Bishop McKelvey, Bishop Gulick, Bishop Roskam, Mr. Chancellor, Honored Ecumenical Colleagues, Clergy and Lay Delegates to the 123rd Annual Convention of the Diocese of Newark, Visitors and Friends:

Grace and Peace be with you in the name of the Lord Christ.

This annual convention of our Diocese convenes at a time when the world seems significantly safer than it was just a year ago, and infinitely safer that it was two decades ago. As 1997 dawns the fragile democracy in Haiti is functioning peacefully. The sound of gunfire in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia has given way to strident, but as yet still peaceful, political rhetoric. The nation of South Africa is addressing its wounded past in a healing and redemptive manner under the leadership of retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In Russia democracy and a free market economy have survived not only an election, but the critical illness of their elected president, Boris Yeltsin. Even the militarism of the North Koreans seems to have ameliorated. We rejoice tonight in this movement toward world peace.

That is not to say that ours is now a perfect world. The peace process in the Middle East has tottered on the fragile edge. The city of Hebron, where the Book of Genesis tells us our spiritual ancestor, Abraham, buried his wife Sarah in a great cave that he purchased from the Canaanites, has been at the heart of this dispute. Behind the political posturing separating Arafat and Netanyahu is the question of whether or not the Jewish state of Israel can tolerate an independent Palestinian state on its west bank, and from the Palestinian perspective the question is whether or not there can be any lasting peace without that independent Palestinian state. That is why negotiations have been so difficult. But at last the recognition has dawned that the best long-term interests of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as of the whole world, are served by a peaceful solution to this conflict.

In other troubled spots around the world we note that tribal warfare and wide-scale starvation still mark Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and the Sudan. The potentially great nation of China continues to have trouble guaranteeing basic human rights, which it must do before it can take its place among the leading nations of the world. The slowness of the Chinese to grasp this reality causes great fear and no small exodus among the citizens of Hong Kong on the eve of their return to membership in the nation of China.

Yet recalling the recent past, when our seas were filled with boat people seeking asylum from Haiti, when the cruelty of the war in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia was front-page news, when we were not certain whether or not Russia might even return to communism in a free election, then surely we begin to realize that we are progressing toward a safer and more peaceful world. With a longer range memory, we note that there is no cold war today between two armed camps, that no missiles are now aimed at the great cities of the world, and that the arms race appears to be over. Perhaps there is a growing consciousness among all people that the destiny of the whole human enterprise is bound up with our capacity to live together on this planet as one human family.

Ours is a radically interdependent world. We now realize that only global solutions can address such issues as environmental protection, world hunger, and overpopulation. Nationalistic sloganeering might still sound good on the lips of politicians, but it is clearly the irrelevant rhetoric of yesterday. Our children will surely live to see the decline of nation states and the growth of a universal one-world mentality in which there is no room for prejudices based on tribal or any other external characteristic. That new consciousness alone will guarantee the future of the human enterprise.

One factor working against this emerging consciousness is found in the popular but small-minded claims that a particular religious tradition is the final revelation of God or the only true pathway to God. To our shame Christianity is not exempt from participating in this divisiveness. Such human idolatry creates political chaos wherever its head arises. Yet the religious mentality clings to this claim again and again. It has happened so consistently throughout history that we are almost immune to its horror. It is seen in the assertion made by some Christians that there is only one true church. It is heard when any body of Christians suggests that their leader is infallible or that their holy book is inerrant. It was demonstrated in Michigan this year when the Synod of the Reformed Church expelled one of its pastors, Richard Rheem by name, for daring to suggest that God's love operates beyond the boundaries of Christianity and that truth also resides among Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists. It was demonstrated once again just this last month when the Pope excommunicated a third world Catholic theologian from Sri Lanka, named Tissa Balasuriya, for the heresy of "relativizing truth." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, defended this episode with an incredible and bizarre statement: "The faith, together with its practice, either comes from the Lord through his church and the sacramental ministry, or it does not exist in absolute," he stated.

