A Draft TEC Grand Strategy

1. August 7, 2014 Rev. 4 A Draft TEC Grand Strategy by Ted Mollegen Senior Deputy L-3, CT for GC2015 Nominee for Executive Council Please forward to anyone who might be interested

2. Introduction The Episcopal Church (TEC) needs an effective Grand Strategy because it has been in numerical decline since 1965. This document outlines a practical way to reverse that decline. Although this document is in slide format, it is expected to read on a laptop or desktop computer monitor, or on paper, rather than by being projected on a big screen before an audience. This document contains the opinions of the author, speaking only for himself. This document contains many ideas that may be useful to the reader, without the reader’s necessarily buying in to the whole draft grand strategy. The reader is advised to make notes of ideas that may be immediately useful in the reader’s own immediate context (diocese or congregation). Please help refine this document by sending your comments and suggestions to the author. See the last page for details.

3. Outline • What is a Grand Strategy? • A Draft TEC Grand Strategy for Today • TEC’s Status Today • TEC’s Context Today • TEC’s Present Trends • Primers on Church Planting and on Re-Starts • Appendix: How to build a Grand Strategy • Links/Bibliography

4. What is a Grand Strategy? • A strategy is a scheme for using cause-and-effect relationships to obtain a desired outcome. • A Grand Strategy is an overall approach for guiding/controlling an organization’s future. It guides decision-making at lower levels. It does not itself consist of detailed plans. • An example: the US Civil War. The North’s desired outcome included: (a) preservation of the Union and (b) to a lesser extent, the ending of slavery. The North’s Grand Strategy was to encircle the South so as to cut-off foreign assistance that might counter the North’s much greater industrial might, and then to divide the South into pieces. The North blockaded the South’s Atlantic and Gulf ports, cutting off almost all of the South’s foreign trade. Then they fought their way down the Ohio-Mississippi river system to the Gulf, cutting off any assistance to the South from the West (especially Texas, a Confederate state). Then Gen. Sherman swept east from the Mississippi Delta toward Atlanta and Gen. Grant drove south through Virginia and East Tennessee toward Atlanta.

5. Characteristics of a Good Grand Strategy • A good Grand Strategy can be expressed in very few words. • A good Grand Strategy is based not only on the present, but also on the foreseeable future. (A quarterback doesn’t throw the ball to where the receiver is now, but to where the receiver will be when the ball comes down.) • A sign of good leadership is that the plan is appropriately adjusted as the situation develops.

6. TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy - Page 1 of 5 • Turn around TEC’s long-term persistent numerical decline. This is absolutely critical. Use: • church planting, • generational targeting, particularly: • campus ministries, and • singles under age 35 (who may be parents of families with children). • effectiveness improvement at diocesan and congregational levels (See slide 9 below) • Use outside money for church planting, for widespread campus ministries, and for congregational turn-arounds; • Get outside money via the TEC Development Office and comparable diocesan and congregational development efforts. Church growth and church redevelopment should be a high priority for the TEC Development Office. .

7. TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy - Page 2 of 5 • Improve diocesan effectiveness in leading mission • See The Fly in the Ointment: Why Denominations Aren’t Helping Their Congregations …And How They Can by J. Russell Crabtree (2008). The author is a Presbyterian minister with congregational experience who now has a management consulting firm. His clients include PCUSA and TEC entities. This book is now used at TEC’s College for Bishops and will also be helpful to lay leaders at both the diocesan and congregational levels. • Improve congregational effectiveness in carrying out mission - See Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, by Diana Butler Bass (2006). Contains lots of good examples for improving what’s going on in congregations. (See slide 22.) - See Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, also by Dr. Bass (February 2012). (See slide 27.)

8. TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy – Page 3 of 5 • Find out more about what all generations today, especially the under-35s, want and need, and experiment with ways of addressing same. This probably involves the use of service music which does not involve a pipe organ and does involve drums, an electronic keyboard, and stringed instruments. • Attract, engage, and incorporate under-35s, especially via well-funded campus ministry, and bycongregational attitude change. • Campus ministry is a good source of future clergy and can also experientially help counter the intellectual forces of atheism that frequent college campuses. • TECcongregations are often-to-usually found to be unfriendly by single under-35s, who constitute the majority of under-35s.

9. TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy – Page 4 of 5 • Connect at all levels to steady outside sources of money • Churchwide level gift solicitation (TEC Development Office) • Diocesan gift solicitation (diocesan development staff) • Congregational-level income producing activities, e.g. • Nursery and/or preschools • kickstarter.com and similar • Teach tithing: • Theologically • By successive annual percentage steps • On websites at all levels of TEC, add donation links to the descriptions of dedicated projects and programs. • Continue/grow TEC’s support for social service and social justice programs at all organizational levels, but increase evangelism and church growth efforts to equal the social efforts. .

10. TEC Strategic Objectives and Draft Grand Strategy - Page 5 of 5 • Address regional changes in the need for church buildings. Some regions need more church buildings and some need fewer. Both needs must be attended to. • When creating new buildings, don’t build future empty-during-the-week structures – keep the infrastructure footprint light. Create flexible space, and/or use someone else’s flexible space

11. A Call to Our Church’s Leaders at All Levels • Mentally try on this draft Grand Strategy to see if you can discern your own role in carrying out the strategy. I believe that most of you will be able to do this. Whether you yourself can or not, please discuss with your colleagues what your role might be. • Consider what obstacles you will encounter and how to deal with them: -- Overwhelm some obstacles -- Go around others • Pray for God’s guidance in this venture.

12. Supporting Ideas and Data The subsequent pages provide support for the ideas in the Draft TEC Grand Strategy

13. TEC’s Present Context • In the sunbelt, evangelicalism • In the North, secularism, with a touch of hedonism • In the North, the word “tithe” is almost never heard, even in churches • throughout the US, materialistic hedonism • economic stress throughout society (except for the top 1%) • the younger a person is, the more likely they are to identify with spirituality but not with organized religion. • religion itself is increasingly under attack in universities, colleges, and the public media. • TEC is accused by splinter-Anglicans of having deserted biblical teachings, when it is actually they who have done so.

14. Another Look at TEC’s Present Condition • TEC’s 2012 condition is described in the 2012 Blue Book reports of (a) the State of the Church Committee and of (b) the Standing Commission on Mission & Evangelism, although both missed some of the points below: • - There is continuing long-term shrinkage, ignored except for necessary cost-cutting. • - While the historical source of new Episcopalians has been that they were born to existing Episcopalians, this is no longer true. Worse still, the average age of TEC members is now well past the child-bearing years. • - There is a serious dearth in TEC of under-35 adults (a majority of whom are single), indicating that there will be continuing membership declines as older generations die off. • - Congregations are usually focused on attracting young families, but are usually focused only on traditional-model nuclear families. • - Congregations virtually ignore: single under-35s (many of whom may be unmarried parents), Hispanics (the fastest-growing US population segment), and African- Americans. • - The figure on 2012 Blue Book page 50 indicates that about 2/3 of our congregations were started before the Great Depression. For most, this indicates the age of the present building. A high percentage of these need major renovations (if such haven’t been done since about 1965 or so). • - In some congregations there are major gaps (more than five to one ratio) between how many people the building is designed to seat and how few people come on Sunday. This mismatch represents very poor stewardship at the diocesan level.

15. TEC Growth/Decline per TEC’s Director of Congregational Research Page 1 of 2(emphasis added) The [last] ten years of change in ASA [Average Sunday Attendance] is disturbing, I agree. However, I am not sure that projections based primarily on the last 9 years would be all that helpful.  After some growth in the previous ten years, ASA had begun to show modest decline as early as 2002.  Starting in 2003 and for the next 5 years or so the pattern got much worse (and stayed that way) as the effects of General Convention 2003 and conflict within congregations and dioceses worked themselves out.  Many churches lost a substantial number of members due to the controversy, quite a few congregations split and a number of congregations were allowed to take their property and participants out of the Episcopal Church (including our largest congregation as measured by ASA—Christ Church, Plano).  We also had some changes in the larger culture that negatively affected all mainline denominations and the impact of an aging constituency and fewer younger members joining.  Following the large losses in 2003-2007, the pattern would not have looked so bad in 2008, 2009 and 2010 if we had not had to deal with San Joaquin, Pittsburgh and Fort Worth (Quincy is minor) in successive years.  The disaffected congregations were zeroed out in those years in terms of the Parochial Report, even though they are not considered closed.  So what about 2011?  Returns from over 82% of congregations show that there will be a slight increase.  This is due in large part to the “Christmas Effect” of counting Christmas Eve services along with attendance on Christmas day (a Sunday).  But even without the Christmas Effect, the declines in 2011 would have been much less than previous years.   

