Bishops' Blog

Bishop Garrett In Retrospect

I have just finished reading our founding bishop's journals. It is a slow read, mostly lists of confirmations and baptisms by an indefatigable man. But it is also interspersed with tales of cyclones, forced rides of a day and a half with food and a day without water (in August!), camping with cowboys in driving rain, his own typhoid and malaria, and a public hanging or two. Remind me not to complain about ordinary inconveniences!  He  seeks to reopen the Sunday school at the Chapel of the Incarnation, and he worries that $600 for land for a church in Waxahachie is just too steep!

But one also sees an evangelist attentive to opportunities, to new extensions of the railroad and what they portend, in the midst of great economic flux. He understands the cultural openings to hearing the gospel - a library here, a store or dispensary there. He has a clear sense of Episcopal identity, of the sacramentally evangelical Christian faith he has on offer. He organizes missionary societies for men, women and North Texas. He creates a Bishop Garrett Association to raise funds in the east. As he travels, he keeps an eye out for clergy and for potential ordinands. He asks the help of the Baptists and Methodists in his peregrinations.

His world is so much harder in one way, more straightforward in another. But his spirit perdures among us to a remarkable extent, and whatever we muster as mission strategy amounts to its evocation.

Peace

+GRS

Holism in Practice

I have written before about the assumption which emerged out of the past generation's debate, in mission theology, between ecumenicals (stressing social action), and evangelicals (stressing evangelism): holism. The two are a seamless garment, not to be separated. We can go a step further: a sound vision of the church combines both with the reading of the Bible and the celebration of the sacraments as the primary expressions of God's redemptive action in His world.

We do we see this with particular clarity? I would suggest that the answer is in many of our fellow Anglican churches in the majority world. I am grateful for all the ties we have with NGO's and para- church groups doing heroic work. But we do well to supplement this with those companion relationships with sibling dioceses and parishes where this holism, essential to our very identity, is on display. Such churches are a distinct gift of God to us as part of the Anglican Communion in our time.

 Let me add a more concrete footnote. Historically churches in Africa and Asia in the evangelical, Church Missionary Society tradition have shown this holism more vigorously. Several years ago at a global conference of fellow Anglicans, this indivisibility of witness to the Islamic world, conversion, prayer, and social help was a given. If you would like advice and contacts for just such friendships we can be of help.