Cardinal Ratzinger apparently does not understand the fact that no human words can capture any absolute truth. All human words are culturally conditioned and thus can never articulate ultimate truth. They can only point to it. The words of our historic creeds assume, for example, a Ptolemaic universe that no one has believed literally for five hundred years unless they are members of the Flat Earth Society. It was Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, who spoke to this issue with his typical blunt boldness. "This is the system as it works," said Professor Kung, "and it will work as long as Catholicism does not get rid of a doctrine that says the Pope is always right. Unfortunately, it is an efficient method," continued Kung, warming to his task, "because," and I quote, "now every stupid theologian in India can accuse others of defending what Father Balasuriya was saying," end of quote. How thankful I am for that one Catholic voice of my good friend, Hans Kung. Yet these imperialistic religious ideas continue to exist in almost every religious system and when they enter the political realm, they feed such murderous behavior as that which sets Protestants against Roman Catholics in Ireland. They are found in the conflict between the Shiite and Sunni Moslems that destabilizes the peace in Iran and Iraq. This same mentality fuels the hatred between Moslem and Jew in the Middle East, between the Moslem and Christian in Uganda and the Sudan. This religious-based sickness consistently feeds the negative side of human life that inevitably rips asunder the human family.

When will we mortals learn that God is infinite and our human minds are finite, that God is mystery and our human minds will never fully comprehend the wonder of the Divine Being? When will we learn, in the words of Isaiah, that God's ways are not our ways? When will we embrace the fact that all of us who claim to be religious people are but pilgrims who can only journey into the mystery of a God, who will always be beyond our power to conceptualize? When will we understand that the reality of God is never to be identified with the human description of that reality? To say it bluntly, God is not Catholic or Protestant. God is not Christian or Jewish. God is not Moslem, Hindu or Buddhist. God is neither eastern nor western, African nor Caucasian. God is not sexually identified. The God we worship must draw us beyond all of our human limits. That is finally what true worship means. No ecumenical or interfaith conversations will be worthy of our time or attention until all religious traditions can lay down their assertions that they are the only true representatives of the God who made us all. Is it not ironic that those who claim to worship the universal God find themselves acting in such a way as to be the major obstacle on the human journey into being one family living together in peace on a tiny speck of matter called the planet Earth? How proud I am that this family of faith called the Diocese of Newark, led by Robert Morris and Tracey Lind, had the courage to address many of these issues in our conventions of 1994 and 1995. Perhaps once again it shall be our vocation to lead the whole church to recognize that justifying our prejudices by claiming an ultimacy for our limited definition of God can never be a worthy role for any of us who claim to be Christians.

In our own country we are, thank God, on the far side of another national political campaign in what is becoming a once-every-four-years embarrassing national spectacle. These campaigns spend billions of dollars, assassinate the characters of almost everyone who seeks public office and leave winners and losers alike with a sense of outrage and/or revulsion. I was particularly embarrassed that the race almost universally acclaimed to be the meanest, the most disreputable and the most tainted with character assassinating advertisements was our own New Jersey senatorial campaign between Robert Torricelli of Bergen County and Richard Zimmer of Morris County. I know both of these gentlemen. They are both better human beings than this campaign revealed. Yet the lure of political power appears to have seduced them both into unworthy behavior. Their respective campaigns brought no honor to either candidate and they succeeded in violating the good image of the State of New Jersey.

Campaign reform legislation is vitally needed in this country but efforts to bring it to pass have been singularly unsuccessful. I am not certain that campaign reform will ever be passed by politicians. They are so deeply enmeshed in it. Perhaps such reform must begin with a referendum initiated by the citizens of this state who will demand such things as a limit on spending, a limit on the length of the campaign, a limit on the influence of political action groups, a limit on money coming from outside New Jersey to seek to influence the political choices of New Jersey voters, and perhaps even a line on the ballot that says "none of the above" so that voters might have a better option than staying away from the polls to express their revulsion at the present state of the elective process of this democracy. Free elections in a democracy were designed to provide an arena in which issues could be debated by men and women of character. They were never intended to be a place where character would be debated by men and women of unfettered ambition.