16. TEC Growth/Decline per TEC’s Director of Congregational ResearchPage 2 of 2(emphasis added) Yes, declines have been very bad, and are likely to continue to be serious, but not necessarily as bad as in recent years.  That being said, I do not think a reasonable projection in ASA to 2020 and beyond can be made for another two years.  2011 will look abnormally good, 2012 will look abnormally bad (no Christmas effect resulting in two years of decline combined in one year) and then there will be a normal year in 2013.  If you want to do it before then, I would use membership—which is less sensitive to immediate changes, but shows the same basic trend.  Here too, things look better in 2011 than in the previous nine years.  Similarly, giving and congregational/diocesan income seem to have improved in 2011.  Dr. Kirk Hadaway – 5/31/2012TEC Director of Congregational Research ------------------------------------------------------- Since Dr. Hadaway’s May 2012 comments above, the leaders of the Diocese of South Carolina have attempted to have that Diocese secede from TEC, increasing the rate of our membership decline.

17. The Fastest Ways to Get TEC GrowthPage 1 of 2 Almost 15 years ago, GC 2000 adopted a growth goal and commissioned the 20/20 Task Force to figure out how to meet it. (GC2000-A034) The 2020 Task Force concluded that by far the fastest and most reliable way to get church growthis by church planting. Report of the 2020 Task Force, October 2001 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was the Secretary of the 2020 Task Force. Its report may be found on page 133ff of the Blue Book for GC 2003 or on my website at www.mollegen.net/2020TF

18. The Fastest Ways to Get TEC GrowthPage 2 of 2 Congregations should initiate services (late Saturday afternoon and/or Sunday morning) that are tailored for under-35s: • Music that under-35s find appealing (see slide 8, above) • Sermon styles that they find appealing • Use of silences to permit reflection • Use of short testimonies from lay members Saturday afternoon services typically increase attendance of families whose kids have Sunday morning athletic activities. In areas of high population density, different congregations may be started which use different approaches to appeal to the under-35s.

19. TEC’s Present TrendsPart 1 of 3 • According to author Diana Butler Bass in her February 2012 book Christianity after Religion (meaning after institutionalized religion), the world and all its religions are in the midst of a massive transformation from the institutional hierarchical religious institutions of the last several hundred years to a new more-personalized and spiritualistic religious pattern. The shift is from • believing  behaving  belonging • to a new pattern of • belonging  behaving  believing • where the  symbol means “leads to.” If her view is even partially correct – and I think it is correct -- then shouldn’t our new Grand Strategy respond to the change that is going on? Otherwise, we will redefine TEC to fit the world as it was, not to fit the new world that is appearing all around us. • Note that one’s sense of belonging is strongly influenced by whether one is moved by the style of music used in the worship services.

20. TEC’s Present TrendsPart 2 of 3 • Religious educational institutions are under severe economic pressures. One Episcopal seminary recently had to sell part of its campus in order to survive. • Under-35s are largely absent from TEC’s mind. They are unsought-after, and are mostly single, abigchange from two generations ago. Most congregations don’t know how to make singles feel comfortable and typically don’t even think about making singles feel comfortable. Singles, who make up over half the population, are just about invisible to TEC. • Facebook facilitated several “Arab Spring” revolutions, but TEC seems barely aware of Facebook. • YouTube is another way to communicate, cheaply and effectively, with the post-physical-book generations. TEC seldom uses it. (For a pleasant exception, see the 2012 Blue Book report of the Standing Commission on Mission & Evangelism on page 497ff. It has links to six videos that are part of its report, and the one on Latino/Hispanic ministry is simply terrific. )

21. TEC’s Present TrendsPart 3 of 3 TEC has recently demonstrated that we (finally) have an effective Development Office. In December 2013, the Presiding Bishop announced that the Development Office had obtained a signed pledge of $5-million to benefit the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti. Approval of the Development Office was controversial at GC2012, because an earlier effort to establish an effective Office failed. However, under its present manager, Ms. Elizabeth Lowell, the Office has quite visibly succeeded. Ms. Lowell has long career experience in this type of work. I hope that raising major funds for church planting and parish turn-arounds will become a high priority for the Development Office in the near future. Without such funds, I doubt that a turn-around in TEC’s numerical decline can be accomplished in the next decade. For those who are not familiar with the nature of a Development office, see www.mollegen.net/GC2012/DevOfficeCase.pptx

