Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum where we carry on our conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. There are many pleasures and probably even a few challenges when you get a chance to interview your boss. But today I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and welcoming her back home to her Cathedral. Just in case you’ve existed in some other planet for awhile, I’ll remind you what a ground breaker Bishop Katharine is—the first woman head of the Episcopal Church, installed right here just two years ago, the first woman leader of any national church in the 450 years of the Anglican Communion. She is a scientist, an author, a person of deep faith and someone committed to seeing our faith lived out in ways that can change the world to a more just and hopeful place for every one. Katharine, it is wonderful to have you with us and we are honored to have you here.

Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori: Thank you. It’s a delight to be here.

Lloyd: You’re just in from Philadelphia yesterday where you led on behalf of the whole Episcopal Church a service of repentance for its historical involvement in slavery. Would you say a little bit about how that service came about and what happened yesterday and what you sense about what that means for us going forward.

Jefferts Schori: That service was prompted by a resolution at the last General Convention asking the presiding bishop to designate a day on which the church as a whole might repent for its participation in chattel slavery and the ways in which the church has profited from slavery. That resolution also directed the dioceses of this church to investigate their own history in the institution of slavery and I heard yesterday that eight dioceses of the 110 dioceses of this church were able to report on their progress in doing that work. Our social relationships in this country are still much impacted by the history of slavery and by ongoing racism. Until we begin to tell the stories and understand the direct impacts and the way in which consequences of slavery still touch and influence our society, we’re not really going to be able to heal from it. The people who were there yesterday spoke frequently about how powerful it was, that it’s a good start, and that it will, I hope, it will encourage other dioceses and congregations to hold their own observances and opportunities to repent for slavery.

Lloyd: Would you describe a little bit of the setting, why St. Thomas in Philadelphia and what that meant and sort of what happened yesterday?

Jefferts Schori: St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Philadelphia is a historically black church. It was founded by Absalom Jones when he and his friends left an Episcopal church after being told they had to sit in the gallery when they attempted to worship in the main congregation; they were escorted from the church. Some other of his friends began to eventually help to develop the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is not in full communion with our church. Absalom Jones and his followers started their own church and applied for recognition to the Diocese of Pennsylvania. He was ordained a priest in that church although he was not allowed to sit as a deputy to convention for a very long time, and as Bishop Bartlett said yesterday, the excuse given was that he didn’t have Greek and Hebrew.

Lloyd: Greek and Hebrew.

Jefferts Schori: Greek and Hebrew. So we have a long way to go. We’re still recovering in our history. We’re still recovering those stories and discovering the ways in which they influence our relationships today.

Lloyd: By God’s providence you were called to be our presiding bishop in an enormously complex time in the life of the Anglican Communion and I know a fair amount, thank goodness not all of your ministry has been spent dealing with the difficulties and challenges of keeping our Anglican Communion together. Could you say a little bit of where you think we are as a communion after the Lambeth conference this summer? Maybe a word about what the Lambeth conference is and what transpired there and your sense of how we’re doing as an Anglican Communion and an Episcopal Church in making our way through the vortex of this storm of conflict over human sexuality.

Jefferts Schori: Do you have a couple hours? The Lambeth conference began in the late 1800s. An invitation from the Archbishop of Canterbury to all the bishops then only the diocesan bishops of the Anglican Communion. He called that gathering as an opportunity for bishops to sit together, to pray together, to study the bible together, to be in retreat together and to have conversation about the issues they faced in their various contexts. Over the years, and the Lambeth conference has been held about every ten years since with a couple of exceptions for the world wars, bishops have continued to come together in England at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Over time those conferences developed a pattern of passing resolutions, of expressing opinions on a variety of things and if you look at the whole history of the Lambeth conference you soon discover that a position might have been taken in 1920 and another position taken in 1930 on the same issue and they were diametrically opposed to each other. It is a conversation and it’s a way of judging the current opinion around the communion about where things are. The first Lambeth conference didn’t pass those kinds of resolutions and interestingly enough at the first Lambeth conference only just over half of the eligible bishops attended and the Archbishop of York stayed away in a very public way. So the behavior we’ve seen at the Lambeth conference just passed is not new, where some bishops decide not to attend and some are very public about their reasons for not attending.