The political campaign of 1996 also revealed other issues on the national scene that concern me deeply. This is an enormously wealthy nation. That wealth has grown in the last two decades at an unprecedented rate. Yet the gap between the richest 20% of our population and the poorest 20% of our population has never been larger than it is today. In the past two years alone the capital wealth of this nation, as measured by either the Dow Jones Average or the Standard and Poor's Index of 500 stocks, has increased by more than 50%. Signs of this new affluence are seen in the salaries paid to star athletes and bonuses paid to resourceful chief executives of major corporations. These excessive expenditures raise soul-searching questions. Is any basketball player worth $100,000,000? Is the Disney Corporation's former president, Michael Orvitz, worth $90,000,000 in severance pay for little more than a year's tenure at that corporation? Perhaps those symbols of incredible wealth would not be major concerns if this nation did not at the same time offer the stark contrast between those profligate salaries and the presence of homeless people in every city of this land. Perhaps we would not notice these excessive salaries if, in the midst of such great affluence, the Congress had not passed and the President had not signed, a welfare reform bill which, while having many attractive features, also puts millions of poor children at risk. Perhaps we do not understand that 80% of the welfare recipients in this land are women and dependent children. Perhaps our present enormous affluence would not bother us if it were not that some 20% of the citizens of this land have no health insurance. Perhaps we would not be concerned about excessive wealth if the major political pressure that is dominating the energy of both the new Congress and the newly re-elected President was something other than proposals to find some new form of tax relief and a way to lower the capital gains tax which inevitably will make even the richest segment of our population richer still. Oh yes, I know the argument regularly trotted out by those who have the most to gain from such legislation, that lowering taxes, and especially lowering the capital gains tax, will create jobs and expand the economy. There is even a small element of truth in that assertion. Yet let me remind you all that taxes on the wealthiest Americans were lowered dramatically during the first term of the Reagan presidency. The result of that tax break for the wealthy has certainly been the creation of enormous new wealth for those who live at the top of the socio-economic ladder. But the trickle down justification for those tax changes has not worked and it never will. Indeed, that Reagan-supported tax deduction was the very act that created the growing gap between the rich and the poor. The enormous affluence in this nation has developed alongside an absolute disaster in health care for the poor, a crisis of life and death proportions for every urban hospital in the United States, and the near collapse of public education in urban America. The great benefits of this expanded economy did not trickle down to these elements of our society. Today the same politicians who changed the tax code in the 1980's to benefit the wealthy now want to turn welfare over to the states, to solve the school crisis with a voucher system that will, in effect, privatize public schools, and refuse to guarantee health care for the poor. I submit that in the light of these continuing realities, it is all but immoral to cut taxes and lower the capital gains rate until we have addressed the pain present in our own society, until we build a floor of decency underneath the poor, until we provide universal health care and until we address the crisis in public education.

It is easy to target politicians for this failure, but that is simply to ignore our own responsibility. Politicians only reflect the will of their constituents. I am weary of hearing right wing politicians playing to their constituents with rhetoric that suggests that the people of America are carrying an excessive load of taxes. The fact is that this nation of ours has the lowest tax burden of any nation in the western world. I fear rather that we have become a nation motivated primarily by greed. There is ample evidence that the majority of the citizens of this nation no longer care about the health of the body politic so long as they are allowed to maintain their own standard of living. My critics say this sounds like I am advocating class warfare. My brothers and sisters, we have had class warfare in this nation for two decades and the poor have lost that war. They are the casualties on our doorsteps.

I wonder if the signs of this same indulgent greed and cultural self interest are not also affecting the church today. I cite as data the fact that some of the wealthiest churches of this Diocese are today reporting financial difficulties. Is it a sign of life or death that no church in this Diocese, nor the Diocese itself, yet gives to others as much as we spend on ourselves? Is it a sign of religious greed that forty-five of our congregations do not even give beyond themselves 10% of their general purpose income? Is it not alarming that in the midst of this greatest economic expansion in history, seventy-four of our churches either kept static their proportion of outside giving this year or even lowered it? For these things to happen in our expanding economy is a telling symptom of our corporate health. It is a commentary on the depth of our commitment, and it raises questions about our understanding of discipleship to Jesus Christ.

When I turn my attention to the State of New Jersey, the same issues of greed and affluence are readily discernible. We responded three years ago to a gubernatorial campaign that promised a 30% cut in state income taxes. That is always a popular campaign appeal. In the three years since, more than a billion dollars in previous sources of State revenue have remained in the pockets of our citizens. Yet no one has yet announced specific cuts in spending to compensate for the loss of income. It is politically much easier to take money from pension reserves or to propose borrowing through the issuance of bonds than it is to cut essential state services. But someday the chickens will come home to roost. While this financial shell game goes on, this State is under a mandate of the courts to equalize spending on education between the wealthy districts and the poor districts of New Jersey. The reason for this mandate is that New Jersey ranks 47th out of the 50 states of this union on the question of the equal distribution of resources between the rich and poor school districts. The amount of money required to equalize the expenditure per child in New Jersey schools would be $270,000,000, about one-fifth of what our citizens have saved with their 30% tax decrease. Our legislators nibble at the edges of this problem with proposed cosmetic changes. Perhaps they anticipate that the court will not recognize smoke and mirrors and thus will not continue to hold the elected leaders of this state accountable for the lack of equal educational opportunity that we offer our children.