22. TEC’s Present Context is Changing • As the economy improves, migration to the Sunbelt will pick up again • well-to-do retirees in the massive Boomer generation • companies that want to escape snow-days • … e.g., trucking, warehouses/distribution centers, etc. • This will cause - more growth in existing Sunbelt congregations • - opportunities for more church plants • - a need for more new church buildings • - a greater need in the North and the upper Mid-West for physical infrastructure consolidation and/or liquidation

23. A Primer on Church PlantingPart 1 of 3 Church Planting is not broadly well-understood in TEC (see below). Church Planting requires lots of money. At the time of the 2020 Task Force (2000-2001), the fastest growing TEC dioceses were Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee. All three had steady streams of new church plants and all three were paying for the new church plants from non-budgetary funds donated by big givers with whom the respective bishops had developed dependable funding relationships. For each new start, decide at the beginning what the target size is. The Episcopal Church Building Fund (ECBF) can help you do this. For a family size church, have one church planter. For program size, from the beginning have one clergy church planter plus one lay or clergy program leader (usually musician/choirmaster or Christian education leader.) One of the best places to locate new church plants is in areas where farmland regularly is being converted into housing developments. Buy the land before ground is broken for the first new house, and put up a big sign that says a new Episcopal Church will be built here. However, don’t start construction until the new congregation has grown to about the size you have chosen, presumably program or corporate/resource size. 10 acres is a good lot size to pick because it will support buildings for a program-sized congregation, including parking. Don’t start putting up buildings until the congregation has gotten close to the size you have aimed for. If the new start doesn’t work, the diocese can sell the unused land, usually at a profit, and then use the money to buy land for another new start somewhere else.

24. A Primer on Church PlantingPart 2 of 3 Church planters, who have a tough job, do better when they have a qualified coach with whom they are in regular contact. Texas and Virginia each had a dedicated coach on diocesan staff. Tennessee was too small to have an expert coach on the bishop’s staff, so they sequenced things so that the planter who started a church last year would be both leading his own plant, plus also coaching the planter who was starting a new plant in the present. In the professional field of organizational training, this is called the daisy-chain approach, and it is frowned upon because if one of the planters introduces a bad idea, it gets passed on. The daisy chain approach can be used if there is some way of insuring that bad ideas don’t enter the system and/or get passed on. This needed quality control can be established by sharing one coach among several dioceses, and/or by having a Church Center staff member serve as a coach for several new starts scattered among several dioceses, using a lot of video conferences with the planters in each given year group, supplemented by one-on-one teleconferences and quarterly group face-to-face meetings.

25. A Primer on Church PlantingPart 3 of 3 In some dioceses where church-planting is an on-going process, to help get a new start going, “borrowing” of lay-leader families from adjacent larger congregations is intentionally arranged. The intended length of the “loan” is 3 to 5 years. At the end of the intended loan period, some such families return to their prior congregation, some stay in the new one, and some go on to another new start. Such “borrowing” may also be applicable in church turn-arounds. For further information on church planting, contact the Rev. Tom Brackett at the Episcopal Church Center, 646-203-6266 or tbrackett@episcopalchurch org, and/or see the 2020 Task Force Report at www.mollegen.net/2020TF

26. Church Turn-Arounds/Re-Starts –Part 1 of 2 • “Church revitalization” is the polite (and somewhat opaque) term for church turn-arounds. Another term is “re-starts.” • Turn-arounds are a lot harder to accomplish than new starts. • About half as many priests are qualified to lead turn-arounds as to lead new church plants. The reason is that whatever is causing the present decline probably lies in deep-seated unrecognized motivations of the present opinion leaders in the sick congregation, and that sickness must be cured (or the sick people dispersed) before a healthy congregation can be built. • If you can’t find someone who is truly qualified, then have the wisdom to shut the failing operation down. An alternative to this is to arrange a merger with another weak congregation, but only if the merger effort is led by a truly transformative leader. • Obviously it’s better to do re-starts than closures, so let’s look more closely at how to do re-starts.