Lloyd: We have a history of not behaving well sometimes.

Jefferts Schori: Well, we have a history of struggle in community and deciding who is a full member and who isn’t. This Lambeth conference returned to the original vision of an opportunity for study and prayer and conversation and no resolutions were passed. The vast majority of bishops who were there in England this summer had opportunities to meet their fellow bishops from around the communion to learn more about varying contexts in which we function and to hear from others about how decisions of this church and the Church of Canada have made their life more difficult. But a number of us heard repeatedly from a variety of bishops that, you know, I may not agree with what you’ve done but, and yes your decisions have made my life harder, but my job is not to tell you you have to ignore the issues in your context. Your job is not to make my life easier. So I think there is a much greater understanding around the communion of the diversity of places in which we function and the fact that issues of human sexuality may be very important to us here but in the developing parts of the world, hunger and disease and lack of education are of far, far more importance and issues of human sexuality way down on the list.

Lloyd: Did you come away from the conference hopeful for the communion? Do you have a sense that there may be some adjustments and discussion of covenants and other things but by and large some foundational set of relationships are going to continue?

Jefferts Schori: Very hopeful. May relationships were deepened that already existed and new relationships were formed and I think we’re going to see an increasing number of companion relationships and people going back and forth really to learn more about what it means to be a Christian in different environments.

Lloyd: A question I get asked often is, is there going to be a breakaway within the communion itself. Is for example the Archbishop of Nigeria going to make a move to the be the head of the Anglican Communion because after all he has 17 million Anglicans and we in the northern European and north American context have considerably fewer. Was a sense of any movement like that in the air where you were?

Jefferts Schori: Really not. There was a great deal of deference paid by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the fact that a number of bishops weren’t there. The reality is that in some parts of the communion, the archbishop rules in a way that’s not true here. The archbishop may have the ability to fire his bishops and if the archbishop says you’re not going to Lambeth, you’re probably not going if you want to come back and be a bishop where you are a bishop. Yes we are experiencing some significant stress in the ability of people to maintain a diversity of opinion within this communion. That’s not new. What is new is the pace of communication and the fact that people in Nigeria know about what we’ve done here instantly.

Lloyd: The same day.

Jefferts Schori: Instantly.

Lloyd: And that makes all of the effort at staying together much more complicated I guess.

Jefferts Schori: And all the more important to send people back and forth.

Lloyd: And then within our own Episcopal Church, you just come not so long ago from a meeting of the House of Bishops building on what happened at Lambeth. Do you have a sense that we’re going to make it through this period as an Episcopal Church by and large intact?

Jefferts Schori: By and large intact. The unfortunate decision of some in Pittsburgh yesterday.

Lloyd: Do you want to tell us what the decision was?

Jefferts Schori: The diocesan convention of the Diocese of Pittsburgh met yesterday and voted in a way that we think is illegal effectively to leave the Episcopal Church. It was not overwhelming majority but it was a significant majority. The bishop of Pittsburgh was deposed by consent of the House of Bishops in late September. They elected somebody else to preside at that convention but he… the former bishop has been recognized as a bishop by the Archbishop of the Southern Cone and I think people expect that he will be installed as a bishop to serve congregations in Pittsburgh and probably elsewhere in North America at the behest of the Archbishop of the Southern Cone which is the southern part of South America. The interesting thing is that Christians from the very early days, from the third and fourth century have said, it is inappropriate for bishops to try to exercise authority in places that aren’t part of their geographic jurisdiction and so wandering bishops, and that’s how they were termed, wandering bishops have been frowned on for hundreds and hundreds of years. And that is effectively what he will become.

Lloyd: Does what happened yesterday have any larger implications for our church? Will there be others to follow? Do you think this is the primary case?

Jefferts Schori: I think there may be similar actions in Fort Worth and in the Diocese of Quincy which is in southern Illinois. There was a similar action in the Diocese of San Joaquin which is in Southeastern California earlier, no last year, at the end of last year. We’re working in the Diocese of San Joaquin to reestablish that diocese. It has bishop. It has governing structure. It has 18 or so congregations and its growing. It’s under some stress as you might imagine having been deprived of its financial assets. But we’re working on that as well. The situation in Pittsburgh is a little different because some of the standing committee members, one in particular, is clearly remaining in the Episcopal Church and that will permit them to re-establish their government structures and call and another bishop fairly quickly.

