Bishop Payne's Report to The Assembly

Rooted for Life, Planting Seeds for the Future

Thursday, June 8, 2006

(Synopsis: During the past six years, the ministry of the Synod has improved, drawing upon the strength of the roots (including our ecumenical partnerships). Like a tree we are not only Rooted for Life but called to go out on a limb, in risky places, for the sake of the Gospel.)

I call your attention briefly … just hope that you’ve had a chance to look over my written report that you received with your assembly materials. You may have noticed that that report did not include a report on the cows.

And so for all of you who ask regularly about the cows and really care – cause I can tell when some people ask and don’t care, but some people ask and really care, I want to say thank you; the cows are fine – and this year we welcomed 45 new calves onto the farm. And they are still hanging around with their mothers, but they’re beginning to learn how to munch on grass that will grow them into delicious and healthy grass-fed beef.

So, for all of you who are not vegetarians: If you see a car drive by that has a bumper sticker on the back that reads Beef: it’s what’s for supper you’ll know that that’s my husband.

During the early years of our marriage when John was away a lot on business, I often felt sorry for myself because I was the at-home primary caregiver of our four children. But times have changed, and now I’m away a lot, and John is the primary at-home caregiver for 45 of our children, and, looking back, I think things have evened out pretty well.

But aside from the cows on our farm, I also want to report on our trees because, actually, most of the acres on our farm provide a home for trees. It’s a beautiful New England forest – silent, dark and deep, as a poet you may know has called it, and I think I continue to grow in my inclination to use the biblical images of agricultural life and growth because of those trees that I have come to love, that have become so close to my home.

The biblical image of a tree planted by living water is one that we have used in our synod. For most of my time as bishop, we have thought of ourselves as being Rooted for Life, using that image. And that image also carried over into the work we did for the Bishop’s Appeal: “Planting Seeds for the Future.”

And that is such a powerful image. A tree planted by a stream of water – water drawn up through its roots for growth, health for the tree even in times of drought, strength offered, shade provided. God’s church and each one of us is like that tree – an oasis in a dry world.

But let’s think a little bit further today about trees. For these six years, we have been thinking about the strength of them which is based in the strong trunks, the fertile soil, the strength for living, and the interconnectedness of the branches of the trees.

In these six years that I have served as your bishop, we have strengthened the ministry of the synod in many ways. We have prepared the soil more completely with visioning; we have pruned back some non-productive committees, and grown, as I’ve watched over this six years, into a newly strong presence in New England – witnessing to a faithful and growing commitment to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, deepening our ecumenical partnerships more and more, and becoming more widely known in this area of the country as a church that provides absolutely incredible social services, especially in the area of immigration, care for children, affordable housing and elder care through our Lutheran Social Services of New England.

We have continued with excellent outdoor ministry and leadership development through the ministries that grow and intertwine with all the other ministries of the synod of Calumet Lutheran Camp and Conference Center.

But in this very last year in New England, I have seen a glimpse of a new spirit. And I talked about it in my written report and described it to you as my feeling that we had truly turned a corner in the ministry that we provide.

And now I’d like to think about that idea as we continue to live in the image of a tree – to not only think about how we are Rooted for Life, but how we are called to go out on a limb, going to new and sometimes risky places for the sake of the Gospel.

Let me give you some examples of the things that are going on in the synod – many of them coming to fruition just in this last year.

After years of struggling to find ways to support urban and multicultural ministries, we now have the beginning of a new effort that I believe is truly the work of the Holy Spirit among us. The Center for Walking with Jesus in the Street has been planted at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Providence, R.I. It has been several years in the birthing and growing, primarily with the help of Pr. Santiago Rodriguez and his wife Keila Rodriguez, who is a member of our synod council. It was begun through prayer and bible study and visioning, and some funding from the Synod Council, and will continue to be supported by our finances in the synod. It will be supported also by a special category that is in the Bishop’s Appeal and will welcome gifts from any donors who care about the church staying in the city. This center will train and support urban pastors; it will provide opportunities for Bible study and visioning for urban and multicultural ministry; it will work in partnership with other expressions of the church (the churchwide expression and our Philadelphia Seminary, in particular) to insure that the so often fragile ministries of Word and Sacrament are strengthened enough to continue to be the sign of hope in the urban communities in which they are located.

Other people who have gone out on a limb …

Our Global Mission Team, and especially I want to give thanks to Wendell Beckman, the chair, who went out on a limb, repeatedly and relentlessly, to petition the national church to have a Global Mission Event on the territory of the New England Synod. And thanks largely to Wendell that will be happening this summer. You probably know about that already but we’ll be hearing more about it later on.

