ENS: ‘Listening to the spirit,’ task force is reimagining church

By Mary Frances Schjonberg
July 25, 2013

Excerpt:
A major task for the group in the beginning was to decide how to interpret the mandate it has in Resolution C095.

The members discussed what it might mean to “reimagine” the Episcopal Church and reform its structures, governance and administration. And, they considered the issue of where the Christian church is now – and where it is not, according to George and Loya.

It is “no longer culturally normative to be a Christian and a lot of our structures of governance and administration and finance were built and put into place to serve a church where it was culturally normative to be a Christian,” Loya said.

The Christian church now faces the imperative to “take the church to the world rather than wait for the world to come to us,” he said.

And it must ask itself what kinds of governance and administrative structures, what ways of making decisions and what ways of being organized in community will best serve that effort, Loya suggested.
Inevitably, any talk about cultural changes and their impact on the church — and any talk about the implication of those for the church’s structure — turns to money, and the lack thereof. However, the co-conveners said, the task force senses that that is the wrong focus.

“Is our primary task to figure out how to enable the current Episcopal Church church-wide organization model to operate at a lower income level?” George asked. “I think our answer would be ‘no, that is not our primary role at all.’ Our primary role is to envision [how] as the church is emerging and evolving in new ways – and that’s happening everywhere – how do we really ensure that the church-wide organization structures and governance enliven that evolution rather than pull the church back to a different era when local church dynamics were quite different.”

The task force senses that it does not need to invent a “new missional response” to this changing context, George said. That response is already emerging across the church and “it will continue to emerge and evolve and change over time.”

“We need to ensure that the church-wide structures and governance are supportive and flexible and adaptive as the church is adapting and changing,” she said.

Her summary of TEC’s role, they said, is how the members have come to understand C095’s mandate. the rest