The Very Rev. Mark J. Lawrence

A fifth generation Californian, and a native of Bakersfield, he attended local public schools, wrestled in high school and college, graduating from California State University, Bakersfield in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. After earning a Master of Divinity from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in 1980, Fr. Lawrence has spent his entire ordained ministry in parish work. After his diaconal year 1980-81, which he spent assisting in a newly planted church in suburban Fresno, California, and as chaplain at Fresno State University, Bishop Victor Rivera appointed him as the vicar of St. Mark’s Shafter, an Anglo-catholic congregation in the rural San Joaquin Valley. The three years he was vicar the Sunday attendance grew by 65 %. He also served as chairman of the diocesan Church Growth Committee and was a delegate to Provincial Synod.

In 1984 he was called as Rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, located in the aging, depressed and declining steel mill region in the Monongahela Valley of greater Pittsburgh. While the region continued to face economic and demographic decline, in the 13 years he served as rector, the parish grew in average Sunday attendance by over 50% and in communicant strength by over a 100 members. The congregation also sponsored an innovative ministry to “street people” and in 1991 established the Mon Valley Tri-Parish Ministry, where Fr. Lawrence put together a clergy staff to oversee two smaller churches in the region—St. John’s, Donora and Transfiguration, Clairton, Pa. He also served extensively in diocesan duties—Standing Committee, Commission on Ministry, Chairman of the Board of Examining Chaplains, Cathedral Chapter, Calvary Camp, and was the liaison with the Anglican Diocese of Chile. He also participated on several community boards from the McKeesport Hospital Ethics Committee to the Advisory Board of the Salvation Army.

In 1997, after 13 years in McKeesport, Pa, he was called to be rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Parish in Bakersfield, California - his home parish in his hometown. Here too the parish has grown by over 50% in average Sunday attendance and the annual budget by 150%. He has also served as rural dean, on Diocesan Council, Board of Examining Chaplains, and lectured in Anglican and Episcopal Church History at the San Joaquin School for Ministry, (a joint venture of the diocese, TESM and the Fresno Mennonite Seminary). He has served as a deputy to General Convention in 2003 and 2006.

He is a member of the Order of St. Luke, the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, and has been active in Cursillo.

He was married to Allison Taylor in 1973. They have five children, and six grandchildren. All are active in parish life and Christian ministry.

My wife, Allison, and I live in my hometown of Bakersfield, California where I am the rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Parish. It was here that we were confirmed on July 7, 1974. We were approaching our first wedding anniversary, and Allison was pregnant with our first child. It was at St. Paul's that we first learned the wonders and foibles of the Episcopal Church. Married in Los Angeles on September 8th 1973, we began life together committed to Christ and his kingdom - though hardly entertaining any dream of ordained ministry. My wife Allison is my dearest friend. Her devotion and wisdom are appreciated by many, including our children, of whom we have five. Of all the reasons I might count myself blessed it is this: That our five children, and their spouses, profess and call themselves Christians and are committed to ministry in the church of Jesus Christ. Of these five, four live in Bakersfield and are actively involved in parish life. We are labeling this year, however - the Great Diaspora. Our older son Chad, his wife, Wendy, and their three daughters will be moving this summer to Ambridge, PA, where he will be attending seminary as a postulant for Holy Orders from the Diocese of San Joaquin. Adelia, our oldest daughter, is married to Steven Phillips-Matson, who is presently St. Paul's Youth Minister/Christian Education director, as well as the Diocesan Youth Consultant. They have two young children and are considering a move this summer, to start a church-plant in Patterson, CA. Middle daughter, Emily, and her husband, graduated last year from Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He teaches high school Physics in Maryland and she is a manager at a Border's Bookstore. They are moving this summer to Pittsburgh where Jake will teach and Emily will enroll in a Graduate Program at Duquesne University. Our younger son, Joseph, after spending a year with YWAM, is getting married in July, and is planning to finish his college at the Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Chelsea, our youngest daughter, will graduate from high school in June, and is considering going to YWAM before attending college. So my wife and I are looking at the possibility of not only an empty nest, but of a substantial ministry-team and joyous extended family leaving us in the coming months. Hardly a comforting thought.