Lloyd: All your spending a lot of time on these matters of trying to the church together and deal with the divisions at hand, but at least what I’ve heard you and talked with you before, that is not where your passion is and what excites you and, in fact, I’ve been struck at times when we have talked at how ebullient you are and excited you are about what you see in the church. Would you, given the Episcopal Church is grappling with this very complex difficult thing, you seem to want us to lived our eyes from that and see something bigger going on. So tell us about the church that excites you.

Jefferts Schori: Well the church that is most alive is not the parts of the church that are focused on what they’re annoyed about. The lively church is focused on the needs of our neighbors both in the immediate community and around the world. A story that I hear frequently from the folks in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as they try to recover from the storms goes like this. Well you know people come from really conservative churches down here to work, and people come from really progressive churches and they manage work together just fine. When we’re focused on somebody else, we do discover that that which separates us is of far less important. That the fact that people don’t have a house or don’t have a place to send their children to school or don’t have access to health care or enough food, that, that’s the immediate cry of the Gospel. Not who’s married to whom or who is adopting children and who shouldn’t. Who’s serving as a bishop the church, who’s eligible for that. Focused on the needs of our neighbor is what it means to love God and love your neighbor and Jesus said that was the essence of religion.

Lloyd: I certainly hear a lot of people asking questions about the health of the Episcopal Church, the decline in numbers, churches having to close for financial reasons here and there and yet you keep saying as you travel around the church what you see is reasons for hope everywhere. What do you think it is that makes some congregations in places vibrant and alive? What can we learned from the vitality that you’re seeing in the church that we can offer to people who want churches that are vibrant alive and not worried about survival?

Jefferts Schori: Are we focused on maintaining the institution? Or are we focused on the gospel? When we’re focused on gospel, institutional, structural, and even maintaining buildings beautiful as they are…

Lloyd: Somebody better focusing here.

Jefferts Schori: I know somebody needs to, but if we spend all of our time and energy on that, we miss the gospel fields around us.

Lloyd: Millennium Development Goals have been important to you from the very start and I understand there has been some significant action, Archbishop of York holding a service having to do with the MDGs, a service up at the United Nations in New York. Would you say something about that?

Jefferts Schori: Yes. September 25 was an occasion at United Nations when world leaders gathered to reflect on our progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals which are about addressing the worst of human poverty in developing nations around the world. There are 181 nations signed up to address those goals in the year 2000 and expect major progress by the year 2015 in meeting them. We’re not making very good progress. Several nations, particularly in Scandinavia and a couple of the smaller nations in Europe, have met their commitments in terms of providing financial support for international development aid. The United States has not. We’re at about a quarter where we should be. The MDGs are going to be met primarily by government investment because the amounts are so large in real terms as a percentage of national budgets, they’re very small, under one percent. Your job is to pester your legislators to step up to the plate and meet promises that we already made. We’re making good progress in things like malaria. The increasing usage of insecticide treated bed nets is preventing lots and lots of cases of malaria primarily among small children and pregnant women and children don’t have malaria they can learn more effectively, they grow in a healthier way they don’t spend so much energy trying to fight a deadly disease. So it may seem like a very small sliver, but it makes an enormous difference.

Lloyd: You’re also talking a lot about being a green church these days and the problem of environmental sustainability. What to say something about your passion for that, I know that something that means a lot to you.

Jefferts Schori: Certainly. The phrase, being part of the body of Christ is undoubtedly familiar to all of you. A theologian named [Sally McFaig] has invited us to think about creation as being a body of God. When Adam and Eve were set in the garden to tend it, and care for it, it was an invitation to remember that all of creation is connected and you and I and the other human members of creation have a responsibility to steward this garden. The way we steward it has enormous impact for others. Our dependence on oil in this country and are growing dependence on corn part of our food supply, in unsuspected ways I might add, influences the ability of other people particularly in places like sub-Saharan Africa to get an adequate diet. When we grow corn for fuel, it raises the price of corn in Africa and it makes it that much harder to feed people there. One small example. The issues of climate change in global warming are going first to be felt the poorest around the world. Already in the South Pacific small island nations are facing the disappearance of their land and people in South Asia are facing increased storms in the lowest lying parts of those lands. Incredible devastation. [] Worse than we have seen in the Caribbean and on the southern coast of the United States in this year. The way we fill the skies with carbon means a great deal for the lives of people in other parts of the world and our consciousness about that can our willingness to change our habits even relatively small ways can make an honest difference for other people.

