Part One of an interview with former Bishop of EDEO, the Rt. Rev. Rustin Kimsey
Matt: My name is Matt Carmichael and this is an interview with the former Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon, Reverend Rustin Kimsey. The date is March 25, 2014 at 1:00 pm. Today, we are talking about Coalition 14 as well as the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence Project.
Thank you for meeting with me Rusty. My first question has to do with MRI. What was the motivation for starting the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence Project? How did it start and evolve into Coalition 14?
Rustin: The Anglican Communion is a community of individual churches throughout the world that at the present time number 72 million people. They are under the leadership and belong to 42 different independent communities of faith. The Episcopal Church is one of those, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Anglican Church in Australia, there’s one in New Zealand, all around the world. They were established mainly because the Anglican Communion, rather the Church of England, had become so expansive because of its chaplain service over the centuries, for two or three hundred years, that that particular interaction with various cultures had created a very impressive world-wide community of faith, but there was a need to contextualize that and to get away from certain colonial standards and to give to people in various countries around the world the opportunity to have an independent church with worship in their own language and their own leadership, so that’s how all of that came into being.
When I say independent, it’s better to say that there was a continuing interaction between these churches mainly because of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role as kind of being the spiritual leader of these people; he didn’t have any political influence on these various churches, but they looked to England and to the archbishop and to England as kind of being their spiritual guides. Of course, the Book of Common Prayer was kind of the glue that held all of that communion together. The representation of those churches in meeting was essentially through bishops, that there was the establishment of meetings in the early 19th century where bishops would come back to London and meet at Lambeth Palace where the Archbishop of Canterbury resided and it was called the Lambeth Conference and they met every ten years. Essentially that was the only meeting of the Anglican Communion except for missionary societies who would often get together and interact with partners around the world.
In 1961, there was a conference called the Toronto Congress and it was the first of its kind. It was a meeting of representatives from all over the world of the Anglican Communion, and it was a made up of bishops, priests and lay people. It was a very good cross section of representation from different venues, different persuasions. When they gathered in Toronto, they were there for two weeks and they emerged with a document that is known as the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. It was wordy, but very significant if you stop and look at what those words mean, because it was an attempt for the church to begin to deal with two major issues: authority and mission. The Anglican Communion, as we inherited it from the Church of England and as we established the various ways of reflecting that Anglicanism, it was very much a top-down strategy of government that bishops and arch bishops, we didn’t have cardinals anywhere, and the senates and legislative processes of the church in that time were essentially reflections of giving more priority to bishops and to a male-dominated hierarchical structure. When I was being raised in the Episcopal Church, and in the early days of my priesthood, the role of women was quite insignificant. Women could not serve on vestries, women could not be involved in diocesan convention as delegates, they certainly could not go to general conventions and national meetings, and girls could not be acolytes. That was kind of a sign that change needed to occur.
The Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence document was an attempt to say, we need to look at the structures of our church. How are the voices heard, and what are the voices that determine what the future mission is going to be of our ecclesiastical structures? The collaboration that came out of that was central to the document was the deep belief that what we had been in the past needed to change, that the colonial interaction between parent churches with missional churches needed to have more parity, there needed to be more voices from the people, all the people. The way in which that began to be reflected was in conversations that took place around the world really between those churches that had largely been founded by missionary strategies from abroad; so there was a growing understanding that there needed to be more control and more influence by indigenous people for the sake of the gospel and the sake of the world. The way that manifested itself within the United States, and within the Episcopal Church, was a collaboration between dioceses began to happen, and I think the most significant experiment that occurred and took root was what we referred to as Coalition 14.
Prior to 1970, the way in which money was dispersed for the mission fields in America, for jurisdictions that were called missionary districts; they were called that because they were not financially viable in the sense of not needing outside support. So, these missionary districts, which had been founded over the years since the inception of the Episcopal Church in 1789, were mainly in the west, some were in central United States, but most of them were in the west, as far west as Hawaii. The way they were funded in the past was that General Convention would have a line item in their budget for these missionary districts and it was several million dollars, and the way that was distributed was that there was a home department, it was called, within the national church structure and they had at the home department, usually it was a bishop, but it was an appointment by the presiding bishop and that person had the responsibility, and he certainly sought the advice of some of his peers in the national church structure, but ultimately, it was his decision as to budgetary allocations as to who would get what and how much. So the bishops of these fourteen jurisdictions would go back to New York once a year and they would state their case; they would talk with the home department people, in particular the director of the home department, and after all of that interaction, then the director would make his decision. The pie would be cut up by that person.
As a result of the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence document in the sixties, there was a growing concern that the way we were doing the allocation and the way we were planning for mission was not being done by the people who were in the field, people who were on the ground. It so happened that during the sixties there were quite a few new bishops who were reluctant to these fourteen jurisdictions, and they began to talk and converse and exchange meetings. The most significant meeting happened in Sedalia, Colorado in 1971 when all fourteen of these jurisdictions came together, bishops and representatives from the clergy and lay people. They essentially chartered a new course for the missionary districts. They began to work on documentation and on strategies to be presented to the next general convention which would have been in 1973. Essentially what they said was that number one, the allocation of money should be done by them, that the jurisdiction would come together and with a clear and fair process they would make the decisions as to who would get what piece of the budget that had come to them from general convention. They had the support of the national church; the home department that had them responsible for this was made up of people who agreed to that strategy. They were supportive and helped them with the documentation process, strategy and all of that.
