An Interview with Bishop "Rusty" Kimsey by former Historiographer Matt Carmichael
Matt: My name is Matt Carmichael and this is an interview with the former Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon, Reverend Rustin Kimsey. The date is March 25, 2014 at 1:00 pm. Today, we are talking about Coalition 14 as well as the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence Project.
Thank you for meeting with me Rusty. My first question has to do with MRI. What was the motivation for starting the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence Project? How did it start and evolve into Coalition 14?
Rustin: The Anglican Communion is a community of individual churches throughout the world that at the present time number 72 million people. They are under the leadership and belong to 42 different independent communities of faith. The Episcopal Church is one of those, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Anglican Church in Australia, there’s one in New Zealand, all around the world. They were established mainly because the Anglican Communion, rather the Church of England, had become so expansive because of its chaplain service over the centuries, for two or three hundred years, that that particular interaction with various cultures had created a very impressive world-wide community of faith, but there was a need to contextualize that and to get away from certain colonial standards and to give to people in various countries around the world the opportunity to have an independent church with worship in their own language and their own leadership, so that’s how all of that came into being.
When I say independent, it’s better to say that there was a continuing interaction between these churches mainly because of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role as kind of being the spiritual leader of these people; he didn’t have any political influence on these various churches, but they looked to England and to the archbishop and to England as kind of being their spiritual guides. Of course, the Book of Common Prayer was kind of the glue that held all of that communion together. The representation of those churches in meeting was essentially through bishops, that there was the establishment of meetings in the early 19th century where bishops would come back to London and meet at Lambeth Palace where the Archbishop of Canterbury resided and it was called the Lambeth Conference and they met every ten years. Essentially that was the only meeting of the Anglican Communion except for missionary societies who would often get together and interact with partners around the world.
In 1961, there was a conference called the Toronto Congress and it was the first of its kind. It was a meeting of representatives from all over the world of the Anglican Communion, and it was a made up of bishops, priests and lay people. It was a very good cross section of representation from different venues, different persuasions. When they gathered in Toronto, they were there for two weeks and they emerged with a document that is known as the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. It was wordy, but very significant if you stop and look at what those words mean, because it was an attempt for the church to begin to deal with two major issues: authority and mission. The Anglican Communion, as we inherited it from the Church of England and as we established the various ways of reflecting that Anglicanism, it was very much a top-down strategy of government that bishops and arch bishops, we didn’t have cardinals anywhere, and the senates and legislative processes of the church in that time were essentially reflections of giving more priority to bishops and to a male-dominated hierarchical structure. When I was being raised in the Episcopal Church, and in the early days of my priesthood, the role of women was quite insignificant. Women could not serve on vestries, women could not be involved in diocesan convention as delegates, they certainly could not go to general conventions and national meetings, and girls could not be acolytes. That was kind of a sign that change needed to occur.
The Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence document was an attempt to say, we need to look at the structures of our church. How are the voices heard, and what are the voices that determine what the future mission is going to be of our ecclesiastical structures? The collaboration that came out of that was central to the document was the deep belief that what we had been in the past needed to change, that the colonial interaction between parent churches with missional churches needed to have more parity, there needed to be more voices from the people, all the people. The way in which that began to be reflected was in conversations that took place around the world really between those churches that had largely been founded by missionary strategies from abroad; so there was a growing understanding that there needed to be more control and more influence by indigenous people for the sake of the gospel and the sake of the world. The way that manifested itself within the United States, and within the Episcopal Church, was a collaboration between dioceses began to happen, and I think the most significant experiment that occurred and took root was what we referred to as Coalition 14.
Prior to 1970, the way in which money was dispersed for the mission fields in America, for jurisdictions that were called missionary districts; they were called that because they were not financially viable in the sense of not needing outside support. So, these missionary districts, which had been founded over the years since the inception of the Episcopal Church in 1789, were mainly in the west, some were in central United States, but most of them were in the west, as far west as Hawaii. The way they were funded in the past was that General Convention would have a line item in their budget for these missionary districts and it was several million dollars, and the way that was distributed was that there was a home department, it was called, within the national church structure and they had at the home department, usually it was a bishop, but it was an appointment by the presiding bishop and that person had the responsibility, and he certainly sought the advice of some of his peers in the national church structure, but ultimately, it was his decision as to budgetary allocations as to who would get what and how much. So the bishops of these fourteen jurisdictions would go back to New York once a year and they would state their case; they would talk with the home department people, in particular the director of the home department, and after all of that interaction, then the director would make his decision. The pie would be cut up by that person.