Lloyd: You are a scientist. A marine biologist. A specialist in squid and octopus, is that right.

Jefferts Schori: Correct. Oceanographer.

Lloyd: How did a very creative oceanographer find her way into the chair you’re sitting in now? Which is really a way of saying what was it that fueled the journey that led you first from being an oceanographer into exploring ministry and priesthood and then continuing in the trajectory found yourself on?

Jefferts Schori: Well, the proximate impulse really came from three people in my congregation in Oregon who in the space of three weeks asked me if I had ever thought about being a priest. I hadn’t. It was shocking enough that I went and spoke to the rector at some length and we came to the conclusion that at the very least the time wasn’t right. My husband was horrified at the idea. Among other things. Five years later, another priest in the congregation asked me if I would preach at a service morning prayer when the clergy was supposed to be a way at convention. It was right before the first war in the gulf started and that experience in preparing to do it and hearing the response afterward finally let me say yes.

Lloyd: Do you think scientific training is good training for the work of a priest?

Jefferts Schori: I think it is. I read an important book for me shortly after I was ordained called The Minister as Diagnostician really talking about pastoral care and being able to analyze a situation. I think more than anything being trained in a method that invites you to the situation and examine a carefully and make hypothesis and test it rather than coming with prejudgments to a situation is a gift.

Lloyd: And given the climate that we have been in a vigorous atheist scientists saying it’s impossible for clear scientific thinker to be a person of faith, clearly you come out in a different place in that discussion. Do you see any tension and conflict between being a scientist, an analytical just the facts scientist, and a person living her faith?

Jefferts Schori: I don’t. I think together I have a richer and fuller view of the world and creation and what my job the job of other human beings is as part of that system. Science asks questions of mechanism and origin and process and religion as questions of meaning and in some real sense of goal where we going and why how should we get there, together they give a fuller understanding of reality

Lloyd: One final question before we open to our audience here. You have a book called A Wing and a Prayer that reflects to some degree anyway on your…another of your many dimensions, that of being a pilot. Does flying airplanes in for your spirituality in any way? Has been affected the way you look at life or how do you see that expression of who you are shaping the rest of your ministry?

Jefferts Schori: Flying gives you a very different perspective on the world. Flying a small airplane is very different then riding a commercial jet at 35,000 feet. The times I’ve spent over the Nevada deserts at 10,000 feet have been times of spiritual encounter, a sense of being a part of that larger whole, the being a creature and not creator, of glimpses into the mystery of how things have come to be the way they are. I’ll give you a couple of examples. When you fly over the desert you can see where there must be water under the surface. There are very few rivers flowing for the desert and it may be a relative small bit of water. You can see pockets of green here and there and see where the stream must be flowing under the surface. You can see how the red rock from this peak over here has been washed miles downstream to color the desert in another part and a white rock from that peak over their discoloring another part of the desert over eons, millions of years. You can’t see that from the ground.

Lloyd: Sounds like the work of a presiding Bishop? Flying high and seeing patterns and growth.

Jefferts Schori: Big picture.

Lloyd: Let’s go to the audience for questions.

Q: Yes, welcome to Washington.

Jefferts Schori: Thank you.

Q: Bishop, what is your vision for the darkness that is fear in the world?

Jefferts Schori: What’s my vision for the darkness that is fear in the world? Actually I think I’m going to preach about that this morning. It’s an invitation to those of us who know something about hope and the ability of love to cast out fear, to walk in and offer that. It takes courage, it takes the confidence that you can remember and know some thing of what love and hope can do in a dark situation and it takes the faith that says this darkness is not eternal, that change is possible and that response has to come in human form. It takes people to go there to enter it.