2) Please give your spiritual autobiography. (Answer may be up to four pages)

I was born prematurely on St. Joseph's Day, March 19th 1950 at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield, California, just a short block away from the church where I am rector. I was given the name Mark Joseph Lawrence, though my backsliding father and religiously untutored mother could hardly have understood why it delighted the nuns in the Sisters of Mercy at the hospital. Their prayers intervened in a gloomy prognosis. Six weeks later my life was again in danger from a blocked esophagus, a condition known as Paloric Stenosis. It was the first of a substantial number of operations on my abdomen that have saved my life. It seems I entered life striving, and have been striving ever since - inevitable, I suppose, I would love the God of Israel.

In 1954 a relative of my mother's died causing her to search deeper than the shallow waters of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, where she had attended sporadically, and soon she settled at Trinity United Methodist Church where my two older siblings and I were baptized by the Reverend Lord. My first memories of religion are there, inside the gray walls at Nile and King Streets where my mother still worships as one of the congregation's more respected members. Less than holy memories abound for me there - snickering with my sister in the pews at Mrs. Smith's warbling soprano voice, or Mr. Burckhardt's whistling snore during a sermon. It was there I remember singing in fevered pitch "Holy, Holy, Holy, LORD God Almighty/ Early in the morning..." It was singing the Trinity that must have gotten the doctrine in my mind long before any written treatise spelled it out with irrefutable logic. Or maybe it was the word trinity in the very name of the church that was so efficacious. For it is one doctrine that has never troubled me much - God could be, I conceded, whatever He was. Other things, of course, about the faith did. There was a Lenten altar call, a rare thing at Trinity, which I resisted, reasoning to myself that I would wait until I won the Valley Wrestling Championship because then it would be a more impressive commitment. Championship won - altar call forgotten. Then there was the high school youth group from which I drifted - pulled as I was by the early folk music of Bob Dylan, the backcountry trails of the High Sierra, and the sweaty, but championship, wrestling mats at Bakersfield High School. By the time I headed to college I was a theist at best and traveling a road that soon led to agnosticism.

I believe it was the second semester of my freshman year in college that a nickel fell in my imagination, and I realized it was the lyrical poetry in Dylan and his peers' music that so charmed me. I gradually played less and less on my acoustic guitar and took to writing poetry - voraciously reading the literary works I had mostly ignored during my four years in high school. I switched my major from Geology to English. Soon it was Faulkner, Steinbeck, and the poets who were my traveling companions, though I was capricious as a student. Robert Frost's axiom was my paradigm here, wanting an education from literature, not one in it. I would work during the summer driving tractors on the farmlands of the southern San Joaquin Valley, get enough money for a semester or so, collect an armload of books, drop out, get a job, and then go back to exploring life, living in the mountains or in some vagrant section of town, never letting, as Mark Twain put it, my schooling get in the way of my education.

It was the fall semester at the State University in Sacramento while taking an upper division class in Philosophy that the writings of Soren Kierkegaard drew me back into the orb of grace, blueprinting my despair without God in contoured relief. So on Thanksgiving evening, November 25, 1971, while out for a pensive walk, I knelt down on the wet grass and prayed simply - "Lord, I don't know if you exist, but I'm going to begin to act as if you do." It was a leap of faith into the unknown, only to find a Father and His Son on the far side of the void. Events unfolded with such rapidity I haven't space here to narrate them with any comprehensiveness. Suffice it to say four days later I was in a quandary, walking off of the college campus dreadful and doubting. Despondently I entreated the seemingly silent heavens, "God, this whole thing seems like a cosmic myth. You'd better do something soon or I'm going to chuck it out the window." My eye picked up a sign posted on the footbridge that spans the American River near the campus. It said, "REVIVAL." I thought to myself, "Mark, you've already crucified your intellect by becoming a Christian, might as well go all the way." An hour or two later I was standing in front of an inner city church, Apostolic Church of the Holy Ghost of Jesus Christ Our Lord, Ebenezer. Two hundred of us pressed into a room designed for half that number, and only one white person among us. Again I haven't space to tell the story. I went down under the Spirit, then went down white-robed in the water with the sacred names croaked over me, coming up, (not rebaptized for there is but one, yet), wet, forgiven and, as clean as a new creature in Christ. This experience, among others, convinced me that God could, and does, intrude into this world governed by the Kantian grids of space and time. I still hold it to be the case. The supernatural became a "given" for me in my new life of discipleship. When the semester concluded, I again dropped out of school, needing to let my conversion settle. This time the armload of books I took with me included Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy; Karl Barth's The Word of God and the Word of Man; Evelyn Underhill's The Golden Sequence; Gerard Manley Hopkins' Poems; and a small library of the works of Soren Kierkegaard. I worked, wrote poetry, read widely, and attended Evangelical and Pentecostal Churches.

