The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Rev. Dr. George Sumner: Convention Address, Diocese of Tennessee, January 26, 2008, St Bartholomew’s Church Nashville

It is a delight to be with you for your diocesan convention, and I as the principal bring you greetings from Wycliffe College, a theologically traditional Anglican seminary, Canada’s largest, which is part of an ecumenical consortium at the heart of one of the world’s most global cities, Toronto. It is always a pleasure to see my old friend Bishop John Bauerschmidt. We go back to our days as curates in cardinal parishes in the Worcester area in the diocese of Western Massachusetts some twenty plus years ago. The rectors for which we worked named our troika Battle, Plague, and Sudden Death….our weekly lunches made them nervous… somehow they got the notion that we would spend our lunchhour trading unflattering stories of our bosses and perfecting our imitation skills…imagine that!...so if any of you have a curates’ support group in this diocese, the bishop is on to you. I would only add, on a more serious note, that I who knew him when , can attest to your bishop as a man of integrity, humor, prayer, and thought. I am confident the Holy Spirit has great plans for you and he in this diocese.

In the spirit of the past as prologue to the future, and of reclaiming the rich treasure of our Anglican past, let us begin this morning by asking what clergy life and ministry were like at the parish grassroots two centuries ago in merry old England. If we listen to the commentators of the time, the answer is often very, very odd. One priest, we read, would give a normal homily in the morning, but at evensong insisted on preaching only about the Empress Josephine. An historian named Brendon tells us that another parson in the West Country did not enter his church for 53 years, and kenneled the local foxhounds in the vicarage. A neighboring priest refused to do any services, but would greet the parishioners in the Churchyard wearing a flowered dressing gown and smoking a hookah. Yet another drove his flock away, replaced them with wooden and cardboard images in the pews, and “surrounded his vicarage with barbed wire behind which savage Alsatians patrolled.” Another spent his whole ministry searching for the number of the beast while the rector of Luffincott devoted all his time to calculating the date of the millennium. Yet another installed his own sanitary arrangements in his choir stall, while a nearby priest declared himself a neo-platonist and sacrificed an ox to Jupiter on the church grounds.

But my personal favorite is one Joshua Brooks of Manchester. During a burial service he abruptly left the church, went nearby to the confectioner’s shop, bought some gumdrops, and came back to finish up the service. One Easter Monday, the traditional day for marriages in the parish, he had a number of couples to marry at once, got the names confused, married several to the wrong spouses, and so at the end of the service declared imperiously “just sort yourselves out when you leave…” All this inspired the archdeacon to tell the new bishop ‘your clergy, my lord, may be divided into three categories: those who have gone out of their minds, those about to go out of their minds, and those who have no minds to go out of.” And then there was Montague who hung the coat of his late dog Tango in the sacristy closet …maybe that is enough! So good news, Bishop John, our little history lesson makes even your most vexing priest and parish of the diocese of Tennessee look pretty good! My point, brothers and sisters, is simply this: if you have your days when Episcopal church life seems to you confused and deformed, right you are, and if you think this is unprecedented, think again!

And it was into just this sort of a church, a church so moribund that many commentators did not suppose it could survive another generation, that Charles Simeon had, by the grace of God, a most fruitful and groundbreaking ministry. My topic this morning is mission, but I want to get at that topic through the historical lens of this one parish priest in the town of Cambridge, diocese of Ely, Church of England. You might call this a bit of missiological hagiography, since Simeon finds a place in the list of saints in Lesser Feasts and Fasts of our Church on November 12. As a young man Simeon came to Cambridge in 1799. He was not a particularly religious sort, and in that time evangelicals were looked down upon. Six had recently been expelled from Oxford for Methodist practices, and many bishops frowned on what they called “the serious clergy,” far too earnest, and their sermons far too long. At matriculation Simeon was told that as a student at Cambridge, he had to prepare for, and make his communion, three times a year. He was a dutiful young man and so set about reading what he could find about a holy life, concluding his own lack of that quality, which in turn disturbed him. During lent he heard in university church the story of the scapegoat in the Old Testament, and became fascinated with the idea that one could bear away the wrong of another- all this on his own, not bad for a freshman! On Easter morning, the Holy Spirit touched his heart, as he writes: “Jesus Christ is risen today, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, peace flowed in rich abundance into my soul, and at the Lord’s Table (of king’s chapel), I had a sweetest access to God through my blessed savior.” He held to this, the insight of a moment, the core of the Gospel, throughout his whole life. He was ordained soon thereafter, and was offered a struggling old parish in the heart of the town called Holy Trinity. The priest in charge in the interim expected the appointment, had ingratiated himself with the lay leadership, and they set about to oppose the new vicar. On his first Sunday he was locked out of his own parish…and on his second, and his third, and his fourth…How do you like that for celebration of a new ministry? When finally the bishop browbeat the wardens into letting Simeon in, they locked all the rented pews so no newcomer could attend. When Simeon rented chairs the parishioners piled them in front of the Church. After some months of this, the bishop informed Simeon that he was ready, willing, and able to have the wardens in question removed. But Simeon passed on the offer; he insisted that they must be opposed only with longsuffering, until such time as their hearts were turned. You see, at the very center of all true evangelical theology is the conversion of the heart. Conversion is decisive for Gospel ministry, for we preach in the hope of it, and rely on God’s grace for the accomplishment of it, and once it does take place, then all kinds of other changes can follow in its wake. Simeon was willing to wait and suffer until such time as the hearts of his own flock’s leaders were moved, and wait he did, for some five years! But finally he wore them down with love, and they relented, and he assumed the leadership of that parish.