27. Church Turn-Arounds/Re-Starts –Part 2 of 2 In her 2006 book Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, Dr. Diana Butler Bass describes her three-year study of healthy growing US Protestant congregations; some but not all of which are Episcopal. The middle section of the book,“10 Signposts for Renewal” describes the important traits of healthy, growing congregations. They are: This book could be required pre-retreat reading for a vestry retreat, with each vestry person to come to the retreat with at least one idea for improving parish performance in at least five of the above 10 areas of activity. Alternately, the whole congregation could be polled, using either a paper survey or surveymonkey.com. The whole congregation could be polled only if the majority have read the book. (You don’t ask a group of horse-and carriage drivers what makes a good racing car – or even a good family car.) Hospitality Discernment Healing Contemplation Testimony Diversity Justice Worship Reflection Beauty

28. Strategically Important ObservationsPart 1 of 2 • The restructuring planned for GC2015 won’t turn around TEC’s negative growth trend – unless it incorporates the church growth/redevelopment principles of this document. Cost-cutting is clearly necessary for TEC, but it basically consists of treating only the results of decline, not the root causes. TEC needs to find and counter the root causes of decline, while concurrently taking action to get positive growth going again. • Put differently, we’ve got to start taking the Great Commission seriously.

29. Strategically Important ObservationsPart 2 of 2 Relocating the Episcopal Church Center out of NYC would involve major costs, with minimal -- if any -- long term benefits. Advocates of such a relocation should buttress their arguments by citing what benefits would be gained.

30. A Word from American Management Guru Peter Drucker • Good management doesn’t consist of saving money -- good management consists of spending money in the right places.

31. Some Definitions • Subsidiarity is the principle that each internal function in a hierarchical/layered organization should be performed at the best level for it in the organization • Cost-shifting means moving costs from one organization to another.

32. Some Observations -- Part 1 of 2 The present (2013-2015) TEC Budget adopted at GC2012 seems to have approached the need for budget reduction by shifting costs out of the DFMS budget (by cutting ECC staff) while saying that certain functions are better done closer to the grass-roots, invoking the concept of subsidiarity. In fact, this is cost-shifting from expensive expert central staff to dispersed, usually-untrained or self-trained unpaid local staff. This reduces costs at the DFMS level, but it also lowers the quality of services received at the lower levels of TEC. I think of this as false subsidiarity. Another term also comes to mind: unfunded mandates. Why don’t we be more honest with ourselves about what’s going on?

33. Some Observations -- Part 2 of 2 It’s just cost-cutting if you only reduce the payroll $$ in the upper levels of an organization. It’s subsidiarity only if you move both the work and the $$ to a lower level of the organization. Cost-cutting is easier to plan than subsidiarity because all you have to do is cut payrolls. Subsidiarity is harder because you have to identify how the work will get done and by whom at what cost in some lower level in the organization and then help the newly tasked to know the what, why, and how of their new jobs.

34. Evangelism and Church Growth – Not the Same Thing, but Hand-in-Hand Partners A good approach is to use church growth principles to get people into the congregation and then teach them an appreciation for true Anglicanism. • This is much more than teaching people who theologically are still Baptists how to use Prayer Books. You haven’t completed the job until you’ve taught them what the bible really is, and how to react to it with intellectual integrity. Teach them about the bible, not just what’s in it. Otherwise they are likely to interpret it as though it were a 20th-Century history book and/or God’s behavior manual. • The relationship between church growth and evangelism is that church growth can be an excellent first step in evangelism – just don’t forget to complete the job!

35. Church Leader and Church Member Happiness People are happiest when: • They know what they are supposed to be doing • They know how to do it well • They are supported in doing their work • They believe that what they are doing is important to: • God • Their supervisors and the higher-ups in the organization • The people who benefit from their work (i.e., the end-users of their work) • Their family, their friends and their community • They feel appreciated • They are growing in capability and effectiveness Following this document’s Grand Strategy will lead to happier church leaders and church members

36. Being Customer-Oriented • Anyone who uses your work is your customer: • When you fill out paperwork, the person who uses it is your customer • When you give a talk, the people in your audience are your customers • When you write a memo or a press release, the people who read it are your customers. So are the people who wanted you to write the press release or memo. • You should want all your customers to be delighted with your product or service. (This is just a specific instance of the Golden Rule.) • Regularly ask your customers how they like your product or service, and how you can make it more pleasing to them. • By the above definition, God and all God’s children are the Church’s customers.