That same team has been tireless in their support and creative work and thinking about our partnership ministry with our companion synod, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. Wendell himself and other representatives of our synod have gone out on a limb by traveling to the Holy Land in dangerous times to provide resources and support to the congregations – and, I might add, receiving a greater gift in return as we learn (I believe we need to learn with a sense of humility) the kind of faith that the Palestinian Christians have in the land in which they live. And the tricky balance of managing our support for Palestinian Christians with Jewish communities of faith with whom we are in close relationship, as well, and seeking to find an answer that will provide peace in the Middle East. Now they are moving out on a limb event further, and we’re going to be engaging in a new companion synod relationship which you will hear more about later in this assembly.

It has been such a gift to serve as the bishop in a synod where these things are happening.

Here’s another example that just about took my breath away a few weeks ago. The congregation of First Lutheran Church in Brockton, Mass., undertook two votes in one day. This happened on Palm Sunday. One was to receive the official notice of the retirement of their senior pastor, the Rev. Michael Fruth, who had been there for many, many years, and the second one, in the knowledge of their senior pastor’s retirement, was to approve the decision to seek a $500,000 loan to purchase adjoining land and a building from the Roman Catholic church next door that had been closed. This building will provide office space for an LSS ministry, and its huge gymnasium will become a community center for ministry in a difficult urban setting. While other churches in the city are closing up shop, or retreating from the challenges of the world around them, and building gates and fences and closing doors, the saints at First Lutheran are going out on a limb, trusting that God will provide money, vision and a pastor to lead them into a whole new experience of their congregational ministry.

Lots of other congregations and lots of other people are going out on lots of limbs:

►First Lutheran Church and Covenant Lutheran Church in Gardner, Mass., are working together to start an exciting new joint ministry, providing an expanded and stronger Lutheran presence in the Gardner area;
►Bethesda in Springfield, Mass., is working in conjunction with a UCC church and now welcomes a variety of diverse people to their worship on Sunday mornings;
►Immanuel in Meriden, Conn., is exploring a joint relationship with an Episcopal Hispanic community;
►Holy Trinity in Newington, N.H., has birthed an Indonesian congregation that will be a Lutheran congregation.

One congregation in particular has gone out on a limb for several years now with outreach to the community by means of a Logos program and a genuine hospitality for all of God’s children at Concordia Lutheran Church in Worcester, Mass.

A colleague of mine once said: “Why not go out on a limb, that’s where all the best fruit is.”

And let me tell you that the people of Concordia live out on a limb. Let me tell you about just one particular new fruit of their ministry.

They have welcomed, and rejoiced in the membership of people from all over the world and particularly members of the Lutheran Liberian community from West Africa, and one man in particular has become very active in the congregation. In fact, now he is the vice president of the congregation. His name is Joseph Deranamie. Joseph came to America after spending 10 years in refugee camps with his family in Africa. And although he was glad to come here, one thing stuck in his mind, and that was that in the refugee camps people didn’t have shoes. And if they had shoes, it was a great gift, and a cherished possession, and so he began to collect shoes. And that broadened into a collection of clothes and furniture and other things to send to Liberia. And since love begets love, his efforts grew as more and more people became involved, and finally in contact with a business man from Boston who was unaffiliated with the church, the man offered to buy and pay for the shipping of a 40-foot container to West Africa, and to buy a round trip ticket so that Joseph could go with it to distribute the goods there. Months went by and the container was filled and I had the privilege of saying a prayer with Joseph in the airport the day he left to go back to Liberia.

And one more thing. Apart from his dream of providing hope and help to his brothers and sisters in Africa, Joseph has a dream of beginning an orphanage. And on top of that he has just applied for candidacy to be a pastor of the ELCA. We look forward to working with him. (Applause)

This list goes on and on, and I know that I’ve missed some people who are doing wonderful things because one of my greatest joys is to travel around and hear the stories from you. So don’t complain that I’ve missed you, but please write and tell me about it, and I will look forward to receiving those letters.

It’s an exciting time of fruitfulness in the New England Synod as more and more people venture beyond the safety of the trunk and provide witness for all of us as they take risks and go out on a limb.