During the next summer two friends who were attending a Christian college in Southern California said the school was starting a wrestling program and suggested I apply for an athletic scholarship. By fall I was not only enrolled in Southern California College, but also co-captain of the wrestling team. I met Allison Taylor, the school yearbook photographer and, after a lengthy courtship of a month, I asked her to marry me. Amazingly, she said, "Yes", having been warned in dreams a day or two before. It was my intention to return to Sacramento and finish my last year of college. So after our wedding in September of 1973 we moved to Sacramento. Within a month we ran out of money and returned to my hometown where I got a job as an electrician for the Santa Fe Railroad. I was once again out of school with an armload of books. We bought a home and settled into family life. One Sunday while attending the Assemblies of God church at 17th and O streets, the worship struck me as needlessly chaotic. I said to Allison I wasn't going back. On our way home we drove along 17th Street until we came to 17th & B. As our eyes caught the California-mission style architecture of St. Paul's Episcopal Parish, I announced, "We're going there next week!" My reading in the Christian mystics, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and others had prepared me well for what we encountered - chorale Morning Prayer from the 1928 BCP. The Cranmerian liturgy spoke to my soul. Two weeks later it was Holy Communion. I approached the altar rail not knowing quite what to expect. But as I received the Bread and Wine I sensed the Holy Spirit come upon me with a presence that made me tremble from the sacramental otherness of God. In the words of Cardinal Newman there was a felt but "unseen hand."

I worked on locomotives by day and read church history and literature in the evenings, while Allison worked as a bookkeeper at the local Christian bookstore. Our first child was born three weeks after our first anniversary and St. Paul's congregation, which hadn't seen an active couple so young in awhile, let alone with a baby, welcomed us, longish hair and all. We worked with the EYC, taught Sunday school, led Children's Church, and I became a lay reader. Soon we were leading small groups in our home as well as at the church. But it was a dreadfully dry time in my spiritual life. Prayer, which had previously been an intimate meeting with God took on a feeling of remoteness. If it hadn't been for the great devotional writers, and the life stories I encountered in Church history of St. Francis, Luther, Erasmus, Cranmer, Wesley, et al, I hardly know what would have become of me. My friends' assessments didn't help: "Mark has a child, is buying a house, working at a blue collar job - and he had such promise...a pity." Eventually I began taking classes at the local State College to finish my degree. I struggled with my vocation. Was it in law, literature, in the priesthood, or was I already doing it? I had just started graduate studies in English Literature when Allison and I were invited to attend an Order of St. Luke's Conference in L.A. led by Fr. Francis MacNutt. There I was introduced to Fr. Todd Ewald, (president of the Episcopal Charismatic Fellowship), as someone considering the priesthood. Fr. Ewald listened to my well-honed arguments why I shouldn't be a priest, then said: "I haven't heard yet one damn good reason why you shouldn't be a priest. God needs you; Christ needs you; the Church needs you; and I need you! What's your answer?" I said, "Right now?" "Right now!" There was nothing to say but yes. A dry season in my spiritual life was coming to an end. I remember the day it happened. Strumming my guitar singing a simple chorus, "God is so good." And I knew he was. I wept for joy under his touch.