So Simeon commenced his ministry, the centerpiece of which was preaching. In the midst of the great university, he did not aim at an erudite or learned style, but expounded the text with the forgiveness of sins by God’s grace as the plumbline. The outlines of his sermons, which he called skeletons, were published and borrowed widely in books called the homiletical hours, a kind of online preachers aid from an earlier era. Here started a fellowship group for university students. This was a new idea. They would gather for tea, conversation, Bible study, and prayer weekly in the vicarage, and soon thereafter on their own as well. He kept his eye out for student leadership and promoted it when he saw it. Some would gather after Evensong Sunday night to critique his sermon, look at this skeleton, and think about preaching. This was a kernel of evangelical seminary training as it would develop in the Church of England. Those same young Christians were the core of an effort to gather and teach the unchurched children of poor families. The students ran a Sunday school, another relatively new idea, called the Jesus Lane School, after the name of its address. And what came of that modest beginning? Those Jesus’ Lane student leaders soon had a bible study to prepare for their work. And that became eventually the Cambridge Inter Collegiate Christian Union, and that group invited Moody and Sankey to England and provoked a revival. And that group nurtured Christians from Lesslie Newbigin to John Stott. And from that root grew Inter-Varsity, and then Campus Crusade and Navigators, and whatever campus group your children may attend at university. The very idea of campus evangelical ministry was born on Jesus Lane.

And Simeon’s efforts were not limited to Holy Trinity alone. He had fellowship with other evangelicals, mostly notably of the Clapham sect, a renowned group that included the great opponents of the slave trade, William Wilberforce and John Newton of “amazing grace” fame. Together with some evangelicals of financial means, they decided that there needed to be a group to promote missions and the spread of the Gospel to the newly commercially open lands of Africa and Asia. To this end they began a voluntary society called the “Church Missionary Society.” It was to work in cooperation with other protestants, it was to bring the Gospel where it had not yet reached.. And all this was to be independent of the formal Church, a voluntary society, and yet loyal to the Church, with sympathetic bishops on its board of governors. It was in regard to this work of launching a mission society that Simeon once said that he understood “the world to be my parish.” And, we might ask, what came of this effort? In Simeon’s lifetime very little. It was at first hard to get Anglicans to go. And once they did they died all too quickly, and had a hard time getting to the interior. The most many could do was to learn the language and create a mission station to which a few converts came. But the rest of the story Simeon could not have imagined. Those converts became the first evangelists to their own people. Over a century they would spread the Gospel in ways that the Westerners could not have imagined to peoples they did not know existed. What would Simeon, the vicar of the world-parish, have said if he could have seen a map of world Anglicanism today, where the great majority of the world’s 70 million members are the spiritual grandchildren of the CMS? All from a small gathering of evangelical men and women who gathered in a suburb outside London for prayer, Bible study, and some brave imagining.

The Church of England in the first half of the 19th Century- was it dying or being born? Well, both, as one might expect of the Body of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. One parish and one vicar- can they have an effect? Of course ,though one can hardly count on the impact of Charles Simeon. And yet he is an encouragement precisely because there was little spectacular about his ministry. It was all bread butter, calling, small groups, preaching, Sunday school, some organizing of a mission group. All which a day’s travel of Cambridge- no Lagos or Kampala or Calcutta. But still, Charles Simeon was one of the great figures in the history of modern Protestant global missions. From those student fellowships would come many of the missionaries. And from the CMS would rise, by God’s amazing grace, a worldwide Anglican communion success story we are obviously struggling to come to terms with.

