I flew to Texas to tell him goodbye, to thank him for all that he has given me: friendship, advice, inspiration, courage, a role model of leadership and commitment. This man also had a vision of what the Church could be that was enormous. A radically dedicated faith community could change the world, he said. It was the task of that Church, in his mind, to be an outpost of God's Kingdom and a sign of God's presence among us. For more than thirty years this man has been my father in God, my mentor, my benchmark in what it means to be a bishop in the Church of God. His name is John Elbridge Hines. From 1964 to 1973 he was the Presiding Bishop of our Church.

In the years of our friendship hardly a week went by that we did not talk by telephone. For the last two months that contact has been impossible. His body has deteriorated. He lives in his own interior world. He does not even read his mail. His death is imminent. So significant has this man been to me that I could not let our relationship simply fade away into nothingness. So I went to Austin, entered his room, engaged his eyes and watched the faintest trace of a twinkle that once brightened his face as we would talk. I told him what he has meant to me. I rehearsed those moments when he had stood at my side in difficult decisions. I expressed my appreciation for those parts of my episcopal career that he had inspired. I thanked him for the example of his courage that had enabled me to stand with integrity for the cause of justice in my time. I also wanted him to know that his ability to accept without bitterness the slings and arrows of those enraged by his witness had made it possible for me to do the same as part of my witness.

John Hines was born in Seneca, South Carolina, the son of a Presbyterian country doctor and a brilliant Episcopal mother. From his father he learned to identify with the poor and to discern the times so accurately that he could act today on that which was inevitable tomorrow. From his mother he received his devotion to the Church, his keen intelligence and his quick, engaging wit.

From the time he entered school at age 5, he was always a leader in his world. He led his class academically, captained the football, basketball and tennis teams, and was president of the student body. Entering the University of the South at the ripe old age of 16, he debated whether or not to seek a career in medicine which was his father's passion, or in the Church, which was his mother's passion. No matter how big or complicated his world became, he had the ability to rise to the top. In order, he was president of the student body at his university and at his seminary. He was elected Bishop of Texas at age 35 and Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church at age 54. He shaped the life of this Church more dramatically than any single person in this century. He led us all beyond the limits of our fears into countless new frontiers. He called into being a generation of new leaders who are today in key positions throughout the Church. He made us proud to be Christians and Episcopalians and proud that we had chosen to follow our callings into the priesthood.

In 1964, when the General Convention met in St. Louis to choose a new Presiding Bishop, the common wisdom was that the choice would be the Rt. Rev. Stephen Bayne, the Anglican Executive Officer and former Bishop of Olympia. He was by far the best known of the three nominees. The others, Emrich of Michigan and Hines of Texas, had no national reputation. There were two nominations from the floor - Louttit of South Florida and Wright of East Carolina. Bishop Bayne led on every ballot but the final one. Despite his enormous ability, he was perceived as a bit imperial, a bit pompous, a bit distant. He appeared to enjoy the trappings of ecclesiastical power a little too much. It was a fatal flaw. John Hines was third in the first four ballots, second on the fifth, and elected on the sixth. The Church was stunned by the choosing of this relatively unknown new leader. Now the process of getting to know him began in earnest.

I met this man first in 1966 on a tennis court in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was visiting our little Diocese of Southwestern Virginia and my bishop, William Marmion, had asked me to arrange a tennis match. I did, and my bishop and I lost to John Hines and a layman named Billy Fix. This Presiding Bishop was very competitive.

