Bishop Brian Cole addressed the 40th annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee on the theme of “Here We Are: Heeding God’s Call Again and Again.”
Please note, there was a technical error in the recording and the first few sentences were not captured. They are presented to you both in the video and below.
The Bishop’s Address 2024
February 10th
Episcopal School of Knoxville
The Right. Rev. Brian L. Cole
Good afternoon. Before I begin, I would ask that we pray. The Lord be with you.
Almighty and everlasting God, by whose Spirit the whole body of your faithful people is governed and sanctified: Receive our supplication and prayers, which we offer before you for all members of your holy Church, that in their vocation and ministry they may truly and devoutly serve you; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
When Bishop William Sanders began to serve as Bishop Diocesan in the Diocese of Tennessee in 1977, after 15 brief years as Bishop Suffragan, the idea of a new diocese in East Tennessee was first suggested. In 1984 and 1985, Conventions were held which formally established this Diocese. Since then, each year in Convention, through worship and business, through budget discussion and passage, through conversations and elections and formation and fellowship, we have been invited to answer the call to ministry for the year ahead. Today, we do so for the 40th time. So, from our beginning, we have been called again and again.
Here We Are: Heeding God’s Call Again and Again is our theme for this 40th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee. I was present at the communal brainstorm when members of the Commission on Ministry, while reflecting on what they have learned regarding how the shape of Christian ministry is changing, first said out loud this phrase which is today’s theme.
I believe I am recalling it correctly when I note a few things about that morning’s conversation.
Your Commission on Ministry, COM for short, is clear that all baptized Christians are called to ministry. While the Commission is primarily charged to support persons discerning a call to the diaconate or priesthood, that work is rooted with the conviction that God’s call to ministry is one that all of us can answer. The COM is not seeking to say yes or no. The COM has embraced the wisdom of the comedy improvisation game of “Yes, And…” YES, God is moving in your life, AND how might this moment, and those listening and learning with you, help add to what is the next faithful step?
Here We Are also embraces the deep wisdom that the call to ministry is best sustained in community. Ministry that is shared and that invites others to join is a ministry for the long-haul. Unless you have the rare call to be a solitary, the Christian life is meant to be lived in community. We need each other.
Also, our location in East Tennessee matters. I believe I have shared the Flannery O’Connor quote before that, “somewhere is better than anywhere.”
So much of the call to ministry is rooted in rootedness. A particular place calls you. A particular ministry in a local context enlivens you. The somewhere that we encounter in East Tennessee, be it city or countryside, is deserving of our listening before speaking, of learning what is in front of us before teaching the lesson we already had prepared. For many of our children and youth, that place in them is Grace Point. East Tennessee is the place where we stand.
In my tenure as your bishop, I have had the opportunity to hear many of your stories, of who you are, and how you have been called. It is the rare story about call which does not include a call to this place, either a call to stability in staying home or a call from away to journey here to these mountains. God is calling you here.
While we are situated in East Tennessee, it is from this place that we encounter the rest of the world. This May, our Diocese will welcome Bishop Given Gaula and Mother Lillian from the Diocese of Kondoa in Tanzania for a week-long visit, as a part of a longer trip they are making in the United States. Plans for their time with us are still being developed. For the years that we have been in companion relationship together, our pilgrimages there have been an opportunity for East Tennesseans to witness how God is equipping the Church in a Muslim-majority region of Tanzania. We both have much to learn from each other.
I have also had a recent conversation with The Right Rev. Jonathan Folts, Bishop of the Diocese of South Dakota. For some years, our relationship with South Dakota has been lying fallow, though I am aware that many of our parishes here pray for the parishes in South Dakota. I am planning to make a trip sometime later this year to South Dakota, with the hope of considering what a renewed connection might mean for us. How might we learn from each other about life and ministry in the respective lands that shape us?
This year, 2024, we answer the next call to minister together while the Episcopal Church prepares to elect a new Presiding Bishop. While the House of Bishops will choose one person to serve as Presiding Bishop, I believe every bishop is discerning how the work of the episcopate remains constant, while also changing.
My prayer is that the next Presiding Bishop will surprise us by inviting Episcopalians to imagine, design, and inhabit an Episcopal Church that is able to meet the moment of 2024, not otherwise trapped in the nostalgia of sometime past.
I can also report that the bishops of Province IV, also known as the Province of Sewanee, the twenty dioceses in the southeastern United States, have begun meeting monthly for an early morning zoom call, for prayer and conversation about what feels most urgent in our respective work. Recent conversations have dealt with more offerings to support lay ministry and formation, creative ways to support small parish churches without consistent clergy leadership, and the need continually to revisit how the entire Episcopal Church funds and finances ministry and mission.