Please understand I do not believe that equal expenditure of money is the only factor necessary to produce equal schools, but I do believe money is an essential starting point. Beyond money, however, are so many more issues that must be addressed. The leaders of New Jersey's public education must rediscover the fact that the sole purpose of our state-supported public schools is to educate our children. Schools do not exist to create jobs or even to solve social problems. Successful public education requires the conviction that all children are capable of learning and any teacher or principal who does not believe that ought to be dismissed. So often we have let our sociological excuses compromise our standards of excellence in education. If our children do not learn, we should hold the educational system responsible instead of asserting that it must be the child who is at fault. In some urban areas, to give our most underprivileged children a chance, we need to lower dramatically the pupil-teacher ratio so that the whole child can be nurtured into the learning experience with individual attention. The children of the poor come to the first grade already far behind because they come from families for whom survival, not enrichment, is the primary daily agenda.

Please look at this issue, dear people of God. This is not about partisan politics or political rhetoric. It is about the lives of children, especially fragile, underprivileged, urban children, for whom a good public education is the only ladder out of despair, the only hope they have for a better life. Are you not embarrassed to recognize that in our State of New Jersey young black males still have a better chance statistically of going to jail than of going to a university? How long will we continue to blame the victim and not the system? Are we not aware that the correlation between school dropouts and later imprisonment is very clear? Does it not say something about our blindness that the budgets of both the state and the nation have no difficulty finding money to construct new jails and new prisons? Those proposals are even politically popular. Why is it that we do not stop to compare the cost of educating a child with the cost of incarcerating an adult? Will we ever elect political leaders who understand that viable solutions to systemic problems may not be politically popular, nor will these solutions occur in time to influence the next election? I raise these issues today because they cry out for the attention of the citizens of this State. I also call that portion of New Jersey's citizenry known as the Diocese of Newark to address these issues in the next year and to frame a response to the crisis in public education and in values in our state by mandating that the Council of this Diocese undertake a study on these issues with whatever state-wide assistance we can garner and report to our 124th annual convention on the role this Diocese might play in this educational and values crisis in our state.

When I turn to look at the life of the church, it needs to be said that this has been a difficult year nationally, at least for our community of faith. Morale is low in this church of ours. Some of the reasons for this are clear. The former treasurer of our church is today an inmate in a West Virginia prison. Bishop Walter Righter and this Diocese were both subjected to personal attacks, involving the integrity of our decision- making processes and our ability to determine who are called, qualified and fit to be our clergy. The Ecclesiastical Court of the House of Bishops upheld Bishop Righter, but the cost, financial, emotional and otherwise, is still hard to measure.

In other parts of our church inappropriate behavior on the part of some clergy brought new anger into our corporate life. Our neighboring Diocese of Long Island has been particularly hard hit. Such behavior diminishes us all. We who are ordained do need to recognize that we have the responsibility to model behavior that is a wholesome example to the flock of Christ.

Throughout this church various political action groups seem to revel in these signs of the church's distress. These organizations busily engage in the task of picking the scabs off the sores of the church in their attempt to line the pockets of their negative witness with angry money of which there seems to be an abundance. These organizations distort, exaggerate, titillate and scandalize. Somehow they feel they gain when they tear this church down. Many of these people still seem to want a church exclusive of racial and sexual diversity and dedicated to the words and phrases of our religious past. They do not seem to understand the distinction first drawn for me by Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale University, who wrote that "Tradition is the living faith of dead people, but traditionalism is the dead faith of living people." Our witness must be clear. Where this church is corrupt, we will seek to purify it, but where it is right, we will seek to establish it. Ours is a church that must reflect the diversity of God's world and a church that must adapt if we are to live into the realities of the 21st century.

We will choose a new Presiding Bishop for our church this summer. A disturbing reality is that ours is the only province of the Anglican communion to accord a vote to retired bishops, and as many as 100 retired bishops may be present and voting. Because of this anomaly, I do not look for a true leader to be chosen who can call this church both to relevance and to greatness, unless perhaps this office has the power to recreate the person who fills it. If, as I suspect, a strong competent national leader will not be chosen, it will mean that effective leadership will have to come from the local dioceses. It will place a new vocation of leadership on clergy and laity just like yourselves. Please be aware of that opportunity and do not minimize what an educated and committed segment of the Church can accomplish.