By the 1973 General Convention, these jurisdictions were prepared to go to the various committees that had control over funds and over mission strategy and to present their case, so they did. That was affirmed by that convention and succeeding conventions. The rules which were put forward were extensive, and just to give some examples of those was that each diocese that was a part of the coalition needed to promise that they would expect from their congregations 25% of the net disposable income of that congregation. That was a heavy asking, but that was stringent and it was also agreed to. They also agreed that they each would pay the full fair share of the diocesan apportionment that went for the support of the national church and that was based on a certain formula of percentage income and communicant strength and so forth. Those two were promises that they made that they would fulfill, one would be the congregational income would be at a certain level and the apportionment going out the national church would always be sacrosanct. They also expected that the national church would support them in such a manner that their mission and ministry within each of those jurisdictions would be able to go forward with a lot more ownership on the part of the membership, because of the money coming directly to them and the national church giving them the responsibility to be caretakers of their own budgeted incomes; so that began to happen.
The annual meetings of the coalition were rather incredible really. Every diocese made a presentation to the total body, this was a group -- the annual meeting was made up of bishops, clergy, and lay people -- usually two or three representatives from each jurisdiction in addition to the bishop. They would make presentations on what their plans were for the coming year, often they moved toward five-year vision statements, but at the annual meeting they would give an accounting of what funds they had in the years past, what they had done with the money, what was happening in terms of the budgetary accountability. A lot of jurisdictions had their own kind of secret fund accounts. The bishops would have quite large discretionary funds that were often used for all kinds of purposes, but it was usually used at the direction of the bishop only. There was nothing shady about that but they were funds that were not known by many other people, so one of the rules that coalition made that there would be no secret funding, that what they asked for and what they got from the national church would be the essential budgeted income for their mission purposes within that jurisdiction. There was some leeway made for bishops and other executives within the diocese to have some discretionary use of the moneys but that had to be reported and that had to be accounted for. It leveled the playing field in terms of what money was available for the dioceses, or for the missionary districts at that time, and it was a growing kind of partnership within the coalition that provided for a lot of ingenuity and creativity. People began to respond more to the mission that church, because they began to own it more.
Presentations were made at the annual meeting and then there was a budget and finance committee that would listen to all of the data, all of the discussion and then they would come back to the annual meeting a few days after the presentations were made with recommendations as to what each of the dioceses should be allotted. There was open discussion about their recommendations. Often their recommendations were accepted at face value, but there were other times where there were long debates about whether or not certain moneys that were being asked for were going to be put to the kind of use that people could affirm. There were also times where people said you’re not asking for enough, that there were possibilities that various jurisdictions for mission purposes that needed more funding. At times, the annual meeting would end up funding more than what the people came with their asking's. I think the great value was, probably the friendships that began to form in those days and the trust that began to build. The interaction that began to occur, not just at the annual meeting, but through the year of jurisdictions coming together, various interest groups, various ways of conducting the business of the church. There was a lot more coalescing going on, and a lot more collaboration.
Locally, the principles that were employed by Coalition 14 were put to use in each of these jurisdictions and in some way or another. Eastern Oregon, I think we had a base budget support for congregations that was probably around $130,000-$140,000, that we could allocate. Originally that was done essentially by a small group of people and certainly passed by diocesan council, but we instituted what we called the Coalition of Congregations, which met annually and we followed pretty much the same format that the Coalition 14 followed at the annual meeting. We would have congregations do an in depth analysis of what was going on in their communities and do some good planning and then they would come to this meeting and prepare to ask for a certain amount of money to augment their mission budget. We would all be around the table, every congregation in the diocese was expected to attend that meeting, not just those that were asking for money, but those who were self-supporting were expected to be there as well.
I must say that the generosity and the goodwill of people in that collaborative effort was amazing. That all of the sudden, it wasn’t a top-down, a kind of divvying out of various funds, but it became a collaborative energy on the part of the entire diocese that reaped a lot of rewards from that kind of creativity and trust.
Matt: What was your involvement in the planning of MRI and C-14?
Rustin: Well, I was a parish priest during the sixties and seventies, but I was appointed to the Executive Council of the National Church in 1969 when the priest delegate by the name of Bill Spofford was elected bishop of Eastern Oregon at that time, so he had to resign his seat on the executive council because it was a priest spot and I was appointed at that time to fill that place. Then at the Houston General Convention that occurred the following year, in 1970, I was elected to a full term of six years on the executive council. Well, the executive council had a lot to do with the Coalition 14 business, so I was privy to a lot of what was going on at the national level, but I was also asked to be a part of the meeting in Colorado in 1971 and was at the table when the architects of all of this really started to sharpen their pencils and began to strategize and bring this into some kind of fruition.
