[Episcopal Church Office of Public Affairs] Chief Operating Officer Bishop Stacy Sauls’ addressed the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council April 18 at the beginning of the council’s three-day meeting in Salt Lake City. This is council’s last meeting of the 2010-2012 triennium. Saul’s remarks follow in full.

Opening Remarks
Executive Council
April 18, 2012
Salt Lake City, UT

The Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls
Chief Operating Officer
The Episcopal Church

When I was a new rector 22 years ago at St. Thomas Church in Savannah, I noticed a something about my vestry that led me to wonder. What I noticed was that the agenda pattern I inherited, and to which the vestry was quite committed, began (after a perfunctory prayer) with the treasurer’s report. I also noticed that the treasurer’s report took up a huge amount of time, an hour or often more. And it took a lot of energy, often because of very strongly held opinions that resulted in frequent arguments. After all, money matters. It is serious business. One of the things that meant was that we often did not get to anything else. At all. When we did, we were too worn out from the arguing about money to give it the attention it deserved. I came home after every vestry meeting frustrated and, often, angry, occasionally pledging to have my bags packed the next morning. I can’t understand why serving on a vestry, like working for the church, is often a spiritually damaging experience.

Like every fairly new priest, I decided that what they needed was religion. So I brought in the monk who had been my spiritual director in seminary to lead a retreat. Maybe, I thought, if I could just direct their attention to spiritual matters and away from money, all would be well. So my friend the monk conducted a silent retreat for my vestry. We did not do any business at all. Just praying. It was a new priest sort of mistake. The main critique was that all the time that had been in silence we could have been used to getting something done. The chair of the finance committee spent the retreat in the car listening to the radio. But at least there was no arguing about money.

Next I called Caroline Westerhoff, a very old friend and someone I think knows as much about parish dynamics as anyone in the world. I explained the situation. The first item on every agenda was the budget and we spent most of our time and just about all our energy arguing about money. “Stacy,” she said, “in my experience when vestries are overly focused on money it is because they are trying to avoid the Gospel.” And then it made sense. The spiritual issue was not needing more time praying necessarily. It was avoiding the Gospel. It is always avoiding the Gospel.

Is it not a basically human issue? Avoiding the Gospel. Good news though it may be, no one ever said it was easy news. And one of the most difficult parts of the Gospel puts vestries—and executive councils—in a very difficult bind. It is an impossible bind if we think of this particular part of the Gospel and the responsibility it places on leadership as a contradiction. It is life-giving if we think of it instead as a paradox.

The part of the Gospel I am talking about is this. Jesus said to his disciples, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” (Lk. 9:24-25) Here is the paradox. Vestries, councils, and boards have a fiduciary duty to use financial assets so that the institution survives, but survival is not a value of the Gospel this institution exists to serve.

I have never been a part of a governing body that did not spend a lot of its time on survival. We do. In the eight months I’ve been back as a part of the life of Executive Council, and in the six years I spent as a member of it prior to this triennium, I have noticed a lot of time spent on survival. It is not wasted time, and the topics are important, but they do relate to survival. I have noticed this time around that most of my time as the Chief Operating Officer, as well as most of the time of the Presiding Bishop and the President of the House of Deputies, the Secretary, and the Treasurer, all the officers of the institution, is spent in the two committees dealing with finance and governance. They have been dealing with important matters, indeed urgent matters, and they needed attention from all of those people to do their work. It is work that undeniably must be done. But it is the servant of the other work, and not the point of the other work. Finance and governance are the committees admittedly necessary to survival. What I have wondered is if the Gospel might suggest some more attention to the non-survival committees, Local Mission and Ministry, World Mission, and Advocacy and Networking. I’m just wondering. I’m just wondering if sometimes we don’t fall into the trap of avoiding the Gospel.

The thing about not being able to see beyond survival is that it leads to making people survivalists. And survivalists behave in some pretty strange ways, excessive ways, tipping the balance in favor of preservation. Something else I’m wondering is if we aren’t seeing some of that in our common life. I’m wondering if some of the acting out we are seeing isn’t kind of a survivalist response to attempts to divert attention from finances and governance to the Gospel. I find myself wondering if the basic survival instinct that the Gospel threatens is the survival of power structures as they are. It is interesting to me that Jesus used the exact same word to describe those who worry about where they are in the power structure and those who worry about their survival—Gentiles. I wonder if by that he meant avoider of the Gospel. Sometimes I have wondered if survivalists are too much to go up against. People will, after all (not just vestries and the rest, but people) fight like hell to survive. And then I remember where the salvation is. “Those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” And I remember that my task as a leader, all of our tasks as leaders, is to live into this particular paradox. Jesus promised that there was life in there somewhere.

Here’s where I think the life is in this particular paradox for us right now. To begin with, it is in having a conversation. That ought to be what communities like this one are good at, isn’t it? We need to have a conversation about, given the inherent paradox of trying to lead a Christian community, what are the structures that will help us and how are our resources most faithfully deployed. The conversation I long to have with you is about that. The conversation I long to have with you as the elected leadership of the Episcopal Church is not about the panic of our declining numbers but about how we strengthen what is working best out there and make what is strong stronger so that the strong can serve the less than strong. The conversation I long to have with you is not about how to get more people in the doors to help us pay the bills but about how to make more disciples of Jesus to go about changing the world into God’s dream for it.

The conversation I long to have with you is about seeking the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness and not about our anxiety for tomorrow. The conversation I long to have with you is about putting everything on the table about our common life and looking at it in light of what Jesus said about survival, about how we live our lives to take up our cross and follow him, not just to Calvary but beyond Calvary to Resurrection. I want us to talk about putting everything on the table and rebuilding the Church for a new time that has no precise historical precedent. I think we should put dioceses on the table and ask how the ministry of a bishop relates to a particular people rather than to a particular geography. I think we should put episcopal ministry on the table and ask how bishops should work with each other collegially and how often they should meet together. I think we should put the exercise of primacy in our unique context on the table. I think we have to put how other clergy and laypeople participate in the councils of the church, and more importantly, are encouraged to live out their baptisms by proclaiming the good news of what God has done in Christ by word and example on the table. I think, and this is my particular concern, we have to put how we use the resource a churchwide staff to serve local mission and ministry on the table. Budgets may help us do that, or at least they may give us the occasion to do these things, but budgets themselves should never be the point of any of them. That is the conversation the staff as a whole longs to have with you.

Here’s my only point. Here’s the paradox. Survival is the enemy of life. This is what I have learned serving as a priest in three parishes, as the bishop of a diocese, and now as the Chief Operating Officer. Churches that turn inward will die. At every level, churches that turn inward will die. Those that turn outward, even at the risk of surviving, will thrive. Mission is how we do that. What serves mission will ultimately thrive. Because this is the Gospel. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” The conversation I long to have with you is about how are we, all of us, using the tasks before us to embrace, and not to avoid, the Gospel.