As a result of the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence document in the sixties, there was a growing concern that the way we were doing the allocation and the way we were planning for mission was not being done by the people who were in the field, people who were on the ground. It so happened that during the sixties there were quite a few new bishops who were reluctant to these fourteen jurisdictions, and they began to talk and converse and exchange meetings. The most significant meeting happened in Sedalia, Colorado in 1971 when all fourteen of these jurisdictions came together, bishops and representatives from the clergy and lay people. They essentially chartered a new course for the missionary districts. They began to work on documentation and on strategies to be presented to the next general convention which would have been in 1973. Essentially what they said was that number one, the allocation of money should be done by them, that the jurisdiction would come together and with a clear and fair process they would make the decisions as to who would get what piece of the budget that had come to them from general convention. They had the support of the national church; the home department that had them responsible for this was made up of people who agreed to that strategy. They were supportive and helped them with the documentation process, strategy and all of that.
By the 1973 General Convention, these jurisdictions were prepared to go to the various committees that had control over funds and over mission strategy and to present their case, so they did. That was affirmed by that convention and succeeding conventions. The rules which were put forward were extensive, and just to give some examples of those was that each diocese that was a part of the coalition needed to promise that they would expect from their congregations 25% of the net disposable income of that congregation. That was a heavy asking, but that was stringent and it was also agreed to. They also agreed that they each would pay the full fair share of the diocesan apportionment that went for the support of the national church and that was based on a certain formula of percentage income and communicant strength and so forth. Those two were promises that they made that they would fulfill, one would be the congregational income would be at a certain level and the apportionment going out the national church would always be sacrosanct. They also expected that the national church would support them in such a manner that their mission and ministry within each of those jurisdictions would be able to go forward with a lot more ownership on the part of the membership, because of the money coming directly to them and the national church giving them the responsibility to be caretakers of their own budgeted incomes; so that began to happen.
The annual meetings of the coalition were rather incredible really. Every diocese made a presentation to the total body, this was a group -- the annual meeting was made up of bishops, clergy, and lay people -- usually two or three representatives from each jurisdiction in addition to the bishop. They would make presentations on what their plans were for the coming year, often they moved toward five-year vision statements, but at the annual meeting they would give an accounting of what funds they had in the years past, what they had done with the money, what was happening in terms of the budgetary accountability. A lot of jurisdictions had their own kind of secret fund accounts. The bishops would have quite large discretionary funds that were often used for all kinds of purposes, but it was usually used at the direction of the bishop only. There was nothing shady about that but they were funds that were not known by many other people, so one of the rules that coalition made that there would be no secret funding, that what they asked for and what they got from the national church would be the essential budgeted income for their mission purposes within that jurisdiction. There was some leeway made for bishops and other executives within the diocese to have some discretionary use of the moneys but that had to be reported and that had to be accounted for. It leveled the playing field in terms of what money was available for the dioceses, or for the missionary districts at that time, and it was a growing kind of partnership within the coalition that provided for a lot of ingenuity and creativity. People began to respond more to the mission that church, because they began to own it more.
Presentations were made at the annual meeting and then there was a budget and finance committee that would listen to all of the data, all of the discussion and then they would come back to the annual meeting a few days after the presentations were made with recommendations as to what each of the dioceses should be allotted. There was open discussion about their recommendations. Often their recommendations were accepted at face value, but there were other times where there were long debates about whether or not certain moneys that were being asked for were going to be put to the kind of use that people could affirm. There were also times where people said you’re not asking for enough, that there were possibilities that various jurisdictions for mission purposes that needed more funding. At times, the annual meeting would end up funding more than what the people came with their asking's. I think the great value was, probably the friendships that began to form in those days and the trust that began to build. The interaction that began to occur, not just at the annual meeting, but through the year of jurisdictions coming together, various interest groups, various ways of conducting the business of the church. There was a lot more coalescing going on, and a lot more collaboration.
Locally, the principles that were employed by Coalition 14 were put to use in each of these jurisdictions and in some way or another. Eastern Oregon, I think we had a base budget support for congregations that was probably around $130,000-$140,000, that we could allocate. Originally that was done essentially by a small group of people and certainly passed by diocesan council, but we instituted what we called the Coalition of Congregations, which met annually and we followed pretty much the same format that the Coalition 14 followed at the annual meeting. We would have congregations do an in depth analysis of what was going on in their communities and do some good planning and then they would come to this meeting and prepare to ask for a certain amount of money to augment their mission budget. We would all be around the table, every congregation in the diocese was expected to attend that meeting, not just those that were asking for money, but those who were self-supporting were expected to be there as well.
