Convention Address
February 8, 2025
Episcopal School of Knoxville
The Right. Rev. Brian L. Cole
From the 13th chapter of Matthew–
“That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. 2 Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. 3 Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.”
In December 2016, this diocese created a profile, what you all called “an honest picture of blessings, ministries, activities, and people of our diocese, as well as the challenges facing us today.” This was the document that potential candidates discerning to serve as your fifth bishop could study and pray over. I was one of those persons studying and praying.
In that profile, you asked for a bishop to “be a person of deep prayer, not claim to know everything, and be a good listener.” In a process of listening to each other and the Holy Spirit that guided your work, you all stated, “Please be aware that bishops who are truly effective today are not ‘typical’ as in the past. Bishops must be more like explorers than administrators, less institutional and more regionally/locally plugged in; fun enough to get healthy, effective people to want to be a part of diocesan ministries and will need help along the way as it is a tough job.”
You also said many other things in that profile. The last thing I want to mention is that you said, “People want to offer their gifts to the diocese, but they don’t know how.” Of all that appeared in the diocesan profile, that image of people wanting to offer gifts to each other and the region but not knowing how to start really struck me. It seemed to suggest a people both frustrated and paralyzed, but with a little clarity and invitation, a people capable and energized and willing. A volunteer spirit, you might say.
Before reading the East Tennessee profile in early 2017, I did not know why anyone would ever raise their hand to serve as a bishop. After reading that profile and praying through it, listening to the Holy Spirit and Susan and the wisdom of friends and mentors, after entering your process, after being elected, after serving here for over seven years, I cannot imagine doing anything else now. You converted me.
As your bishop, I hope I have helped more persons in this region find a way to offer their gifts to the diocese and to its people. I hope I have helped unleash what is possible in others to serve others in the name of Christ. I hope I have not gotten in the way as we all seek to discern our way along the path of the One who is the Way.
Upon joining you as bishop in 2017, I believed it was not my task to bring a vision from Kentucky to share with you in East Tennessee. I believed it was my task to join you, and the collective vision shaped in the discerning and dreaming process you undertook as you searched for a bishop. Your profile from 2016 has shaped our work.
Now, eight years later, I have a strong belief that it is time for us to frame a new strategic vision. As a bishop entering my eighth year with you, I am now coming up alongside the average tenure of an Episcopal bishop today.
In the Diocese of Tennessee, from which this diocese emerged, the first three bishops served for a combined total of 100 years. For Bishop Otey, he probably spent seven years either mounting or dismounting a horse. Bishop Gailor may have spent seven years simply responding to correspondence. But in the Episcopal Church today, seven years is often the entire arc of episcopal ministry.
It is my intention we have many more years of shared episcopal ministry together. This summer, I will take a sabbatical. Let me say thank you, thank you, thank you to you all for being the kind of church community that supports and encourages clergy sabbaticals. It is a gift I do not take for granted.
While away from you, I hope to spend a great deal of time reflecting on contemplative prayer and contemplative life and leadership, and the essential call to solitude. I also plan to spend a great deal of time with Susan in Wisconsin and my eldest brother has informed me that he and I are taking a road trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
As your bishop, Sunday visits to parish churches are always a highlight. I remain in awe of the good work done on the ground by clergy and lay leaders. In anticipation of each Sunday, a visitation worksheet is filled out by the parish clergy and helps guide our conversations in preparation for the visit and gives me a good snapshot of parish life, both the joys and the struggles.
Each worksheet includes a couple of questions about what the parish church needs in terms of support from me and your diocesan staff. For most of my time as bishop, the number one need has been an ongoing request for help in Christian formation and discipleship. While this is not true in every parish church, many of you tell us that mid 20th century models for Christian formation are losing purchase with persons, and new efforts are hit and miss, at best.
So, what are we doing to form mature Christian believers in our parish churches? As a bishop whose work includes a call to teach the Christian faith, asking for help in formation and expecting help from me and the bishop’s office is appropriate.
When I first heard this need articulated, I thought of the request for effective formation like a people asking for help in getting tomatoes. Okay, let’s get some tomatoes! With Miracle-Gro and any other quick-fix, ready-made stimulants, I prayed for an order of rushed tomatoes, and now.
