Candidate Being Nominated by Petition

I have learned that a local priest is being nominated by petition to be Bishop of Pittsburgh. Assuming that nothing damaging is uncovered by the background check—there is no reason to expect that any skeletons will be found in the closet—this person will become the fifth candidate in the April election.

I have been waiting to see if anyone would be nominated by petition, and I am saddened that someone has been. This will not be everyone’s reaction, of course, and there are those who will not be pleased by my sharing my opinion on this topic. I have written a post on my own blog about why I think an internal candidate should not be elected bishop, irrespective (mostly) of the particular attributes of the candidate being put forward. You can read my post here.

Initial Candidates Announced

As many readers will already know, four candidates for Bishop of Pittsburgh have been put forth by the Standing Committee. They are:

1. The Rev. Canon Michael N. Ambler, Jr., Rector of Grace Episcopal Church, Bath, Maine
2. The Rev. Dorsey W. M. McConnell, Rector of Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
3. The Rev. R. Stanley Runnels, Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Kansas City, Missouri
4. The Rev. Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, Rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Denver, Colorado

The official announcement is here. We now enter a period during which additional candidates can be nominated by petition. Petitions need to be postmarked by February 5, 2012.

Since only names, current positions, and photographs of the candidates have been released, anyone who feels strongly that someone else would be a good candidate is in a difficult position. If such a person knew more about the candidates, it would be easier to say either that the slate is strong and there is no need for additional candidates or that the slate is not strong and other candidates are indeed needed. Even if one is willing to give the Standing Committee the benefit of the doubt—I count myself in this category—the need to know more about the candidates is irresistible, and it is unreasonable to suggest that everyone should wait until the final slate is determined before attempting to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those whose names have now been placed before us.

It would be a terrible duplication of effort for all Pittsburgh Episcopalians to be Googling the candidates and to be finding the same information. I therefore suggest that we use this blog to collect and distribute candidate information. Opinion is also welcome, but it should be tied to particular information you have discovered.

If you leave comments here, we will try to aggregate the information, so that people can go to a single page to access it. When the Standing Committee releases information, we will have more data before us, but the effort expended before then will not have been wasted. If you know any of the candidates or know someone who does, we would like to hear from you also.

Let me begin by offering the Web sites of the churches the candidates are presently leading:

1. The Rev. Canon Michael N. Ambler, Jr.: Grace Episcopal Church, Bath, Maine
2. The Rev. Dorsey W. M. McConnell: Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
3. The Rev. R. Stanley Runnels: St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Kansas City, Missouri
4. The Rev. Ruth Woodliff-Stanley: St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Denver, Colorado

OK, then. Let the Googling begin!

Getting Involved

by Lionel Deimel
St. Paul’s, Mt. Lebanon

Individual churches invariably have strong congregational tendencies. This fact is not unique to The Episcopal Church. Churches are understandably concerned with their own financial and programmatic issues. Matters of the wider church, including intermediate bodies (dioceses, synods, etc.) tend to be secondary concerns. We can even see this phenomenon in the recent schism in our own diocese. Many people are assuredly in the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh because their loyalty to their parish is stronger than their loyalty to The Episcopal Church. No doubt, our own churches host parishioners who would be happier in the ACNA diocese.

Of course, we have been trying to hold our own parishes together, but, at the same time, we have been recreating our own diocese more or less from scratch. This is not fair; those who wanted to leave The Episcopal Church should have walked out of the diocesan office in 2008 and given us the keys. That did not happen, and we are where we are.

With help from the wider church and the extraordinary efforts of Pittsburgh Episcopalians, we are rebounding from what Calvary’s Harold Lewis is fond of calling “the recent unpleasantness.” Were this not the case, we would not be conducting a search for a new bishop. For a variety of reasons, we are better situated than the rebuilding dioceses of San Joaquin, Fort Worth, or Quincy.

Despite our evident progress, the strain is beginning to show. Our diocese is smaller than formerly, but the number of volunteers needed to run its many governing bodies has not been much reduced. People who were disenfranchised under the previous regime are laboring hard, often holding more than one position, to keep our diocese functioning. We owe these people our deep gratitude. They are tired, however, and they need our help.

It is ironic that our diocese has recovered well enough to initiate a search for a new bishop, but that the search itself is consuming the efforts of very many people who would otherwise be available to help run the day-to-day activities of the diocese. It was not intuitively clear that searching for a bishop necessarily weakens a diocese like ours.

As evidence for this phenomenon, I would cite the fact that we are having a very hard time finding candidates for diocesan offices. Many of the people who would otherwise be in the candidate pool are either helping to find episcopal candidates or planning for the welcome and consecration of the person we ultimately choose as our next bishop.

One of our challenges, then, is to find more people to offer their services in running the diocese. This can be a hard sell; many churches have a difficult enough time recruiting people for their own vestries or other parish bodies. On the other hand, our bishop search has at least focused attention on the diocese, and it is important that we make the most of this opportunity.

