The Rt. Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello
This address was given on October 26, 2024 during morning Eucharist at the Bristol Event Center in Bristol, CT.
Good morning, Episcopal Church in Connecticut!
It is so very good to be with you this weekend for our 240th Annual Convention. I can’t tell you what a glorious sight it is to look out and see each one of you here gathered for the work of the Church, to the glory of God.
I have just completed my second year as your Bishop Diocesan. They say, in the wisdom imparted to new Bishops, it takes three years for a Bishop to know what they are doing. While that feels more true than I’d like to admit, I hope I’m slightly ahead of the curve in that regard.
On my consecration anniversary, on the 15th of October, I received a text from a member of the clergy congratulating me. In it, they expressed their prayer that you all were: “becoming easier to live with and to love.”
I responded honestly and immediately. I wrote, “Loving you all is the easiest part of this job!” And I meant it.
You have made loving you so easy. And I know some of you might not like to hear this, but you are incredibly loveable, even in the hard places and even in our difficult conversations. If I didn’t love you, if I couldn’t love you, this job would be impossible.
It wasn’t until a few days after I received that text, though, that I realized I didn’t comment on the “easier to live with” part.
Of course, the “loving” makes the “living with” easier, but it is true that we are still getting to know one another—getting to know each other’s peculiarities and priorities.
In our still relatively new relationship, you’re discovering that I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, and you are finding that completely bewildering.
I am discovering that I have my own set of “Because I’ve always done it that way,” and you are stretching me in new and unexpected ways.
I pray this is always the case. I hope we are forever stretching one another, helping each other to grow more and more into the Bishop and People of God that Jesus calls us to be together.
We are growing together. With Jesus as our vine, our branches are stretching and reaching new places—the very places God needs us to be.
Last year, I stood before you at Convention and outlined what Bishop Laura and I had been hearing from you all at our gatherings, visitations, and meetings over coffee.
I gathered what we had heard into main categories and outlined for you some of the hopes and plans we had for each one of them.
Those categories became the guide for how we would restructure the Diocesan Staff and better organize ourselves to support you all in your work.
We have seen progress in each area, and we have so much more work still to be done.
The first area was work on the Diocesan Structure level. We reviewed how the staff at The Commons (the name for the Diocesan Offices) could be organized to better meet your needs and the needs of the incredible staff who work there.
With the help of Diocesan Council, we chose not to invest in a major remodel of the offices and decided instead on an interim step of physically organizing people by collaborative team, rather than by job title. This was a low-cost solution we could try on while we begin a study of the longer-term vision for your Commons staff’s working space and location.
We have also done work regarding the properties held by ECCT. We created a Property Advisory Group who are helping to move this work forward in a way, that I hope, best supports the mission and ministry of ECCT, and I am grateful for their service. As you heard from our Treasurer yesterday, we are hopeful that significant movement can happen in this regard in the next year.
Our Advocacy, Racial Justice & Reconciliation work continues and, as you heard from Canon D yesterday, we are not yet where we would like to be, or even expected to be at this point in our work. Convening the Reparations Board shortly after this Convention adjourns will help to continue that work in a meaningful way this next year.
I am also excited by the work that has been done to create a program for anti-racism work in ECCT that speaks to our context in a meaningful way. I am grateful for the work that continues on with our Title IV and our Safe Church practices as they intersect with our call to be a people of Justice and of Reconciliation.
And friends, this work is long and it is hard. It is life-long. It is not linear, and we will continue to meet challenges to the work. We must not let these challenges stop us from doing what we can, whenever we can, wherever we can.
A major area of focus this past year has been on Lay & Ordained Vocations. We know many of our clergy are tired. Others are full of energy and longing for resources to support them in their work. And the same can be said for our lay leaders.
The clergy in ECCT are an incredibly faithful group of followers of Jesus Christ who lead in a terrain none of us could have seen coming. I am grateful for their commitment to the Gospel and their willingness to try creative new ways of being church in this time.
I continue to be humbled by the lay leadership of this diocese who work tirelessly, many on top of demanding careers and already too-full family lives.
I am particularly impressed by our lay leaders serving in parishes without settled clergy. Some of these folks have been at it for years: working the Supply Clergy list; organizing worship, meetings, and building repairs—all while shouldering the anxieties of their communities and trying to have some semblance of a spiritual life of their own.