I must say that the generosity and the goodwill of people in that collaborative effort was amazing. That all of the sudden, it wasn’t a top-down, a kind of divvying out of various funds, but it became a collaborative energy on the part of the entire diocese that reaped a lot of rewards from that kind of creativity and trust.
Matt: What was your involvement in the planning of MRI and C-14?
Rustin: Well, I was a parish priest during the sixties and seventies, but I was appointed to the Executive Council of the National Church in 1969 when the priest delegate by the name of Bill Spofford was elected bishop of Eastern Oregon at that time, so he had to resign his seat on the executive council because it was a priest spot and I was appointed at that time to fill that place. Then at the Houston General Convention that occurred the following year, in 1970, I was elected to a full term of six years on the executive council. Well, the executive council had a lot to do with the Coalition 14 business, so I was privy to a lot of what was going on at the national level, but I was also asked to be a part of the meeting in Colorado in 1971 and was at the table when the architects of all of this really started to sharpen their pencils and began to strategize and bring this into some kind of fruition.
Matt: What were the implications of this kind of organization in 1970?
Rustin: Well, the Episcopal Church operates pretty much as an organism that has separate entities, kind of like states. These dioceses are pretty independent, they have their own ways of worshiping and their own ways of thinking, strategizing and doing mission work. There a lot of similarities, we’re certainly bonded by the Book of Common Prayer and how we orchestrate our worship and the customs and the ways in which we’ve constituted ourselves, our rules and orders and so forth; there’s a lot of overlap there, but dioceses can be side-by-side, but not have a lot of interaction. Western Oregon and Eastern Oregon, two separate jurisdictions since 1907, it was possible to live out a whole year without any kind of communication between the two jurisdictions except probably through the two bishops. So, Coalition 14 was a drastic change from that, the isolation that was so common in the Episcopal Church, we really cut into that and said that we are our brother’s keepers, we have a responsibility to support one another, and also to challenge one another and to say we believe that when people are falling down in a certain area of potential mission that we need to step up and ask what can we help you to do that? That began to happen certainly in the coalition and I think that it had an impact and we began to think of ourselves in different ways in terms of being a church.
Matt: In what ways?
Rustin: We weren’t as concerned about just our own turf, just our own kind of independence, but rather we began to think more broadly in terms of what is our responsibility in helping one another be better vessels of the gospel, so that was huge.
Matt: Right, and you said that there was also an attempt to encourage a discussion of equal rights, in order to get more input from voices that had not been heard.
Rustin: That’s right. I think there’s a definite line of progress from the time we began to act like that, be more collaborative, and be together more often, not just for retreats and spiritual moments which we had exchanged some of those kind of events in the past, but rather the hard work of deciding where we stood on certain issues and how we were going to plan for mission projects. All of that kind of collaboration around the issues by clergy and lay people sitting down at the same table, I think there’s a direct line from that to being more concerned about race issues, about gender issues, about what was the role of women. The first major thing that was being talked about in the sixties was the revision of the Book of Common Prayer and that took years and years of study and debate and arguing. It was a great time, since we got the new prayer book in 1979; I kind of miss those arguments, I kind of miss the cutting edge of debate around you know what is appropriate in terms of our prayer life and our worship life and what are the hymns that are helpful and what are the ones that ought to be taken out, forgotten about.
Matt: So, you’re saying the MRI and C-14 really facilitated that discussion.
Rustin: Exactly. It is just a common thread from 1961 to 1976. For instance, when we voted on the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church, I don’t think, without the Toronto Congress, the Mutual Responsibility document and living into that in such a manifestation as Coalition 14; I don’t think the Episcopal Church would have moved as they did, not just in terms of their own infrastructure, like the ordination of women, but we became very, very involved with societal issues, particularly race. Like all Christian churches, and most organizations, we had a checkered history with the issue of race, so those were huge growing years for us and for our country as well and we were impacted by the sixties. That decade was an incredibly volatile, dangerous time. It was also a time of really opening up and of society beginning to pay more attention to things that had been taken so much for granted. I have a lot of time now to reflect about my life and about the life of the church before my time and what might be the life of the church after my time; that I don’t have a lot of perspective about, but I am grateful for the opportunity to have lived when I did, and to have been a part of the conversations when I did and the turmoil and the angst and the conflict that the church and our society went through was more privilege than not, and it was very grace-filled. There was a lot of remarkable people, courageous people. We never would have had Desmond Tutu come to Ascension School had it not been for what we’ve been talking about. We wouldn’t have known him and even if we had known of him, there probably would not have been any kind of relationship and I probably would not have met him.