Selling the Diocese

For most of the people in the pews, I suspect that the diocese is a source of ecclesiastical services (confirmations, receptions, and occasionally baptisms) and an expenditure line (for diocesan assessment) in the parish budget. For many Pittsburgh Episcopalians who have actually paid attention to the diocese over the years, the diocese and its bishop have been a source of mischief and a cause of great distress.

As we increasingly become a "normal" Episcopal Church diocese, we need to explain to our members that the diocese can be a positive force in our lives. The diocese can help us find a new priest when we need one, help us repair our buildings, and help us get back on track whenever our individual parishes run into difficulty. The diocese provides a safety net that independent congregations do not enjoy. Perhaps even more importantly, the diocese can help parishes band together to do mission more effectively than individual parishes can do on their own. And the diocese offers opportunities for fellowship and friendships in a wider community.

The benefits of the diocese are not immediately apparent to the typical worshiper on Sunday morning. Church leaders need to educate parishioners that the diocese is important—in some cases, they may need to convince themselves of the proposition—and encourage people to volunteer to do diocesan work and to stand for diocesan office.

My own experience, in several dioceses, is that, in the normal course of church life, there is little reporting of diocesan activities, goals, and projects. This is not healthy, as, in many ways, the diocese is the fundamental organizational unit of Anglican life. We need to keep parishioners aware of what is going on at the diocesan level, speaking of it during announcements on Sunday morning, perhaps even mentioning the diocese in sermons.

In this Internet age, our diocese can tell its story more easily than formerly. How many people regularly visit the diocesan Web site, however, or subscribe to its electronic newsletter? Many, but hardly enough. We need to encourage more people to do so, and, for the computer-challenged (or technologically indifferent), we need to post diocesan stories on church bulletin boards and encourage people to read them.

What can you do to get more involved in the diocese and to involve others?

Welcome to “Our Pittsburgh Diocese”

In preparation for the election of the Eighth Bishop Diocesan of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, the Nomination Committee has released the official Diocesan Profile to assist in the invitation of nominees and to create a framework for conversation with them in preliminary interviews.

The Committee deserves our thanks for its work on the Profile, and we encourage all members of our diocesan family to read the Profile carefully and to share it with others in ways that will be helpful as we move forward in this process.

Although the Profile is intended to draw a clear picture of the diocese and of our ideal episcopal candidate, no document could do this, except imperfectly. In fact, both our individual perceptions of the diocese and our hopes for our next bishop differ from one person to another.

This new blog, Our Pittsburgh Diocese, is offered as an extension—an elaboration, if you will—of the official Profile. Just as many families have posed for a formal studio portrait, our diocese has its Diocesan Profile. But families also have photo albums, shoe boxes, computer hard drives, and smart phone memory cards filled with occasional images—informal snapshots, rather than formal portraits. This blog seeks to be to the diocese what those albums and shoe boxes are to a family.

The official Diocesan Profile necessarily distills many individual contributions and conversations, reflecting the diversity of views, values, memories, and aspirations, into some “consensus” perspective. What we intend to provide here is a place where individual contributions can be shared and discussed without any editorial “distillation.” This can be a place to discover consensus or a place to uncover differences.

Our Pittsburgh Diocese, then, is an unofficial and unsanctioned public square in the blogosphere for lay persons who are members of congregations in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and for clergy canonically or physically resident here to talk together about who we are and where we’re headed.

What is your take on the diocese today? Where are we strong? Where are we fragile? How are we affected by our recent history? What will be the most significant challenges for us in the next decade or so? What should we be looking for in our next bishop?

The conversation facilitated by the Nomination Committee was surely helpful, but those conversations did not take place across parishes. This blog will allow us to have a broader and more sustained conversation. It can help us clarify our own thoughts and may even be helpful to potential candidates for bishop.

At the right, you will see Bruce Robison and Lionel Deimel listed as “contributors.” We are that, but we do not intend to be the primary contributors. That role belongs to the lay and clergy members of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. Of course, anyone can comment on posts made here. If you would like to make a post yourself, send your contribution to mailto:submit@pittsburghepiscopal.org or click on the link at the right.

Posts may be submitted directly in e-mail messages or in attachments (e.g., as Microsoft Word files). In general, the official contributors will neither edit nor censor contributions, though contributions may be formatted for readability. All submissions should include the name and parish of the submitter. Both submissions and comments are expected to be free of profanity, ad hominem attacks, etc. Submitted posts will be published as quickly as possible; please be patient.

With hope that over the coming months this space may host an interesting and robust conversation and, in that way, build up our life together in Christ, we remain

Bruce Robison, St. Andrew’s, Highland Park
Lionel Deimel, St. Paul’s, Mt. Lebanon