The Rt. Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello
This address was given on October 25, 2024 during morning Eucharist at the Bristol Event Center in Bristol, CT.
Well, good morning, Church! I wish you had the view that I have right now. You look amazing! It is so incredible to be here in this crowded ballroom filled with faithful Episcopalians. If anybody this week asks you what you did, simply say: “I went to church with 500 other people this weekend.”
As you may already know, or have a sense, Diocesan Convention is something to which I look forward to with great anticipation every single year. I love everything about it. I love coming together as a whole, a family reunion of the very best kind, and seeing the breadth and depth of the faithfulness of Episcopalians across Connecticut.
I love how we do business together. I am always in awe to be part of a Church in which our life together is discerned, and decisions are made, by the people, lay and ordained, of the Church.
I am increasingly thankful to be part of a tradition in which faithful agreement, and disagreement, carried out in covenanted community, is at the cornerstone of our common life.
And I love that we have a chance, as the Body of Christ gathered, to share in this feast of Christ’s Body and Blood, and to break bread with those from across ECCT whose name we might never learn, but to whom we are bound in sacred relationship.
And so, I love our Annual Diocesan Convention. And I’m grateful that each of you is here this morning.
But I would be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that, this year, my excitement has been in conversation with some trepidation.
We are living in a time in which who we are and what we have to offer as the Body of Christ organized as the Episcopal Church in Connecticut is critical to the world.
It is time for us as Episcopalians in Connecticut to be preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ with courage, with boldness, and with clarity. We need to be preaching the Good News in our congregations, in our neighborhoods, on our social media accounts, and at our dinner tables.
And we need to preach it in word and example as we promise: “We will, with God’s help.”
I absolutely believe that this is a time for which the Episcopal Church was made. I believe that our congregations and our communities in ECCT can have incredible impact in our neighborhoods and in the lives of those who are longing to know what it is we proclaim to know, though they might not know the same words to use that we use—or they might not yet know that they might just find what it is their heart is longing for on the other side of our red doors.
I haven’t known in my lifetime a more critical time to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ as I have received it in the Episcopal and Anglican traditions than the moment we are in right now.
My excitement this morning with you all lies in the possibilities and potential for transformation and renewal that exist in every corner of our Diocese, and where it is already happening—and it’s happening everywhere, as witnessed by the cards hanging on either side of the room, filled with examples of how we, as ECCT, are already growing in faith, living in hope, and serving in love.
My trepidation this morning finds its home in the question of whether or not we will, as the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, have the will, the courage, and the boldness needed to realize the potential of the present moment, and to turn the possibilities of hope that exists into the actualities of our common life together.
There’s a joke of sorts that the Episcopal Church is the world’s best kept secret.
But as I look at the world around me today, I don’t think that’s funny anymore.
I have no interest in keeping that secret anymore. Do you?
Pundits ask the blogosphere: “Is the Church still relevant?”
Well, it’s relevant to me. It’s where I met Jesus. It’s where I was first held in God’s saving Grace, and where I was transformed by the love of God. And it is where I have seen countless others find the same.
And I’m guessing that the Church might be relevant to you all, or you wouldn’t have given up a Saturday morning to tend to its care and to its health.
But our relevance does not come from what kind of music we sing, what vestments we wear, or how large or small our worshipping communities might be. Our relevance comes from our clarity of who we are and why we do what we do. Our relevance is in Jesus Christ. Members of the Body of Christ is who we are, and in order to follow Jesus more closely, is why we do what we do.
So, I wonder if the question we might want to ask ourselves this 241st Convention isn’t whether the Church is relevant or not—but is it willing or not; is it capable or not; is it convinced or not; is it courageous or not; and is it bold or not?
Where it is already all of those things, and I know it is, how do we build on that?
And where it isn’t quite yet, how to we help it to become?