Q: Bishop Jefferts Schori, most churches don’t do marriage well and as Episcopalians locally and nationally we don’t have an all-inclusive marriage policy even though the family is the gateway to increasing adult church involvement 50 percent, so strengthening, preparing and restoring marriages as community marriage plans to do is a decades-old self-interest of all churches, our attendance has declined from 3.5 million in 65 to 2 million today so God’s purpose for me today for my Sept. 24th letter to you is to ask will you commit the national office to considering community marriage policies that Bishop Lee in Richmond thinks are going well, the 10,000 pastors and priests use in 223 communities…

Lloyd: That’s enough please. We’ve got a question.

Jefferts Schori: I think I know where you’re going. When I was a priest in Oregon, I worked with other pastors and religious leaders in the community to help develop a marriage policy. It was a remarkable experience to work with evangelical pastors who didn’t think women should be ordained and mainline denominations. Basically our goal was to ensure that couples who were preparing to marry had good preparation. On that they knew what they were getting into and that they were doing it with the intent that the lifelong and faithful and that applies to all of us. If that’s what we’re talking about. Yeah, I think it’s a good thing.

Q: Good morning. I’m a professor of internet studies at Georgetown University.

Jefferts Schori: A professor of…?

Q: Internet studies. I look how the internet is changing organizations and how different organizations use the internet. I’m very glad that the Episcopal Church is very interesting things, it was to see the to have a Facebook page and that there are 1170 fans.

Jefferts Schori: Oh, oh…there is a fake one out there. I don’t maintain it.

Q: It’s actually a fan club I think.

Jefferts Schori: Okay, all right.

Q: But my question is whether there are any new initiatives that the Episcopal Church is exploring to use the net more effectively particularly to build bridges between our congregations and our parishioners and other members of the Anglican community around the world?

Jefferts Schori: Ah, okay. I know we’re working on some creative initiatives. That plants a seed though. How we can be linking with folks around the world. Give you a small example. When the House of Bishops gathered a couple of weeks ago, I encouraged all of the members who had been at Lambeth to communicate with the members of their bible study groups and their groups by email to tell them what had gone on at our meeting as a way of attempting to increase those connections. That’s a very small and relatively low-tech internet way to do it. I can tell you I put a message up on YouTube yesterday, Friday, talking about the challenges that we were talking about a little earlier in terms of dioceses deciding that, or some members of dioceses deciding that they don’t want to be part of the Episcopal Church anymore. We’re are probably way behind the curve, but we’re running hard to catch up.

Q: Bishop, thank you for your leadership. My question concerns the continuing congregations that have resulted from parishes that have elected to leave our church. They are sort of a horse of a different color, their not plants, their not missions, and yet they’re in many ways starting over. Certainly it’s a diocesan responsibility primarily and yet is there a role as you see it with a national church in their support?

Jefferts Schori: There most definitely is a role for the whole Episcopal Church in their support. I’m trying to discourage national church because we are in international church; we are in 16 different countries. We’ve hired a church planting expert. We’ve hired an evangelism expert and a small congregation expert in the last few months at the church center. Already, the evangelism person is producing a plan for out reach in the Diocese of San Joaquin. A way to be present in communities where large significant numbers of people have decided they don’t want to be part of Episcopal Church, to remind them that the Episcopal Church is there and begin to develop new congregations, new faith communities in that place. That kind of strategy could be promulgated in many different places, so yes we are working at that. We are providing very intentional support for the diocese is that are most grievously affected. San Joaquin and Pittsburgh in particular. Thank you.

Q: Bishop Jefferts Schori, My name is Emily Bolts and I’m a parishioner in this diocese and I have many concerns about what’s happening. I like to point out something you haven’t discussed that several hundred thousand individuals, at least a couple have left on their own, whole dioceses are leaving, churches on their own are leaving and the Episcopalians themselves are not refilling the pews with their children. Is that not more like the Shaker church than like a denomination in this country in that it is becoming leaner and smaller instead of growing? And how is that relate to your comments about the live church?

Jefferts Schori: About the what?

Q: Most alive church.

