Bishop Greg Brewer’s Convention Address 2015

When I think of the Diocese of Central Florida, the words that immediately come to mind are Paul’s opening words in the Letter to the Philippians: “I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion, until the day of Christ Jesus. It is right for me to feel this way about you since I have you in my heart.”

I’m especially grateful for those who pray. There was a time just this past year when I felt like several of our congregations were actually under significant spiritual attack and I quickly turned to Krisita Jackson, the President of the Daughters of the King, and I asked her to call the Daughters to prayer. She did just that and I am happy to report that the crises of those days are past us.

The landscape has cleared, but only to reveal new challenges and new opportunities. Our lot in life is to be a people on a pilgrimage, serving Christ faithfully in sacrificial service, having the joy of seeing God move in our midst while at the same time, always longing for the return of our Savior to come and to make things right. It is, you see, this tension that we will always live with as followers of Jesus, that on the one hand, we have the joy of seeing God move and yet at the same time, always knowing that there is a horizon, a better day that we have yet to experience.

Barbara Spencer from Church of the Advent, Dunnellon, is going to be the new president of the Daughters this year and she has significant shoes to fill. But I want you to know that I am incredibly grateful for the men and women who make the time in the unseen places to win things for us by prayer that we could never accomplish merely by human action.

What I would like to do in my address this year is to revisit the five points of our strategic plan and make this a summation of how I feel like we’re doing in the fulfillment of that plan.

1. A commitment to strengthen our relationships with one another in the Diocese.

Laura Lee and I continue to host dinners and have a blast doing so. We have had eight this year, totaling over 200 people .We deeply enjoy showing up in events around the Diocese as well, just to be with the people that we care about, everything from Good Shepherd Maitland’s Chili Cook Off to the job fair at St. John the Baptist in Orlando.

We’ve attended around 35 church-related events this year, not counting formal Episcopal visits. It’s safe to say Laura Lee and I really like being with you. We love a good party. Our staff, besides meeting weekly for prayer and planning, also holds a monthly celebration for birthdays.

Probably the best party of the year though is Canon Ernie Bennett’s retirement party. Hundreds of people showed up to share jokes, reminisce, eat terrific food and give Ernie a great send off. While he is no longer the Canon for the Ordinary, I assure you, he is not entirely retired, presently serving at Saint James Ormond Beach. As Ernie’s wife, Roz, will quickly tell you, “I didn’t marry Ernie for him to hang around my house all day,” and as Ernie would say, “That’s the last thing I want to do, too.”

There will always be Canon Bennett around the Diocese doing something and I have to tell you, I’m incredibly grateful. Probably one of the best gifts God could have given me and the Diocese is Ernie’s successor, Tim Nunez, our new Canon to the Ordinary. Tim is a quick study. He is doing an outstanding job, wading quickly into the deep end of the swamp of church conflict where the real gators are – and I don’t mean University of Florida graduates – and doing so with grace good humor.

Tim is given to puns. In fact, Fr. Edward Weiss, Tim is giving you a run for your money. Sometimes the puns are subtle, like, “You can never explain a pun to kleptomaniacs. Why? Because they always take things literally.”

Or, “I found a lion and a witch in my wardrobe. When I asked them what were they doing, they said ‘Narnia business.’”

Thanks to this capable scheduling skills of my Administrative Assistant Cindy Muldoon, along with our Archdeacon Kristi Alday – who I’m convinced can do anything – I’m a regular at Diocesan and church events, and have made 42 official visits to our Diocesan churches. I’ve ordained five priests, six transitional deacons, five permanent deacons and I received one priest from the Roman Catholic church, Fr. Luis de la Cruz, serving now at the growing Spanish speaking congregation at St. John’s, Kissimmee.

I’ve also participated in several funerals, including the funerals of three of some of the most dedicated priests I’ve ever known: the Rev. Al Durrance, the Rev. Terry Fullam, and the Rev. Malcolm Murchison.

I’m utterly convinced that it is friendship – and the times that we have enjoying one another’s company – that really make this Diocese work.

2. A commitment to raise up new leaders of both clergy and laity.

One of the significant developments in the structural life of our ordination process here is the revamping of the curriculum of the Institute for Christian Studies to train permanent deacons. Archdeacon Alday, Canon Justin Holcomb and I have worked to create a curriculum that has been shortened from three years to two, made more accessible through online courses and more focused on the ministry of the deacon as a servant to the wider community, beyond the four walls of the church. New courses are being offered and more options are available as well for lay training and continuing education. I commend it to you.

Speaking of Canon Holcomb, God is using him to bring in a raft of new seminarians, including former Presbyterian and Baptist church planters to help us meet the missionary challenge of our growing population. In so many ways, Justin is one of the guys who just makes things happen and the best thing I can do is turn him loose and watch the show.