Matt: What were the implications of this kind of organization in 1970?
Rustin: Well, the Episcopal Church operates pretty much as an organism that has separate entities, kind of like states. These dioceses are pretty independent, they have their own ways of worshiping and their own ways of thinking, strategizing and doing mission work. There a lot of similarities, we’re certainly bonded by the Book of Common Prayer and how we orchestrate our worship and the customs and the ways in which we’ve constituted ourselves, our rules and orders and so forth; there’s a lot of overlap there, but dioceses can be side-by-side, but not have a lot of interaction. Western Oregon and Eastern Oregon, two separate jurisdictions since 1907, it was possible to live out a whole year without any kind of communication between the two jurisdictions except probably through the two bishops. So, Coalition 14 was a drastic change from that, the isolation that was so common in the Episcopal Church, we really cut into that and said that we are our brother’s keepers, we have a responsibility to support one another, and also to challenge one another and to say we believe that when people are falling down in a certain area of potential mission that we need to step up and ask what can we help you to do that? That began to happen certainly in the coalition and I think that it had an impact and we began to think of ourselves in different ways in terms of being a church.
Matt: In what ways?
Rustin: We weren’t as concerned about just our own turf, just our own kind of independence, but rather we began to think more broadly in terms of what is our responsibility in helping one another be better vessels of the gospel, so that was huge.
Matt: Right, and you said that there was also an attempt to encourage a discussion of equal rights, in order to get more input from voices that had not been heard.
Rustin: That’s right. I think there’s a definite line of progress from the time we began to act like that, be more collaborative, and be together more often, not just for retreats and spiritual moments which we had exchanged some of those kind of events in the past, but rather the hard work of deciding where we stood on certain issues and how we were going to plan for mission projects. All of that kind of collaboration around the issues by clergy and lay people sitting down at the same table, I think there’s a direct line from that to being more concerned about race issues, about gender issues, about what was the role of women. The first major thing that was being talked about in the sixties was the revision of the Book of Common Prayer and that took years and years of study and debate and arguing. It was a great time, since we got the new prayer book in 1979; I kind of miss those arguments, I kind of miss the cutting edge of debate around you know what is appropriate in terms of our prayer life and our worship life and what are the hymns that are helpful and what are the ones that ought to be taken out, forgotten about.
Matt: So, you’re saying the MRI and C-14 really facilitated that discussion.
Rustin: Exactly. It is just a common thread from 1961 to 1976. For instance, when we voted on the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church, I don’t think, without the Toronto Congress, the Mutual Responsibility document and living into that in such a manifestation as Coalition 14; I don’t think the Episcopal Church would have moved as they did, not just in terms of their own infrastructure, like the ordination of women, but we became very, very involved with societal issues, particularly race. Like all Christian churches, and most organizations, we had a checkered history with the issue of race, so those were huge growing years for us and for our country as well and we were impacted by the sixties. That decade was an incredibly volatile, dangerous time. It was also a time of really opening up and of society beginning to pay more attention to things that had been taken so much for granted. I have a lot of time now to reflect about my life and about the life of the church before my time and what might be the life of the church after my time; that I don’t have a lot of perspective about, but I am grateful for the opportunity to have lived when I did, and to have been a part of the conversations when I did and the turmoil and the angst and the conflict that the church and our society went through was more privilege than not, and it was very grace-filled. There was a lot of remarkable people, courageous people. We never would have had Desmond Tutu come to Ascension School had it not been for what we’ve been talking about. We wouldn’t have known him and even if we had known of him, there probably would not have been any kind of relationship and I probably would not have met him.
Matt: Let’s step back and look at the broader picture again, especially regarding MRI and how that became C-14. I’m curious to know what you think about this quote from Samuel Van Culin's article on the Project Process: It's Character and Value from April 26, 1967: “MRI was not a discovery of the Anglican Communion, it is a fact of our own life"...furthermore, "the project is the means by which a program or plan of action is made visible”.
Rustin: I think that’s accurate. I think what they’re trying to say is that it didn’t invent the communion itself, that there already was a structure and a history out there that simply needed some new life, some new vision, and that came. I mean, the kind of relationships between national, well they call it provinces, in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church of the United State is a province and Canada is as well as West Africa and Uganda. Those 42 provinces essentially acted pretty independently and they were all products of colonialism too. They were all products of England, which did a lot of things right, but it still did a lot of things that were very colonial in nature.
Matt: How would you define “colonial”?