You will, at this convention, adopt a profile of this Diocese that will articulate both who we are as a Diocese and what we hope to become in the next decade. I shall not comment either tonight or during the discussion tomorrow on this profile. That is for the people of this Diocese to determine. I do, however, want to take this opportunity to call to remembrance some of the events that have been particularly important to me in my years in this office.

It was in September of 1976 that I, as the newly elected Bishop, met for the first time with the clergy of this Diocese to plan for our future together. The great need expressed on that occasion was for ongoing clergy education to enable the ordained leadership of this Diocese to grapple effectively as Christians with both theological issues and with the theological aspects of the public issues of our day. After much discussion the form that we developed together was that of bringing national and international leaders to our Diocese three or four times a year to spend a day lecturing and to be in dialogue with our clergy. I was accorded the honor of being one of those three or four guest lecturers each year. Every book I have written as a bishop has been born in that lecture series. At the suggestion of the Rev. Dr. David Hamilton of Morris Plains this opportunity came to be known as the New Dimensions Lecture Series and, over the years, it has been one of the distinguishing marks of this Diocese. Our clergy have had the opportunity of spending some days each year in dialogue with such world leaders as Hans Kung of the University of Tubigen, Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, James Forbes, Ann Ulanov, Phyllis Trible and Roger Shinn of Union Seminary in New York, Rosemary Ruether of Garrett, Charles Curran of Catholic University, Paul Davies of Newcastle on Tyne, Arthur Peacocke of Cambridge, Krister Stendahl of Harvard, Keith Ward of Oxford, John Boswell of Yale and Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar. We have also been graced by such secular scholars as Mortimer Adler, Buckminster Fuller, Lewis Thomas and Caesar Chavez. We have welcomed members of the faculties where most of our clergy have trained - Reginald Fuller, Charles Price, and Marianne Mix from Virginia Seminary, and Richard Norris and James Fenhagen from General Seminary. Bishops like John E. Hines and Fred Borsch in the United States and the Bishop of Durham and the Archbishop of York in the United Kingdom have also been our guests. In May of 1997 we will present in this lecture series the world famous Karen Armstrong from the faculty of the University of London whose book, A History of God, occupied a position on the best seller list of The New York Times for months. We have also dealt in these New Dimension Lectures with vital public issues, ranging from abortion to physician-assisted suicide. We have faced the challenges to our faith raised by the fields of microbiology and subatomic physics. We have welcomed astrophysicists who have helped our people scan the vastness of space in search of a God who must not be too small. This regular feeding of the minds of our clergy and an increasing number of our lay people has been the part of our life that is talked about throughout the breadth of this Church. I know of no diocese whose clergy have the privilege of spending days like these with such world class scholars. This opportunity has happened so regularly that people in this Diocese have begun to take this privilege for granted and even not to be aware of the uniqueness of this opportunity. If searching for the truth of God is one of the pathways to leadership, as I believe it is, then these diocesan guests have helped us to fulfill that part of our vocation.

It is my conviction that this twenty-year intellectually enriching opportunity has undergirded in a systematic and significant way the prophetic ministry of this Diocese. That ministry has found expression through various task forces which have been formed in the Diocese of Newark to stretch our thinking on crucial concerns of our day. We, as a Diocese, have addressed issues rising out of the environment, human sexuality, child abuse, physician-assisted suicide, the problems of aging, the future of the church, the definition of a Christian in the 21st century, the proper use of the Bible, the proposed revision of our liturgy and many others. Primarily as a result of these task forces, this convention has become an arena for incredible theological debate time after time. In that process we have learned how to listen, how to allow our prejudices to be challenged, and we have even been encouraged to grow as debate raged on the floor of this convention. Indeed, powerful issue-oriented debate has become so commonplace for us that we have also tended to take that for granted. But new clergy coming to us are amazed by it and clergy who leave us for other dioceses are caught up short when they learn that convention debates like ours are not normative throughout this church. In my opinion these task forces and the debates they have produced have been the growing edge of our common life.