So the following summer of 1977, with Allison eight months pregnant with our second child, we headed off to Trinity Episcopal School for the Ministry in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, the first student under the auspices of a Bishop to attend the new seminary. We sold our house which, in my mid-20s had made me feel overly sedentary, and with a touch of irony, not to mention California's booming real estate market, provided the lion's share for our three-year expenses in seminary. Trinity deepened my understanding of Holy Scripture and turned my intellectual interest from Church History to Systematic Theology. Upon graduating, my theology professor, Dr. John Rodgers, suggested I should spend several years in parish ministry and then consider whether the Lord was leading me to study for a doctorate in theology. After several years of ministry in the Diocese of San Joaquin, I was learning so much from priestly work that my focus shifted from doctrinal theology to pastoral theology. So much so in fact, I thought if I did pursue an advanced degree it would be in the latter field. But our third child was born, a fourth was on the way, rural stipends are small, and duty called. During a backpacking trip in October of 1983, hiking down from Glacier Pass in Sequoia National Park, I heard among the granite peaks and the autumn-yellow aspen trees God's whisper, "You need to enjoy this, Mark, you won't be back here for awhile." I slowed my pace and wondered what such a word could mean, but I knew the One who had spoken it.

The next summer my family and I were on a cross-country trip as I was to take a continuing education course at Princeton Seminary. It was early morning. We had just left Bowling Green, Kentucky. Allison and the kids had fallen asleep and I was praying as I drove north on I-65, when God spoke clearly. "Mark, I'm taking you to Pittsburgh...." It was Friday, July 20th. By September of that year, 1984, I was resident in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and rector of St. Stephen's Church, McKeesport, Pa. McKeesport was a burned out steel mill town in the center of the Monongahela Valley, what Time Magazine that year called, "The center of industrial devastation and white poverty." We went from the farms of San Joaquin, laced with traces of the dust bowl, to the heart of the rust belt. Once again my wife made a cross-country move large with child. We were there for thirteen years, the longest rectorship in the 125-year history of the parish. On my first Sunday I looked at the aging congregation and thought to myself, "I could bury this parish in ten years." I almost did: doing more funerals each year then any priest in the diocese. But early on, as I walked the streets lined with boarded up storefronts, and rusting mills, God seemed to be saying to me, "My church is to grow and plan to grow." And that is what happened. For the first six years we were there, St. Stephen's, McKeesport was one of the few parishes in the diocese that showed significant increase in average Sunday attendance. We did some creative street ministry. But mostly it was the hard work of regular parish ministry - preaching, teaching, worship, parish calling, and pastoral evangelism - that under God grew the church.

In 1990 I initiated what we called the Mon Valley Tri-Parish Ministry, taking two smaller churches under our wings. Two years earlier, having become convinced that the Episcopal Church was suffering from pastoral amnesia, I identified from prior generations six exemplars of parish ministry to study. I read widely in their works and biographies. It was transformational in many ways. C. H. Brent was my tutor in spiritual leadership. Phillips Brooks deepened my understanding of preaching. William Lawrence challenged me to become a better administrator. J. O. S. Huntington and Elwood Worcester were bookends for contrasting models in the cure of souls. Sam Shoemaker reminded me to stand by the door and not neglect the work of pastoral evangelism. I was invited to lecture on this during a January/June term at TESM in Ambridge. I still occasionally ponder putting what I learned of these examples of excellence in the Episcopal Church into written form.

In 1997 several factors converged to suggest this might be a time to consider if God was calling us elsewhere. Two parish profiles arrived. I submitted my name. The searches were soon nosing side by side in their process. Then it was time to answer a call. It was the only time in my priesthood when I thought we could have chosen either way without being negligent of God's will. We chose the place we thought duty called most fully. I later wondered why I hadn't allowed the Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue to be a deciding factor! Shame on me. Still we got here just the same: rector of my home parish in my hometown. Three years ago I baptized my father as he lay dying of cancer. He had come to faith. And to think there had been times during the previous years when I wondered why we were here. The reasons are clear enough now. St. Paul's has grown into a major influence in the diocese. I've taught Church History at the seminary in Fresno, served as Rural Dean, and been actively involved in diocesan life. Still, God has put a poverty in my soul here, even as He has continued to steep me in his ways. Our richness, however, has been all of a human kind - the joy of our family around us: our adult children and their families, (read grandchildren in my wife's lexicon), sharing life and ministry with us in the parish - who can measure such a blessing? They all depart soon. We stay engaged with the work here, even as we await orders. God after all is good. One cannot say it enough.