Yet, tomatoes grown artificially and out of season, with no regard for the long haul, might yield something that looks like a tomato, though taste and texture and true health of the fruit is in real doubt.
Instead of focusing on the tomato, the rushed piece of produce, the parable from Matthew’s gospel about seeds and soil helped me slow down enough to consider that before we grow a good crop, we must prepare good soil. The best seed, the best tomato plants money can buy will only do so much if the soil is rocky and shallow and hard.
How do we grow good soil, good earth in our souls?
This is where I want to say again how much I appreciate how hard you all work in your parish churches and I have heard you say that you all need help in growing mature Christian believers. And I have come to believe we have to slow down and begin again.
It’s not about growing tomatoes and getting a good crop once. It’s about feeding and nurturing good soil for the long haul, trusting that good things will grow in good soil, both in the proper season and with a crop native to the place of our souls.
What does good soil look like in a human soul? I believe it means to become a deeper and more grounded people. I believe it means we grow mature Christians able to listen and respond to the needs of our communities and not simply react.
In this moment, the Church needs to listen to those in need in our communities and be the ministers of the Gospel we are called to be from our baptisms. This past week, my colleague, Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of New Hampshire, shared this portion of Bishop Todd Hall’s Convention Address to the Diocese of New Hampshire in 1951. Bishop Todd Hall said,
“The world is on trial for its very life. We have so much to give to the life of the Christian Church in a baffled world that it hardly behooves us to be either careless or selfish in this call to bring others to Christ. Now, if ever, it can be said—‘a disfigured world demands transfigured lives.’”
In this moment, you and I live in a society where we are treated less like citizens and more like consumers and easily manipulated consumers at that. The attention economy is built on the idea that we are being formed for shallow and reactive responses. It’s time to buy something. After we do so, in little bit, it’s time to buy something else.
Left on my own, I am easily distracted. Instead of seeking true solitude, I settle for isolation.
In this season where this diocese is engaging strategic visioning, I want to share a dream with you. For me, I believe it is a dream that can be a blessing to us. I believe it might sustain our humanity, renew our call to live as free citizens in this Republic, and equip us as Christian disciples able to meet this moment.
It is my conviction that you and I are being called to become a diocese of contemplatives. The call to contemplation is a call to rest in our identity as children of God, as a people who respond to each other and the world from a posture grounded in the grace and mercy of God. We do not need to seek artificial fruit. We need to be grounded in good soil.
I am proposing that we establish a School for Contemplation and Discipleship. It will be a dispersed school, able to move from parish church to parish church, able to move from St. John’s Cathedral to Grace Point Camp and Retreat Center. It will be able to be accessed online, though my prayer is that local circles of human connection will be the primary expression of this kind of school.
In growing good soil, a School for Contemplation and Discipleship begins with teaching people how to pray. At the core of contemplative prayer is a call to sacred silence, resting and surrendering to God’s gracious acceptance of us as God’s beloved, human beings made in God’s image, loved by God without need to perform or compete.
From that ground of sacred silence, we then move to engage each other, seeing each other as children of God, persons to be loved rather than used.
The best definition I know regarding contemplation comes from the Jesuit theologian, Walter Burghardt. Burghardt wrote, “Contemplation is a long, loving look at the Real.” The Real, according to Burghardt, is the living God we have encountered in Christ Jesus and the reality of things we encounter in each other and the created world, enchanted by God.
A long, loving look at the Real is not simply the preferred posture of an introvert. To linger and to abide is the call of every Christian pilgrim. We are called to be a people who seek roots. So, if you are going to make good soil, it takes time. It takes the time it takes.
The contemplative also looks with love. That does not mean the contemplative does not see fault when fault is in front of them. It does not mean the contemplative ignores injustice when injustice is in front of them. But the contemplative looks through divine love when seeing the other, speaking to the other, no matter the challenge, with love, a divine love that seeks healing and wholeness.
When we look at the Real, we come to understand that the Real looks back at us. The Real looks at us with love and keeps looking at us, delighting in what God has made.
When we keep looking, when we keep growing good soil, then we come to believe that the Real is not only in front of us, but also in us. God is with us. It is said that God does not know how not to be with us.