Today another issue forces itself upon us. In the political life of our nation, leaders in both parties are under ethical scrutiny by special prosecutors. Our ethically-compromised Church is also trying to define the values by which it lives. Ethical issues have been present in every task force debate we have had in this Diocese. When any action is recommended, there are implicit within that action some ethical assumptions. On what ethical basis can we speak to such subjects as the environment or the morality of sexual relationships or the care of our children and our elderly citizens? What makes one action "Christian" rather than another? Whether we like it or not, the Bible has been relativized as the source of ultimate ethical authority by the explosion of knowledge in our century, so a simple appeal to literal texts no longer provides ethical certainty. At the same time, the moral absolutes that we once took for granted as unchanging truth have also been relativized. Very few issues come to us today in any shade but compromised gray. So what is the basis for ethical decision-making in our generation? Is there still such a thing as a Christian ethic that is distinct from any other ethics? What makes it Christian? To help us focus on these questions, I am asking for this convention to support my decision to constitute a Task Force on Ethics to assist this Diocese to speak to the moral climate of our times. I ask you to mandate that the findings of this Task Force be presented to this body in 1998 for our deliberation, debate and, in some form, for our adoption. I believe this could be one of the more exciting ventures that we have undertaken in our life together.

Let me now touch on a number of Diocesan subjects quite briefly.

I am proud to inform you that in the brief prepared by a firm of Washington, D.C. lawyers for presentation earlier this month to the Supreme Court of the United States on the subject of physician-assisted suicide, the report of our Task Force, co-chaired by the Rev. Larry Falkowski of Holy Trinity, West Orange, and Dr. Mary Hager of St. Mark's, Mendham, played a significant role and was quoted directly. I also want you to know that both Dr. Falkowski and I have filed amicus briefs before that Court in support of Dr. Timothy Quill and the legalization of physician-assisted suicide under the restrictions that this convention so carefully delineated last year.

I am pleased to tell you that this Diocese has under development more than 100 additional units of low income housing in Newark, Jersey City and Paterson. This is the work of our Episcopal Community Development Corporations, both local and diocesan. I also note that this Diocese has reestablished its relationship with Apostles' House, a Newark based social service agency founded by a coalition of urban and suburban Episcopal Churches. During December I dedicated their latest facility, to house a residential program for pregnant teenagers.

I rejoice that another one of our leading congregations, Grace, Madison, has called an outstanding women priest to be its rector. I recall that in 1982, in my convention address, I implored the leadership of this church to break the barrier that many felt existed between our ordained women and the position of rector or vicar. My friends, that barrier has been broken and today we boast twenty-nine women clergy in charge of congregations, including the rectorships of two of our five largest churches.

I am gratified that The Oasis Ministry has been so powerfully revived under the leadership of our Canon Missioner Elizabeth Kaeton and a deeply dedicated Board. I commend to you their dream to create Oasis congregations throughout the Anglican Communion, and I appeal to your generosity in our attempt to build the endowment of The Oasis so that someday it will be financially independent of the budget of this Diocese.

This Diocese is honored by the leadership that Bishop McKelvey has given to our church nationally on the subject of racism and I urge all of our leaders in every congregation to transform Martin Luther King, Jr.'s holiday each year into an occasion to concentrate on removing the remaining vestiges of a killing racism from our corporate life as a church and a society. I also invite the white members of our Diocese to come together with the black members of our Diocese annually in the celebration of Absalom Jones, the first black Episcopal priest in this nation. That celebration will take place at our Cathedral on Sunday, February 9th at 3:00 p.m.

For at least two decades the leaders of this Diocese have been working to turn around declining churches by developing new models of ministry appropriate to our day. We faced the fact that some churches clearly needed to be closed. Others, however, needed to discover that full time ministry might not necessarily mean the presence of a full time priest. We have tried to break the hierarchical understanding of ministry that tends to play a game we call Father or Mother Knows Best. Guided principally by Bishop McKelvey and Dale Gruner, we have finally begun to see that labor come to fruition as new forms of ministry are being born in this Diocese. Today we invite you to look at what we call the Ridge Ministry, the BEAM Ministry, the Hasbrouck Heights/ Ridgefield Park Training Ministry, the Jersey City Strategy, a proposal to bring Incarnation, St. Stephens and St. Matthews in Jersey City into a new church building in the southern part of that city, and the Newark initiative designed to form a unified way for the Episcopal churches of our See City to present a common witness.

