Bishop John Shelby Spong
on the occasion of the 124th Convention
of the Diocese of Newark
January 30, 1998
At home we see a booming economy, low inflation and low unemployment. We rejoice that crime, racism and gender prejudices are all in decline. But we also have the specter of scandal in high places that is apparently so engrossing that it fills the media. Those allegations concern us but so do the tactics of stalking a victim, spreading rumors as if they are facts and using concealed microphones to entrap. Our system of justice is today being compromised by unfocused investigations that look like fishing expeditions, by politically motivated organizations funding various accusers and by publishers lurking in the background with book contracts. Those things need to be addressed.
The process will run its course. I will comment on it no further than to say that sexual accusations have been leveled against occupants of the White House throughout American history. The victims of these charges have included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The tactic of trying to destroy a political figure with sexual accusations is also not new. Do remember that no less a person than F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover used wire taps of telephone calls and monitoring devices to entrap Martin Luther King, Jr. in compromised sexual situations. It was a blatant attempt to destroy a charismatic leader. But Dr. King is not remembered today for his sexual appetite even though it is now well documented. He is remembered for his enormous contributions to human rights and for his contribution in the breaking of the power of racism. Perhaps we ought to separate individual acts which may be less than admirable from great social contributions which are lasting. We also need the perspective that even if all the rumors are true, these allegations do not constitute a crime sufficient to bring down this president. But wallowing in this investigation which has now cost this nation millions of dollars and lasted five years, does have the ability to immobilize this nation to the detriment of us all. We all want our president to be effective, but most of us do not expect politicians to be saints. If we did, we would be constantly disillusioned. I think most of us simply hope that this episode will soon be over and our nation can move on to its role of world leadership.
Looking back on 1997 we find that the most public attention of the people of the world was paid to several noteworthy deaths. One thinks of Diana, Princess of Wales and Mother Theresa. For American Episcopalians it was the death of the greatest leader of our Church in this century - John Elbridge Hines.
On the other end of life's spectrum the birth that was most widely reported in 1997 was not that of a human being, but of a sheep named Dolly. Suddenly the technology to clone mammals was present and available. Human beings will certainly be cloned, no matter how many voices are raised against it or how many ethical questions are asked about it. Human beings have never before achieved the ability to do something without proceeding to do it and this will prove no exception. So the cloning of human life will become a reality within the next few years. I hope our Science/Theology Committee will organize an event in which the clergy and people of this diocese can examine that issue in depth.
This new year moves us one year closer to that mysterious and much hyped time span we call the third millennium. In many ways I find the energy around this moment of transition to be amusing. According to the best estimates of the scholars, Jesus was born somewhere between 4 and 8 B.C.E. So, if one wishes to be literally and historically accurate, the millennium actually passed unnoticed sometime between 1992 and 1996, but please don't reveal that secret and rain on all the planned celebrations and the predictions of the end of the world.
Observing the passage of time is a uniquely human thing to do. It is a human gift to keep our feet planted in things that we believe are timeless while we observe the changes and chances of this transitory existence.
It is out of this experience that faith itself is born. As I get closer to the end of my active ordained career, I find myself given to this human activity in an increasingly intensive way. It is that theme which will permeate this address. Tonight I seek to place our Christian faith tradition into its own history, to recognize the changes it has undergone, and to spell out the opportunities and challenges which lie before the Church of the future. In the process I will also seek to interpret the reality that has driven my ministry, shaped my message and defined my episcopal career.
In order to see these issues clearly we must look first at that moment when the second millennium dawned in human history. So focus with me on the year 1000 in this common era. Nation states had not yet been born. Human beings lived either in tribal units or in city states. People still believed, almost universally, that the earth was flat, that heaven was a physical place just above the sky where an intensely human deity lived whose primary concern seemed to be with the particular deeds of our human lives. This God, it was believed, kept extensive records on each person and, in accordance with human deserving, dispensed rewards and punishments, not just at the end of life, but all through our earthly pilgrimage.
In the year 1000 people did not, for example, understand weather fronts, low pressure systems, tornados, hurricanes or heat waves. Since all weather patterns came out of the sky, they were believed to have come directly from God and to reflect God's judgment. In that world view we came to believe that our behavior affected the weather and so we sought to escape hurricanes by offering sacrifices, making confessions and promising that if God called off the winds and gave us another chance, we would be faithful and God-fearing as never before.
In the year 1000 the scientific enterprise was so very primitive that what we call modern science had simply not been born. In that world anything that the human mind did not understand was assumed to be a divine miracle. Indeed, to people living then the miraculous was everywhere. God was believed to be constantly invading our world in supernatural ways. The mysterious skies held the answer to everything.