Rustin: Well, I would say a super-imposing of one culture onto another, not always through war and armaments, often as England did; it was through economies, but still the bottom line was often the same and that was that one culture was subjugated to the other. That was the way mission was done. A great book is a book called Christianity Rediscovered and it’s by a guy named Vincent Donnovan who was a Roman Catholic Priest in Tanzania for 17 years with the Maasai people. We had him at Cove, at Ascension School. He was there not many years after Desmond was there. He talked about what it meant to be a Catholic Priest going to the Maasai many of who had been converted to Roman Catholicism over the past 50-60 years. He told a story…he gave a long regiment of education of baptism to the Maasai people. He said that his strategy was that he would teach his course and when he though the people were ready to be baptized, then they would have a mass-baptism in the river. Several months went by and finally he went to the chief and he said, I think we’re ready, people have responded well, except, three are three people who will not be baptized. The chief asked, what has happened? Vincent said, well they just don’t seem to get it, they don’t seem to be interested and when I inquire about their religious faith, they come up a bit short, so they can wait until they’re ready. The chief looked at Vincent and said, then we’ll all wait. Vincent said, well, what do you mean? The chief said, well you talk about family, the Maasai is family, and if we’re going to become Christian’s, this tribal unit will do that together. We’ll not leave anyone behind. So, they were all baptized. Vincent kind of relaxed and sat back and knew the truth of what the chief was saying and he acquiesced. That was a good indication of the culture who had been converted by another culture, teaching the first culture something about Christianity that had they had lost.
Matt: That goes back to the notion of unification which has been one of the driving forces of the Christian movement since its inception.
Rustin: That’s right, exactly. The value of that story is that we all have something to teach one another. I can remember the original document of MRI that for centuries, some of has been “giving” churches, and the other have been “receiving” churches. That has set up a kind of relationship that is skewed, that it’s not equal. The point of the document was that if we are in Christ in a way that is at all meaningful, there aren’t any just givers or just receivers. We all need to be involved in giving and receiving, and that we need to learn from one another. Western Europeans and American’s, we need to listen more. We need to listen more to those people who have often been what we call our children and not treat them like children, but as mature people who have a wisdom that we probably have not even heard of yet, and we need to hear it. When you were talking about unity, it reminded me, that the whole ecumenical movement was greatly impacted by MRI and I think the ecumenical movement impacted MRI too. In the fifties and the early sixties, certainly with the advent of John 23, and the Vatican Council, that inter-faith dialogue and having new understandings of one another, denominations and faith communities outside of Christianity. We had predispositions and stereotypes about them that were not very helpful, so the more we talked…you know when I was young in the priesthood, I remember Gretchen and I hosted and were part of a group that went around to various homes of what we called “living room dialogues”. It was wonderful immersion into understanding the faiths of other denominations and the various people making up the group would be affected to give some kind of dissertation about what some of their core beliefs are, and we would have that conversation. It was so rich and so helpful, we don’t do that much anymore. Is that getting at what you were asking?
Matt: Yes, thank you, that’s definitely getting at the heart of it. With this article, I’m focusing on some of the broader themes of MRI and C-14. Culin's article on The Project Process, also talked about how MRI, as a project, was an "introduction of the means by which diocese’s, who were not only contiguous to each other but drawn together by common regional concerns, began to expose their lives to each other, began to look at their communities together and began the difficult process of establishing their own priorities in obedience to their common mission as they saw it". What is your response?
Rustin: Well, a lot of that happened, like I told you, by the meetings, the annual meetings of the Coalition 14 and also in our local constituents, gathering with the Coalition of Congregations.
Matt: Right, and I’m also curious to know more about how this was achieved at the parish level.
Rustin: Well, I think that those people who were involved, say within the Coalition of Congregations in the dioceses, they would bring back that message of what it means to be collaborative and to have the courage and the wisdom to know how to listen and how to confront; that the whole matter of being able to be honest within a community of faith was just so important, and that again, cut against a lot of mores and values that a lot of us had been living into for decades as a priest, as a “father knows best”. The authority of the church really stopped with the priest, that the vestries were needed to be seen as responsible for some of the finances. For all the rest of it, they probably needed to be advisory more than proactive. Well, that’s not why vestries exist. The vestry are a balancing tip for the leadership of the church, and they certainly need to be supportive of their priest, and advise in appropriate ways, but they also need to take on their share of the responsibility of the decisions. They do so by listening to one another, including their priest. That gets all fouled up, really pretty easily, as Anna probably could tell you. Any priest can.
Matt: That makes sense. It’s important that congregations and vestries work through these issues together.
Rustin: It’s a circular issue. The more we experience the kind of collaborative effort of learning to listen and that was high on our priority in Eastern Oregon for years and years, we had workshops just on listening. We used a book that was written by a husband and wife team that I knew in seminary, the Farnhams. Suzanne Farnham became a lightning rod nationally. Listening Hearts, that was the name of the book. She was responsible for thousands of those books, generating all kinds of discussions in congregations about the value of listening.
I think there’s a lot of strength that comes from collaboration and it’s a different kind of strength, then is derived from top-down leadership. I think when people have some sense of a stake in the decisions, they may not even be very articulate at times but if they’ve been present and felt they’ve been listened to, and felt that they had some input into a process, I think they’re more alive. I think it’s just human nature, that if they feel valued then they feel like they’re voice is important and not determinative, but important to the process. I think their own inner faith and their own willingness to move forward with mission in their own lives is strengthened.