I can tell you that, based on what Bishop Laura and I see on our visitations, and what we hear in our conversations with you, is that you are willing, you do want to be more bold, and you are increasing daily in your courage and in your witness. Thanks be to God! And we’ve got work to do, friends. Thanks be to God.
Some of that work, this past year, we have continued to make progress on the objectives first set out at convention two years ago. The staff at The Commons have continued the work of mission alignment, moving resources toward the work of supporting you all—the laity, clergy, congregations, and communities of ECCT—to do the work God is calling you to do in deep and powerful ways.
We have hired two of the three strategic positions created as part of the reorg and realignment. Marsha McCurdy Adell has engaged already in the work of supporting our lay leaders, creating opportunities for training and formation, and examining and developing our licensing processes to make sure our lay leaders have what they need to do the ministries to which they have been called.
The Rev. Jill Morrison recently joined us as Director of Congregational Development & Networking and is already making an impact connecting congregations with needed resources and providing support to our Region Leadership Teams and our Ministry Networks.
We continue to examine ways to lift the burdens of managing the many administrative tasks that steal precious time and resources that could be better spent on doing mission and ministry in your local contexts.
We are confronting head-on the very real challenges facing our congregations without settled clergy, of our clergy serving parishes less than full time, and those places where the Church is growing—but the resources aren’t quite keeping up.
We are embracing what it means to be a nimble Church, not afraid of experimenting, and learning from the experiments we try.
Of course, there is a lot more work still to be done in all of these areas, and we are willing, we are able, and we are committed to doing that work.
Three years ago, at my first convention, just two weeks after my consecration, I told you that I suspected we had some work to do, we were going to need to do, before we would be able to move more fully into the work we were longing and aching to do.
And this year, just about on cue, something in our conversations began to shift. At visitations and meetings of our Diocesan Leadership bodies, the tone began to change. Your questions and ideas have started to become more strategic, adaptive, and visionary in nature. While the technical challenges we find there amongst the weeds are still there, I have felt as though our collective heads have begun lifting up and over those weeds to look to the horizon and ask ourselves: “Where are we headed?” and “How will we get there?”
And I couldn’t be more excited for the shift.
As I mentioned yesterday, in September, we gathered the members of Leadership Gathering, made up of our Mission Council, Standing Committee, Commission on Ministry, and Trustees of Donations & Bequests and we asked them three questions to consider:
First, “What has ECCT been paying attention to?”
Second, “What do you wish ECCT was paying attention to?”
And third, “What does ECCT need to be paying attention to?”
Well, I was delighted—and relieved, honestly—that the answers to these three questions were in alignment to the conversations and questions we have been having as your Bishops and The Commons staff. And they weren’t just about the challenges in front of us, but the abundant possibilities and dreams for what might lie in front of us.
We want and need to be continuing to address the challenges of clergy shortages, increasing expenses, exhausted leadership both lay and ordained, and explore more opportunities for collaborative ministry.
Canon Olds has done great work to continue to develop our Transition process in order to meet congregations where they are and to help them to discern where God is calling them next.
And with Bishop Ahrens’ faithful leadership and guidance, we are seeing parishes coming together in new ways, creating opportunities for collaboration and new ways of being Church together.
We must not back away, or back down from, our commitment to Advocacy, Racial Justice & Reconciliation. I am grateful for the work of the Racial Justice Task Force, the Reparations Fund Board, and to Canon Littlepage as they work toward a long-term and sustainable approach to that critical work.
But let’s be clear, friends. Creating the Board and moving some money does not complete the work of dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy in our world, or even in the Church. There is more work for us to do.
We desperately need to develop our support for Children, Youth, and Young Adult ministries. Our young people are hungry for the Good News, and if we are not going to be there in those spaces to tell them that Good News, we can’t complain when they find it someplace else.
We can and we must do much better by our elders, who have served our Church for decades, only to find the Church ill equipped to support them fully as they grapple with aging, failing health, memory loss, retirement, and isolation.