Matt: Let’s step back and look at the broader picture again, especially regarding MRI and how that became C-14. I’m curious to know what you think about this quote from Samuel Van Culin's article on the Project Process: It's Character and Value from April 26, 1967: “MRI was not a discovery of the Anglican Communion, it is a fact of our own life"...furthermore, "the project is the means by which a program or plan of action is made visible”.
Rustin: I think that’s accurate. I think what they’re trying to say is that it didn’t invent the communion itself, that there already was a structure and a history out there that simply needed some new life, some new vision, and that came. I mean, the kind of relationships between national, well they call it provinces, in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church of the United State is a province and Canada is as well as West Africa and Uganda. Those 42 provinces essentially acted pretty independently and they were all products of colonialism too. They were all products of England, which did a lot of things right, but it still did a lot of things that were very colonial in nature.
Matt: How would you define “colonial”?
Rustin: Well, I would say a super-imposing of one culture onto another, not always through war and armaments, often as England did; it was through economies, but still the bottom line was often the same and that was that one culture was subjugated to the other. That was the way mission was done. A great book is a book called Christianity Rediscovered and it’s by a guy named Vincent Donnovan who was a Roman Catholic Priest in Tanzania for 17 years with the Maasai people. We had him at Cove, at Ascension School. He was there not many years after Desmond was there. He talked about what it meant to be a Catholic Priest going to the Maasai many of who had been converted to Roman Catholicism over the past 50-60 years. He told a story…he gave a long regiment of education of baptism to the Maasai people. He said that his strategy was that he would teach his course and when he though the people were ready to be baptized, then they would have a mass-baptism in the river. Several months went by and finally he went to the chief and he said, I think we’re ready, people have responded well, except, three are three people who will not be baptized. The chief asked, what has happened? Vincent said, well they just don’t seem to get it, they don’t seem to be interested and when I inquire about their religious faith, they come up a bit short, so they can wait until they’re ready. The chief looked at Vincent and said, then we’ll all wait. Vincent said, well, what do you mean? The chief said, well you talk about family, the Maasai is family, and if we’re going to become Christian’s, this tribal unit will do that together. We’ll not leave anyone behind. So, they were all baptized. Vincent kind of relaxed and sat back and knew the truth of what the chief was saying and he acquiesced. That was a good indication of the culture who had been converted by another culture, teaching the first culture something about Christianity that had they had lost.
Matt: That goes back to the notion of unification which has been one of the driving forces of the Christian movement since its inception.
Rustin: That’s right, exactly. The value of that story is that we all have something to teach one another. I can remember the original document of MRI that for centuries, some of has been “giving” churches, and the other have been “receiving” churches. That has set up a kind of relationship that is skewed, that it’s not equal. The point of the document was that if we are in Christ in a way that is at all meaningful, there aren’t any just givers or just receivers. We all need to be involved in giving and receiving, and that we need to learn from one another. Western Europeans and American’s, we need to listen more. We need to listen more to those people who have often been what we call our children and not treat them like children, but as mature people who have a wisdom that we probably have not even heard of yet, and we need to hear it. When you were talking about unity, it reminded me, that the whole ecumenical movement was greatly impacted by MRI and I think the ecumenical movement impacted MRI too. In the fifties and the early sixties, certainly with the advent of John 23, and the Vatican Council, that inter-faith dialogue and having new understandings of one another, denominations and faith communities outside of Christianity. We had predispositions and stereotypes about them that were not very helpful, so the more we talked…you know when I was young in the priesthood, I remember Gretchen and I hosted and were part of a group that went around to various homes of what we called “living room dialogues”. It was wonderful immersion into understanding the faiths of other denominations and the various people making up the group would be affected to give some kind of dissertation about what some of their core beliefs are, and we would have that conversation. It was so rich and so helpful, we don’t do that much anymore. Is that getting at what you were asking?