Stay tuned for Part Two of this interview with the Rt. Rev. Rustin Kimsey
Matt: My name is Matt Carmichael and this is an interview with the former Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon, Reverend Rustin Kimsey. The date is March 25, 2014 at 1:00 pm. Today, we are talking about Coalition 14 as well as the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence Project.
Thank you for meeting with me Rusty. My first question has to do with MRI. What was the motivation for starting the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence Project? How did it start and evolve into Coalition 14?
Rustin: The Anglican Communion is a community of individual churches throughout the world that at the present time number 72 million people. They are under the leadership and belong to 42 different independent communities of faith. The Episcopal Church is one of those, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Anglican Church in Australia, there’s one in New Zealand, all around the world. They were established mainly because the Anglican Communion, rather the Church of England, had become so expansive because of its chaplain service over the centuries, for two or three hundred years, that that particular interaction with various cultures had created a very impressive world-wide community of faith, but there was a need to contextualize that and to get away from certain colonial standards and to give to people in various countries around the world the opportunity to have an independent church with worship in their own language and their own leadership, so that’s how all of that came into being.
When I say independent, it’s better to say that there was a continuing interaction between these churches mainly because of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role as kind of being the spiritual leader of these people; he didn’t have any political influence on these various churches, but they looked to England and to the archbishop and to England as kind of being their spiritual guides. Of course, the Book of Common Prayer was kind of the glue that held all of that communion together. The representation of those churches in meeting was essentially through bishops, that there was the establishment of meetings in the early 19th century where bishops would come back to London and meet at Lambeth Palace where the Archbishop of Canterbury resided and it was called the Lambeth Conference and they met every ten years. Essentially that was the only meeting of the Anglican Communion except for missionary societies who would often get together and interact with partners around the world.
In 1961, there was a conference called the Toronto Congress and it was the first of its kind. It was a meeting of representatives from all over the world of the Anglican Communion, and it was a made up of bishops, priests and lay people. It was a very good cross section of representation from different venues, different persuasions. When they gathered in Toronto, they were there for two weeks and they emerged with a document that is known as the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. It was wordy, but very significant if you stop and look at what those words mean, because it was an attempt for the church to begin to deal with two major issues: authority and mission. The Anglican Communion, as we inherited it from the Church of England and as we established the various ways of reflecting that Anglicanism, it was very much a top-down strategy of government that bishops and arch bishops, we didn’t have cardinals anywhere, and the senates and legislative processes of the church in that time were essentially reflections of giving more priority to bishops and to a male-dominated hierarchical structure. When I was being raised in the Episcopal Church, and in the early days of my priesthood, the role of women was quite insignificant. Women could not serve on vestries, women could not be involved in diocesan convention as delegates, they certainly could not go to general conventions and national meetings, and girls could not be acolytes. That was kind of a sign that change needed to occur.
The Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence document was an attempt to say, we need to look at the structures of our church. How are the voices heard, and what are the voices that determine what the future mission is going to be of our ecclesiastical structures? The collaboration that came out of that was central to the document was the deep belief that what we had been in the past needed to change, that the colonial interaction between parent churches with missional churches needed to have more parity, there needed to be more voices from the people, all the people. The way in which that began to be reflected was in conversations that took place around the world really between those churches that had largely been founded by missionary strategies from abroad; so there was a growing understanding that there needed to be more control and more influence by indigenous people for the sake of the gospel and the sake of the world. The way that manifested itself within the United States, and within the Episcopal Church, was a collaboration between dioceses began to happen, and I think the most significant experiment that occurred and took root was what we referred to as Coalition 14.
Prior to 1970, the way in which money was dispersed for the mission fields in America, for jurisdictions that were called missionary districts; they were called that because they were not financially viable in the sense of not needing outside support. So, these missionary districts, which had been founded over the years since the inception of the Episcopal Church in 1789, were mainly in the west, some were in central United States, but most of them were in the west, as far west as Hawaii. The way they were funded in the past was that General Convention would have a line item in their budget for these missionary districts and it was several million dollars, and the way that was distributed was that there was a home department, it was called, within the national church structure and they had at the home department, usually it was a bishop, but it was an appointment by the presiding bishop and that person had the responsibility, and he certainly sought the advice of some of his peers in the national church structure, but ultimately, it was his decision as to budgetary allocations as to who would get what and how much. So the bishops of these fourteen jurisdictions would go back to New York once a year and they would state their case; they would talk with the home department people, in particular the director of the home department, and after all of that interaction, then the director would make his decision. The pie would be cut up by that person.
As a result of the Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence document in the sixties, there was a growing concern that the way we were doing the allocation and the way we were planning for mission was not being done by the people who were in the field, people who were on the ground. It so happened that during the sixties there were quite a few new bishops who were reluctant to these fourteen jurisdictions, and they began to talk and converse and exchange meetings. The most significant meeting happened in Sedalia, Colorado in 1971 when all fourteen of these jurisdictions came together, bishops and representatives from the clergy and lay people. They essentially chartered a new course for the missionary districts. They began to work on documentation and on strategies to be presented to the next general convention which would have been in 1973. Essentially what they said was that number one, the allocation of money should be done by them, that the jurisdiction would come together and with a clear and fair process they would make the decisions as to who would get what piece of the budget that had come to them from general convention. They had the support of the national church; the home department that had them responsible for this was made up of people who agreed to that strategy. They were supportive and helped them with the documentation process, strategy and all of that.