It is almost breathtaking to face the changes we have undergone in the past one thousand years. Today we know that this planet is but a speck of matter rotating around a mid-sized star called the sun which is but one star among billions of stars that make up our galaxy. Our galaxy is only one of billions and billions of galaxies that inhabit the infinite reaches of space. Into those demystified heavens we human beings have now traveled, first by airplane and then by space vehicles and finally by unmanned rocket ships. Human beings have now walked on the moon and by instruments explored the far reaches of the planet Jupiter. In those once mysterious skies we found the explanations for weather patterns. None of them had anything to do with God. So today God and the weather have been disconnected and God has faded from this area of life that 1000 years ago God dominated.
Between the years 1000 and 2000 the rise of the sciences of human biology also made rapid advances. We began to discover that it was not sin that caused sickness, but germs, viruses, and tumors. When vaccinations and antibiotics were developed to combat these germs and viruses, the place of God in that area of human experience also began to disappear from view. Yes, we continued to pray for the intervention of the deity into our sicknesses or those of our loved ones, but our confidence in those prayers as something more than psychological window-dressing has surely evaporated. Today we place our primary hope for cure not in God, but in surgery, chemotherapy, angioplasty procedures, heart transplants, blood thinners and rehabilitation programs. Once again, God has faded as a causal element from this area of human experience.
During this last millennium we human beings have also come to embrace some startling new possibilities. We once viewed our humanity as just a little lower than the angels as the book of Psalms suggested. Now we view it as just a little higher than the apes as Darwin proposed. We began to suspect that human life was not the crown of God's creation, but the result of an intense survival struggle during the four and half to five billion years of our evolutionary history. It was that perspective that has finally destroyed the primary religious myth by which we have traditionally interpreted our relationship with God. We are now painfully aware that there never was a perfect or finished creation which God pronounced good and from which the Holy One rested from the divine labor as our biblical narrative suggests. Such ideas have disappeared in a world that we know is still being created, in which galaxies are still being formed and in which human life is so clearly still evolving. In the tiny bit of history that recognizable human beings have been present on this planet, the transition in less than 50,000 years from cave dwellers who did not use language to the people who inhabit this generation is so obvious. All of us wonder what our descendants will look like and what they will be able to accomplish when the fourth millennium dawns.
But if there was no finished and perfect creation at the dawn of history, then there could also have been no human fall into original sin and so another part of our religious story collapses. One cannot fall into sin if one has never lived in perfection. Human life has rather emerged through millions of years into new and higher forms of consciousness. So the mythical religious language of a finished creation, the fall, original sin and the need for a rescuing God becomes language out of touch with our present perception of reality. The loss of this mythical framework has also rendered meaningless the normative portrait of Jesus as the divine rescuer, and the story of the cross as the sacrifice designed to pay the price of sin. Those concepts are rapidly becoming all but nonsensical. Yet this is still the mythology that overwhelmingly shapes Christian language. It is the language found in our liturgies, our hymns, our scriptures and our sermons. We continue to worship in language that our world has abandoned. Some worshippers, traumatized by their inability to translate these fading concepts into meaning, respond by denying the truth of that contemporary knowledge which has created this problem. That denial produces a peculiar brand of recognizable religious hysteria. It is as if they believe that if they shout loudly enough, they will be convincing. Other worshippers simply close their minds to this knowledge so that their modern minds and the mythical language of their worship are never allowed to come into contact. Their church life becomes an escape from reality. Still other worshippers, facing what for them are empty and meaningless religious words, simply drop out of church life. When interviewed, these former church members say such things as "church is boring," but what that means is that the language of worship no longer connects with the world in which they live and so worship is perceived as a long, tedious, empty, irrelevant experience. These dropouts from the church today constitute the fastest growing statistic in institutional religious life. I call them "The Church Alumni Association." However, all of us need to face the fact that the ancient mythologies of our faith tradition, developed in the first two millennia of Christian history, are perceived as increasingly irrelevant at the dawn of the third millennium. The faith we profess is encased in what many believe are dying concepts.
As devastating as this is, it is not the only problem institutional religion in the western world faces today. We human beings have also developed insights into our own psychological makeup that raise even deeper and more disturbing questions about the very nature of our faith tradition. In religious circles we continue to use a childlike vocabulary about a parent God who delights in obedient children. We play ecclesiastical versions of the game "Father (or Mother) Knows Best" to the detriment of developing maturity among our worshippers. The Church actually encourages passive dependency. We seem not to hear the biblical call to the fullness of life as the mark of life in Christ. In our world of mushrooming, easily accessible, knowledge and instant communication, religious appeals to outdated myths, an inerrant Bible or any other infallible sources of truth are simply unsupportable.
We have also in the last 1000 years watched our cultural prejudices and stereotypical definitions collide with this enhanced knowledge and be mortally wounded in the process. That is what lies behind the ecclesiastical debates of this century. Racism, male chauvinism and homophobia have not been easy to purge, but they are in varying states of rigor mortis because the premise that sustains each of them has been broken by scientific insights and a newly informed consciousness.
