee]

Karen:

Excellent job. Thanks. This will help me here in this Diocese. It's always easier to use another's voice when talking about these things.

Before I send the article to some leaders here, I wanted to check on one possible typo. On page 14, should "MPR" be "NPR"?

Cheers,
Rick

[Karen Ward]

Paul thanks for you comments. I am with you on wanting to help reform the seminaries. How to begin with this? So far, the only seminary that has ever asked me as a local pastor to help revision courses for the future church has been Mars Hill Grad School, non denon and progressive Evangelical. The day Episcopal Seminaries ask for help from pastors to do the same, sign me up!

Also if the regular ordination track would breathe, and flex, there would be no need for any alternate.
No one wants to be alone and isolated. Being cool, is of no interest to me, but being included is as most emerging leaders just want to participate as equals and grow weary of knocking at the establishments door. My point being sometime you have to create separate places and spaces for those not let in, until the wider door eventually opens.

I'm doing what I can to work with CDSP and SSW on internships and an Anglican House of Studies for Seattle.
As of the COMs, well, the only people who can appoint visionary people to them are visionary bishops. I am not on any COM and I'd be very surprised If I would ever be appointed no matter my pioneer visioning for six years and going on seven in my diocese. So what I can do (as I did when I started the now defunct emergingchurch.org website 8 years ago) is to 'vote with my mouse' and cast dreams online for anyone who is interested to listen, as this is the only vote I have currently, still not being a legit Episcopalian, which I've struggled to give up trying to figure out... So I am doing what I can from where I sit as an Outlier' who has been camped out on the porch for some years now. At least people are talking... so there is some are interest in all of this.