A particular joy for me that I want to mention – that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in a bishop’s report before – but has been the wonderful work and the growing and changing excitement in the Synod Council of this synod. This group is no longer, if it ever was, a group of people who gather together periodically when they don’t have anything better to do to rubberstamp my proposals and micromanage teams, but very much the opposite. They have grown into a group who has willingly taken on more and more responsibility of leadership in this synod, for your sake, for God’s sake, for the work of God in New England. They are claiming the hard work of making the budget decisions, and you will hear more about that in the assembly as we go along. They are working hard to interpret our joint mission. The money that you share with the synod is not dues or a pledge; it’s the support of the mission that we do together and can do best together, and you’ll be hearing about that. The members of the Synod Council work in small groups with specific goals for the ministry of the synod. They support me personally in difficult times, and I am very, very grateful for that support. They trust in prayer as the centerpiece of all of their meetings, and they are willing to go out on a limb and take a chance to support ministries that are truly consistent with the vision that we have of the abundance that is available to us, and our need to pray unceasingly, and to insist on justice, and to do outreach.

I want to extend a special thank you to them – most of them are here for this assembly. Could you all just stand for a second so we can thank you with applause? (Applause.)

There are quite a few other more detailed thank-yous that I mentioned in my written report, so please take an opportunity to look at those and you will read more about what we’re accomplishing.

But one more thing I want to emphasize and give thanks for is the work of the staff of the synod that supports you. We’re going to take some time on Saturday morning to thank the office staff who particularly do incredible behind-the-scenes work for us, but now I would like to say a thank you to those who work most directly with me as pastoral staff, and new members of our staff. As you may remember we reconfigured the synod staff to some extent last summer and so this year has been a little bit experimental with some part time folks and with others continuing in the role of full time associates but with slightly different job descriptions. I’d like to ask them to stand one by one, and please hold your applause, but then we can thank them when they’re all standing.

(Bishop Payne introduced Pr. Ted Asta, associate to the bishop, who serves the Massachusetts and Greater Hartford Conferences, oversees mobility, and is “an incredibly wise and knowledgeable representative for us in the ecumenical world,” and who is “helping us begin to form our first school of lay theology in the synod;” Pr. Rebecca Bourret, associate to the bishop who serves as a “most loving and gracious shepherd” to the congregations in southern New England, as well as guiding stewardship and evangelism; Pr. Jane O’Hara Shields, mission director, who “finds a way to help people to be empowered by the Holy Spirit in ways that seem miraculous to me;” Pr. Alice Kerr Laird, ministry specialist for administration and development, and coordinator of The Bishop's Appeal: Planting Seeds for the Future; Pr. Tim Roser, ministry specialist providing congregational care for northern New England and New York; Pr. Lisa Stoen Hazelwood, ministry specialist for transformational ministry; and Mr. Steve Kennedy, ministry specialist for youth and young adult ministry. She also introduced Pr. Erica Kennedy, an ELCA pastor who serves Regions 7 and 8 for the ELCA for stewardship, “an important resource person for you.”) These have been not only wonderful supportive partners, but truly instruments of the Holy Spirit for our work together, so please join in thanking them. (Applause.)

And finally, as you may or may not know, I feel very strongly about environmental stewardship – the care of creation – and so I guess one way to say that is to say that I really respect tree-huggers. But there’s a difference between tree-huggers and trunk-huggers.

Tree-huggers are witnessing to the love of the earth, but trunk-huggers, who are clinging close to the tree that is rooted by living water, are living in the fear of scarcity and putting all of their energy into just hanging on. Their arms only wrap around what they know, and their vision is turned inward.

But if you turn outward from the trunk, and inch out on the limb, then you are daring to believe that God does provide a safety net. You will risk failure for the sake of fruitfulness, but the fruit that you will gain is the joy that you will find in the fruitfulness that you will be able to accomplish as you look toward others and as you look toward the needs of the world.

We have turned a corner in the New England Synod, and we are poised to grow and be a stronger witness than has ever been possible before.

We are inching out on a thousand limbs and we doing it only because we are able to do it together in the power of God’s Holy Spirit. We help each other to keep our balance on those limbs and to keep our eyes on the vision of God’s kingdom. And to sing us into a new day of partnerships and life on the limb, I would like to invite Keila Rodriguez to come up now. Keila, as I mentioned before, is a member of the Synod Council. She is a member of the Leadership for Liberation Team of our Healing the Wounds effort. She is guiding the development and growth of our Center for Urban and Multi-Cultural Ministry. However, something that you might not know about her, but those of you who were here last year do know, is she has the wonderful gift of music that I was behind the door when God passed out. So, I’ve asked Keila to join me to close my report.

Note: Bishop Payne ended her report with a hymn, The Lord Now Sends Us Forth (Enviado soy de Dios), led by Keila Rodriguez, a member of the Synod Council. At the bottom of the hymn sheet were three questions Bishop Payne asked the voting members to take back to their congregation councils for discussion and prayer:

1) How do individuals in our congregations go “out on a limb” in the world in their ministry as the baptized?
2) What is God’s mission for our congregation?
3) To what “limbs” does God beckon us as a congregation?