The racial prejudices by which the western world lived at the dawn of this century are now seen as nothing more than ill-informed ignorance. Our attempts to maintain these racist definitions succeeded in producing such dreadful things as segregation and apartheid that are now recognized as nothing more than legalized violence. We continue to need to address the residue of racism in both Church and society with repentance, with overt acts designed to make the playing fields of life equal and, yes, I still believe in affirmative action programs.
Our cultural and ecclesiastical prejudice against women is likewise being dismantled. As recently as the dawn of this present century women in American could not vote. Less than one-tenth of one percent of the women of this nation had been to a college or university and access to the professions or to the world of business was, for women, nonexistent. But now at the end of this century polls tell us that the vote of women elected President Clinton in 1996, two women sit on the Supreme Court, more than 50 percent of today's college graduates are women and the professions and the world of business are increasingly open to their presence. The Christian Church is one of the last places in which this chauvinistic prejudice is still honored by significant numbers with certain major parts of the Christian Church still seeking to preserve their antiquated and outdated all-male priesthood. So overwhelming has this revolution been that I can assert with confidence that every church in Christendom will ordain women by the year 2010 or they will be the laughing stock of the western world.
When the 2nd millennium dawned, people defined homosexuality as a mental disease or a moral depravity chosen by sinful people who were worthy only of banishment of death. In the last fifty years scientific studies have demolished these ideas and brought our world to the awareness that homosexuality is a given, not a chosen, something to which some 5 to 10 percent of the population simply awaken. It is part of a person's identity like discovering one is left-handed. It is not abnormal. It is simply real. As this ancient prejudice dies, a new consciousness and a new inclusiveness is being born. These are but a tiny sample of the changes that have marked the last 1000 years.
My brothers and sisters, we who are to witness the dawn of the third millennium need to embrace the fact that we live in a vastly different world from the world which shaped and defined almost every aspect of the faith we profess. That means that modern Christians are called to speak to a very different world. In this world we must battle to establish values, discover truth and embrace the reality of transcendence, God and ultimate meaning. A church that is either unaware of these changes or unwilling to engage them meaningfully is a Church that is headed for oblivion. Reality cannot be avoided if this institution we cherish wishes to be alive and relevant.
For twenty-two years this inexorable transformation of the way reality is perceived has formed the background against which I have organized my Episcopal career. It was to engage this modern world that in 1976 we initiated in this diocese the New Dimensions lecture series, to bring the thoughts of those who understood these issues to interact with our clergy and lay leadership. In that series we have had the privilege of listening to such intellectual giants as Hans Kung, Elaine Pagels, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Davies, Mortimer Adler, Karen Armstrong, Krister Stendahl and Keith Ward, among many others. No other part of the Anglican Communion has had this kind of opportunity.
This is also why I have insisted on dedicating a major part of my life as a bishop to study, to lecturing and to writing. This is why I have used my columns in The Voice over the past twenty-two years as a bully pulpit, probing issue after issue. This is why I have sought to escape the declining limits of Church life by responding to invitations to lecture at universities in America and across the world. This is why I have appeared on television programs, from the discreet McNeil Lehrer News Hour to the less discreet Oprah Winfrey Show to the indiscreet Politically Incorrect program. This is why I have been willing to engage the public in dialogue on countless talk radio shows and why I am known to the religion editor in every major newspaper in the English-speaking world.
This is also why I have over the years utilized the enormous talent present in this convention to form task force after task force to examine one critical area of our life after another. We have exposed our racial, gender and sexual prejudices. We have examined our violation of the environment, the way the Bible is used, the way we articulate our faith, the future of the Church, the ethical crises in public education, in medicine, in abortion, in physician-assisted suicide and in ethical decision making. This is why we have looked at the interface of science and theology, at the plight of our children and the elderly in this society. This is why this Convention has been asked over the years to study these issues, debate these issues and make decisions about these issues, and to do so very publicly. In our attempt to respond to our real world, we have become an issue-oriented diocese, an exciting, risky and inclusive faith community.
These efforts have borne fruit. We have forced the debate on many questions both onto the agenda of a more complacent national church and into the secular order. This diocese has created for itself a public image that is admired, envied, feared and hated depending on whether the one who states his or her opinion is open to the future or defensive about the dying past. I have no doubt but that time will reveal that we have been faithful to our commitment to live as Christians inside this rapidly changing world.
However, despite the fact that we in this diocese have engaged the future as few parts of the Christian Church have done, we continue to lose the battle against a rising nonreligious secularity. The primary reason for this, in my opinion, is that we have not yet captured either the attention or commitment of our local congregations in this effort. Unless we crack this final barrier, we will fail in this mission to renew and refocus the Christian Church for life in a new century, to say nothing of a new millennium. For it is in the local congregations that our people will either transform this Church or allow this Church to die.