37. Better Balance Needed • Because of TEC’s continuing numerical decline, we must strike a better balance between our emphasis on - improving social justice and social services - propagating the faith. • No matter how one does the analysis, TEC at the churchwide level is putting far more effort, time, and money into social justice and social service than in responding to the Great Commission. Analyses of the January 2012 draft budget comparing totals for each of the Five Anglican Marks of mission were performed in early 2012 in different ways by (a) Arizona Clergy Deputy the Rev. Susan Snook, (b) by Bp Steve Lane, the vice-chair of PB&F and (c) the Episcopal Church Center Chief Operating Officer, Bp Stacy Sauls. The conclusion that there is nowhere near a balance between the categories cited above in the first bullet stands out in all three of these analyses. • Those members who are most interested in supportingsocial service should keep in mind that if TEC keeps getting smaller and smaller, then TEC will be able to do less and less social service/social justice work. Much better propagation of the faith is a necessary foundation for continuing and/or expanding our work in social service/social justice.

38. Adopt a More Proactive Attitude • If you need more money, then go out and get it. At the top TEC level, the TEC Development Office is raising significant new money. At the diocesan and congregational levels, the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) will help you get started . • “Maybe the church can’t afford what we need to do, but God can.” • Not only the whole DFMS, but also the individual dioceses should have Development Offices. (This can be a part-time job in a small diocese.) The ELCA Development Office has a more than 12 to 1 payoff ratio. The Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) will help you get started. • Remember this important leadership principle: “If you always do what you always did, You’ll always get what you always got.” • And as a good therapist recommends, “If you want to feel better, then do something to feel better about.”

39. A Fertile but Untapped Resource – Our Seminarians • We can use seminarians to brainstorm how better to approach the under-30 generation . Seminarians under age 30 can also more readily assess what will work for the under-30 age group, and what won’t work. • We can also include seminarians in evaluating new approaches . See 2012 Deputy Liza Anderson’s Blue Book “Cliff Notes” for how one young adult views what’s in the Blue Book. (See Links, the final page in this presentation.) • It will be much easier to teach seminarians how to do effective personal evangelism than any other demographic segment in TEC, especially our over-40s. The best evangelists are new converts, because they can tell how they found their life change to be a big improvement. Many seminarians have relatively recently re-directed their lives into a deeper and strong relationship with our Lord and our God (by going to seminary), and in this sense are new converts.

40. Organizational Life Cycle Theory • The Life Cycle Theory of Organizations comes to us from the field of business management. They got it from the field of biology, where it is known as evolution, the survival of the fittest. • TEC is shrinking because mainline Protestant churches are no longer the fittest in our environment. TEC must learn how to grow or TEC will die. • While TEC does have competitors that are churches (CANA comes to mind) but our most threatening competitors are the many non-religious and anti-religious materialistic forces in society, many of which are driven by profit-oriented corporations who want to sell us myriads of things – a materialistic approach to what often really are spiritual needs. • Organizations survive by adapting to changes in their environment, an especially tricky proposition today because our environments are changing rapidly as technology changes faster and faster, and as our competitors copy more and more quickly what succeeds and also more and more quickly invent their own technological improvements. • TEC must more aggressively improve itself or it will slowly die.

41. The Episcopal Church Offers a Better Way of Being Catholic IMO, one of the strategic objectives of TEC should be to establish and implement a plan for aggressively marketing TEC to disaffected Roman Catholics. TEC is both catholic -- small "c" -- and protestant: we have many institutional features and all the sacraments of the church of the early and middle centuries, but we have avoided such latter-day aberrations as: Mariolatry; misogyny; forced and unpopular clerical celibacy; widespread, persistent, and covertly-protected clergy ephebophilia; rejection of the most effective and convenient forms of birth control; and church leadership which both excludes and insultingly devalues lay leadership and women, and which is determinedly and unconscionably hostile to sexual minorities. One of the worst aberrations is so-called Papal Infallibility -- a hubris-encrusted doctrine which has led to required belief in such non-biblically-based doctrines as the Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By today's standards of belief, today's Roman Catholic Church would have to excommunicate the church of the early centuries. IMO, we should intentionally offer clear-sighted disaffected Roman Catholics a spiritual home that is more rational, more historically-catholic, much more loving, and less hubris-encrusted, and which demonstrably values all orders of ministry in all people. Remembering that the Protestant Reformation led to RCC improvements in response, we should keep in mind that a welcoming initiative directed to disaffected Roman Catholics may lead to improvements in how the RCC handles itself. (However, I won’t be holding my breath waiting for this to happen. It took them almost 500 years to follow us in worshiping in the language of the congregation.)

