Teaching sermon: on church governance

By lay preacher, Will Harron

Awake, O my God, decree justice; let the assembly of the peoples gather round you. 

Good morning, saints!

I’ve been asked to give a teaching sermon this morning on church governance, and the gospel reading for our feast of Saint James gives such a touching entry to this issue. Because this reading is, in its own way, also about church governance. 

Governance and politics are very nearly dirty words in our society, especially when combined with “church.” And there’s very real and compelling reasons why this has become the case: The corruption that power, money, and human immiseration have wrought on our systems of government and governance, the way that “politics” has become a synonym for fecklessness, partisanship, and deadlock, and the way that systems and structures of power have become pathways of abuse.
And so, what, is church governance? James and John’s mother is asking this exact question. 

Let’s think about this text, what’s going on in the moment. This mother knows her sons have been following this teacher, this potential king and deliverer, for some time, and giving up all they owned, all of the systems and relationship with power that they had previously been enmeshed in, to do so. She has an idea of what Jesus’s kingdom will mean - a new world where the Roman oppression has been overthrown, replaced by a power structure where Jesus will be at the top. She has faith that this will be an effect with cosmic ramifications. And she know the worth of her sons. So she goes to Jesus and asks that they be given positions of honor in this new kingdom. Thanks, mom!

Jesus deflects this request - as he told the disciples in the preceding passage, he is travelling to Jerusalem to face death. The honor of being at Jesus’s right and left is one fraught with danger rather than being heir to power.

And this scene immediately provokes an uproar among the other 10 disciples. Why should James and John be at Jesus’s right and left? Why not Peter and Andrew, or Thomas and Matthew? Why disrupt the magnificent equality of the 12? 

And so Jesus again steps in, repeating and underscoring the message that the first will be last and the last will be first. This time, he expresses it as, “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave,” contrasting this to the worldly rulers who lord it over each other in extreme hierarchies. The kingdom that Jesus proclaims will be led from below, empowered by service, and following the witness and example of one who faced and overcame death itself to bring liberation.

How does our own church governance relate to this witness and example?
In the 18th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says that when two are three are gathered in his name, he is with them. I like to borrow that phrasing to say that when two or three people are gathered, for any decision, politics ensues. Because what politics is, at the root, is people engaged in group dynamics around how to distribute power. 

And so rather than a dirty word, for me politics and governance are expressions of how an institution composed of tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions, of people organizes itself.

And while we don’t need to be focused on governance at all times to the exclusion of other ministries, we are all called to take up roles in the organization of our church. On page 855 of the Book of Common Prayer, in the Catechism, the ministry of the laity – people not ordained to the diaconal, priestly, or episcopal ministry, is defined as:
to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ's work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church.

So church governance is, in its own ways, all of our work. How does this work in our Episcopal Church? 

For one thing, the Episcopal Church has some explicit hierarchies. We have bishops - it’s in the name, it’s what Episcopal means. Bishops serve as the chief priest and pastor of their diocese, and they act as the CEO of the legal corporation of the diocese. Our diocese, Western Massachusetts, is one of one hundred and eight dioceses in the Episcopal Church. Each diocese has a bishop, called the ordinary, or the bishop diocesan. Some of the larger dioceses have additional bishops - with titles such as suffragan, assistant, or co-adjutor, but the bishop diocesan is the top of the organizational chart of the diocese. Each bishop serves in the churchwide House of Bishops, which meets several times per year, and many bishops also serve on various churchwide bodies. 

But the Episcopal Church is not all about bishops! Bishops are elected by priests and by lay people - generally, each parish or church in a diocese is entitled to send representatives to the Diocesan Convention, an annual event where elections happen, budgets are passed, and the membership of the diocese can weigh in on the various issues facing the church. Bishops are elected at special meetings of Diocesan Convention (our Diocese will be electing our next bishop at an Electing Convention the day following our Diocesan Convention). 

The lay and clergy delegates to Diocesan Convention also elect the Diocese’s Deputies to General Convention. General Convention is the governing body of the entire Episcopal Church. It meets every three years, a triennium, and the next meeting will be in 2027 in Phoenix, Arizona.

 Each of the 108 dioceses is entitled to elect four clergy deputies and four lay deputies, as well as alternates for each, who take part in the General Convention. All of the deputies form a House of Deputies, which is the counterpart to the House of Bishops - we have a bicameral church legislature. The deputies and bishops spend the months before General Convention engaged in legislative committee work, taking all of the reports and proposed resolutions and budgets and statements and working to create a cohesive body of legislation that can be debated and voted for over the course of several days. Both houses - Deputies and Bishops, must pass legislation for it to take effect. 

In between the triennial meeting of General Convention, the church is governed by an Executive Council. This council is presided over by the officers of each house of the Convention - the Presiding Bishop, who is elected by the House of Bishops, and the President of the House of Deputies, which is elected by, you guessed it, the house of Deputies. Bishop Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and Julia Ayala Harris is the President of the House of Deputies. Because Episcopalians love acronyms, they’re often referred to as the PB and the PHOD. There is also the Executive Office of General Convention, also called the General Convention Office, or GCO, which is the bureaucratic glue that holds the two Houses together and makes General Convention function. The interim Executive Officer of General Convention is Molly James. 