Let me be specific. A congregation that does not understand and engage these issues of change and the explosion of knowledge in which they live is surely doomed. So I invite you, the elected leaders of our diocese, to focus your attention on your local church tonight and consider with me some daunting questions. Are you, in your church, still operating out of one of the historic prejudices of racism, male chauvinism or homophobia? Are people really invited to come to your church just as they are without one plea?
Do you, in the educational life of your congregation, ever touch on the real theological issues of our day or is pious propaganda still the basis of your program? Have you faced what the death of the traditional Christian myth, the loss of the Bible as a source of inerrant truth, or the demise of an external basis for making ethical decisions and the disappearance of God as a working premise in many areas means to the Christian lives of your people? Do you offer to your people something that might replace these fading resources or do you assume that they will develop these faith resources somewhere else? Where, if not in the churches, do you expect this to occur? Are you perhaps depending on something like osmosis? Are those of us who are clergy aware that so many of the people who still come to worship in our churches today cannot make sense of the language of the pre-modern creeds that our liturgies compel them to say? Are we able to listen to that? Do we not yet realize that most of our lay people believe they have no alternatives except to parrot these ancient words? No one has ever suggested to them any other possibility if they desire to remain church members.
Where in the church in which you worship can these issues be raised, engaged or debated? Are our leaders afraid that this is too dangerous, that if these issues get raised, the dwindling core of our faithful attenders will be offended or diminished?
In a world in which faith is dying, the fact remains that significant adult education opportunities are increasingly nonexistent in this diocese on Sunday mornings. Yes, we have Education for Ministry groups that are outstanding, but they reach only a small handful of people. The newly organized Newark School of Religion addresses these issues, but again only for a tiny segment of the population. So the local church sits in a world of exploding knowledge and declining faith and is dedicated to making almost no response. Either we do not recognize the problem or we do not know how to respond to it. I can name on two hands the churches of this diocese that offer meaningful Sunday adult education. In more churches than I want to believe the only Sunday adult education that is available is contained in the 10-15 minute sermon. Even if it is a magnificent sermon, that is a woefully inadequate adult educational standard.
When I look at the education programs we offer the children of this diocese, my alarm for the future is only increased. We have a core of concerned and effective educators, but they are far too few for our needs. The majority of our churches still worship at 8 and 10 o'clock on Sunday morning and run church school programs in conjunction with the 10:00 a.m. service. That schedule is, in my opinion, so inadequate as to guarantee the slow death of that church in the early years of the next century. If the church school classes for our children are not well-planned, undergirded by strong teacher training and designed for a minimum of fifty minutes each Sunday, then we need to face the fact that we are wasting everyone's time. Similarly, if there is no adult class or forum, equally well planned and also lasting at least fifty minutes, providing a time in which questions can be raised and issues explored without appeals to authoritarian answers and pious cliches, then nothing worthy of the name of Christian education is occurring in the Sunday life of your church.
If Christianity is going to survive into the future, then I believe we must start right now to ask our people to make a commitment to a two-hour block of time each Sunday morning that will include both worship and education. If they will give that time, then those of us who are the ordained leaders must demonstrate our ability to fill those two hours with effectiveness, power and meaning. Such an enterprise will not just happen. It will require an effort that will demand the best our clergy have to give. No effective education program will occur without the professional support of the priest being the central resource. But may I suggest that this is exactly what our clergy have been trained to do. So many of the things which now take our clergy's time are actually peripheral to our primary vocations as priests.
When I hear clergy say that their people are not willing to give two hours to their church life on a Sunday, I respond by saying they are not willing to give two hours to what is now being offered on Sundays because it is generally not worthy of two hours. But if our clergy develop an educational program worthy of their people's time, if they enable their people to engage the theological issues that are in their minds, if they are not afraid of controversy or of upsetting the prevailing spiritual immaturity of so many church attenders, then people will come and so will their children. For this world is filled with spiritually hungry people who have actually begun to suspect that the Church is no longer a place where that hunger can be satisfied.