3) Jesus said, "Who do you say I am?" What does this mean to you?

This question from our Lord is found in the synoptic gospels. They all agree that Jesus asked this question of his disciples while near the villages of Caesarea Philippi - that is, in Gentile territory. There they could feel the power of the gods of this world, as when a young woman who has never cared much for silk and satin suddenly finds herself in a social group where such things alone seem to matter; or when the blue-collar worker finds himself among the canyon-like streets of the business district and feels for the first time the power of bankers and brokers to buy and sell his job. Jesus knew that it was not only in Galilee that his followers would need to answer this question, but also before the gods and power brokers of the Roman world. This is not irrelevant to the question. It is one thing to answer the question of who Jesus is in the safe surroundings of one's home turf. It is quite another thing to make one's confession about Jesus in the midst of a hostile or impervious world. I mention this because it would not be difficult for me to say that I believe he is the incarnate Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. At once and for all time, he was and is fully God and fully Man. Savior, Redeemer, the only begotten Son of the Father, God of God, light of light, very God of very God.... But what does that mean before the gods and the power brokers of the world?

Let me put this in everyday language. Jesus is the one who shows us what God is really like. In fact not only what God is like, but who God is. And let's take it one step further, Jesus is the one who brings God really to us - as such he shows us the face of God. This face of God that Jesus Christ makes known, even after two thousand years of the blearing and smearing of civilizations and ideologies, still shines out in every corner of our darkened world. Some years ago the great missionary statesman, E. Stanley Jones was in the great old church of Byzantium, Hagia Sophia. It was then a Muslim Mosque - it is now a museum. Looking up at the great dome, which was once one of the architectural wonders of the world, he was suddenly stunned. Speechless. There through all the layers of paint and daubing he could see the outline of Christ the pantocrater emerging. The exalted One who is at the right hand of God, who sits in the place of executive power, was shining forth. To know him is to have a friend in high places. Yet he is not only in high places, he is one who stoops to conquer. Years ago Fulton Sheen said that when Mary was holding the baby Jesus, "It was the first time in the history of the world that anyone could ever think of heaven as being anywhere else than somewhere up there; when the child was in her arms Mary now looked down to heaven." Whether baby in Bethlehem, victim on the cross, executive in the place of power, messiah with his disciples in Caesarea Philippi, or friend to the seeker, he shows to us the face of God. In a world where loved ones die, dogs get lost, vows are broken, dollars fall short of expenses, children are lonely, houses and towns are flooded by waters, crushed by earthquakes, strewn by winds, and shattered by bombs, he still shines in the darkness. And that light shows us the way to God; indeed it is the very light of God for our lives.

4) What is your favorite scripture, and why?

I am inclined to answer the question by saying it is whichever passage God is using to speak to me today. But seriously I do not have one favorite passage of scripture. Archbishop William Temple once made the observation that the great Anglo-catholic bishop, Charles Gore, lived in the world of St. Paul, while he (Temple) lived in the thought of St. John. I am closer to Bishop Gore on this one. By temperament, I live more in the epistles of St. Paul and make forays into St. John. They are fruitful raids at times, but nevertheless, raids. Oddly enough, having made this statement regarding the Pauline letters, when it comes to preaching, a quick review of my sermon log will reveal that I preach more often from the Synoptic Gospels - Matthew, Mark, or Luke. I don't think this is because they appear more often in the lectionary cycle, for there is always an epistle reading on Sundays. It is because my ministry over the years as been one of calling churchmen and seekers to a more intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, and the singular episodes of Jesus' life, parables, miracles or teachings, each a self-contained unit of wonder and grace, are ideally fitted for this task.