I continue to speak as well and recruit seminarians in our various seminaries to consider coming and serving in Central Florida. We continue to get inquiries about openings from across the whole church and from other parts of the world. The word is getting around about what God is doing in the Diocese of Central Florida.

I continue to thank God for the caliber of the clergy that are coming here and serving here in this Diocese, the men and women, priests and deacons, I am so grateful for you and for your service.

Much of the money for training, necessary to raise up these new clergy continues to come from the Timothy Fund. That fund was launched two years ago, and we have a little over $600,000 in the fund. That sounds like a lot of money, but only this year we dispersed over $70,000 in educational grants. I continue to be grateful for gifts that come in to support this fund, from individual donations as well as congregational efforts like the Cathedral Golf Tournament – thank you, Dean Tony Clark. If you want some place to put some money, come and see me.

We’re also exploring new training possibilities for recruiting and raising up Spanish-speaking clergy, one of the fastest growing population groups in Central Florida, including an innovative program that we’re exploring that the Diocese of Dallas now offers which are night classes for newcomers. I’ve also called upon the Anti-Racism Commission to find new ways to recruit and raise up people of color in our ordination process, in a very intentional way.

The racial diversity that reflects our communities must be matched by the racial diversity of our clergy and of our congregations. I would like us to move past the legacy of Sunday morning being the most segregated hour of the week and the good news is that in a growing number of our congregations in this Diocese, that is happening.

I’ve also been emphasizing a vision for clergy and lay people working together as a collaborative team. That’s what it takes to have healthy congregations that become missional communities. So under the leadership of Canon Justin Holcomb and Mr. Charlie Pierce of Incarnation, Oviedo, I’m calling a conference specifically for lay people on faith in the work place.

As well, Tim Nunez, Earl Pickett and myself will also be holding a regular, annual meeting of wardens, to encourage them and assist them in their important ministry. There should not be in our congregations the rector in one place, the Vestry at another place, and the congregation somewhere in the middle. If we cannot understand our work in the various orders of ministry as collaborative, for the sake of the Gospel, our hierarchical structures will always get in the way of us doing effective ministries.

There really is such as a thing as the ministry of the baptized, and that must be released in new ways in the life of our Diocese. Lay people, you can’t expect your clergy to do all the work and, clergy, you’ve got to stop complaining about some of your lay leaders. Find ways to work together.

3. A commitment to look at our neighborhoods and face the missionary challenge that is before us.

If we’re going to rise to the missionary challenge that we face, it will require a significant change of mind from thinking about “going to the church” to understanding that “I am the church, wherever I am.”

The writer of Ephesians tells us in 4:17, “That it is time that we no longer live as the gentiles do in the futility of their minds.” Those are harsh words, but not inappropriate, given the present state of our culture. The call for us as Christians is to learn how to live as consistent and secure citizens of the Kingdom, wherever we are in the midst of a culture where God has planted us.

It challenges us to look at the places of inconsistency within our lives and to find a way to live comfortably with our identity in Christ, wherever we are. The temptation is for me to be religious with the religious people and then be somebody with other people. I think that’s called multiple personality disorder.

The challenge means being comfortable with not always fitting in all the time and of being secure in living with the complexities of the multicultural world in which we find ourselves. It calls the church – us – to work out our differences within the bonds of charity and to find ways to serve together for the sake of the Gospel, even when we disagree.

The invitation of the New Testament is to not divide the church into binary categories like liberal and conservative. We tried that and it didn’t work. Seeing people as either with you or against you, tempts us to use power strategies and manipulations that do not reflect the Kingdom of God.

What saddened me when I first came to the Diocese was the sense that some but not all had divided the Diocese into these liberal versus conservative camps. They created a relational divide of personal acceptance or rejection based on where people stood on the hot issues of the day. Building Christian community, sadly, in some cases was sacrificed for the sake of political strategy a win/lose war from which we are still recovering.

From what I saw, it looked more like Fox News versus MSNBC than any true Christian community formed out of baptism and the affirmation of our creeds. Besides, as I’ve said earlier, we live in a society and a church that is much too complex for that simplistic “us-versus-them” dynamic. It may make entertaining television but in the end, it is in fact a carnal work of the flesh.

Even as a means for changing the Episcopal Church, it was doomed from the start, and actually contributed to the forces that caused some of our parishioners to leave the Episcopal Church altogether for Anglican breakaway congregations. My hope is that we get past all of that, that we find a way together and that if we have hurt each other that we repent and ask God to help us build bridges where there has been resentment in the past and to give ourselves collaboratively in a fresh way to working together to reach our neighborhoods with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The model can never be us versus them, no matter who the binary groups are. Instead it starts with each of us, like me, like you, and finding a way to say “yes” to Jesus’ missionary call to be together with our fellow Christians, some of whom we’re going to agree with, some of whom we’re not and to be together as salt and light together in this broken world, a world in which we are full participants, modeling Christian community marked by a common sacramental bond that transcends our differences, living together with gentleness, emotional security, forbearance and Christian charity.