Perhaps if we are afraid to venture in this new direction, we should look at what will happen if we do not develop this kind of program. The precipitous decline we now face in church life will surely continue. The Church will die of boredom long before it dies of controversy. Nothing is more obvious when we look at the state of the Church in the western world today. Are we simply oblivious to what has already happened to church attendance and church membership in the mainline churches of America over the past 30 years. Has none of us noticed the number of churches in our own diocese that, within the past 25 years, have shrunk their clergy staff from a double to a single full-time ordained person. They are St. Paul's/Chatham, All Saints/Millington, St. Peter's/Essex Fells, Atonement/Tenafly, All Saints'/Glen Rock, St. Paul's/Englewood, St. Michael's/Wayne, St. Luke's/Montclair, St. James/Upper Montclair, Grace/Newark, St. Mary's/Sparta, St. George's/Maplewood, Grace/Westwood, St. John's/ Ramsay, St. Paul's/Montvale, Christ/Glen Ridge and now even our Cathedral. Have we not noticed those churches in this diocese that have gone from full-time to a part-time ordained ministry? Has not the time come, perhaps it is way past due, to look at what we are offering to our people and to face its inadequacies, to make demands upon our people and upon our clergy to reorient the life of our congregations and the professional lives of our clergy so that we can engage the issues of life and death presented to us by our post-modern world?
If there are resources needed to help our congregations and clergy accomplish this ministry beyond those resources this diocese now offers its people, then we need to have them identified. This total reorientation of congregational life, this refocusing on the life and death issues before the Church must be a corporate effort, a partnership of diocese and congregation. We must work together to engage the future if we expect to have a future. To prepare us for this task, I am asking that this convention authorize the formation of a Task Force to analyze the strengths and the weaknesses, the opportunities and the barriers that are present in the Sunday programmatic life of our congregations, to listen to what our lay people say they need from their clergy and from the diocese in order to do this job, and to make recommendations to our 125th Annual Convention of the diocese about how we can develop the Sunday educational ministries for both adults and children of our churches so that they are relevant and powerful, enabling our people to face contemporary biblical, theological, ethical and social issues as Christians. I see no initiative in this direction coming from our National Church. Perhaps, once again, this diocese is being called to lead the way. By having this report presented to our 1999 convention, this material will be available at the beginning of our bishop coadjutor's career for his/her knowledge and implementation. Then that person can ask this convention in the year 2000 for the staff and the resources to carry out what you have identified as the needs in this critical area of life. This will probably be the last task force I will ever ask this Convention to authorize, but, in my opinion, it may prove to be among the most important for it has the potential to help us transform the Christian faith in the third millennium.
When I turn to look at what has happened in our Church nationally in the past year, two things become obvious. First, the Episcopal Church has made progress in our fight to overcome overcome our operative prejudices in the area of race, gender and sexual orientation. We now have two black diocesan bishops, four black suffragan bishops and two black cathedral deans in the United States. That is not yet parity in terms of the percentage of Afro-Americans in the American Episcopal Church, but it represents enormous progress. The number of women priests rises each year and within the first decade of the new century will approach the 50 percent level. Five diocesan bishops are now women, two are suffragans, one seminary has a female dean and president. On the gay issue our Church has debated this question nationally since 1973 and we clearly are on the edge of the full acceptance and inclusion of homosexual people into the life of the Church. The ordination of qualified gay and lesbian clergy has been affirmed at least in a negative way by the decision of the court in the Righter trial by stating that there is no prohibition to such ordinations. The pastoral blessing of committed, monogamous gay and lesbian relationships missed by only one clergy and one lay vote from being passed in the House of Deputies at the 1997 General Convention and is on the docket for the year 2000 when surely it will be affirmed. Our Church nationally has begun to face the inadequacies of its present liturgical forms. We have survived the crisis of a dishonest treasurer, and the challenge of a presentment against Bishop Righter. We have elected a new Presiding Bishop who is rooted both in the mystical past and the daunting future. He affirms the directions in which this Church is going. The leadership of the Church nationally is clearly in good hands.
But as these movements into the future have occurred, this Church has spawned a backlash led by certain conservative bishops who have failed to win a single vote nationally, so they are now threatening to cut off financial support unless their defeated point of view prevails. That is nothing but blackmail. They are also threatening to leave the Church in a separatist movement unless their dated prejudices are preserved.
These people seem to have decided that since they cannot win in a democratic and canonical fashion, they will seek to destroy the institution that has given them their vocations. I want this Church to be as broad and inclusive as it can possibly be. I want us to encourage frontier thinkers and traditionalists both to be part of the ongoing dialogue. But when a point of view is defeated, and its advocates adopt a pattern of ecclesiastical terrorism that seek to destroy the institutional integrity of the Church itself, then I believe we must say enough is enough. Everyone is free to battle for his or her point of view within the framework of the canons, but no one is free, when an issue is lost, to employ terrorist tactics in an attempt to impose their defeated solutions on the Church by force. Furthermore, for anyone to proclaim that their defeated, and thus minority, conclusions represent the truth of God and that anyone who opposes their point of view has departed from the true faith of the Church is not only arrogant nonsense, but it comes dangerously close to what the Bible calls the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. The time has come for the leadership of this Church to say to these irresponsible and destructive voices present in our Church, "We will no longer stand by idly and allow you to destroy the Church in the name of yesterday's issues." Let me assure you that I intend to take whatever action is necessary to defend the integrity of the Episcopal Church in the State of New Jersey.