42. Responding to Diana Butler Bass’s Book Christianity After Religion I personally am at a loss regarding how to address Dr. Bass’s vision of a new Great Awakening described in this book. I’m a native of the “Silent Generation “ (born between 1927 and 1945), so I don’t feel at home in the world Dr. Bass is describing. Here’s what I suggest: Ask each of TEC’s three largest seminaries on the same day to • convene a morning brainstorming/analytical session of their students under age 30 who have read and reflected upon this book • after lunch, have a second session of the same students process the results of their brainstorming session and develop an outline plan for TEC’s response to the book. • have the Executive Council’s Committee on Strategic Planning compare and contrast the three plans from the three seminary meetings and combine them into a recommended overall strategy for proceeding. • ask Executive Council as a whole to review and modify the results of its committee as they see fit --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Readers of this document may feel that this scheme is half-baked, but it is a way to proceed, it won’t take long (maybe three weeks), it won’t take many person-hours, and it will give us a generation-appropriate strategy for addressing both the under-30s and the on-going changes in our society. However, seminarians are not representative of the whole generation, so other inputs should be developed as well.] .

43. Designing/Redesigning Future Church Buildings • Let’s not be in the business of constructing soon-to-be-out-of-date church buildings. • Plan to share space with organizations that don’t need buildings during the same hours that your church does. Examples might include: • private or public schools (including pre-schools) • movie theaters • sports arenas • synagogues • In the Middle Ages, cathedrals didn’t have fixed pews. The chapel at the Diocese of Texas’s Camp Allen doesn’t have fixed pews either. Its seating can be set up for large or relatively small groups to worship in, or for secular groups to have business meetings, such as corporate shareholders’ meetings and corporate management retreats. It has projectors that are unobtrusive and screens that can be dropped into place only when needed. • Use the building design advice and assistance of the Episcopal Church Building Fund (ECBF). That’s what they do and they’re good at it.

44. Dealing with Empty, Crumbling and/or Near-Empty Church Buildings – Part 1 of 2 • Truly empty church buildings are a cash-flow sink and an investment sink because the buildings are not only depreciating but also are continuing to have ownership costs such as insurance and minimal-but-still-present energy costs. Insurance costs go up rapidly for unoccupied buildings, especially because sprinkler systems don’t work when the building’s interior temperatures are below freezing. Empty buildings are more subject to break-ins, which speed-up depreciation. Either use the buildings or sell them and invest the proceeds in a new church start elsewhere in the diocese. • Or in the case of congregations that attempted to secede, lease-to-sell the buildings back to the people who used to occupy them. A good model agreement was entered into in Northern Virginia, where the diocese and the secessionist congregation agreed for that congregation to take over the use of the buildings and to pay operating costs (insurance, energy, etc.). The congregation agreed not to affiliate with another denomination for five years, and both the congregation and TEC agreed not to publicly criticize each other.

45. Dealing with Empty, Crumbling and/or Near-Empty Church Buildings – Part 2 of 2 • I’m using the term near-empty but there may be a more gracious term that I haven’t thought of yet. I’m thinking of the situation where there is a very large building and a very small congregation which can’t afford to take proper care of the building. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a serious problem with the building and the diocese is suddenly going to have to intercede, likely at substantial expense to the diocese. Wouldn’t it be better to intercede before the inevitable major problem occurs? • One way would be for the diocesan canons to specify that when a congregation’s Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) falls below say, 25% of the church’s seating capacity for three years in a row, the congregation is placed in an Intervention-Needed status. • The congregation is then given notice that within four months its vestry must have chosen one of the following three approaches, in consultation with the Bishop and the Standing Committee: • Adopt an authorized growth plan, which the bishop and diocesan staff may have helped the rector and vestry prepare and for which the bishop and diocesan staff will provide assistance in implementation. • Adopt an authorized facility-sharing plan with another worshiping community to share a facility and facility costs, such that the result is economically viable. • Establish a merger plan with another Episcopal or in-communion congregation. Each such plan will have milestones, which if not met will cause the congregation to come under closer diocesan control. Note: in the business community, continuously pouring money into continuously substandard operations is known as backing your losers. In the church, it’s known as being caring, but it’s very poor mission strategy, not to mention poor stewardship. • b .