As church structures shift, the shape of ordained ministry also begins to change. The role of an interim rector, for example, was almost unknown twenty years ago. Non-stipendiary clergy are today a growing phenomenon. Some dioceses in the western part of the State of New York are experimenting with local ordination. In the Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia, an official proposal to allow a lay presidency of the Eucharist is being considered. The new catechism of our church defines the ministers of our Church as laity, bishops, priests and deacons. I think the time has come for us to look anew at these changing patterns and at the shape of the total ministry in this Diocese. When I was consecrated Bishop, this Diocese had twenty-six ordained deacons. Today we have only two. Some of these deacons have served with great distinction. Despite that, I have never been particularly enthusiastic about diaconal ministry, except for those in transition toward the priesthood. It has been my conviction that the office of a permanent deacon denigrates the ministry of lay people by suggesting that ordination is the ultimate validation of lay ministry. I have also had problems with deacons who did not want to leave the church that sponsored them when the clergy leadership changed. I have even had deacons who led rebellions against the rector. It is for these reasons that I have been unwilling even to consider, much less to ordain someone to the perpetual diaconate. But I have learned from people I respect that most of the problems I have experienced with deacons arose from a misunderstanding on the part of the deacon and perhaps even the Diocese as to what a deacon's role was meant to be. These persons have suggested that if we as a diocese could rethink, redefine and clarify the total ministry of our Church, including the role of a permanent deacon, we might develop some new forms of ministry that would aid us in our attempt to develop new forms of congregational life. I am willing, therefore, to call for a study of the whole ministry of this Diocese as it is prepares to enter a new century. Implicit in this study will be a look at both the role of the laity and the possible role of permanent deacons. I would like to ask the Commission on Ministry to undertake this study by appointing a committee out of its membership to look at these issues in depth and make a report on their work to this convention by 1999. I do not guarantee that I will change my mind on the permanent diaconate, but I do guarantee that I will listen to the report of this committee and to your action on it, and I will not seek to block the decisions we make together.

At that convention in 1999 we will celebrate our 125th anniversary as a Diocese. I believe we should take note of this milestone in a significant way. We might, for example, want to commission the writing of a history of this Diocese to recall some of our heroic laity and clergy who have shaped and influenced this faith community. Such a history could demonstrate the way we as a Diocese have dealt with such issues as racism and segregation, woman's suffrage and the role of lay and ordained women in both church and society. We might also chronicle the involvement of this Diocese in the revolution in thought that has changed everything from our theology to our attitudes toward homosexuality. Anniversaries provide us with the opportunity to celebrate our life yesterday and today and to anticipate our life in this Diocese in the third millennium. It seems to me that the planning for this anniversary should be carried out by a special committee appointed by the Bishop and the Diocesan Council and under the Council's direction. If this 123rd convention would indicate its desire to celebrate our 125th year of life, I am certain that both the Bishop and the Council would accept this responsibility for bringing their plans for this celebration to this convention next year for approval.

I am pleased to have been able to introduce you to the President and Chief Executive Officer of Christ Hospital in Jersey City, Dan Connell. I am so proud of this hospital and of its Episcopal connection. Christ Hospital makes a powerful witness for life and justice in health care issues in a major urban center of this Diocese. Whether it will survive or not as an independent church-related facility in the present hospital environment is not clear. What is clear is that Christ Hospital has done the task for which it was created with honor and integrity, and at this moment we rejoice in that alone. It is our intention to have this hospital act in such a way as to guarantee the continuity of that vocation whether it continues to be independent and church-related or not.

This Diocese will move its headquarters from 24 Rector Street to 31 Mulberry Street between February 17th and March 1st, 1997. Because of the pledges and gifts of many of you, we will occupy our new headquarters with an indebtedness of about $400,000. We are still seeking to raise additional capital funds. If you have not made a pledge to this project, I ask you to consider that tonight. Please recognize that had we stayed at 24 Rector Street, we would have faced renovation costs, including asbestos removal, in excess of $2,000,000. We believe we have been good stewards of the diocesan resources in this move and that after an inevitable period of some dislocation, we will have a smoothly running Diocesan House to serve you. I hope the people of this diocese will recognize that we will not function very effectively during the thirty days of transition. There will be a period of two or three days when telephone contact will be cut off at 24 Rector Street before we have moved out. We hope you will be patient. I am especially aware of the loyalty of our diocesan staff for enduring with good humor incredible hardships in our present deteriorating building. The members of our staff deserve the appreciation and affirmation of the people of this Diocese.

And now, a brief look ahead.