When clergy are installed as rectors in this diocese, they are authorized to act because they are in communion with their bishop. To be in communion with one's bishop does not mean being in agreement in all matters. This Church must always welcome responsible diversity. In this diocese we have congregations like Redeemer in Morristown that are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of the future, and we have congregations like St. Anthony's in Hackensack that are rooted in a devotion to a particular tradition of the past. We are proud of this wide spectrum and believe that this diversity makes this diocese a more faithful Church. But let me be specific. If any priest of this diocese decides to affiliate with the structure now being set up by these dissident bishops, if any of our clergy turn away from the Church that ordained them, or called and installed them into their present responsibility to join this movement, I will interpret that as an act of abandoning this communion and renouncing their ordination. I will therefore respond with the appropriate canonical action. I have no reason to believe that this is now or ever will be an issue for any priest or church in this diocese, but I do not want to leave anyone in doubt as to what the consequences will be if anyone moves in that direction. I expect the Presiding Bishop to take the same position and I encourage him to do so.
Moving on to the highlights in our diocese during the past year, I want you to know first that our people have pledged to their churches in this diocese for this program year of 1998 the largest amount of money ever given to the work of the Church in the history of this diocese. Only four of our churches did not get their pledges in by the canonical deadline and only two of our churches have cut the percentage of their giving to the diocese. This generous response has meant that we can propose for 1998 the largest budget in the history of this diocese and we are able to give to outreach the largest amount we have ever given in our 124-year history, a sum equal to 30.5% of our total income. That is a signal accomplishment and ought to be the occasion of much rejoicing.
Secondly, I wish I had the ability to enable this diocese to appreciate fully the work that John Zinn does to enhance our common life. I am not referring to his brilliant management of our diocesan finances, or even to the way he has shared his commitment to stewardship with this diocese that has made our present financial health possible. I am rather referring to his work beyond our boundaries at Youth Consultation Services and Apostle's House, to his four years as the Senior Vice Chair of the Christ Hospital Board of Trustees and, above all else, to his work with Episcopal Community Development Corporations throughout this diocese. Under John Zinn's leadership the Jersey City Episcopal Community Development Corporation has now hired an Executive Director, begun the Grace Kids Program at Grace Van Vorst, and is initiating a first-home ownership project in that community.
The diocesan Episcopal Community Development Corporation has this year witnessed the sale of the first houses renovated under The Samaritan Project in which government-owned houses are renovated and sold to low-income home buyers. The St. James Community Development Corporation, which emerged from the ashes of St. James' Church in Newark now has 40 units of low cost housing under development. This adds to the total of 180 units of housing that are now either newly occupied or soon to be occupied that are the direct result of John Zinn's ministry in this diocese. Even Governor Whitman, in her recent State of the State address, took cognizance of the religiously oriented community development programs in our state and pledged her support to them. I would be grateful if this Convention would mandate the production of a video on this aspect of our diocesan life that we could view at this Convention next year to enable our people to embrace the scope of these housing ministries. Such a video would stretch the imaginations of our people mightily and it would enhance our pride in being part of this diocese and our appreciation to John Zinn for what he brings to the life of this diocese.
I call your attention to the report that will be available to you on the Jersey City Strategy which reveals that we are in the process of purchasing land in the southern part of Jersey City where a new church, already named St. Augustine's, will be built. Into St. Augustine's will be folded St. Matthew's, St. Stephen's and Incarnation. Two of these churches are predominantly black, one of them is predominantly white. We rejoice that the life of this new congregation, being born in our second largest city, looks the way the Kingdom of God surely looks. The Rev. Isaac Persaud now the Rector of Incarnation, will be the new Rector of St. Augustine's. When that $2.5 million project is complete, I hope we will turn our attention toward establishing a new congregation in the Heights area of Jersey City so that once again we will have an Episcopal presence in every major part of that bubbling city.
In the distant reaches of Vernon, New Jersey, far removed from all of our urban areas, St. Thomas' congregation has completed the building of a new church to serve that growing community. The Vicar, Stephen Steele, whose enormous energy made this project successful, celebrated the completion of the building by falling down an empty elevator shaft and breaking his arm. But Steve, with one arm, is better than most folks with two.
In 1997 we had the largest number of campers ever in our Eagles Nest program and began to see our total youth ministry develop under the leadership of the Rev. Richard Bardusch. Today you heard the proposal to join with the Lutherans in a joint camping program and you welcomed Lutheran Bishop Roy Riley. Tomorrow you will have a chance to vote on that proposal and with your vote to affirm the future of our camping program. Please know that I support this proposal with great enthusiasm.