46. Laying the Foundations for Future ReunionPart 1 of 2 Reunion with the recently schismatic ex-Episcopalians won’t happen overnight, but we can begin laying the foundations now. Think separately of the schism-leaders (mostly clergy) and the schism-followers (some clergy, but mostly laity). The schism-leaders had to work themselves up into an emotional tizzy to justify to themselves breaking their ordination vows. Reversing their schism decision will not come easy for them. An organized return to TEC may need to wait until the leaders of schismatic organizational units (dioceses and/or congregations) are replaced by their successors. This is already beginning to happen. However, the followers of the schism-leaders may individually much sooner be ready to return when: • “Their” church building is returned to TEC • The broad society (including themselves) concludes that gay marriages in fact have not harmed traditional marriages • Members of their own expanding number of descendents include some who are GLBT • When it is more broadly recognized that the main effect of the effort to replace TEC as the US member of the Anglican Communion has been to contribute to dividing the Anglican Communion • TEC is more broadly recognized as a leader in inter-communion agreements, especially if/when such agreements are made with the PCUSA and/or the UMC. • TEC recognizes that lease-to-buy agreements with some secessionist congregations can be a win-win solution • TEC recognizes that the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral should apply to relationships with : • CANA • The Reformed Episcopal Church • Other breakaway groups

47. Laying the Foundations for Future ReunionPart 2 of 2 • Assign a blue-ribbon Task Force to design and test approaches to departed Episcopalians and report back to Executive Council. Then Ex Council should make appropriate recommendations to GC2018 • These approaches should include providing explicit paths for reunion with • Departed dioceses • Departed congregations (including their deserted property) • Departed priests/deacons • Departed parishioners (should formal reception be considered necessary, or can it be forgone?)

48. Improving Your Parish Website – Part 1 of 3 • The parish home page should convey the sense of a warm caring community for both families and singles. A photo of a Baptism is a great choice for the home page. The photo of the church building may make present church members feel warm and fuzzy, but to people who have just moved into the area, it may convey “we’re a century or so out of date” or (especially to financially savvy onlookers) “our old building is a money-pit.” • Say: “Our kids love to come because we have a great Sunday School and youth group.” • Convey that worshippers here usually feel that they have experienced deeply meaningful and joyful contact with the Divine. (PS: The services and the individuals’ coffee-hour conversations must convey that also, not just the website.) • Convey that providing the visitor with the experience of God is of utmost importance to us. We don’t ask people to subscribe to a list of theological propositions -- this isn’t the 16th Century. A goodly number of us here probably couldn’t agree to all the standard propositions anyway. • Convey that there is continuing education for all ages. Don’t use the current buzz-word “formation” which can be heard as “brainwashing.” If calling it “education” isn’t adequate for you, call it something like “education with experiential aspects.” • The photo of the church building belongs in the “directions to the church” section, and the directions should end by describing where the entrance to the parking lot is, and which door you should use to get into the building. .

49. Improving Your Parish Website – Part 2 of 3 • Convey that “families” here includes: single-parent families, nuclear families, unmarried couples (with or without children), and singles. Don’t make singles activities sound like “find-a-mate” sessions; you don’t want to covey that there’s something wrong with being single. • Have a “comparisons” section: TEC compared to others. We represent the historical church brought up to the 21st century. Also see earlier slide 40 – “a better way of being catholic.” • TEC isjointly governed by four orders of ministry, providing a check and balance system among the four orders: • Bishops in the Historic Succession • Priests and Deacons ordained by bishops in the Historic Succession • Lay people in Mutual Ministry (lay people participating in leadership) Until the ELCA received the historic succession from TEC in a recent agreement, TEC was the only major US Church with these characteristics. • Convey that we wear our name tags to all church events. This is single most important thing that a congregation can do to make newcomers and visitors feel that you truly want to include them. (Don’t say it unless you do it.) It’s very important, so do it.

50. Improving Your Parish Website – Part 3 of 3 • Make sure that the words ‘spirit’ and “spiritual” appear somewhere on the homepage (so that a seeker’s search engine can find your website.) • Remember that the basic question in the back of the mind of a seeker or a website visitor is likely to be: “What things that are meaningful to me are going on in this church?” • On the whole, we need better answers than we usually give to that question. • Good answers may depend on whether the seeker is a boomer, millennial, silent-generation person, Anglo, Latino/Hispanic, etc. • We also need to counter mistaken impressions that people may have: • Christianity is NOT anti-gay • Christianity is NOT anti-evolution • Our Churches DO NOT care more about their clergy than they do about their children • Our Churches DO NOT deny their faults rather than fixing them • Henry VIII DID NOT establish the C of E because he wanted a divorce . [Being a good Roman Catholic, Henry sought an annulment. His request was denied because the Pope was under the control of King Philip of Spain, a political enemy of Henry.] .