No matter how large and well-resourced a diocese is, every diocese is experiencing the changes and chances of this present moment. And just as a parish church can reach a moment of discernment to consider whether it is vital and viable, so too a diocese. Currently, in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, processes are underway where neighboring dioceses are exploring models for reunion, merger, or deep collaboration to sustain ministry in the days ahead. As those processes go forward, I believe we will see more dioceses enter those kinds of conversations.
Since the Commission on Ministry suggested our theme, it is worth noting the persons we have in process right now for ordination. At present, we have twelve postulants, four candidates, and five seekers in discernment. Those numbers include both for the diaconate and priesthood.
We currently have seminarians in residence at Sewanee, Virginia Seminary, and Berkeley at Yale Divinity. Along with traditional programs, we also have persons who are studying through distance-learning at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Bexley Seabury, Mercer School of Theology, and the ACTS program at Sewanee.
Currently, we are funding two aided curacies through our Diocesan budget. Our aided curacy program supports half of the cost of a curate’s compensation and benefits for two years, with the understanding that the parish church will take on the full cost of the curate for the third year while the curate searches for their next call. This program is only open to persons who have discerned from the Diocese of East Tennessee.
Later this year, we are anticipating that two additional aided curacies will begin in our diocese. This is only possible because we have set aside additional funds beyond our operating budget to afford a third and fourth aided curacy.
The aided curacy program still operates with a traditional model of a newly ordained curate serving alongside a rector. While I would argue that this is an ideal way for a priest to begin parish ministry, I am aware there may come a time when will need to explore some kind of aided vicar program, where a newly minted priest serves in a small parish that can only afford half of the full compensation of a full-time parish priest. For that possibility to succeed, we would have to create a means by which this new solo priest is mentored and supported by more seasoned colleagues beyond that parish. We do this work together.
God is calling all of us to ministry. The Diocese of East Tennessee continues to support equipping lay ministers in all our parishes. We do not equip lay ministers because there is a lack somewhere of ordained clergy. We equip lay ministers because we believe in equipping people who are being called.
In the area of lay ministry, I want to highlight three things. This past year, the first class of lay preachers from East Tennessee who participated in the Lay Preacher Training Initiative, supported by Trinity Wall Street, graduated and were commissioned at the National Cathedral in Washington DC in November. Canon Beverly Hurley Hill and The Rev. Amy Morehous served as local preaching instructors in this effort. At present, The Rev. Morehous is teaching a new class of lay preachers which meets at Diocesan House.
To preach is to tell a story, a story of the Good News, a story of where the preacher sees Scripture showing up in the world. To preach is to see the needs of the world and show us how the Word which we encounter in the words of Holy Scripture still speaks now. As a people who live in this region, we are a people of story, gifted storytellers, and people able to love a good story, and where a good story can take us.
The story of God, the story of the Good News, is a story that belongs to all of us, and our stories are rooted in the divine story. So, while we might not all have the gift of preaching, we all have a story. The more we learn to tell that story of God in us, the more gifts for preaching we will discover.
In August, a Leadership Summit was held at Grace Point Camp and Retreat Center, which brought together members of Bishop & Council, Standing Committee, Commission on Ministry Co-Chairs, and the President of the Disciplinary Board, with the goal of understanding how our respective work and decision-making impact each other. We left with a better sense of how we are called to share work together, appreciating that these different leadership bodies hold separate roles in this common work.
In September, the Diocese of East Tennessee served as a co-host with Sewanee’s Center for Religion and Environment in a pilot project called, Learning to Lead from the Land. Dr Andy Thompson, who teaches at the School of Theology also serves as the Director of the Center. With financial support from the Episcopal Church, a small group of leaders from our diocese, as well as the Dioceses of West Tennessee, Tennessee, and Alabama gathered for two days at St Mary’s Sewanee, with the intent of learning how Sewanee stewards the farm, food systems, trails, and lands that make up the Domain. How might the lands we are called to steward contribute towards healing? Also, how have we hurt the lands under our trust and what steps might we take to redeem that hurt, healing both land and the people on those lands?
I can report that it is the intent to offer another gathering like this at Sewanee, with the possibility of expanding the number of dioceses which participate. Sewanee is an Episcopal institution which belongs to all of us. In 2024, as we live with more harmful impacts from climate change, we need to learn what the land can teach us, in making amends and seeking justice, in living more simply and rightly with the resources entrusted to us by the Creator God.
Earlier today, we welcomed St. Michael’s Kingsport into our diocesan life as a new parish, born out of the history of two older parishes. For me, the St. Michael’s story this year has been an example of how people already called have been called again into something new.