This fall, as we gather here today, we are working to develop needs assessment for these critical ministries. But we want positions that hold real possibility of support, a transformation and renewal in these areas, not just a position on staff that we can point to and makes us feel as though the work has been done.
I have heard your concern, as recently as yesterday, that this work just might be too much for one person, or require too varied a skillset. I wonder the same things. And if that is what we find, I commit to working with our Mission Council to ask them for their creativity, and generosity, to make that happen.
Supporting you all, the congregations and communities of ECCT, for you to do the work of forming disciples, helping you to do the work of helping God out there in the world, that is my hope and vision as your Bishop. And it is a hope and vision I see materializing bit by bit by your good work and continued faithful leadership.
But to do it well, and to do it faithfully, it is time for us to tell the world its best kept secret.
It’s time to speak with courage, with boldness, and with clarity about who we are as the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and what we know the Church – not simply the institution, but the people who are the living Body of Christ – have to offer the world in this time.
We need to do this not simply in the hope of more bodies in pews, and not just in hope of moving more bodies out of pews out into the world—although those are great byproducts of this work.
It is time to tell the world who we are, what we are about, and who we know Jesus to be, because the world is suffering. It is broken and it is hurting.
And we have a message of love, a message of healing, redemption, and resurrection the world desperately needs to hear in this time.
As many of the structures and systems of support that have existed in our common civil life crumble and disappear, it will become even that much more important to us, for us, through our churches, our communities and congregations, to do the work of caring for the least among us.
We need to support the weak, strengthen the fainthearted, stand with those who are persecuted, and honor all persons.
And friends, we need to do this work not because it’s popular. Not because it’s the platform of one political party or another, but because Jesus Christ demands it of us, and nothing less from us.
That is who we are: to be made more and more into the likeness of Christ is our greatest hope.
We can disagree with one another. And we do, and in fact, faithful disagreement is a cornerstone of healthy community. But we cannot, we must not, treat one another as the enemy.
We cannot, we must not, let the powers of fear and apathy, of anger or resentment become the gods we worship.
We have one identity, and that is in Christ.
We need to be clear about who we are and what we are about.
And so, I offer to you our theme for this year’s convention, which I hope might guide our work and our vision for who we are, and who we are working to become as the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. Centered in Christ, we are: Growing in Faith. We are Living in Hope. And we are Serving in Love.
Growing in Faith: we are committed to the ongoing formation of all the people of God, young and old, lay and ordained, cradle Episcopalian, and hesitant seeker. We will continue to worship together, to study scripture together, to learn new ways of living our lives of faith.
Living in Hope: we are a people of the resurrection; a people who refuse to stay stuck in Good Friday. We will not let the narrative of church decline define who we are, but we will seek new and creative ways to be the Church God still needs for us to be. We will plant new locations and lift up new vocations. We will continue the work of Advocacy, Justice & Reconciliation as though we actually believe it’s possible to achieve.
We will tell our story boldly and with courage as though it just might make a difference in this world.
Serving in Love: we will continue to break out of the four walls of our congregations to take our places as servants of all, as Jesus modeled for us.
We will love one another first, because we are free to love one another before we know whether or not we like each other very much. It is the great gift of being a follower of Jesus. We will serve alongside each other to feed the hungry, shelter the unhoused, care for the immigrant, and protect those who have been marginalized. And we get to do that work united in our desire to serve in love, without regard for the differences between us that threaten to divide us.
ECCT, you already know this. It is who you are and it is what you continually witness to me and to each other.
And it is the work in front of us. Centered in Christ, we will continue to grow in faith, to live in hope, and to serve in Love.
It is who we are as the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. It is a vision for who we pray we might become, and it is a roadmap for how we might just get there.
So friends, can I tell you a secret?
The Episcopal Church in Connecticut are faithful followers of Jesus Christ who are Growing in Faith, Living in Hope, and Serving in Love. That is who we are, and this is exactly the time for which the Episcopal Church in Connecticut was made. Now, let’s go tell everyone!
AMEN