Matt: Yes, thank you, that’s definitely getting at the heart of it. With this article, I’m focusing on some of the broader themes of MRI and C-14. Culin's article on The Project Process, also talked about how MRI, as a project, was an "introduction of the means by which diocese’s, who were not only contiguous to each other but drawn together by common regional concerns, began to expose their lives to each other, began to look at their communities together and began the difficult process of establishing their own priorities in obedience to their common mission as they saw it". What is your response?
Rustin: Well, a lot of that happened, like I told you, by the meetings, the annual meetings of the Coalition 14 and also in our local constituents, gathering with the Coalition of Congregations.
Matt: Right, and I’m also curious to know more about how this was achieved at the parish level.
Rustin: Well, I think that those people who were involved, say within the Coalition of Congregations in the dioceses, they would bring back that message of what it means to be collaborative and to have the courage and the wisdom to know how to listen and how to confront; that the whole matter of being able to be honest within a community of faith was just so important, and that again, cut against a lot of mores and values that a lot of us had been living into for decades as a priest, as a “father knows best”. The authority of the church really stopped with the priest, that the vestries were needed to be seen as responsible for some of the finances. For all the rest of it, they probably needed to be advisory more than proactive. Well, that’s not why vestries exist. The vestry are a balancing tip for the leadership of the church, and they certainly need to be supportive of their priest, and advise in appropriate ways, but they also need to take on their share of the responsibility of the decisions. They do so by listening to one another, including their priest. That gets all fouled up, really pretty easily, as Anna probably could tell you. Any priest can.
Matt: That makes sense. It’s important that congregations and vestries work through these issues together.
Rustin: It’s a circular issue. The more we experience the kind of collaborative effort of learning to listen and that was high on our priority in Eastern Oregon for years and years, we had workshops just on listening. We used a book that was written by a husband and wife team that I knew in seminary, the Farnhams. Suzanne Farnham became a lightning rod nationally. Listening Hearts, that was the name of the book. She was responsible for thousands of those books, generating all kinds of discussions in congregations about the value of listening.
I think there’s a lot of strength that comes from collaboration and it’s a different kind of strength, then is derived from top-down leadership. I think when people have some sense of a stake in the decisions, they may not even be very articulate at times but if they’ve been present and felt they’ve been listened to, and felt that they had some input into a process, I think they’re more alive. I think it’s just human nature, that if they feel valued then they feel like they’re voice is important and not determinative, but important to the process. I think their own inner faith and their own willingness to move forward with mission in their own lives is strengthened.
Matt: When was Coalition 14 at its apogee, and how did it evolve, and what did it evolve into?
Rustin: I was a part of all of that. It began to be weakened by diocese’s that began to be self-supporting. They did not feel the need to continue with the Coalition. It’s the old way of thinking that my judgment about it that when we become “strong enough” to be self-perpetuating, monetarily self-sufficient, then we will withdraw. I think Hawaii was one of the first who opted out and to some degree there was some logic to that, it was because of distance, but we also had diocese’s that became self-supporting but they continued to send representatives to the coalition because they believed that the process that we used, it didn’t matter whether they were self-supporting or not, they felt that it was a very important way of being a church, so they continued on. But, some of that went away when there was new leadership, and some of those jurisdictions didn’t stay the course. The thing that was odd to me was, that in 1945, Arizona and Eastern Oregon, were pretty much the same. There were no large cities in Arizona at the time and Eastern Oregon certainly didn’t have any either. The demographics were similar, we each had about the same ratio of parishes that were self-supporting to a multitude of smaller churches that were not self-supporting. Well, look what happened in Arizona, Phoenix happened, and Tucson happened, and Flagstaff happened. So, you get this huge influx of people, plus all of the winter crowd. The diocese, it’s a cash cow, it became self-sufficient almost overnight. Now, Arizona was one of those that stayed with the Coalition for some time because the bishop and the deputies who were part of the coalition structure really believed that they needed it. That was the first major things that occurred as dioceses began to be more and more self-reliant, there was a sense on their part that they didn’t need it.
Matt: Why is that, do you think?
Rustin: I think again, the old structure of top-down leadership is very forceful. There is something within us that if we have been raised a certain way, where the rector really has the last word on whatever, that people can generate and feel very enlivened by the community of people discussing issues and so forth and entering into a kind of interactivity that is exciting and challenging, often disappointing and hurtful. Still, that kind of interaction they join in it, but it doesn’t take much for them to revert back to relying upon a particular person, usually a priest, or a lay pope who comes along and acts as though and seems to have the answers that everyone needs. It’s very beguiling, you know what I mean?