We can, however, sometimes not be here, with ourselves. We are scattered and distracted, forgetting the one thing necessary. The one thing necessary is to know that God is here, with us, abiding in us, wanting to place more and more good soil in us. Out of the abundance of good soil, the fruit of that soil will come, without being forced.
Contemplative prayer is more than the amount of time you spend in prayer, in silence. Contemplative prayer, as has been practiced by the Church since our earliest days, reorients the rest of our lives. From resting in God’s life in silence, I engage the world with a renewed, prayerful focus. That prayer does not keep me from the world. Rather, it helps me see the world as God sees it.
This past summer, the Episcopal Church gathered at General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. While there the House of Bishops elected and the House of Deputies concurred Sean Rowe’s election as our new Presiding Bishop. In speaking to both bishops and deputies after his election, Presiding Bishop Rowe asked those gathered to “follow Jesus into an unknown future filled with hope.”
The invitation of Presiding Bishop Rowe’s is grounded in a contemplative posture. The unknown and hope rarely reside together in everyday thinking. If you want me to have hope, I might also ask for an assurance of how things are going to turn out.
Presiding Bishop Rowe is leading the Episcopal Church to ensure that our primary focus is to support dioceses and parish churches on the ground, where all ministry begins. That new organizational design will be sustained with a spirituality grounded in the contemplative tradition.
I know Sean to be a person with a book of organizational thinking in one hand and a book of prayer in the other. Good design enables us to engage the reality in front of us, with clarity and honesty. Good design, rooted in a collective contemplative spirit, will allow us to move forward and keep on experimenting as the moment demands.
In early January, eleven bishops gathered in Nebraska for a few days of contemplative retreat. We were lead on that retreat by a monk named Brother James Dowd, who helped us reflect on our own lives of prayer and how prayer shapes our work as bishops.
Those eleven bishops came from dioceses both large and small. We were diverse in gender and race and sexual orientation. We were drawn to gather out of a sense that how we have “done” church work the past several years is broken and that the impulse to seek the next quick fix will simply exhaust us.
We need to begin at the beginning. We need to meet God in prayer. With the reality of God’s presence in us, with the grief of what has not worked touching us, we can move with hope into that unknown future.
Beverly Hurley Hill has served us well as Canon for Mission and Lay Ministry the past nine years. In particular, the growth of the lay preaching initiative is a testament to Beverly’s deep belief that ministry, including the ministry of preaching, belongs to the whole Church.
But, Beverly is moving to the wilds of Alabama to Camp McDowell to join her husband, Derrick, as he has taken on a new call as Executive Director there. As we are searching for a new Canon for Formation and Lay Ministry, it is our intent that the School for Contemplation and Discipleship will be a major focus for the new Canon’s work.
Contemplative prayer and practice are more than a program for Christian formation. Contemplative prayer is not about adding something to a person. It is about uncovering and rediscovering what is already true about you. From that ground of our being in God, the good soil can grow.
The contemplative life touches all that we are and do as a diocese. It is my belief that a School for Contemplation and Discipleship can guide our work with parish churches in conflict, with leadership development and raising up persons called to ministry in all the orders of the Church, with our work with children and youth, and with how we discern and decide within our respective diocesan leadership bodies.
A School for Contemplation and Discipleship will nurture our works of mercy and justice. When John Lewis prepared to walk across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965, he had two books in his knapsack. One was on the American Political Tradition. The other was a book by the monk and writer on the contemplative life, Thomas Merton.
“People want to offer their gifts to the diocese, but they don’t know how.”
A School for Contemplation and Discipleship needs the gifts you may be called to offer. Along with a new Canon for Formation and Lay Ministry, I would welcome hearing from you about what gifts you might be able to bring to this new School.
Before we depart today, we are going to ask you to share your dreams for the Diocese of East Tennessee as we enter the next three to five years together. My prayer is your dreams are seeds which will take root in good soil. As we listen, as we share, as we listen to each other and the Holy Spirit that connects us, I continue to believe that before we go forward, we are called to stop, to pray, and to engage the world from the good soil of contemplative souls.
Thank you for asking me to join you in this work over seven years ago. You listened to each other, your communities, the Holy Spirit, and you chose me to join you. Now, I am asking you, once again, to listen, to each other, your communities, the Holy Spirit, and choose again to stay connected to each other and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as we tend good soil in our souls for the work that is ahead.