When I sense a personal lack of passion, or I need iron in the inner man I turn to the prophets, for as Isaiah notes: "So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty; But it will accomplish that which I have purposed and prosper in that for which I sent it." If you catch me one day hiking, whether in the deserts, woods, or mountains, I'll most likely have a psalm that I'm meditating upon, like Ps 63, Ps 104, Ps 42, Ps 25, Ps 18, or my favorite Psalm, Ps 139. This is because I can experience a dual terrain - the topography of the landscape and the geography of the imagination: God is Lord of both. "You trace my journeys and my resting-places and are acquainted with all my ways...Search me out, O God, and know my heart; ...and lead me in the way that is everlasting" (Psalm 139). And for just great literature and to comfort oneself in the mercurial ups and downs of life it is hard to find anything more encouraging than the lives of the quixotically faithful in the Old Testament, especially in Genesis, Exodus, and 1 & 2 Samuel. The writer of The Letter to the Hebrews summarized it well: "...that apart from us they should not be made perfect."

5) How do you understand the Bible to be the inspired word of God?

I do not get caught up with arguments about the inerrancy or infalliblity of the Bible. How did the great Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, put it? Defend the Bible I'd rather defend a lion! No, I agree with the great Anglican divines who have always affirmed that it is a "trustworthy" word. It contains everything necessary for our Christian life and salvation. What is not taught there is not necessary for us to know or believe for our on-going life with God or for our salvation. But what is taught in Holy Scripture is God- breathed, and we are not to interpret one portion of it in such a way that it is contrary to another, nor confusing to the faithful, (BCP Article XIX). Of course there are things that are not taught in the Bible, held by godly tradition or Holy Spirit led reason, that may be edifying and rightly employed in our religious life, but that is another matter altogether.

If I may use alliteration, (and I can't remember who or where it came from, though it sounds to me like John Stott), the Bible is a sacred word, a sufficient word, and a supreme word. When we say the Bible is sacred or inspired we do not mean that God dictated it to certain men, nor that he overrode their personalities or thoughts. We mean that God so spoke to them, through his living Word, and through events or their experiences, that we hear in their writings both the Word of God and the word of man (humankind). Emil Brunner's illustration is helpful here. It's like hearing Carouso singing on a phonograph. We hear a scratch here or there, a little white noise as they say today, but through it all is the unmistakable voice of the Master. The Bible is also a sufficient word: Sufficient to reveal who God is; What his purpose is for us; What his plans are for the world; For the human race; For you and me. It is entirely "trustworthy" for this purpose. If you are marooned on a desert island and want to get off you may, along with G. K. Chesterton, prefer Childs' Complete Book of ShipBuilding. But if you want to know the way of salvation, the Bible and the church that is its custodian are entirely sufficient guides. Finally, it is a supreme word. Nothing ought to be taught as true of God which is contrary to it, (see BCP, Articles XIX and XX). The Bible is the book the church holds out to the world. It is also the book that continually reforms and corrects the church. Though the church is the Bible's keeper, the church itself is to be governed and guided by the Word of God that is in its custody.

6) What is the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection?

In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ God defeated all the perennial enemies of the human race before which we were helpless. These enemies included sin, shame, the Law (manifested in perfectionist obsessions), death, the judgement of God (on unrighteousness or injustice), hell, and Satan. I have only space for a brief word about three of these.

The first two are Sin (and its sister, guilt) and Shame. There are those social scientists that suggest we are evolving or, perhaps better said, regressing from a guilt-based culture to a shame-based culture. This has profound implications for our understanding of the Cross. For instance, if we are spiritually healthy we experience guilt when we sin and break the moral Law of God. The cross is the antidote to this guilt for God in Christ's death was reconciling sinful and guilty humankind to himself. He, the sinless and guiltless, took our sin and guilt upon himself. The resurrection then is God's vindication - God's declaration that Christ was not only sinless, but that his death was the sufficient atonement for our sin and guilt, which he bore in his body on the cross. Shame however is another problem. We experience shame when we fail to live up to the expectations others may have for us, or that we have for ourselves, regardless of any moral commandments of God. Just one example of this problem: The child of an alcoholic parent often feels a sense of shame at her parent's addiction and behavior. She thinks if she can only be the right kind of daughter she can keep her father from drinking and behaving so badly. When she fails in this expectation she has placed upon herself, along with an experience of guilt, (which is wrongly felt I might add), she also has an experience of shame. The cross, however, was a shameful death which Christ endured for our sake, (Hebrews 12:2). He has shared her shame. I have found in preaching the cross as Christ's-sharing-of-our-shame, many have been profoundly moved, even healed of shameful experiences that have crippled their lives.

