Bishop Michael Hunn brought a visual aid to a visual discussion May 29: a toy light saber from the Star Wars universe. “I feel like we’re the last Jedi, folks,” the Bishop of the Rio Grande said, prompting broad smiles from his fellow panelists.
“I feel like we in the Episcopal Church, maybe in the sense of Christianity in a growing secular world, are nearing the place where the stories that matter to us, that create our lives, are being lost,” Hunn said before lifting the light saber to the camera.
Hunn and three other bishops — Brian Prior, who assists in the Diocese of Alabama, Phoebe Roaf of the Diocese of West Tennessee, and Douglas Scharf of the Diocese of Southwest Florida — gathered to discuss “The Role of the Diocese in the Changing Church.” The Episcopal Church Foundation sponsored the session on Zoom and Facebook, and its president, Donald V. Romanik, moderated. About 700 people watched the presentation, organizers said.
The bishops agreed that the Episcopal Church cannot rely on its lovely buildings or even a steady average Sunday attendance for parishes and dioceses to thrive.
“In many respects, what happened was COVID,” Prior said. “Parishes that were in a thin place did not survive COVID.”
Hunn said the prolific author Phyllis Tickle predicted in her book The Great Emergence (2008) that technology would drive immense changes in culture, and her prediction is taking shape now. Hunn said social limits during the COVID pandemic shocked most churches into launching video worship services within roughly 10 days.
The profound changes of technology, Hunn said, “are changing the nature of our hearts and changing the nature of our relationships.”
Bishop Roaf mentioned an older and non-technological challenge. “All three dioceses in the state of Tennessee have had declines in membership since we were split into thirds” in the 1980s, she said. More than half of her congregations are missions in areas with declining populations, she said, “so much of the challenge is to prepare layfolk to be faithful leaders.”
Bishop Scharf said his diocese was created in 1969, the same year that Presiding Bishop John Hines began a General Convention address with a simple declarative sentence: “People are leaving the church.”
The cities within his diocesan borders are booming and attracting young professionals, and methods of church-planting may have to change to reach them.
“We have not yet taken seriously the huge demographic shift that’s about to happen,” Hunn said, as baby boomers die and millennials fill leadership roles. Both the presence of boomers and their financial support will drop sharply in the next “three, five, eight, and 10 years.”
Hunn said he did not have to close any of his parishes because of COVID, but they’re not keeping pace with inflation. He believes the Episcopal Church works from a strength because it combines credal faith with a support for women in leadership and affirmation across the spectrum of sexuality.
He mentioned futurist Amy Webb’s idea that we now live in Generation T (for transition).
Prior mentioned “the browning of America,” adding: “The Episcopal Church is perceived as an Anglo-only church” because of its buildings and music.
Prior described talking with a Latino who thought there was no place for him because he interpreted the phrase “a church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition” as referring to race.
Scharf wryly observed that some parishes are “50 folks over 70,” and they remain that way for generations.
Roaf said her diocese is more than 90 percent white, which runs counter to the Black population of west Tennessee. She said the diocese has drawn from a program used by Alabama and Oklahoma that gives grants to parishes ready to launch mission-oriented projects, like renovating a playground, that strengthen their presence in their communities.
Scharf quoted Bishop Andy Doyle of Texas as saying the Book of Common Prayer (1979) “envisioned a laity-led, clergy-supported church,” but the church has instead remained clergy-led and laity-supported.
Hunn believes the Episcopal Church faces an existential crisis, and it’s tied to a lack of generosity. “Every diocese or parish gets what it can afford and no more,” Hunn said, which looks more like market forces than the church described in the Book of Acts. “Market forces are closing seminaries, and they may begin closing dioceses or parishes.”
Hunn said it breaks his heart that the Diocese of Alaska and the Episcopal Church in Navajoland “have to plead every three years for financial support” at General Convention.
Roaf expressed hope, without criticism of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry or his predecessors, that the next Presiding Bishop could make more conversations about the church’s mission possible. “There’s a lot of reinventing the wheel,” she said.
Hunn said the Episcopal Church is roughly the same size now as it was in the 1930s, and he began to study how the church functioned then. The church in New Mexico had twice as many lay readers as clergy, and priests rode on trains to make their rounds among churches.
Considering today’s technology, Hunn said, the church needs to use it more often: “What would St. Paul do without a Twitter account?”