The other thing that happened in the Coalition history that was there were four major areas where a lot of the funding, about half the funding, went to those jurisdictions with Native American work, North and South Dakota, Alaska, and Navajo land. The rest of us, had native populations, but we did not have the kind of central ministries that those four jurisdictions had. At least half of our budget from General Convention, several million dollars, at least half of that was going to those jurisdictions. There came a time where the department in New York that was responsible for Native American ministries, it also had that desk, the people who were a part of the leadership also had other responsibilities, but their primary focus was on Native American work. They thought would be helpful if they had their own funding, that it would be not up to the Coalition 14, but that it would be up to those four jurisdictions to determine how much they would get. That happened, and it happened during my watch, I was chairman of the coalition at the time, and I really was trying to listen to the native people and their voice and be supportive, of whatever they wanted to do, but I also had this sinking feeling that if they pulled the plug, if they pulled out of it that it would seriously jeopardize the coalition’s ability to go forward with the same strength that we had known. I think I was right about that.
Matt: Why do you think that?
Rustin: Well, because that’s what happened, they did pull out and some of those jurisdictions, Navajo land certainly, and North Dakota and Alaska, three out of the four, continued to come to Coalition 14 meetings and be a part of that and it was very helpful, but that was the initial response. That over the years, they began to be pulled away by their own, I mean they had other issues in the fire that drew them away from the coalition structure, because they were building up their own kind of interactive council. So, the coalition began to be more and more fragile. We also moved into a period where were beginning to invite other jurisdictions into it, especially when the native dioceses pulled out, we began to recruit other jurisdictions that were small and fragile, not unlike Eastern Oregon and try to show them the value of that kind of interactive experience that we’ve been describing, and with some success. When I retired as Bishop, the Coaliton was still pretty viable. Bill Gregg, my successor’s take on it was that the diocese should become self-supporting and he believed that we could. He really stepped up the process of saying that diocese needed to be free from any kind of budget support, from the National Church within five years, so I think we were receiving about $100,000 at the time. So, it was mater of making cuts to the tune of around $20,000 a year. So, that began to occur…and well, I think that’s all I want to say about that. It’s so complex and it’s not really for me to judge some of that.
Matt: So, Eastern Oregon opted out of the Coalition, then what happened?
Rustin: Well, the Coalition changed its name to the Domestic Missionary Partnership (DMP). It was an attempt to have a new identity and still keep some of the same rules of cooperation that we had gathered over those years, but I think the internal discipline of a lot of that went away. I think that the challenge and the response of the annual meeting that I’ve described -- which was really the central part of our life that by getting into one another’s budget, we really got into each other’s life in big ways -- I mean we weren’t just talking of dollars signs, we were really talking about the guts of mission and purpose and where people knowing some joy and celebration, and also where they were hurting.
Matt: That must have been difficult for some to go there.
Rustin: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the more they drifted away from that particular moment of our life together that they lost something of the intimacy and really sharing the journey in a way that had been known before. But, there’s a lot that still lives on, I think that Eastern Oregon was deeply affected and impacted by the kind of honesty and interactivity that occurred. I think that remains in large part throughout the diocese. I have been out of it for thirteen years.
Matt: How involved is Eastern Oregon with the DMP today?
Rustin: How much it is involved today, I’m not very clear, because I have drifted.
Matt: What do you believe is the legacy of MRI and C-14?
Rustin: I think the legacy is that we need to be people who are for one another. I think that what Jesus was about was reminding us that we are all the children of God, and that we all deserve a place in the sun, and that we all really need one another that is not paternalist or manipulative but rather we’re needing one another to really pay close attention to who we are in the context to which we find ourselves and being able to affirm our lives but also to ask for the kind of help where we need it. That kind of interdependence is really dependent on mutual responsibility. If you take the words of the document and try to give life to them it manifests itself rather quickly. The legacy is to be found in how much I am your keep and you mine and how well we listen to one another and how well we can continue to be in communion even when we disagree. How we take context, I think context is everything. I think Jesus, well, if I were to say a one-word description of his life, I would say that he was a contextualist. I don’t think he came to us all ready with the answers, I think he learned from his people by listening, and by being appropriate to situations in different ways, because he learned new context and new ways of understanding. I think that’s the legacy for me of MRI and the coalition.
