Absent: Germaine Hoston

Visitor: Anna DeMoss, reporter for Episcopalians United (attended the afternoon session on February 1st)

We spent the first morning in closed session introducing ourselves. Reynolds Cheney left the meeting for emergency treatment at Presbyterian hospital, for kidney stones.

We spent the rest of the day electing officers for the triennium and brainstorming about goals for the Commission. We were quite open-ended and expansive in this session, understanding that all commissions and committees will met as a body in Minneapolis, October 12-15. At that time we expect to focus much more narrowly, expecting the other bodies to take on several pieces of the huge array we considered initially for ourselves.

Commission officers elected for the triennium: Bishop Edward Salmon, chair; Bruce Garner, vice-chair; Louie Crew, secretary.

Some of the issues we considered for the Commission Agenda:

1. We felt that "human affairs within the Episcopal Church" are just as important as human affairs within the culture; and we felt that our major need to address human affairs is in the context of our trying to bring good news to absolutely everybody. Part of recognizing good news is identifying what is bad news: what is bad about our cities, about our schools, about our neighborhoods....? In answering those questions, we as Christians begin to see what shape and sound news needs to take if it is to be considered good.

2. Identifying and holding up new models of ministry by which the church might more effectively bring good news to parts of the world not now hearing it.

3. Looking closely at issues raised by the Oregon legislation regarding assisted suicide. We would like to speak as the church to the church (if not to the culture) regarding these concerns. We would like to participate in the moral dialogue, not merely react to it. We wrestled with some of our own differences on this issue, and feel that it would be good for the health of the church for all Christians to think deeply about them.

4. We expressed an interest in the use of electronic networks to further our mission as the church, noting that in one place the "shut-ins" are thereby now doing ministry for others, no longer stuck as recipients only.

5. Several expressed an intense issue of promoting ministries in higher education, and noted that at least one bishop has appointed a faculty member as lay chaplain to a campus..

6. We would like to hold up and value Anglican responses to the First Commandment, to love God with our minds. We want to assure that Anglican space remains safe for intellectual inquiry, that it is a space that welcomes diversity and ambiguity. We need have no uncertainty about who Jesus is, but much humility as try to discern God's will as we observe through the dark glass of our time and place.

7. We want to seek out and share with others models of where Episcopalians are working together in parishes with mutual love and respect and inclusiveness across many boundaries of difference regarding theology and morality. Uniformity has never been a mark of the Episcopal church; unity, however is still possible and desirable. How can we move beyond adversarial posture, no longer defining ourselves as winners and losers, but as mutually supportive pilgrims? How can we move beyond the nastiness that has too often characterized discourse from any side of the issue? Episcopalians need to talk to each other long enough to join hands and do the work of the Lord. We need to unite around what we are for, not divide over what we are against.

8. We need to identify new types of education to address the problems of our inner city and the problems of the poor in rural areas. The current 19th-century model of seminary education is not addressing these problems. We need to identify persons within the under-served communities and train them in new ways to meet the needs of their communities. We need ministers who know and speak the language of the needy. Perhaps we need to look at boot-camps for Gideon troops. We need missionary procedures, not maintenance procedures. Too often we in the church find ourselves with a dynamic system in the church yet position ourselves for only a static response.

9. We expressed concern that the secular world is doing much of revitalization in social services, in ways more structured than our own--such as in service-learning. But in the secular services the values are not named. We want to explore the synogogy model, by which different ministries come together with a process that shares across their ministries.

10. We need to revisit the concerns of senior citizens, perhaps more integrally this triennium. In our 1994 report, we included their concerns only as an appendix.

11. We need data to give us a comprehensive picture of the church. We need to look at the matrix of multiple dimensions of populations--seeking hat to do about people who are there, and about those who are not there. We need especially to look at how we might more fully engage ministries of classes and cultures not broadly represented in the Episcopal Church.

12. We need to review and hold up strong of lay ministry, such as those in the Diocese of Northern Michigan. We also need to look at new models of training the laity. For example, in the Diocese of SC the diocese no longer brings a handful of people to conferences, but instead, takes a handful of diocesan staff to the local setting and trains entire congregations.

