A Note from the Author: At their recent pre-Lenten retreat, the clergy of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe gathered in Assisi for three days of reflection on the life and spirituality of Saint Francis. The retreat came in the midst of Vice President Vance choosing to meet with the leader of Germany’s extreme right party in the leadup to parliamentary elections there, and remarks from President Trump placing the blame on Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and calling Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator.”
I think it is fair to say that over the past 50 years or so the people and the congregations of the Convocation have lived in an increasingly conflicted relationship with the American identity of our church. We could probably trace this at least as far back as 1968, and the disagreements over American policy in Vietnam, which deeply damaged America’s standing in the eyes of European public opinion. We could follow a line from there through the bitter debates over the placement of intermediate range nuclear forces in Europe in the early 1980s. Some of us here might even have come out onto the streets in protest in those days.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s opened an era of better feelings among the nations of the West. Perhaps it was triumphalism, or perhaps it was naïveté; it surely was naïve to declare it to be “the End of History,” as Francis Fukuyama did. History has a way of resisting ending, but it does seem to repeat itself. Whatever the reason, we can now see that that moment of optimism was short-lived.
I have no interest in turning this into a seminar on international relations. Most of you know that is a subject of deep interest to me, and indeed was my first career; but it is not our purpose here. Instead I want to invite us to reflect on the pastoral needs of our people, and the feelings each of us has about our church just now.
I have worked pretty strenuously in my ministry here always to remember that we are the distinctly European expression of a distinctly American form of Anglicanism. That’s a lot — maybe too much — of distinction piled on distinction. And I will confess to you, my siblings, that the perfect balance point in that tension is often hard to find, much less maintain. I have tried to share with the wider church “back there” the lessons, the creativity, the sheer determination of our congregations here, while at the same time always trying to remind our congregations here that there are distinctively Episcopal ways of doing things, ways we need always to teach and to follow no matter where we are situated.
I could finance my entire retirement if I had a Euro for every time I have observed to one of our congregations a gap between the tradition and practice of the Episcopal Church and the way in which a given church here is ordering its affairs, only to be told, with varying degrees of impatience, “but we are different here; we can’t do it that way.” And the longer I have been here, the more I have become persuaded that in fact we are not all that different here; we just choose to believe we are. Said differently, it is a reflexive response that too often serves as a supremely effective work-avoidance strategy. There is a difference between being the European expression of the Episcopal Church and presuming to remake the Episcopal Church in our preferred image.
Yet one thing I know, and that I am always eager to remind people when I preach back in the United States, is that here in the Convocation we don’t have a single congregation that is majority-American anymore. Some of you serve congregations in which Americans are a plurality; some of you serve congregations in which there are no Americans at all. All of us serve the Episcopal Church; and it turns out that to be that church does not depend, in any essential way, on either priest or people being American.
Whatever might be true of the communities you serve, I suppose that all of the people in our pews in the Convocation have ideas, or feelings, about what is happening in the United States just now — not just the Americans. It is a hard thing to feel abandoned by a friend, especially a friend upon whom you have depended, and who once was helpful. It is a hard thing to feel as though your country, upon whose reputation abroad you have in some way relied as an American living overseas, has suddenly shown itself unworthy of that reputation and untroubled by losing it. It is a matter of outright shame, at least for me, to feel that my country seems to be deciding between simply abandoning or actively betraying the brave people of Ukraine who want nothing more than to order their own affairs in line with the same liberties and same rights we blithely take for granted.
I am hearing a dizzying range of reactions to this moment, from Americans and non-Americans alike in our congregations — anxiety, amusement, cynical resignation, bewilderment, disappointment, anguish. Somehow, those of us who minister in the Convocation have to be pastorally present to all of that. Not because we are an American church, but because this moment of confusion and turbulence in the United States affects everyone here, no matter their passport, whether we like it or not.
I don’t have any wise advice to offer you for how to handle this moment, other than to say that nothing any of us have ever done or studied or experienced before is anything like this moment, and so if you feel a little bit at sea or overwhelmed in this moment, you are not wrong — and you are not alone. But because I have the blessing of knowing you, I am certain that you are up to the task.