By the 1973 General Convention, these jurisdictions were prepared to go to the various committees that had control over funds and over mission strategy and to present their case, so they did. That was affirmed by that convention and succeeding conventions. The rules which were put forward were extensive, and just to give some examples of those was that each diocese that was a part of the coalition needed to promise that they would expect from their congregations 25% of the net disposable income of that congregation. That was a heavy asking, but that was stringent and it was also agreed to. They also agreed that they each would pay the full fair share of the diocesan apportionment that went for the support of the national church and that was based on a certain formula of percentage income and communicant strength and so forth. Those two were promises that they made that they would fulfill, one would be the congregational income would be at a certain level and the apportionment going out the national church would always be sacrosanct. They also expected that the national church would support them in such a manner that their mission and ministry within each of those jurisdictions would be able to go forward with a lot more ownership on the part of the membership, because of the money coming directly to them and the national church giving them the responsibility to be caretakers of their own budgeted incomes; so that began to happen.
The annual meetings of the coalition were rather incredible really. Every diocese made a presentation to the total body, this was a group -- the annual meeting was made up of bishops, clergy, and lay people -- usually two or three representatives from each jurisdiction in addition to the bishop. They would make presentations on what their plans were for the coming year, often they moved toward five-year vision statements, but at the annual meeting they would give an accounting of what funds they had in the years past, what they had done with the money, what was happening in terms of the budgetary accountability. A lot of jurisdictions had their own kind of secret fund accounts. The bishops would have quite large discretionary funds that were often used for all kinds of purposes, but it was usually used at the direction of the bishop only. There was nothing shady about that but they were funds that were not known by many other people, so one of the rules that coalition made that there would be no secret funding, that what they asked for and what they got from the national church would be the essential budgeted income for their mission purposes within that jurisdiction. There was some leeway made for bishops and other executives within the diocese to have some discretionary use of the moneys but that had to be reported and that had to be accounted for. It leveled the playing field in terms of what money was available for the dioceses, or for the missionary districts at that time, and it was a growing kind of partnership within the coalition that provided for a lot of ingenuity and creativity. People began to respond more to the mission that church, because they began to own it more.
Presentations were made at the annual meeting and then there was a budget and finance committee that would listen to all of the data, all of the discussion and then they would come back to the annual meeting a few days after the presentations were made with recommendations as to what each of the dioceses should be allotted. There was open discussion about their recommendations. Often their recommendations were accepted at face value, but there were other times where there were long debates about whether or not certain moneys that were being asked for were going to be put to the kind of use that people could affirm. There were also times where people said you’re not asking for enough, that there were possibilities that various jurisdictions for mission purposes that needed more funding. At times, the annual meeting would end up funding more than what the people came with their asking's. I think the great value was, probably the friendships that began to form in those days and the trust that began to build. The interaction that began to occur, not just at the annual meeting, but through the year of jurisdictions coming together, various interest groups, various ways of conducting the business of the church. There was a lot more coalescing going on, and a lot more collaboration.
Locally, the principles that were employed by Coalition 14 were put to use in each of these jurisdictions and in some way or another. Eastern Oregon, I think we had a base budget support for congregations that was probably around $130,000-$140,000, that we could allocate. Originally that was done essentially by a small group of people and certainly passed by diocesan council, but we instituted what we called the Coalition of Congregations, which met annually and we followed pretty much the same format that the Coalition 14 followed at the annual meeting. We would have congregations do an in depth analysis of what was going on in their communities and do some good planning and then they would come to this meeting and prepare to ask for a certain amount of money to augment their mission budget. We would all be around the table, every congregation in the diocese was expected to attend that meeting, not just those that were asking for money, but those who were self-supporting were expected to be there as well.
I must say that the generosity and the goodwill of people in that collaborative effort was amazing. That all of the sudden, it wasn’t a top-down, a kind of divvying out of various funds, but it became a collaborative energy on the part of the entire diocese that reaped a lot of rewards from that kind of creativity and trust.
Matt: What was your involvement in the planning of MRI and C-14?
Rustin: Well, I was a parish priest during the sixties and seventies, but I was appointed to the Executive Council of the National Church in 1969 when the priest delegate by the name of Bill Spofford was elected bishop of Eastern Oregon at that time, so he had to resign his seat on the executive council because it was a priest spot and I was appointed at that time to fill that place. Then at the Houston General Convention that occurred the following year, in 1970, I was elected to a full term of six years on the executive council. Well, the executive council had a lot to do with the Coalition 14 business, so I was privy to a lot of what was going on at the national level, but I was also asked to be a part of the meeting in Colorado in 1971 and was at the table when the architects of all of this really started to sharpen their pencils and began to strategize and bring this into some kind of fruition.