Then there is death. The last enemy to be destroyed. When death comes into your home he brings a lot of his unwanted relatives with him - guilt, for things done and left undone, grief for what we've lost, loneliness, fear "which is the power of death", sorrow, etc... As St. Augustine said, "God had only one son on earth without sin, but none without sorrow." Death is the father of sorrows. Christ's death was the death of the guiltless for the guilty. It was God's great exchange, and in that exchange death over-reached, and through the resurrection, Christ "opened a door that had been shut since the death of the first man."(C. S. Lewis). This victory over death is our hope. And hope is an important word in the Christian lexicon. The cross speaks of God's love; the resurrection speaks of hope. So I Peter 1:3 declares, "...we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable...kept in heaven for you...." Good news in all of this and we've only just begun to talk about it.

7) What part does prayer play in your life and that of your family?

There has always been an ebb and flow to my prayer life. Days, months even seasons when it is rich with God's' presence and his voice echoes from the pages of the Bible and the Prayerbook with glowing resonance. Then there are other seasons like the one I've been in for the last year when the Word seems lifeless on the page and my words come fumblingly from my mouth. These are what I call fallow seasons, when prayer is difficult. So difficult in fact that I have to do it daily. For now it is the morning office, a prayer list, then the study of a book of the Bible, (usually accompanied by a commentary or two), and followed by writing in a journal, which I've kept religiously since the early spring of 1987. The keeping of a journal has been a balancing and nourishing spiritual discipline for me over the last twenty years. It started out as a journalistic dialogue with God on leadership issues, but within a year evolved into a dialogue on all dimensions of parish ministry, until it now includes every aspect of my life - personal thoughts and experiences, family, church, and world. It is one way of bringing myself before the Lord. It is also a resource for my parish ministry, whether for sermons, teachings, articles, or spiritual counsel. Many fruitful ideas begin there. Along with this it is in periodically reviewing my journals that I have often been reminded of God's faithfulness when I felt most hard pressed. Parish ministry in my experience is hard work and I do not envy the priest who makes of it anything less. Journaling helps keep my hand on the plow and God's hand on me.

Now to one of my failures: Family prayer. My wife and I go through days when we make time to pray together and weeks when we let our schedule preclude it. In my experience praying together is one of the most difficult things for married couples to do regularly, especially if they have children. My wife and I do far better at praying as individuals then we do at praying as a couple. So to with family prayers: we pray of course at dinner time, and prayed each night at bedtime when the children were young, but as for regular and meaningful family prayers, it has not been a part of our lives. We've prayed when decisions needed to be made; when one of our children was having a problem; when one member of the family needed to forgive another, be it parent or child; or at the conclusion of a family argument - and with two stubborn parents and five children there have been more than a few of these. It is only by God's grace that all of our children are believers and practice personal prayer. We might console ourselves with this: At least they had the witness of seeing my wife and me praying and reading scripture as individuals. They know at least it is has been a lifeline for us.

8) What is your position on the issues currently facing the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion?

The divisive issues facing the Episcopal Church revolve around the Christian understanding of Revelation - that is, what God has revealed about Himself, the church, and the Christian life; and, along with this, how he goes about making such things known to his people. The issues facing the Anglican Communion revolve around ecclesiology - that is, our understanding of how our Communion should be governed. Both manifest themselves in questions about authority. Who speaks for God? Who speaks for the Church - especially when local practice seems contrary to universal teaching. (I have recently published an article on the issue facing the Anglican Communion that is readily available so I will leave that to those who have a mind to read it). Let me begin this all too brief presentation with some personal thoughts on the divisive issues facing the Episcopal Church. I often wish the debate circled around the doctrine of the Trinity, or the Divinity of Christ. But, unfortunately, the wagons have circle around sexuality, and in particular, homosexuality, and what the scriptures, the Church's tradition, and godly reason have to teach us about it. What is often forgotten in the discussion is a seminal question: "For what purpose has God created us as sexual beings?" Summarily put, this would seem to be for 1) procreation; 2) complimentarity: male complimenting the female; female complimenting the male - physically, emotionally and spiritually, so that two fundamentally different beings become one - mirroring therein God's nature of plurality in unity; and, 3) only then should we understand genital sexuality as God's gift to further intimacy and pleasure.