These officers, as well as the Treasurer of General Convention, currently Kurt Barnes, serve as officers of the Executive Council. Joining them are thirty eight elected members of Executive Council. Twenty of them, consisting of bishops, priests, deacons, and laity, are elected at General Convention. The other eighteen - 9 clergy and 9 lay members - are elected by the nine Provinces, geographical regions that I will talk about momentarily. The Executive Council meets quarterly and conducts the day-to-day business of the church. 

But most of the legislation passed by General Convention is larger in scope than an Executive Council. In between meetings of General Convention, the presiding officers of the two houses appoint Episcopalians from across the church to interim bodies, working groups who are tasked with taking the legislation passed by General Convention and applying it. Some interim bodies are standing commissions, carrying an ongoing mandate broader than one General Convention. 

I serve on one of them - the Standing Commission for Formation and Ministry Development. We are currently working on enacting legislation passed by General Convention around access to Spanish language resources, issues around clergy formation, gathering various Christian formation materials into an easily accessible online hub, and other projects. Other standing commissions include the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, the Standing Commission on World Mission, and the Standing Commission on Structure, Governance, Constitution and Canons (a mouthful, but I hear they have their own t-shirts, and I want one). 

Other interim bodies include Task Forces, constituted for a single three year term to work on a specific issue, as well as various ecumenical and interfaith bodies that the Episcopal Church sends representatives to. This triennium, some task forces include Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property and LGBTQ+ Inclusion.

Any Episcopalian can apply to serve on an Interim Body - you don’t have to be on your church’s Vestry or be elected to Diocesan Convention or General Convention. After each General Convention the church opens an application process for Episcopalians interested in serving on an interim body to put their name forward for consideration. 

Supporting the General Convention, dioceses, interim bodies, and Episcopalians everywhere are the Presiding Bishops’ staff. The Presiding Bishop serves as the CEO of the Episcopal Church - our corporate name is the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, or DFMS. The DFMS is headquartered at 815 Second Avenue in New York City, and so sometimes the churchwide office is referred to as 815. The Presiding Bishops’ staff includes staff officers working on youth ministry, leadership development, racial justice, global mission, as well as supporting dioceses outside of the United States, ministry to members of the Armed Forces, and up until very recently, refugee resettlement.

And so that’s our churchwide governance. Moving laterally across the org chart, I want to also mention Provinces. The 108 dioceses of the Episcopal Church are arranged in 9 geographical Provinces. Confusingly, Province is also the term used for member churches of the Anglican Communion - the Episcopal Church is a province of the Anglican Communion and also has 9 provinces. We are in Province 1! Province 1 is the 7 dioceses of New England - Western Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Provinces don’t quite fit into the “hierarchical” model of the Episcopal church. I serve as the Provincial Coordinator for Province 1 - it’s my job, and it’s not full time. Provinces look different in each region. 

Because Province 1 is geographically compact, we have some advantages that help us organize our ministry effectively. Provinces fill the gap between dioceses and the churchwide systems of governance and ministry. Province 1 supports its dioceses with a Province 1 School for Deacons, a modest grant program for ministries that connect multiple dioceses, and, recently, sponsorship of the Episcopal Path to Creation Justice, a program guiding Parishes through a year of discernment and action around climate issues.
Each Province has a Provincial Synod- the provincial version of Diocesan Convention - and each diocese elects delegates to the Synod. In Province 1 we call our Synod Provincial Conference. The Synod has one extremely important churchwide mandate - electing a lay member and a clergy member to Executive Council. Beyond that duty, the Province is free to experiment and explore the best way to engage in ministry in its context. 
All this is a confusing rush to get through in one teaching sermon, and one might reasonably ask, amidst all of this governance and bureaucracy and structure, where is Jesus? 

Jesus is present in the faithful Episcopalians who put their time and talent and effort towards building and maintaining structures that allows our church to worship together, engage in pressing issues, and stay in faithful relationship across 50 states and over a dozen countries. Jesus and his kin-dom are present when Episcopalians in their diocesan and General Convention and Provincial Synods urge the church to speak on behalf of the marginalized. Jesus is with us when Episcopalians build provincial networks to take part in indigenous justice efforts or to raise up young leaders. Jesus is with us when we pray faithfully for servant leaders to take a turn in our various leadership bodies, whether on our Vestry, serving our Diocese, or stepping into churchwide leadership. 

We have certainly created a structure more complex and convoluted than what James and John’s mother was envisioning when she asked for her sons to sit at Jesus’s right and left, or when the disciples squabbled over their internal pecking order. I think there are days when what we have doesn’t quite pass the test of the leader being the servant rather than lording it over others. But the governance of our church reflects an honest engagement with the realities of two or three, or a million and a half, Episcopalians praying, serving, giving, and being church together. 

I pray, and I hope you will pray with me, for the leaders in our church - in our parish, diocese, province, and the whole Episcopal Church - and pray that they reflect and continue to reflect the model of Christ’s servant leadership.

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