For the last decade the biblical debate that has echoed around the halls of academia for almost a century has finally come into the awareness of the person in the pew. That revolution began primarily with the church's rejection of the attempt on the part of religious conservatives to use a literal and uncritical approach to the Bible to justify first segregation, secondly a second-class status for women in both church and society and thirdly to reject and stigmatize gay and lesbian people. Biblical studies have been the primary arena in which I have labored for years. Indeed, I once felt that I was a lonely voice trying to rescue the Bible from fundamentalists. Today, however, the field is crowded with the likes of Robert Funk, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar and Burton Mack, Rosemary Ruether, and a host of feminist scholars. This exciting public campaign to enable biblical scholarship to be embraced by our laity has brought neo-conservatists rushing into the fray with their modern facelifts on the traditional and outdated biblical concepts of antiquity. I think of people like Luke Timothy Johnson and even Raymond Brown in the United States and N. T. Wright and Alistair McGrath in the United Kingdom. This process has produced a lively debate in which even these critics of contemporary biblical scholarship have enabled the scholarship they oppose to come to public attention.

But where do we go from here as a Church. I, for one, plan to go to the creeds. My present theological work is to raise and face these crucial questions: Can we continue to say the pre-modern words of the creeds with integrity and still live on this side of the intellectual revolution occasioned by the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein? Can one still articulate our creedal beliefs in 4th and 5th century words and concepts without having to close our minds to the contemporary work of the subatomic physicists with their concept of quantum weirdness and the astrophysicists with their comprehension of the infinite distances and vast emptiness that constitute our universe? Is the God we Christians worship and the God of the creeds too small to be God for our times? Is the problem these questions raise a problem located in God or is it located in the words we have traditionally used to speak about our God?

So on my agenda for the immediate future is the commitment to revisit and reargue the issues of Nicea that produced our creeds. I want to reopen the Chalcedonian Formula adopted in 451 and rethink the concept of salvation which hinges upon the nature of the Christ. I am pleased that the Jesus Seminar is also poised to move in this direction and that they have invited me to join them in a leadership role in this enterprise. I have accepted and I suspect that this quest will dominate my writing and my intellectual and theological life for the next decade. Through my columns in The Voice and through the New Dimension Lectures, Fall Lectures and Lenten Lectures in this Diocese, I will invite the clergy and lay people of this Diocese to join me in this newest adventure as we journey as a faith community into the truth of God.

In closing let me say that the past year has been busier and in many ways more stressful than any I have ever lived through in this office. Part of that pressure comes from the issues I have addressed in my second career as an author. Ministry is never confined to a geographical area when one's words go out by print, by radio, by television, and by the internet across this nation and around this world. I am intensely aware of the fact that my first vocation is to serve to the best of my ability the people of this Diocese who have elected me to the high privilege of the Office of Bishop. I am also aware that my election was to be a Bishop in the Church of God, not just a Bishop in the Diocese of Newark. I have been given the rare opportunity of being able to force debate on the entire church on a variety of theological and moral issues. I am able through various media to carry my message far beyond our boundaries. Between September and December of 1996, for example, I made 105 public appearances, outside my regular Sunday schedule, in lectures, radio, television, press conferences and print media interviews on a variety of issues, from my newest book to human sexuality to physician-assisted suicide. I have, in recent years, been invited to numerous college campuses to speak to audiences to which few religious people are ever invited. I could not have managed this dual career had not someone named Christine Mary Spong worked full time to enable me to fulfill first my responsibilities to the people of this Diocese. She has managed our household, our personal finances and all of my scheduling. She has edited my columns, my books, my galleys so that I could meet every deadline. She has served on Diocesan boards and on the Task Force on Children. She has even made pastoral calls on her own and on my behalf to clergy and clergy spouses who are either sick or in some personal distress. She and I together have entertained clergy and lay leaders in our home with great regularity. I could not live at the pace I live without her and I need to pay this public tribute to her so that you will know the immense role she has played in this Episcopal career. Besides that, I simply adore this very special person.

Both of us look forward to a three-month sabbatical granted to me this year by this wonderful Diocese. I will spend six weeks studying at the University of Edinburgh and at Oxford University, working primarily with the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Keith Ward. The balance of the time in the fall will be spent lecturing and teaching in Australia and New Zealand, where I have been elected "Theologian in Residence" for a month. I also will complete the final draft of my newest book on this sabbatical leave. I express to you my deep gratitude for this opportunity.

Chris and I are now beginning to view the horizons of our career. My great joy is in the realization that as we walk into those horizons, we will walk together into new and as yet unimaginable adventures. The time to be specific about those plans is not here yet, but it is creeping up on us. So stay tuned.

I thank you. God Bless.

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