I have prayed, explored and thought about this issue since my early field work experience in seminary. I have pastored and been the spiritual director to more then a few gay persons. I have known believers to struggle profoundly with the experience of their sexual attraction or sexual relationships with members of the same sex. They need, like all of us do, profound empathy. When I served on the committee for the "Consecration of Bishops" at the 2003 General Convention, I did not take lightly writing the minority report in opposition to Canon Robinson's consecration. It did not come from any animus toward gay or lesbian persons, but, rather, from convictions thought through while seeking to be faithful to scripture, tradition, reason, and pastoral experience. I print a portion of that report here as a summary of my position on this matter of such personal and institutional anguish. "...[T]he approval of a bishop elect who is in a same-sex relationship, even if monogamous and loving, is in opposition to the clear teaching of Holy Scripture, the historic teaching of the church, and the promulgated teaching of this Body of Christ known as the Episcopal Church by previous General Conventions; ...the approval of a bishop in said lifestyle would become a pretext upon which the church would de facto resolve the question of the appropriateness of homosexual behavior without due reordering of the church's teaching; ...the approval of this consecration will bring profound consternation to many of our sisters and brothers at home and abroad, straining relationships within the Anglican Communion, and adversely affecting the mission and ministry of the church at home and abroad...." The last of these points has been, unfortunately, all too true.

9)How do you understand the role of a bishop in the church today?

In twenty-five years of ordained ministry I have served in two dioceses and under four bishops. Each has had his strengths and weaknesses as every leader does. These strengths and weaknesses have to a large extent determined the ministry they have exercised - whether that was leadership, administration, preaching, teaching, pastoral care of clergy, or evangelism. We need to recognize that a bishop's role and ministry, like that of a rector's or vicar's, will be largely determined by his or her gifts. There is another circumstantial dimension to the bishop's role, the needs of the present hour - those within the Church and those within the world. Finally there are the needs of the diocese under his charge. These also determine the role he or she is called to fulfill. Having said that there are two non-negotiable dimensions to the office.

A bishop is to be a guardian of The Faith that was once delivered to the saints. This faith is revealed in Holy Scripture. Certainly he recognizes the need for it to be faithfully and relevantly interpreted and then forthrightly proclaimed to each successive generation, ‘lest it become a dry, sterile orthodoxy. But this interpretation needs to be done in concert with the consensus of the faithful - the faithful in the present generation, the faithful in the past, and the faithful clergy and laity within his own diocese. The bishop should set the theological direction for the diocese. In doing this he should seek to be as inclusive as the apostolic faith, unity and disciplines of the church allow. While fulfilling this role within his diocese, he is, as lies within his power, to advance the faith in the entire One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church to which he is ordained and consecrated. Secondly, he is to be the Chief Pastor of the diocese, especially the pastor to the pastors. This pastoral ministry should be carried out through his preaching and teaching, his written words, and in his personal and public witness. William Temple once said something to the effect that the church should be very clear in its public teaching so that it may be very pastoral in the application. This ministry should also be carried out in his personal and pastoral relationships with the priests and deacons in his diocese, including when appropriate, their spouses and children. The latter often have no other pastoral presence to which they may turn. This role as Bishop-Pastor is the chief way he may grow the diocese. Setting vision is important - "without vision the people languish", but without healthy and effective priests the parishes languish. The only way a diocese grows is by growing congregations. In this growth the bishop is what the rector-evangelist, Sam Shoemaker, called a sort of player-coach. He is not a coach on the sidelines; he's on the field of play with eyes on the field, and eyes on team to contribute, to encourage, and, most of all, to cheer loudly at every score.