Those were difficult days in the life of this nation. Racial tensions were high. John Kennedy had been assassinated. The disillusioning war in Vietnam was sapping the nation's strength. The cities of this land were exploding in racially tinged violence. It was not a time for business as usual. As one city after another went up in flames, John Hines turned this Church to a new mission field. With a member of his staff, Leon Modeste, he walked the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant and other cities to confront personally the reality of urban and racial pain. In his mind a church that did not engage these issues would die of irrelevance. So at his first General Convention in Seattle in 1967 he called this Church to take its place "humbly and obediently at the side of the poor and the dispossessed" The prepared budget of the National Church was scrapped. The General Convention Special Program was born to invest the Church's resources, not in the structures of the Church, but in indigenous community groups designed to bring dignity and power to the people they represented. It became the Church's operative theological principle that an empowered person could never be a marginalized or oppressed person. Empowering the powerless became the very shape of the Church's ministry. It was a breathtaking moment in Church history.

The crescendo of this movement grew through the South Bend Special Convention of 1969 where the church faced its role in sustaining the corporate power of racism. This was a time when black people were demanding reparations and the Church first used its shareholder power to force corporate America to face its own racism. The move to have American business divest itself of its role in supporting apartheid in South Africa was a John Hines initiative.

Across this land, as the implications of their Church's stand for justice began to be felt, the people in the pews recoiled. John Hines was the symbol of this dramatic shift in direct ion, and the vilification he received was unbelievable. Editorials throughout America, but especially across the South, excoriated him as a communist, a destroyer not just of the Church, but of "society's values." The hatred flowed so freely from those "pew-sitting Christians" that body guards were hired for this Presiding Bishop and he wore a bullet-proof vest at the General Convention in Houston in 1970.

In Virginia the Richmond Times Dispatch was one of the most vicious editorial critics of the Church's challenge to the racist patterns of the past. I found myself called to defend my Church and my Presiding Bishop in a public way, including running a full page paid ad in that newspaper.

At the Louisville General Convention in 1973 John Hines tendered his resignation as Presiding Bishop effective in 1974. At that same convention, I was elected to the Executive Council. I would have six months to serve with John Hines on the Church's national "vestry" before his successor chosen in reaction to his dramatic and stretching leadership would return our Church to its path of risking nothing while claiming a new, benign pie ty. In some sense I would become a part of the Hines voice that would remain at the national level of our Church's life when his leadership departed.

Far more than his successor realized the Church traveled for years on the energy of the Hines years. The new leadership fought a constant, rearguard action to slow it down. They failed. Women were ordained irregularly in 1974 and canonically in 1977. The Prayer Book was revised in 1976. The debate on the place of gay and lesbian people in the Church's life began in 1979. John Hines led this Church for at least anothe r decade beyond his retirement.

Our friendship developed significantly during those years. My writing career had become established and in 1973 I approached him about the possibility of being designated his biographer. I wanted to show how effective leadership could transform an institu tion. He finally agreed. For the next two years I studied his life. I listened to him tell his own story. I was given access to all but his confidential mail. I interviewed his friends and his enemies. I traveled to Seneca to speak with his teachers, and neighbors. I followed the trail of his priesthood from St. Louis and Hannibal, Missouri, to Augusta, Georgia and Houston, Texas. To understand his Episcopacy I devoured the journals of the Diocese of Texas from 1945 to 1964. I had probably another year of research to do when Newark elected me to be its bishop in 1976. With great sadness I stored my hours of taped interviews and stacks of notes and printed matter until I could find the time to return to this project. I never did. Instead I gave my research to a Texas priest named Ken Kesselus and he wrote the powerful story of the Hines years, published in 1995 under the title, Granite on Fire. I did, however, have John Hines as the guest of our Diocese at nine consecutive conventions, and he advised me on every issue of my career, from homosexuality to physician assisted suicide. In retrospect I now know that my study of his life prepared me for the role of leadership that being Bishop of Newark required. I have indeed been a bishop in the style of John Hines, perhaps even his heir. He has remained to this day my closest friend.

I talk to clergy and lay people today who have never heard the name of John Hines. That is inevitable. Fame is so transitory. But those of us who shared his time know that he was a moment of grace, and we are proud to be a part of a Church that could produce John Elbridge Hines.

Farewell, my treasured friend.

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