13. We might review prison ministries and explore how congregations might become more involved in the criminal justice system. We noted that some congregations already are adopting parolees and trying to surround them with nurture when they move out of the prisons. Some begin this process with visitations during the incarceration.

14. We might pick a congregation that needs help, visit it, and do a comprehensive analysis. The process could become a gift from both sides of the fence.

We agreed to try to identify persons and groups with whom we might connect for each of the issues above. We committed ourselves to share items towards a short but powerful bibliography of works that we might read in common.

We spent the second day revisiting some of the "wish list" of our first day. We noted a common thread to many of them: a desire to reach persons not now reached by our church.

We considered specific communities that we might visit or might ask to send representatives to us, including 1) Asian congregations, 2) team ministries in Upper Michigan, 3) campus ministries, 4) the community of Tutwiler, Mississippi, near Memphis, in which Sister Dr. Ann Brooks, and a group of nuns have established ne economic and social setting (widely reported, including a feature by 60 minutes)....

We explored the possibility of a Commission presence at Bishop Keyser's conference on prison ministries, to be held in Indianapolis, May 4-6 this year. Scott Evenbeck, Bruce Garner, and Louie Crew all expressed an interest in being present.

We explored the possibility of being an instrument of peace across some of the divisions in our church. We want not so much to create dialog is as to create a safe space in which persons might be heard. Part of the shouting comes when we try to answer something. We might just listen, without any other agenda. Towards this end, we contacted the director of Episcopalians United and invited him to propose one of their meetings or some other setting in which we might hear them. He seemed interested and will get back to us.

We reviewed the process by which commission reports are circulated, noting that after they appear in the Blue Book, General Convention itself determines whether and how to circulate them further. Since members of the last Commission were discouraged by the failure of General Convention to circulate the Commission's report to the whole church, Bishop Borsch used his own resources to circulate it to all dioceses. We noted that the Commission has a long history of prophetic nudging, leading the church to face difficult problems we are tempted to ignore.

We explored possible dates for our meetings during the remainder of the triennium, taking care to avoid conflicts with the dates already known for meetings of the Executive Council and House of Bishops. At this point in our deliberations, our own numbers had diminished to four, due to exigencies of illness, weather, and a re-scheduled consecration. The remaining four suggested the following times merely to start the search for appropriate times and places, not to finalize it:

Those present urged those who missed any part of the meeting to consider adding their suggestions in writing for us to consider now rather than wait until our October meeting.

We committed ourselves to suggesting items for a short bibliography of items to read as a common base for our deliberations. Louie Crew will combine these and circulate the bibliography to everyone if you will send your citations to him.

We will explore the use of conference calls and electronic mail to expedite some of the Commission's business, never replacing, however, important face-to-face sessions in which we build our own community.

--Louie Crew, Secretary

We committed ourselves to exploring connecting the commission through Quest, the Anglican part of Ecunet, an international and ecumenical network. We decided that we want to do this only if every member of the commission commits to participate. We also felt that no one need apologize if you decide that we should not use the networks.

Participation would involve each person's access to a computer. We will explore ways to get high-speed modems for those who do not have them, and we will explore ways to get accounts on Quest and the software to use them. Participants would pay their own connect charges, which would be minimal for Commission business. (Currently accounts cost $11 per month plus $7 per hour of connect time. Connections are automatic transfers; reading and writing is done offline. As a very heavy user, I have averaged $24 for the last 18 months; for Commission use, I would be surprised to increase my connect charges by more than a dollar for an entire year, plus of course, the $11 per month cost).

______I will not commit to using email for Commission business.

______I will commit to using email for Commission business.

_____ I will commit to maintaining a Quest account if funds can be found to supply me with

the software and a high-speed modem.

_____ I would prefer to connect using my account on the internet (including commercial

services such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy). In this case I would

provide my own modem and software.

_____I do not have easy access to a computer.

_____I now have access to a computer. Brand:______________________________

_____I already receive mail at this electronic address:

_____________________________________

I may receive faxes at this number:___________________________