The Oasis Ministry has thrived under the leadership of Elizabeth Kaeton. In 1997 the endowment of the Oasis has grown by $30,000 and now has a corpus of more than $100,000, which was the first milestone that we set when this endowment fund was launched. That means we are only $900,000 short of our ultimate goal of a $1,000,000 endowment for this program. We believe that amount will be necessary to secure the ministry of the Oasis for all time. Blessed by a program grant from ACTS/VIM the Oasis has launched a major education project. They have begun to identify Oasis congregations in the Anglican Communion all over the world. These will be individual churches that will publicly assure gay and lesbian Christians of a welcome. They have developed Guidelines for a Holy Covenant, trained Oasis members to be lay readers and Eucharistic ministers so that the ministry of word and sacrament might be carried to those members of the homosexual community so alienated from and bruised by institutional Christianity that they cannot yet come to the Church, but who desperately need the Church to come to them. They have initiated a joint EFM program with the people of Christ Church, Ridgewood. The Oasis is becoming all that those of us who witnessed its birth in 1989 dreamed it could become.
We have in 1997 attracted the incredibly talented group of clergy that was introduced to you tonight. Included in that group are seven new priests, just ordained last December, who are, as a class, probably the most qualified and gifted group that we have received from seminary in any one year in my memory. Among those seven are three former wardens of this diocese, one former search committee chair, two lawyers, one social worker, one AT&T executive and one medical doctor. Two of these seven were presidents of their seminary classes and one was the national head of the Union of Black Seminarians. For the first time in our history, a predominantly white congregation, Christ Church, Ridgewood, has called one of these graduates, John Quartey who is an Afro-American to be the assistant rector. He has been warmly received and one can almost feel the ancient barriers tumbling. In a very few years John will be experienced, trained, ready and able to serve as rector of any church in this diocese. I hope that when that day comes one of our congregations is smart enough to call this gifted young man to be their rector so we can break the last remaining barrier that binds us into the patterns of our prejudiced past. We anticipate the ordinations of two additional Afro-American candidates next spring, one man and one woman. Perhaps a new day is dawning.
The final activity to which I want to call your attention is the Diocesan Investment Trust. It has had a spectacular record in the past three years. Our investment advisor, W. P. Stewart and Company of New York, has grown the capital we have placed at their disposal by 90 percent in the past three years. When I came to this diocese in 1976 the DIT was in a single fund dedicated to the preservation of capital with modest growth. It totaled between three and four million dollars. Eliot Knight of Grace Church, Madison, more than anyone else, helped to restructure and turn that fund around. Today the D.I.T. has more than $25 million under management and is divided into two funds, one dedicated to income and the other to growth. The income side produces an annual return of 6 to 7 percent, but the capital remains static. But if a church had three years ago placed all of its endowment money into the growth side of the D.I.T., and taken out 5 percent of its total capital a year to be treated as income, the following results would have occurred. In the first year your income from endowments would have decreased by 1 to 1-1/2 percent. But in the second and third years those churches would have more than made up for that deficiency, so that at the end of three years they would be receiving an amount equal to a 9 percent return if the money was still in the income fund. At the same time their capital would have increased by 75 percent. People argue that the last three years have been phenomenal years on the stock market and that is true. However, W. P. Stewart & Company has been in business since 1974. Their stated goal is to increase the capital worth of their accounts by 15% a year, which, as you surely recognize, is an ambitious goal. In their 23 years of doing business they have averaged, after their fees, a 23.2% growth in capital per year. They have beaten the S&P 500 growth rate in twenty of those twenty-three years or 87% of the time. W. P. Stewart & Co. will not manage less than $1 million in a single account. Most of our churches have endowments a good bit less than $1 million. In many instances these endowment funds are handled by brokerage houses or invested in Certificates of Deposit with mixed results, but nothing approaching the W. P. Stewart rate of increase. I do not understand why so many of our churches do not avail themselves of the opportunity the DIT provides them. A church can place any amount - $5,000, $50,000, $100,000, $500,000 - into the DIT divided, as that church chooses, between the income and growth funds. Because the money is pooled, the total amount placed on the growth side more than qualifies for Stewart management. The fee charged by Stewart is less than that of the typical mutual fund. The DIT indeed works like a mutual fund. A church places its money into the DIT and receives shares in the fund which the vestry is free to buy and sell in the same way that the owner of the shares of any mutual fund can do. The diocese exercises no authority and no control over those decisions. I do wish we could overcome the latent paranoia that seems to affect some clergy and vestries about the diocese. Churches that have not used the DIT have, in fact, suffered financially. I look at St. Mark's, West Orange, which had a $400,000 endowment in 1979 when we reclaimed that church from the rector who had abandoned the Episcopal Church. All of those funds were invested in the income side of the DIT. Over the years much of that money had to be used for capital repairs, but if St. Mark's had placed their total endowment in the growth side of the DIT managed by W. P. Stewart and if they had, instead of dividends, taken out 5% of their capital each year to be used as income, that $400,000 would today be more than $2 million and the 5% a year that they were taking out for income would be $100,000. But alas, we did not do that and the capital did not grow and when the capital had to be used, it was not replenished and so we fight a life and death battle today to save St. Mark's, instead of having a financially healthy and flourishing congregation. How many more of our churches could tell a similar story. I commend the growth-oriented fund of the DIT and the management of W. P. Stewart to our churches so that ten to twenty years from now we do not have more churches who, by not managing their capital assets for the long term, are forced to make life-killing decisions. I urge our larger and wealthier churches, the Cathedral, Grace Newark, St. Paul's, Paterson, Christ, Newton, St. Peter's, Morristown, Christ, Short Hills and many others to look at this remarkable resource this diocese offers you and to invest your capital resources in the growth side of the DIT for your own benefit.