Matt: What were the implications of this kind of organization in 1970?
Rustin: Well, the Episcopal Church operates pretty much as an organism that has separate entities, kind of like states. These dioceses are pretty independent, they have their own ways of worshiping and their own ways of thinking, strategizing and doing mission work. There a lot of similarities, we’re certainly bonded by the Book of Common Prayer and how we orchestrate our worship and the customs and the ways in which we’ve constituted ourselves, our rules and orders and so forth; there’s a lot of overlap there, but dioceses can be side-by-side, but not have a lot of interaction. Western Oregon and Eastern Oregon, two separate jurisdictions since 1907, it was possible to live out a whole year without any kind of communication between the two jurisdictions except probably through the two bishops. So, Coalition 14 was a drastic change from that, the isolation that was so common in the Episcopal Church, we really cut into that and said that we are our brother’s keepers, we have a responsibility to support one another, and also to challenge one another and to say we believe that when people are falling down in a certain area of potential mission that we need to step up and ask what can we help you to do that? That began to happen certainly in the coalition and I think that it had an impact and we began to think of ourselves in different ways in terms of being a church.
Matt: In what ways?
Rustin: We weren’t as concerned about just our own turf, just our own kind of independence, but rather we began to think more broadly in terms of what is our responsibility in helping one another be better vessels of the gospel, so that was huge.
Matt: Right, and you said that there was also an attempt to encourage a discussion of equal rights, in order to get more input from voices that had not been heard.
Rustin: That’s right. I think there’s a definite line of progress from the time we began to act like that, be more collaborative, and be together more often, not just for retreats and spiritual moments which we had exchanged some of those kind of events in the past, but rather the hard work of deciding where we stood on certain issues and how we were going to plan for mission projects. All of that kind of collaboration around the issues by clergy and lay people sitting down at the same table, I think there’s a direct line from that to being more concerned about race issues, about gender issues, about what was the role of women. The first major thing that was being talked about in the sixties was the revision of the Book of Common Prayer and that took years and years of study and debate and arguing. It was a great time, since we got the new prayer book in 1979; I kind of miss those arguments, I kind of miss the cutting edge of debate around you know what is appropriate in terms of our prayer life and our worship life and what are the hymns that are helpful and what are the ones that ought to be taken out, forgotten about.
Matt: So, you’re saying the MRI and C-14 really facilitated that discussion.
Rustin: Exactly. It is just a common thread from 1961 to 1976. For instance, when we voted on the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church, I don’t think, without the Toronto Congress, the Mutual Responsibility document and living into that in such a manifestation as Coalition 14; I don’t think the Episcopal Church would have moved as they did, not just in terms of their own infrastructure, like the ordination of women, but we became very, very involved with societal issues, particularly race. Like all Christian churches, and most organizations, we had a checkered history with the issue of race, so those were huge growing years for us and for our country as well and we were impacted by the sixties. That decade was an incredibly volatile, dangerous time. It was also a time of really opening up and of society beginning to pay more attention to things that had been taken so much for granted. I have a lot of time now to reflect about my life and about the life of the church before my time and what might be the life of the church after my time; that I don’t have a lot of perspective about, but I am grateful for the opportunity to have lived when I did, and to have been a part of the conversations when I did and the turmoil and the angst and the conflict that the church and our society went through was more privilege than not, and it was very grace-filled. There was a lot of remarkable people, courageous people. We never would have had Desmond Tutu come to Ascension School had it not been for what we’ve been talking about. We wouldn’t have known him and even if we had known of him, there probably would not have been any kind of relationship and I probably would not have met him.
Matt: Let’s step back and look at the broader picture again, especially regarding MRI and how that became C-14. I’m curious to know what you think about this quote from Samuel Van Culin's article on the Project Process: It's Character and Value from April 26, 1967: “MRI was not a discovery of the Anglican Communion, it is a fact of our own life"...furthermore, "the project is the means by which a program or plan of action is made visible”.
Rustin: I think that’s accurate. I think what they’re trying to say is that it didn’t invent the communion itself, that there already was a structure and a history out there that simply needed some new life, some new vision, and that came. I mean, the kind of relationships between national, well they call it provinces, in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church of the United State is a province and Canada is as well as West Africa and Uganda. Those 42 provinces essentially acted pretty independently and they were all products of colonialism too. They were all products of England, which did a lot of things right, but it still did a lot of things that were very colonial in nature.
Matt: How would you define “colonial”?