In January, Bishop Laura and I began meeting with all Wardens once a month and with Wardens without settled clergy once a month. These Zoom gatherings have been sources of incredible support and wisdom shared between these lay leaders. Bishop Laura and I leave these meetings having learned so much more than anything we had to offer.
Last year, we introduced the role of Regional Deans to support connections between clergy and facilitate communication and feedback between clergy and the Bishops’ Office. I am grateful to each one of our Regional Deans, and to the clergy they serve for prioritizing, and trying on this new way, of building support and connection for the challenging work of ministry.
I am also pleased and grateful to Bishop Laura and to the Deacons in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. They have just published a beautiful new Deacon’s Handbook and have it available on the Deacons page of ECCT’s website. I encourage you to give it a look. They are also exploring how they might further the ministry and reach of Deacons across Connecticut. More on that soon.
Very soon, we will name our new Director of Lay Ministries & Vocations. Working with Canon Rebekah Hatch, this position will be focused on supporting our lay leaders in their work, including Wardens, Treasurers, Clerks, Vestries, Lay Preachers, Worship Leaders, and Eucharistic Visitors.
It will be, of course, no surprise to you that Clergy Transitions continues to be a topic of great interest and concern in the diocese. We completed several listening sessions in the spring and Canon Hodapp has used that feedback to help us imagine what Transitions in ECCT might look like next. This will be the subject for our upcoming Clergy Day, and please be on the lookout for public sessions online to learn more about what Transitions in ECCT will look like in this next chapter.
We still have yet to hire the new position of Director of Congregational Support & Networking. As the title suggests, this position will support congregations in your efforts to be communities of faithful followers of Jesus, but also to support the ways we are organized to work together, across congregations and geographic boundaries, such as supporting the work of our Region Leadership Teams, our Ministry Networks, and other initiatives as you all discern them.
We have had to put that search on hold for now. As you know, after 12 years of serving ECCT, Canon Hodapp has announced his retirement. We are glad for him and for his family, even as we will miss his incredible wisdom and his loving heart. The good news here is that we get to keep him in ECCT and we look forward to continuing to work with him.
We are also getting ready to say goodbye to Robin Hammeal-Urban. Robin has served ECCT faithfully for 25 years. She has spent 25 years supporting the part of our common life together that is often the most challenging. And if the work itself is not hard enough, I am the fifth bishop with whom she has had to work. I am grateful to have had the time I have had working alongside Robin, learning from her—and, I am grateful she will continue to serve the wider Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Thank you, Robin.
We hope you all will be able to join us on Tuesday, November 19 from 5-7 PM at The Commons to celebrate these two gifted and faithful servants.
We have begun a search already for a new Canon for Congregations & Transitions, we hope there might be some overlap with Canon Hodapp. And Robin has been working closely with our Canon to the Ordinary, Canon Ranjit Mathews, who will assume Robin’s portfolio upon her retirement. I hear all the whispering: “We’re praying for him.” Please do. Once the new Canon for Congregations & Transitions is in place, we will then resume our search for the Director of Congregational Support & Networking.
So this has been a year of reorganization, and we are not done yet. Transition can be exhausting, and it can fuel anxiety. My prayer, and my true belief, based on what I am already seeing, is that we are moving more and more in the direction of orienting ourselves towards supporting you all in concrete and meaningful ways so that you all can be doing the work God needs you to be doing.
I know we are not entirely there yet. I expect we will continue to fall short and make mistakes along the way. But supporting you in your mission and ministry—doing the work of God out there in the world—that is our goal. That is my vision: a Commons staff equipped to support you in your mission and ministry to welcome, form, and send disciples, witnessing to the Good News of Jesus Christ for the sake of the world.
Your ongoing feedback and faithful participation in these efforts is helping us to get there.
I believe that this time of reorganization and capacity building is the work we need to do to give us the firm foundation necessary to help us to do more of the work of God we are called to do. I trust this hard work is preparing us for a bold and faithful future as the Episcopal Church in Connecticut.
Bishop Laura and I, over these past two years, along with the Canons, Regional Deans and others have remained committed to the practice of active listening. We continue to build infrastructure to support that listening, and to make sure that the feedback we are hearing is making its way to where it needs to be heard.
One of the overarching themes we have continued to hear is how disconnected in the world many of us feel. People out there in our communities feel disconnected. Parishes feel disconnected from the life at The Commons, or the larger life of ECCT. Some parishes feel disconnected from one another. Many of you report feeling disconnected from one another in your parishes and your communities.