Jefferts Schori: Most alive church. You’re correct in noting that the numbers of Episcopalians have declined over the last few decades. We measure the number of members in the Episcopal Church has changed. That’s part of it. Forty years ago many people in the United States particularly about their job was to be in church on Sunday morning. They are relatively few parts of the country where that still true. The southeastern part of the U.S. is probably the most like that today. There are other options on Sunday morning and many people have chosen other options. Sometimes a chosen other options because our congregations have not done a very good job of making the faith relevant. Of explaining or teaching ways in which is spiritual community is important in a time like this one where they seem major financial difficulties, all in a time when you want to celebrate a passage in your life. That’s a piece of it. A piece of it that you acknowledged is the fact we don’t produce children at the same rate we did in the Fifties and Sixties so we can simply expect that kind of natural reproductive evangelism is going to fill the churches. And that’s a big chunk of it. We have not across the church done a good job of translating the gospel into images and language and music that is accessible to the younger generations. We’re working on that. We’re beginning to work on that. People in their twenties and thirties in younger today are not so interested in joining organizations as people and their sixties and older are and were. Church looks like an organization to the unchurched of younger generations. I give you an example of creative initiative. A priest I met in New Hampshire last week said that she is going to the local coffeehouse and holding her office hours there. The difficulty she has is not with being in the coffeehouse, the employees are discovering that it’s a great resource to have a person of faith there several hours a week. the parishioners who think she ought to be sitting in her office of the church are the ones who are objecting. And I said, well you know you’ve got a phone. The phone will find you wherever you are. Simply remind them that they can get hold you. So part of it is our need to get outside of our doors and reach out people beyond us. People that don’t know the great riches that are to be found in a community like this.

Q: Hello, Bishop. I was wondering in your busy schedule even before you became a presiding Bishop what advice to have for me and for us on maintaining our spiritual life and our prayer life?

Jefferts Schori: Maintaining spiritual life and prayer life… you know, the goal of mystics and people who think about spirituality over the centuries really has been to figure out how all of life is a prayer… can be a prayer so that we’re praying constantly. We’re able to give thanks for the beauty of the flowers. We’re able to give thanks for the people sitting around us. We’re able to give thanks for the fact that we’re still breathing and our heart is still beating. We’re able to give thanks even for stubbing our toe because it reminds us we can feel that. When prayer begins to penetrate every part of our lives, we’re well on that journey. An essential part of my own discipline is getting out there and running most mornings. It’s a way of putting my body to work and in doing that it lets my mind and spirit be quieter to listen.

Q: Good morning, Bishop Jefferts Schori. My name is Michelle Roberts. I’m a third generation Episcopalian. I had the distinct pleasure and blessings of being in Philadelphia this past weekend where I heard one of the most profound prophetic messages come from one of the most energetic presiding bishops - you. Thank you so very much. I want to take this opportunity to thank the international church for its apology to me and my ancestors for the participation in slavery. That was phenomenal. However, there is work to do. The events that occurred this past weekend were so rich and so filling, it is my deepest most profound wish and prayer that we bring that service to the seat of this nation, that being Washington, DC. Beyond that I would like to ask where do we as an international faith body take next steps, that being said to me by being that bold beckon of light to show the world that we are willing to move forward in faith and love through a reconciling process that will speak to the concerns that everyone has with the rebuilding of the Church. How do we collectively move forward in faith and love and truly dismantle the systems that have each and every one of us in bondage? Thank you.

Jefferts Schori: Thank you. I think the immediate response is going to have be at the diocesan levels. I think people need to grapple with the history in their own part of the world. When we hear the stories of, and I was able to share some the stories of places like Birmingham and Atlanta yesterday. When we hear the stories for example of how race relations changed in the city of Washington, until Woodrow Wilson was elected president it was a fairly egalitarian society. Blacks and white lived together and worshiped together in many cases worked together in the same buildings. Under Woodrow Wilson much of the institutional segregation that was normative in the south came to Washington, DC. It hadn’t been here before that. Learning our own history is a way of beginning to wrestle with how we move forward in way that will heal the whole world.

Lloyd: Will this continue to be on the National Episcopal Church’s agenda?

Jefferts Schori: Most definitely. Most definitely.

Q: Good morning. As a young person it is very disconcerting to see how few people of faith there are in my generation, especially at a time when there are movies being produced that do not reflect positively on all faiths, not just Christianity. What can we do to change this trend so that people in my generation will have children and teach them about the importance of faith in their lives?