Cornel West recently described the secular challenge before us this way, quote, “Market driven economies foster insatiable pleasure but also spiritual malnutrition.”

As N.T. Wright recently said, “Postmodernism, modernism and secularism have nothing to say to the crisis of greed that presently afflicts us.”

But Christian sacrificial living, generosity, and servanthood do have something to say to all of that. The call is not to win, either inside or outside the church. The call is to bear witness with clarity, character, and compassionate service that reaches out in love, prayerfully discerning with people, getting the people into the room that need to be there, to see how God might speak to us to meet a challenge that’s larger than any one of us. What’s sacrificed in the “us-versus-them” model is evangelism, missions and growth.

There is a reason that in the midst of that time period our congregations did not grow. The call of the church is to offer to the world a different way of living together, quote, “By this shall all people know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

For there to be congregations that work together for the spread of the Gospel, we need leaders who are mission minded. These are leaders who work with congregations to see them become sending churches to the world.

These are congregations who say, “God has placed our buildings in this geographic location for a reason and God has given us a charge to work with our fellow Christians to reach this location with the Gospel.”

In other words, the Gospel calls us to think geographically, not merely congregationally. It excites me to see congregations taking on the problems of their communities and prayerfully asking God to give them strategies on how they can make a difference: From job fairs for unemployment, to efforts at racial reconciliation, to challenging materialism, to commitment to high-quality education, to having passion for the arts, to tackling poverty, hungry, homelessness.

From signs-and-wonders healing ministries that see non-Christians from the neighborhood coming to the church to receive prayer, to reaching out to college students in renewed youth ministries, the list is endless – and should be – because our communities vary widely from place to place. I’m excited to see these congregations understand that God has put these buildings in neighborhoods for a divine purpose.

The prime purpose of the local church is not pastoral care. It is worship and a pattern of discipleship and pastoral care that sends people into mission. Rectors, vicars, priests in charge, do you have a pattern of worship, discipleship, and pastoral care and prayer that is actually sending people into mission? Because that’s the litmus test. It’s not how many people fill the pews. It’s what happening outside the pews in a way that actually makes a substantive difference in the life of your community.

If your church all of a sudden stopped existing, what would your community say about you? What were you known for? What reputation did you have? That is one of the ways we can begin to get at why God has placed us here. Again, I see this happening in congregations across the Diocese. I’m particularly grateful for St. Edward’s, Mount Dora – Fr. Ed Bartle, Rector – and Grace Church, Ocala – Fr. Jonathan French, rector for moving from aided congregations to parish status. Congratulations, as well, to Incarnation, Oviedo, and Fr. Rory Harris, for moving from mission to parish status.

Their congregations are growing precisely because they are asking God to help them with this missionary challenge. I’m also deeply encouraged about the flourishing of new overseas missionary partnerships. If you’re interested in learning more about international partnerships, I could not commend to you a better resource than the New Wineskins for Global Missions Conference. It takes place every three years at Ridgecrest in North Carolina. The next conference takes place next year. I would encourage clergy to go and bring delegations from your congregations.

Missionary partnerships are all such strategic ways not only of serving those overseas but also a dynamic way of immersing the members of our congregations in foreign settings that cause them to grow in their trust in God, and to become deeper men and women of faith, that’s what we saw in the video about the missionary teams that we’ve booked to Jamaica, as well as to Honduras.

It also gives participants a vision not just for “over there,” but they begin to see their own neighborhoods in a new light in the light of mission. I know one rector, for example, who was sending his people over on overseas missionary teams because they couldn’t embrace local evangelism to save their life. It just scared them to death, so they went overseas.

They came back so on fire for how God had used them in those places, they began to look in their own neighborhoods and they were the ones that began to look and to say, “We need to do something about the poverty in our community. How can I do something about the poverty in the Honduras, if I’m not willing to do something about the poverty here,” and on and on it went.

Also, at a time when many of our Anglican sisters and brothers are suffering profoundly for their faith, the persecuted need our prayers, our financial support and personal relationships more than ever. One of the most under reported stories in the United States is about what is happening globally to religious minorities and particularly to Christians. If you cannot go, then pray and give so that others might go.

I would encourage congregations to include in their regular Sunday intercessions the plight of our brothers and sisters who are persecuted Christians.

4. A commitment to take our place within the councils of the Episcopal Church.

I attended the spring House of Bishops meeting in Texas and the fall House of Bishops meeting in Taiwan. The delightful surprise of the House of Bishops meeting in Taiwan was the witness of the Taiwanese Episcopal Church. It was breathtaking.