Matt: The secret is in the exchange between cultures; through a cross-cultural exchange.
Rustin: That’s right, because there’s a great teaching about that. If you are really alive -- I like your word, of exchange -- If you’re really alive through the exchange then you don’t have much trouble knowing that you don’t have all of the answers. That you really need that exchange in order to live more into really the mystery of life rather than the bottom-line truth. If we don’t have that exchange then often times we do believe we have the bottom-line truth, you know that the world would just be great if it agreed with everything I believed. That’s the danger of newspapers today are full of that, the inability of people to fully see that your change has been holy and necessary.
Matt: Let’s talk briefly about the Mutual Ministry Development, how does that relate to Coalition 14?
Rustin: Well, one of the things that we were concerned about in the Coalition from the get go was the how we would provide the kind of presence that The Episcopal Church had embodied over the years with leadership. How did we continue to have the kind of integrity with that that was consistent with what we had known but probably different in the way that we were going to go about it. Parish commissions on ministry were formed in every congregation and there was a diocesan commission on ministry that was to be the developer of all of this and the parish commission on ministry was charged with what is the first canon under the ministry of canons in our national canons in that was to make sure that every member of the episcopal church has access to the encouragement of their baptismal ministry, whatever that is. Obviously, we were not just talking about ordination, we were talking about baptismal ministries that whatever people were called to be in their workaday lives, how can the church support them in that? How can the church reflect the support for all the people of God in the way that we were structured in the congregation?
This is a long story, but I’ll try to keep it short. The key to all of this was T.E.A.M. (Teach each a ministry), was the acronym. The Parish Commission on Ministry, if it did its job, was to assist every member of the church to know their worth, to know that we were paying attention to their story, to know that what they were being formed into as Christian people that we wanted to be a part of that. So, what was their calling? Those are questions that were never asked. My father was a life-long Episcopalian, served on all kinds of vestries, help started a new church, but no one ever asked him, Loren, what’s your calling as a Christian? How do you see your ministry? I mean, my dad would have thought, you know somebody asking that, what planet did you come from? Those are questions that people asked for people who were preparing for ordination. The challenge was great, but it began to take hold. One of the ways in which was manifested in some congregations was that we thought this is the way we want to establish our leadership locally, would be to say to the congregation, you need to find out what areas of church life are important for this congregation. So, we did this in St. Paul’s years ago, probably about 1995, maybe a little earlier. The bottom line was that we had the congregation, after a lot of discussion and dialogue and prayer, list what are the areas where leadership was needed. You can guess what they would be, evangelism, education, stewardship, pastoral care, clergy (both lay and priest), catechists, people who would prepare other for consecration and baptism, those were essentially the seven or eight categories that were chosen.
We talked a lot about that, what that might look like in terms of those responsibilities would be. Again, the Parish Commission on Ministries would be primarily responsible for that, but so was the parish priest at the time. Then we asked the question, how do we name people who might fulfill those leadership positions? So, we talked about that a lot. What we would look for in people with those gifts, the congregation had named what I said and under pastoral care they had named healers that they wanted to see lay people who were not to be ordained but who had the gifts for a healing ministry. So, after several months that we talked about this and agreed about procedures and so forth, and at a service of worship that I came to, I had visitation, we had parish lists available for everyone in the congregation and we had a list of those leadership positions that they had agreed to and prioritized. We said, look down the parish list and put people’s names beside the positions that we are needing to fill, so they fit that. Those tabulations were gathered and the rector and myself were they only ones who saw that and it was amazing. It was amazing the consensus that the congregation as a whole had for certain people in those slots.
Let’s talk for a moment about the priests. That was of course the big issue for most Episcopalians, well what about the priest? If they’re not going to go to seminary, then how can they be a priest? So, we talked a lot about priesthood, we talked a lot about, well, what is priesthood? What are the essential qualities of that? I told my story, when I got out of seminary, there were about thirty seven priorities that were given to the office of the priesthood. All the way from Sacramentalists to Eucharists, other sacraments of the church, worship, all the way through how to run a mimeograph machine and be the secretary. I mean the parish priest, we inherited an incredible amount of jobs, most of which, any number of the people could have done a lot better that I did it. So that was my story. I said that I think priesthood needed to be more tailored, it needed to fit, not only the needs of the congregation, but it also needed to be tailored to the people who had the gifts that the congregation perceived to be needed in a priest. The whole issue of training, which was always on the front burner. We talked about all the courses that were than becoming more and more available through the internet. That was really just beginning, but it was obvious that that would going to be a really huge resource for people, and the diocese had a experiences with high desert school of theology, is what we called it was situated in Trinity Bend, and we trained a lot of people, not just lay people, but later people that were ordained though those weekly, weekend meetings that lasted a long time, we had that going for several years.