Rustin: Well, I would say a super-imposing of one culture onto another, not always through war and armaments, often as England did; it was through economies, but still the bottom line was often the same and that was that one culture was subjugated to the other. That was the way mission was done. A great book is a book called Christianity Rediscovered and it’s by a guy named Vincent Donnovan who was a Roman Catholic Priest in Tanzania for 17 years with the Maasai people. We had him at Cove, at Ascension School. He was there not many years after Desmond was there. He talked about what it meant to be a Catholic Priest going to the Maasai many of who had been converted to Roman Catholicism over the past 50-60 years. He told a story…he gave a long regiment of education of baptism to the Maasai people. He said that his strategy was that he would teach his course and when he though the people were ready to be baptized, then they would have a mass-baptism in the river. Several months went by and finally he went to the chief and he said, I think we’re ready, people have responded well, except, three are three people who will not be baptized. The chief asked, what has happened? Vincent said, well they just don’t seem to get it, they don’t seem to be interested and when I inquire about their religious faith, they come up a bit short, so they can wait until they’re ready. The chief looked at Vincent and said, then we’ll all wait. Vincent said, well, what do you mean? The chief said, well you talk about family, the Maasai is family, and if we’re going to become Christian’s, this tribal unit will do that together. We’ll not leave anyone behind. So, they were all baptized. Vincent kind of relaxed and sat back and knew the truth of what the chief was saying and he acquiesced. That was a good indication of the culture who had been converted by another culture, teaching the first culture something about Christianity that had they had lost.
Matt: That goes back to the notion of unification which has been one of the driving forces of the Christian movement since its inception.
Rustin: That’s right, exactly. The value of that story is that we all have something to teach one another. I can remember the original document of MRI that for centuries, some of has been “giving” churches, and the other have been “receiving” churches. That has set up a kind of relationship that is skewed, that it’s not equal. The point of the document was that if we are in Christ in a way that is at all meaningful, there aren’t any just givers or just receivers. We all need to be involved in giving and receiving, and that we need to learn from one another. Western Europeans and American’s, we need to listen more. We need to listen more to those people who have often been what we call our children and not treat them like children, but as mature people who have a wisdom that we probably have not even heard of yet, and we need to hear it. When you were talking about unity, it reminded me, that the whole ecumenical movement was greatly impacted by MRI and I think the ecumenical movement impacted MRI too. In the fifties and the early sixties, certainly with the advent of John 23, and the Vatican Council, that inter-faith dialogue and having new understandings of one another, denominations and faith communities outside of Christianity. We had predispositions and stereotypes about them that were not very helpful, so the more we talked…you know when I was young in the priesthood, I remember Gretchen and I hosted and were part of a group that went around to various homes of what we called “living room dialogues”. It was wonderful immersion into understanding the faiths of other denominations and the various people making up the group would be affected to give some kind of dissertation about what some of their core beliefs are, and we would have that conversation. It was so rich and so helpful, we don’t do that much anymore. Is that getting at what you were asking?
Matt: Yes, thank you, that’s definitely getting at the heart of it. With this article, I’m focusing on some of the broader themes of MRI and C-14. Culin's article on The Project Process, also talked about how MRI, as a project, was an "introduction of the means by which diocese’s, who were not only contiguous to each other but drawn together by common regional concerns, began to expose their lives to each other, began to look at their communities together and began the difficult process of establishing their own priorities in obedience to their common mission as they saw it". What is your response?
Rustin: Well, a lot of that happened, like I told you, by the meetings, the annual meetings of the Coalition 14 and also in our local constituents, gathering with the Coalition of Congregations.
Matt: Right, and I’m also curious to know more about how this was achieved at the parish level.
Rustin: Well, I think that those people who were involved, say within the Coalition of Congregations in the dioceses, they would bring back that message of what it means to be collaborative and to have the courage and the wisdom to know how to listen and how to confront; that the whole matter of being able to be honest within a community of faith was just so important, and that again, cut against a lot of mores and values that a lot of us had been living into for decades as a priest, as a “father knows best”. The authority of the church really stopped with the priest, that the vestries were needed to be seen as responsible for some of the finances. For all the rest of it, they probably needed to be advisory more than proactive. Well, that’s not why vestries exist. The vestry are a balancing tip for the leadership of the church, and they certainly need to be supportive of their priest, and advise in appropriate ways, but they also need to take on their share of the responsibility of the decisions. They do so by listening to one another, including their priest. That gets all fouled up, really pretty easily, as Anna probably could tell you. Any priest can.
Matt: That makes sense. It’s important that congregations and vestries work through these issues together.
Rustin: It’s a circular issue. The more we experience the kind of collaborative effort of learning to listen and that was high on our priority in Eastern Oregon for years and years, we had workshops just on listening. We used a book that was written by a husband and wife team that I knew in seminary, the Farnhams. Suzanne Farnham became a lightning rod nationally. Listening Hearts, that was the name of the book. She was responsible for thousands of those books, generating all kinds of discussions in congregations about the value of listening.
I think there’s a lot of strength that comes from collaboration and it’s a different kind of strength, then is derived from top-down leadership. I think when people have some sense of a stake in the decisions, they may not even be very articulate at times but if they’ve been present and felt they’ve been listened to, and felt that they had some input into a process, I think they’re more alive. I think it’s just human nature, that if they feel valued then they feel like they’re voice is important and not determinative, but important to the process. I think their own inner faith and their own willingness to move forward with mission in their own lives is strengthened.
Stay tuned for Part Two of this interview with the Rt. Rev. Rustin Kimsey