Typical was the witness of the young priest in his early 30s, whom I got to know who said, “I graduated from seminary 10 years ago and I was so inexperienced that I did not know what I was doing. The Bishop assigned me to a church with 10 people and he wanted me to close it. But I said, ‘Give me a chance.’ I went away and prayed and I asked Jesus to give me a vision. He gave me a vision and now 10 years later, we have daughtered two other churches out of our congregation.”

Remember he only started with 10, and that is in a culture where almost nobody does anything with any church. They’re mostly cultural Buddhists and so there’s nothing culturally to hold on to, except when God gets hold of a life, things actually begin to happen. It was phenomenal.

I participated in the consecration of Matt Gunter in Wisconsin, where I saw both our preacher in yesterday’s Eucharist, my long time friend Bishop Frank Gray, as well as the present interim rector of Saint Michael’s, Orlando, the Rt. Rev. Russell Jacobus, one of our Communion Partner bishops. I also participated in the consecration of this Bishop Suffragan of New York, Allen Shin.

Heading down Conway Road, I saw a tree and I said, “That’s it,” and I literally pulled over to the side of the road, got out my phone and took a picture of it. It seems to me that this picture is in fact an accurate picture of the present state of the Invisible Church.

Parts of it are living and flourishing; parts of it are dying. There’s a transition that’s happening in our church. We have the extraordinary opportunity and it’s really happening, of being a witness to the wider church, finding ways to build partnerships to say, “How can we serve together?” I’m very delighted that we have again this year representatives from the Episcopal Church here. They are our sisters and brothers and I’m very glad that they are here because I want to see that dream come alive, the whole tree, not just parts of it and I want to tell you, I really do believe it’s happening.

This year in 2015 on February 24 and 25, I will be the host at Canterbury Retreat & Conference Center, Oviedo, of an international Meeting of the Communion Partner Bishops, including bishops from overseas.

Also, to the next meeting of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church this summer, we are sending a full deputation. If you are a Deputy to General Convention this summer, would you please stand? Do keep this wonderful cadre of people in your prayers. I’m excited that we’re going to be able to do this together. We’ll work really hard, pray a lot and have a great time.

For this upcoming General Convention, I’ve accepted an appointment by the Presiding Bishop to serve as Chairman of the Evangelism & Communications legislative committee, which receives and proposes resolutions on evangelism within this Church’s jurisdictions. The committee also receives and proposes resolutions on communication strategies and technologies to strengthen the Church’s communication of the Gospel and opportunities for information management and exchange within the Church.

There is a place at the table for us, don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.

5. A commitment to revitalize Children and Youth Ministry.

Under the leadership of Craig Maughan, Headmaster at Trinity Preparatory School, a taskforce was hard at work this year trying to clarify our canons to help strengthen the relationship between the Diocese and our parochial and diocesan schools. If there ever was a laboratory for developing future leaders, this is it, and I’m very grateful to Craig and his crew for their dedicated service.

Later you will be hearing from Mr. Steve Shneeburger, a professional educator in youth ministry and our Youth Consultant here in the Diocese. Steve continues to crisscross the Diocese and offer consultations to local congregations at no cost to them, by the way, and also has been a superb support to the voluntary professional youth ministries here in this Diocese. I am very glad that Steve is with us. Also, under the continuing leadership of The Rev. Phyllis Bartle and her gang, New Beginnings continues to grow only stronger. It is a life-changing weekend for middle school students held regularly at Camp Wingmann and I commend it.

The Revs. Deke Miller and Sonya Sullivan Clifton have joined together with their own team to restart Happening in this Diocese, with a delegation going to the Diocese of Georgia’s Happening program this year. I would also like to say that I’m thrilled that the baton has been successfully handed over from the legendary Bill and Joanie Yates to Deke Miller and that Camp Wingmann is in full swing with new ideas and full program and even – get this – a Cordon-Bleu-trained chef!

In conclusion, as the excellent video just showed us, the Diocese of Central Florida was founded on extraordinary personal sacrifice and significant prayer. The growth of the church and extension of the Kingdom grows no other way.

Supporting every move of God has always been a group of individuals who were willing to go beyond what was asked of them by others, to step out in front, to be willing to be pace setters, to pray when no one else would, to speak up against injustice even when no one else was with them, responding to the call of God at significant levels of personal sacrifice and personal prayer.

To this Diocese’s credit, God has given us numerous clergy and lay people who were and are willing to give so sacrificially of their time, their money, their courage and their prayers.

I am humbled to stand in the shadow of such giants and thrilled that God has asked us to take our places with them to meet the new challenge of reaching this area afresh with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is not a time for business as usual, unless business as usual means new depths of loving commitments to the Savior who so passionately cares for us and to a world in desperate need of very, varied views.

May we remember with gratitude the sacrifices of the past and take up the mantle for the sake of the very exciting future that God has for us. Thank you. If you want to help out, come and see me.