The central issue for me for the priest, for all of us to understand, was that the priest was not to be isolated and to act in a vacuum, that what we were trying to get away from was the isolation of most priesthoods often become. Let me give you an example of a priest in another congregation that was called in using this essential process. Dan (Gardner) was one of the best priests that I had ever known and in some ways, I think good priest are born priests, that there’s certain intuition about their relationship to God and their ability to interact in such a way that they become a mediator, people who some are way able to help people find their way, and their own vision of God that it’s so inclusive and so welcoming that they are, well, intermediaries. Dan was very much that. He also knew that he was a part of a team, so when people came to him for counseling, because he wore a collar on Sunday and was called by some Father, not many, but some, and he was the priest of St. Luke’s, people would come to him seeking counseling, he would say that it’s not a part of my calling, I mean, I could talk to you about certain things in a friendship kind of way, can give you whatever insights I have to offer, but I’m not going to be your counselor. If you need professional help that’s where you need to go, and you need to not be mistaken about who I am as a priest and think that that is a part of my bag. So, he was very disciplined about that. There were other priest’s that were not very good preachers, and a part of their calling was to say the pulpit is going to have to be shared by people in this congregation who have more of a calling to speak the word of God.
You can imagine, all of this turned everything upside down for people, but for the most part it went well when we did a good job of, well, again, interactivity; of talking about this and of being straight ourselves. I’m a firm believer in that kind of mutual ministry development and I see the role of seminary trained clergy and our grand plan was that they would be rectors and vicars of congregations, but they would also covenant in contract with the diocese and give a fair portion of their time to being mentors of other clergy in the diocese who were not going to be able to go to seminary and who were not going to avail themselves of hands on theological education that we know to be very important. I can’t imagine my life without my seminary education, but I also know that there’s got to be other ways we can do this or we’re just not going to have a presence in many of our communities. That covenant with seminary trained clergy, that worked, it would have worked more if there had been more commitment on the part of leadership to all of that. We were going to do that by deaneries.
Every jurisdiction was committed to the mutual ministry development. Not all of them, in the same way I have described to you just now, there were different models of that, but the education component was very alive and very real. We used to incredibly good debates about this and a lot of anger expressed of people dabbling into an area that was very sacrosanct in all of our minds in some ways as we began the process. Wes Frensdorf, who was one of the architects of Coalition 14 and the Bishop of Nevada, killed in a tragic plane crash in the Grand Canyon long before he should have died, Wes used to say, what do people need to know? He said, when we went to seminary, it was as if they unzipped our scalp and poured in all of this stuff, I mean, tons of stuff, and then sent us out in a generic manner, saying you’re not prepared to be a priest of the church and you can serve anywhere in the world. Wes said, where is the wisdom in that? I mean, good night, if you’re going to be a college professor, that kind of thinking might work, although college professors that don’t pay attention to their constituents, don’t know their classroom community at all, are probably going to make some pretty bad mistakes as well. I think people need to know the basics of what any baptized Christian ought to know. I believe in life-long learning, that people are not just going to be confirmed by a bishop when they’re twelve and lock it up and don’t worry about it for the rest of their lives, and that was kind of true about my youth. I think that in a good ministry development program like I have tried to describe, that congregations can grow together, the clergy, ordained people as well as the lay body, growing together in a community into a commonality, a cooperative way of doing ministry that would avert a lot of the dead ends we get into, like the buck stops with the priest, or, there have been all kinds of horror stories for me.
Matt: Well, it sounds like the conversation was essential considering the fact that you were addressing so much change, I mean, it was a necessity to address these issues. Everyone needed to be on the same page.
Rustin: Yeah, we were driven to be on the same page because of bucks, you know even though we had several million dollars at our disposal, we had incredible needs out there. If seminary trained clergy was going to be the norm for all of the congregations it would have busted us, we couldn’t have afforded to do that. That kind of echoes what you were saying.
Matt: It sounded like a fascinating experience and I have enjoyed learning all about it. Thank you again for meeting with me, I really appreciate it.