For several years, there have been conversations regarding the existence of three parish churches in Kingsport, and how might they best minister, both individually and together. For the last few years, The Rev. Jon Hermes served as the priest to St. Timothy’s and St Christopher’s. Beginning in late 2022, Fr Jon reached out to Canon Bolt, alerting us that the Vestries of those two parishes were discerning whether they might be better together, as one parish church.
This began a series of conversations and meetings, with Canon Bolt and Archdeacon Askew and I meeting with Fr Jon and the combined vestries to consider what was and what might be. Working closely with Chancellor Arrants, the lay leadership of two parishes made careful, Holy Spirit-filled decisions. They decided to become new and one. They decided that all would be changed in the process. The people of St. Timothy’s would move to the campus of St. Christopher’s. Together, however, that campus changed, too. It became St. Michael’s.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, a Saturday evening liturgy took place at St. Timothy’s Kingsport to secularize the space, to hold a last Episcopal liturgy there. The fire from that evening’s Paschal Candle then led us the next morning to the new St. Michael’s. On that morning, we confirmed and received numerous new members.
For me, the experience has truly felt like what a lay-led, clergy supported church could be. It was the people of St. Christopher’s and St. Timothy’s who felt called to change, to do something new. Their priest supported them in that new thing. And the people and clergy of St. Paul’s Kingsport have endorsed this new effort, too, with the hope that this new parish church in Kingsport will be a blessing well beyond parish church walls. We pray it will be a blessing to all of Kingsport.
Also, today, with the changes we made to our Canons regarding how parish churches may merge, you have helped create a pathway forward, to put down on paper our learnings from an initial process led by the Holy Spirit, while we all did our best to keep up.
In 1984, Bishop Williams Sanders, in his sermon for the Primary Convention of the Diocese of East Tennessee, or the Convention before the first Convention, used an alliteration in his remarks. He spoke of the need for recollection, recommitment, and renewal.
Forty years later, I would like to conclude my remarks to you with an alliteration of a sorts. Except that I only have one word. Listen, listen, listen, listen.
In 1991, I spent a summer in Berea, Kentucky, that changed the course of my life. It was my first journey to Appalachia. I was there to participate in a summer seminary program, with seminarians and divinity school students from across the country. The director of the summer program and the organization that sponsored it was a Presbyterian clergyperson. The Rev. Dr. Mary Lee Daugherty, a daughter of a West Virginia coal miner, she had founded the organization.
In Fairchild Hall on the campus of Berea College, she began her remarks to us by saying, “Listen, listen, listen, listen.” She went on to say that too many people with too many intentions, either good or ill, had traveled to Appalachia with preconceived ideas about the region and its people. Appalachia did not need any more people to come to her aid if they were not willing or able to listen. For, if we listened, we might learn that she did not need us to come to her aid.
That speech, that summer, changed my life. It changed it to the point that I am now here with you, in this work together.
So, going from here, I would simply repeat Mary Lee’s words. Listen, listen, listen, listen.
In the classic book, Listening, by the Church of England deacon Anne Long, we see a four-fold approach to listening.
We listen to self. How do you listen to self? Well, tell me your story. Or, first, tell it to yourself. Write it down. Write it all down. Be sure to recognize yourself on the page. Trust that we need you and your story as God prepares to call us again. So, listen to self, to true self.
We listen to others. That can be hard, for it so tempting to have others simply listen to us. But when we listen to others, in our parish communities, in our neighborhoods, we learn that more stories and more perspectives exist beyond our own. Those stories and those perspectives stretch us. With humility and grace, they can remake us. With time and trust, they can make more space, both in us and in our communities. Space for healing, justice, understanding, and mutual support. But, first, we must listen to others.
We listen to the world. We listen to the hurt and the need. We listen, both to those with and without power. We listen to those who consider us to be friend and to those who consider us to be foe. We listen to the world, and then we consider how the Word that enlivens us might call us to respond.
Finally, we listen to God. Listening to God invites us to seek places where being able to hear God is more likely. That would suggest a retreat space, a quiet church, that prayer corner in your house. Still, small voice, right?
But do not be surprised if God also speaks to you at Table Graces Pantry on a food pickup morning, or at a Pride Festival, at Green Magnet Academy, or when a lay catechist welcomes a class of new pilgrims into a healing, enlivening church home. We go to those quiet places to listen for God. But once we have been to those quiet places, God is able to tune our hearts to hear wherever God chooses to speak, to abide, to reside.
I believe, and I am persuaded that God is still calling us, the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee. God is calling us, not to do our best imitations of 1977 or 1985. God is calling us now, to go from here to what is next.
As St. Paul told the church in Corinth, we never know what is next, for we see in a mirror, dimly. We do know God sees us clearly, even now. Even now, God sees us and has equipped with faith, hope, and love. With faith, hope, and love, with a community of companions, we are being called again.
So, listen, listen, listen, listen. And then let’s go. AMEN.