Jefferts Schori: We’re doing around the church some very good work with young adults and college students and younger people. It takes some very intentional work by congregational leaders and diocesan leaders to make resources available so that that can happen. I visited two incredibly vital campus ministries in the last few weeks; one at Georgia Southern University and one at Dartmouth. There are houses in both of those places where there is at least one chaplain and often more that one available to the students. Students experience it as a home, a place of dialogue, a place where they can go and cook, hang out, sleep, bring their friends, have conversations, deep conversations about what it means to be a person of faith. The group at Dartmouth told me that a young Muslim woman has been part of their conversations this fall and that they are all learning a great deal from each other. That’s simply one small example of how that work can happen. It also happens in the coffee shop. It happens out there on the street. It takes us going out there and sharing what we value about this tradition, about the Gospel with people of all ages.

Q: Hey Bishop Katharine. Back in January you attended the annual youth program for the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia where we packaged 44,000 meals. We were wondering what are your current thoughts, feelings and hopes for the youth programs now and that will emerge in the future for junior high and high school?

Jefferts Schori: I’ve been telling the story of that experience in other places and dioceses that don’t know what it means to invite all ages to convention or annual counsel, I think are getting some ideas. The ability of high school students to come together and junior high school students to come together from across the diocese and do something valuable together, do something that will serve other people and in the process learn from each other, share their faith with each other, it addresses exactly what the person before you was asking. We need to make that possible. We need to encourage it and support it. I was also amazed that with which your gathering ended, and I said you know it’s amazing to see the rock band up front and then see the elderly women in the back going like this... you know, it was absolutely stunning.

Q: Thank you for taking our questions today. You mentioned earlier how important it is for us to be stewards of the earth. Could you talk about next steps and specifics that are happening now?

Jefferts Schori: Sure. I think people begin to raise their consciousness and communities begin to raise the consciousness of their members by thinking about the light bulbs, by thinking about recycling, by thinking about insulation. The next step from there is to think about power production and use of power, solar panels on the roof, windmills in some places, green power, geothermal, using less of it, being more efficient and effective in using the power that we do use. This building is a wonderful example of how a holy space can serve the larger community almost 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. That I think is one of the bigger challenges of many faith communities around the church. How do we put our buildings to best use. Bishop Steven Charleston who just stepped down as the dean of Episcopal Divinity School issued a challenge a year or so ago called the Genesis Covenant. He said I what to challenge every faith community in the country not just the Episcopalians, to cut their carbon footprint by half in the next ten years. How do we do that? The kinds of things I’ve talked about first, but also maybe by sharing buildings. What if the Lutherans and the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians in a community got together and said we don’t really need three different buildings or maybe we can use two of our buildings to serve the community in a different way.

Lloyd: One final question.

Q: Thank you. Presiding Bishop Katharine, I have a question regarding, and you’ve just touched on it, in your travels across the country, could you say a little bit as to where our churches are growing in different ways that perhaps have not been covered yet in this discussion today?

Jefferts Schori: Churches are growing where their focused on the people outside of them, where their feeding the people who do come through the doors with what they need to go out and spread the gospel. Churches can grow if there are ten members or if there are a thousand. There are different challenges depending on what size you are. The resource challenges of the ten member congregation are different if they have a building than if they don’t have a building. If they for example meet in someone’s home or in the local coffee shop or in the police station’s community room. It’s possible to grow in all different contexts. Growth does not just mean numerical growth. Episcopal relief and development uses a metric that I think is particularly important. They say how many lives have we touched over the last year. Two million in their case. How many lives has your congregation touched in the last year?

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation and we have so much enjoyed hearing from you personally in this way. We’d love for you to join us next week when the popular author and historian, Thomas Cahill will be with us. He wrote How the Irish Saved Civilization and a series of other very rich books, popular history that allows us to see some of the key turning points in history. We hope you’ll stay for the service that begins at 11:15 where Bishop Katharine will be our preacher and celebrant, and in the meantime there is coffee available at the west end of the Cathedral where Bishop Katharine’s books are on sale as well. Please join me in thanking Bishop Katharine for being with us.