Well hurrah for Charles Simeon! But what has this got to do with my parish and its ministry in the year of our Lord 2008 in the Diocese of Tennessee? Here I want to steal a lesson from another worldwide evangelical Anglican phenomenon, Alpha. Part of their secret, each time you meet, is a meal, a joke, a prayer, a teaching. So let me leave you with a virtue, a strategy, and a vision, all thanks to the stay-at-home missionary Charles Simeon. First of all, the virtue of patience. If you recall the armor of faith that St. Paul. I wish he had added patience to the list. It would be the saint’s grappling hook, by which we hang on until the weapons of faith, hope, and love do their work. Charles Simeon gathered up those chairs tossed outside his church for years! He prepared those sermons for decades in a church may of whose colleagues were deists or wacky or both! If you read his biography you realize that there was nothing passive or lackadaisical or defeatist about him. On the contrary he had a distinctly stubborn and adamant streak. But by God’s grace it was turned to the spiritual weapon of patience. His suffering and praying and waiting were tools by which God in his sovereign grace could beat on the hard hearts of his opponents. Simeon knew that until this happened compelling them would not conduce longterm to the cause of the Gospel. And, I might add, there is not rosy outcome to this story. A few of his opponents were waiters too, and tried to overturn him in the last decade of his 50 year tenure! The point I want particularly to make is that Simeon’s commitment to patience is not just tempermental or merely strategic. It is deeply evangelical, for it is rooted in his sense of the centrality of conversion and its dependence on God’s grace. God is the only one who can pour love into our hearts, and until such time as he does we can only do assiduously about our round, keep praying, keeping witnessing, keep on being patient. Patience waiting on what God is doing as the prime actor in mission. It amounts to what Church people these days like to call the mission Dei, God’s mission not ours. It lies then at the heart of the spirituality of real evangelistic work in and beyond every parish. Missionary success happens at God’s time and in unforeseen ways, and the virtue that reflects this insight is patience.

I would offer you, secondly, a strategy. For I believe that there is a real correlation between societies, fellowships, and orders, each with a calling to which it answers, and the missionary vigor of our Church. I do not know about the diocese of Tennessee, but in many parts of our Church YPF or the brotherhood of St. Andrew or the Mother’s Union, or Cursillo, or the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer, or the South American Mission Society, or whatever find themselves in struggling times. Maybe we need new groups. Maybe the trench warfare in recent years has discouraged folks. Maybe we, in line with the book called Bowling Alone that came out a decade or so ago., simply are not a culture of social joiners any more. Still I believe that there is still an important place for groups and fellowships. At their best, they have maintained the secret of the Church Missionary Society, which is to say they have been in the Church but not of it. They are loyal, but can move freely and stay focused on the work they have been called to. They move in the margins, the interstices, of the Body. They are not directly effected when the structures of the Church find themselves in gridlock. Please note the lesson of the CMS- the organizational Anglican Church missionized virtually no one! It was not because of the Church of England that there is a vibrant Church of Tanzania or of Nigeria…rather it is because of the Universities Mission to Central Africa on the catholic side and the CMS on the evangelical side. I believe that now more than ever we need to freedom and vitality of societies and mission fellowships can the ride easy on the strife and get on with the Gospel’s business. Now this does not mean that parishes and their clergy have nothing to do with this work. They need to be a framework in which they can move and find support. We need church leaders to encourage them and their new Christians in turn need to be led back into parish life. Simeon was after all a parish priest, who used that calling to launch university student ministry and international missions! What does the cashout look like here? Parishes, their lay leaders and clergy, need to make young peoples’ and university ministry a priority. They need to be encouraging seedling fellowships for renewal for particular constituencies, young mothers, intercessors, prison ministry, men’s prayer, business men and women, etc. The clergy need to promote even as they remind groups that they are limbs of a single body. And finally I would mention among such groups seminaries and theological colleges. They too need the independence of a voluntary society, as most of them are structurally. They too must be for the institutional Church but not run by it. For they need theologically to imagine a renewed future and to call the leaders of a new generation to it.

Wiping out any pretense of profundity, let me close with a bumper sticker. It was one of the most popular a couple of decades ago…it may still crop up…Think Globally, Act Locally. Remember that Habitat and Oxfam learned that lesson from the Church of Jesus Christ! It was the watchword of the ministry of the vicar whose parish was the whole world. The turbulence we find ourselves in are, I still believe, the birthpangs of a global Christian communion marked, as we Anglicans affirmed almost half a century ago in the city of Toronto, by mutual responsibility and interdependence. That vision has come into sight, though it still awaits its time. It is a sad byproduct of recent conflict that the emergence of the global Anglican church has become an occasion for hostility. So hold on to Simeon’s vision, of an intimate connection between the particularities of parish ministry and the reality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ which, in ways we could never have guessed, has given birth to a global koinonia. Could it be that recent struggle will show us more clearly the fragility and preciousness of this gift? Are we not thrown back into ministry with students from away, with overseas residents or visitors, with companion churches, with a renewed humility and resolve? With a virtue, a strategy, a vision, in parish bounds as narrow and wide as Holy Trinity’s, in times as inauspicious and as promising, may God bless each of your parishes. Amen. 

Back to Bishop's Forum