This disconnection is not unique to us, here in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. It is not unique even to the Episcopal Church or religious organizations at large. This disconnection is a symptom and a cause of the times in which we live.
We can blame COVID for a portion of this. Our young people are still recovering from a large portion of their childhood spent disconnected from their peers.
But many of us are still struggling with isolation and, increasingly, polarization. The Gospel we heard this morning, from which our theme for this year’s Convention was drawn reminds us that we are all branches belonging to the one vine that is Jesus Christ.
It seems as though a sense of isolation and separation is nothing new, then. Jesus needed to remind his followers of their connectedness through him in the same way we need reminding of that today.
One bread.
One body.
One body.
Many members.
Many branches.
One vine.
While the powers of this world continue to do their best to divide and separate us—to pit us one against the other—Jesus calls us back to remember that we are, whether we feel it or not, inextricably bound, one to another.
That is what the church has to offer this world—that is the very thing of which the world seems bent on depriving us.
When this election is over next week, no matter who wins, we will still need to be the Body of Christ in this world.
How we do that work; how we live fully into our identities as one body, one bread, one vine, how we do that will show the world the hope Jesus promises us “that all may be one.”
That is the vision I have for us in this season of our common life as ECCT. That we will actively seek out ways to continue to build connection, to continue to build trust, to build our relationships with one another here in ECCT that we might do that work out in the world as the beloved children of God.
I first thought of the theme of this year’s convention when I was attending the Consecration of the new bishop in the Diocese of Albany, a place that has known polarization and disconnection. Using the Gospel we heard today, in the image of Jesus the vine with many branches, the preacher, the Rev. Jennifer Williamson, who happens to be married to the new Bishop of Albany, encouraged those of us gathered to “be the branch.”
And I thought, “That’s it. Isn’t it? Be the branch.”
If there is one vine in Jesus, our call is to be the many branches bound together in Christ’s transformative love.
Bishop Michael Curry is in his last week of his tenure as our Presiding Bishop. One of the expressions he has been well-known for is on the bumper sticker on your tables: “We are the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement.”
Your parishes, your communities, are the branches of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut.
And you, friends, you are the branches of your local parishes and communities. You are reaching out into your neighborhoods and communities. You are bringing the justice, love, hope, peace, reconciliation and joy of Christ to where it is most needed, you are bringing it to those for whom it is the most lacking.
Whatever we do; whatever new program, whatever initiative, whatever committee or working group we find ourselves on, we must always remember that we are, all of us, branches of one vine, members of one body.
And we see you.
We see you being the branch all across Connecticut.
When you collect food for the hungry, you are being the branch.
When you respond to the crises in your neighborhoods, you are being branches of the true vine.
When almost 500 of us come together on a glorious fall weekend to do the work of the church and to worship together, we see the branches moving and growing.
When we saw yesterday the number of people discerning a call to ordained ministry – priests and deacons – fully aware of the realities of the church today and yet still filled with the Spirit’s stirring, we could see the branches at work.
In your courageous experiments to be the church in the world, you are being the branch.
In our work to be an anti-racist church, we are being the branch.
When you have stood in the public square, and I have seen you do it, on behalf of those on the margins, when you have lifted up the voices, and I have heard you do it, lifted up the voices of those whose voices have been silenced, you have been the branches.
When you look at the uncertainty of the future in your parish, in the church or in the world and you say “yes” to God anyway, you are being the branch.
Everywhere we go on our visits across ECCT, Bishop Laura and I are constantly inspired by the ways you are all figuring out how to be the branches right where you are and in the communities you serve. Sometimes you may feel alone in this work. You may feel like you are out on your own, but you are connected to a much larger branch, and to a Vine that never abandons us.
We must continue to tend to the places where the branches of the one vine are in need of care. We have work to do to strengthen where the connections between branches have been broken.
There is so much happening in ECCT to lift up and celebrate. And we have a great deal of work still in front of us. When we are unsure of what we are supposed to do next, let’s just remember Jesus’ invitation to us to be the branches.
When we are tired, let us remember that we are but one branch that goes all the way back to the one vine, and that the Spirit that courses through our veins is the same Spirt that courses through every other branch on that beautiful vine.
Despite whatever challenges we might be facing, whatever might get in our way—and something will, with Jesus as our vine, our branches are stretching and growing in new ways all across Connecticut—reaching into the very places God needs us to be the most
Jesus is our vine. May God continue to give us the strength, the hope, and the courage to be the branch for the sake of the world.
AMEN