So maybe the best advice I can offer to you, which I will both accept for myself and do all I can to facilitate, is to be present to each other, now more than ever. I know that is hard, in our peculiar circumstances here, being so few and so spread out; but I will keep looking for ways to bind us together, and I hope if you have ideas for making this group of colleagues more supportive to you and to each other, you’ll share them.
Let me shift from our congregations to ourselves — to this beloved community of colleagues. Just as the membership of our congregations varies, the same is true of us. Some of us are Americans, and some of us are not. Some of us are experiencing this moment as confused and disappointed friends; some of us are experiencing this moment as people who are deeply troubled about what is going on in a home far away.
I will say for myself that I am grieving the damage inflicted on countless millions of lives by the thoughtless and callous termination of American overseas aid, and the irreplaceable loss of what my former colleague Joseph Nye well described as the “soft power” that for so long enabled a generally benign influence for good that America exerted in the world.
But all of us, no matter our passports, serve this church. And we cannot escape the reality that what distinguishes this church from any other expression of Anglicanism, whether in Europe or anywhere else, is the fact that we emerged from a singular collision between the Anglican idea and the forces that shaped the founding of America. The structures of our church, with its constitution and canons and its bicameral legislature, was drafted at the very same moment and in the very same city as the Constitution of the United States, a constitution by which — at least until these past weeks — ordered the affairs of the United States. And it is no accident that both of those structures are characterized by a suspicion, and thus a separation, of powers and a system of checks on authority.
That is why bishops in the Episcopal Church have perhaps the least authority that bishops enjoy anywhere in the churches of the Anglican Communion. That is why I am so insistent on assuring the vitality of the systems of shared governance by which the people of our church govern the affairs of the church. Those are the things that make us, not just Anglican, but Episcopal.
And that is why, I am deeply persuaded, over these past few years communities of faithful people—in Amsterdam, in Weimar, in Tbilisi, and in Paris—have come to us seeking to become new mission congregations of the Convocation. The good news about us for the wider church is that the Episcopal Church still draws people in—not because they are American, but because they want to be part of a church so ordered and so focused on living out Christ’s mandate.
I still believe that a church like that — the Episcopal Church, for all its errors and past pretensions — has something distinctive, even urgent, to offer in Europe in this moment. I would go so far as to say that there has never been a moment in which God’s call to this church in this place has been so filled with both peril and promise.
Yesterday, in his opening remarks to a meeting of the Executive Council, Sean Rowe, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, spoke of our whole church entering uncharted waters. That is no less true of us in the Convocation. We are a minority of a minority of a minority — an American form of Anglican Christianity in Europe, a Europe that has largely abandoned the Christian faith.
But we are not just a minority. We are the builders of communities drawing together people across vast differences of culture and race and language and nation, in a moment when the loudest voices are luring people into division and mutual disdain. We are a church that gathers in the oppressed, the forgotten, and the reviled — the victims of our timeless seduction by racism, the vulnerable refugees traduced by the powerful, the derided queer community beaten in the streets; and we welcome them not just in the room but at the very center of our discerning God’s purpose, because we take with joyful seriousness Christ’s teaching us that from such siblings we will learn the designs of the kingdom of heaven.
So let us resolve that we will not let them divide us. We will not let them discourage us. We will not let them deflect us from the purpose to which we were are all called: to reconcile all people to God and each other in Christ—as the prayer book teaches us. Never forget that perhaps the highest claim of the work we share among the people we are called to serve is to be a source of absolute and assuring confidence in God’s ultimate sovereignty and Christ’s rule of love, especially when everything around them seems to be telling them that cannot possibly be true.
I’ll end with these words that Jesus spoke to us, his disciples:
“Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:29-32).
The Rt. Rev. Mark Edington is the Bishop of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe and the author of Bivocational: Returning to the Roots of Ministry (Church Publishing, 2018). His previous appointments include serving as Epps Fellow and Chaplain to Harvard College and founding director of the Amherst College Press. Bishop Edington lives in Paris.