I close this annual address with a word of thanks to this diocese for the sabbatical study leave you have granted to your bishops, to Bishop McKelvey in 1996 and to me in 1997. Bishop McKelvey has reported last year on his study time. I report now on mine very briefly. I spent June and part of July of 1997 at the University of Edinburgh and at Oxford University doing research and rewriting a book out of which I delivered the New Dimensions and fall lectures in this diocese and out of which I will deliver the lenten lectures next spring. This book will be published by Harper Collins in April of 1998. It will be my last major theological publication. This book will be entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. It is designed to do nothing less than to initiate a new reformation and to call the Church to grapple openly with the issues about the future of the Christian faith to which I have dedicated a portion of this address. This book has been read in manuscript and galley form and endorsed by a significant number of scholars on the theological faculties of such places as Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the United Kingdom and Harvard Divinity School in the United States. It has also been read and endorsed by such world renowned figures as Karen Armstrong, the author of A History of God; Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the author of Women Who Run with the Wolves; and the Templeton prize-winning physicist, Paul Davies, the author of God and the New Physics and The Mind of God. It will be the most controversial but, I believe, the most important book I have ever written. I expect this book to create a storm and to be widely debated. Indeed, an article that appeared in the December Voice, written by Fletcher Harper reviewing my November New Dimensions lectures has already been the occasion of fearful and angry letters. But the fact is I could not have finished this book without the sabbatical time you gave to me. In September and October I completed my sabbatical time with an extensive lecture tour of Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand that involved 205 public appearances in churches, lecture halls, radio and television studios and interviews in newspaper pressrooms. Also, on that portion of my study leave I completed some 800 hand-written pages of my autobiography which my publisher, Harper Collins, has asked me to write. This book, as yet untitled and perhaps no more than half completed, will be published in the year 2000. It is the story of how a southern boy raised in the racial prejudice of segregation in the buckle of the Bible belt as an evangelical fundamentalist, a male chauvinist and a homophobic personality, could emerge in the Diocese of Newark in the last decades of the 20th Century to become the most published bishop in the Anglican world and a leader of the Anglican Communion's struggle to be an inclusive, non-prejudiced body of Christ. I don't want to make you nervous, but many of you will appear by name in this story for much of it is the story of our life together in this diocese. I would be willing to share this material in a series of public lectures next fall and in 1999 prior to its publication if there is any interest in my doing that. Writing on my days off, while on airplanes and in the summer, this manuscript should be complete before Easter of 1999.
Finally, I want you to be aware that during this sabbatical time I entered a new consciousness about who I am and who I have become. I came to a deep awareness that I now belong to this diocese and to the State of New Jersey in a total and emotional way. My home is no longer in the south. It is here. To return to my home is now to return to New Jersey. So Chris and I have abandoned the plans we once had to retire to Richmond, Virginia, and we will instead, on January 31, 2000, retire to Morris County, New Jersey. I hope when that day arrives to do some teaching at universities or theological seminaries in the first year or so of my retirement, should I still be healthy and mentally alert. I am engaged in discussions with several universities and divinity schools about those possibilities at this moment. Perhaps in retirement I will write some more, but it will not be theological or controversial books. If I write at all at that point in my life, it will be novels, short stories, biographies or biographical sketches. We plan to worship, when we are at home, at St. Peter's in Morristown, a church that has long nurtured both Chris and me, and I will spend a lot of time simply adoring that special lady who is my wife and staying in touch with our five children, three sons-in-law and four grandchildren. Whether I look forward to that retirement date of January 31, 2000 or not I am honestly not yet sure, but that it is the right thing to do and that this is the right time to do it, I have no doubt. I shall participate in no way in your choice of my successor. That is your business, not mine. However, I have absolutely no doubt that you will choose well. This is a great diocese. I have been your privileged servant. My successor will be an equally privileged person.
- God bless you all,
John S. Spong
Bishop of Newark
January 30, 1998
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