Jesus and his disciples were together in a boat one day on the Sea of Galilee, when “a storm of wind came down on the lake, and they were filling with water, and were in danger” (Luke 8:23). Maybe the seasoned fishermen among them argued for a bit about how to turn the sail or if rowing on the right side or the left was the safest plan. Voices were raised, egos bruised, and for a few moments, the disciples seemed to be making things worse.

But then they turn to Jesus: “Master, Master, we are perishing!” Saint Luke continues, “And he awoke and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; and they ceased, and there was a calm.” Expertise, procedural rectitude, rhetorical flair — all these were useless. Only Jesus could help.

The small boat of the Episcopal Church feels exposed on the windswept sea on the eve of our 81st General Convention. We are in a period of profound unsteadiness. Recent moves to consolidate dioceses are resourceful decisions, but they also make the reality of decline more vivid. Despite many creative projects, our numbers continue to fall sharply. We are closing more churches than we can plant. Zoom church was not the cure-all it may have seemed three years ago, and it’s harder to make our message known in a time of such shrill polarization, within and outside the church.

Squabbling and disorganization have set in. The president and vice president of the House of Deputies are not on speaking terms, and now challenge each other for the top post. Executive Council and Church Center staff squabble over appointment processes and divisions are found between and betwixt them. Many complain that our clergy discipline system (Title IV) is unfair or unwieldly. But there is not widespread agreement about problems or potential solutions. The work that task forces and standing commissions were able to accomplish in only about a year is uneven. At least one crucial working group, charged with sorting out the chaos of our various liturgical rites, was never appointed at all.

In light of all these struggles, the bloated size of General Convention and its bureaucracy looks more and more silly and insulates many of us from the stark reality on the ground and the necessity of returning to basics: the person and work of Jesus; the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and salvation; the source and summit of the Holy Eucharist; confession and forgiveness; care and service to the vulnerable and needy.

Doing the church’s work by our own methods clearly isn’t working. “Master, Master, we are perishing!” We have no other hope than this. To whom else could we go? It is only our Lord who has the words of eternal life.

In at least a few corners of the boat, that seems to be already happening. The search committee wisely called for a Presiding Bishop who would help us speak with care to a world of violence, inequality, and division, while facing our weaknesses in sharing and teaching the faith. “We have discerned that the church faces a challenge of adapting to our current reality,” the committee wrote, and called for a leader who can help us reorder our structures and priorities to use our resources more wisely.

The Holy Spirit has moved five people to offer themselves for this task. Each of them has weathered storms in the dioceses they now lead, learning to call upon the Lord in their times of crisis. All of them bring gifts we need, all love the whole church, none is angry or polarizing. They know that the future must include a commitment to being a big-tent church. We pray for God’s clear direction in this weighty decision.

The Task Force on Communion Across Difference, a group equally composed of those who hold traditional and inclusive understandings of marriage, has developed solutions to help our church flourish across this deep divide, which sets Christians against each other in nearly every church in the West. Our editor-in-chief hasbeen a part of the task force’s work in this triennium.

The task force’s proposals secure continued access to our current Book of Common Prayer in the face of inevitable revision. They deal with the emerging problem of weaponizing the Title IV process against theological conservatives, and they create assurances about access to discernment for ordination, call processes and canonical residency for all clergy, ensuring that the agonies that attended the consent process for the Diocese of Florida’s bishop election won’t be repeated. The proposals emerge from patient listening, mutual respect, and sincere love, and we pray for their success.

Several other promising proposals before General Convention would help our church “adapt to our present reality.” Resolutions proposed by four of our strongest dioceses urge a gradual reduction in assessments to the Church Center to keep funds where they can best foster local mission. Some practical fixes to the denominational health plan would ensure more equitable access while also lowering costs to parishes. A series of rule changes should help the House of Deputies act as a more deliberative body by limiting the number of issues that can be discussed constructively in the time we have together.

Perhaps most hopefully of all, General Convention will begin for the first time with a revival, a signature Michael Curry event. Together, we will call on Jesus for help — the Name our Presiding Bishop has restored to our vocabulary. We will pray to heal our relationships and focus us on things that really matter. May he rebuke the winds and the raging waves, so that our little boat may be filled with his peace, and we might witness with clarity to his death and resurrection and to the power of a life grounded in Holy Scripture and the Sacraments of the New Covenant.

Our work did not, of course, take place in a vacuum. Last fall, amid some highly publicized cases of alleged misconduct involving bishops, both the President of the House of Deputies, Julia Ayala Harris, and Presiding Bishop Michael Curry asked the standing commission to examine Title IV as it pertains to bishops. The new, churchwide court also has spent many hours working on the first appeal of a case. The court resolutions are a response to what the group learned in that work, particularly in places where additional clarity would assist in implementing the canons.

The makeup of these two bodies is significant, as bishops are far from the majority in both groups that drafted these resolutions. The standing commission comprises five bishops, five other clergy, and ten laypersons. The court consists of three bishops, six other members of the clergy, and six laypersons, as well as one alternate in each of these groups.

To hear the voices of the broader church, the standing commission sent out a survey in October of last year. More than 150 people responded, and the standing commission was further informed in bringing resolutions to the Convention that address the issues identified in the canons. An important point in this work was clear in the statement the standing commission made in inviting participation in the survey: “The issues we face arise in part because of the language and structure of Title IV. They arise as well from the manner in which the church implements these canons, the tension between transparency to build trust and confidentiality to protect participants, and the culture of the wider church.”

The canons related to the discipline of bishops are largely identical to those for other members of clergy, so most of the changes proposed in the resolutions relate to the discipline of all deacons, priests, and bishops. The resolutions submitted by the standing commission would change the canons that relate solely to the discipline of bishops in at least two significant ways. The first is to change the composition of the Disciplinary Board for Bishops so that bishops are not a majority of that body or of any conference panel or hearing panel drawn from that board.

The second change relating solely to bishops is to create closer parity with the discipline of other clergy in a suspension. Any suspension of a bishop lasting longer than six months would mean the termination of the pastoral relationship, unless a diocese’s Standing Committee, by two-thirds vote, asks of the Disciplinary Board for Bishops within 30 days that the relation continue and the Disciplinary Board for Bishops approves the request. In the case of any bishop provisional, a suspended bishop’s pastoral relationship would end without needing a vote of the diocesan convention, as currently required.

Beyond this, the changes to all matters of discipline would have an effect on concerns raised about cases involving a bishop. Two key examples are the role of the church attorney and a change in who may serve as an intake officer. In the proposed changes, the church attorney may not act unilaterally, but when declining to advance a case will be required to set out reasons for that decision and require others in the Title IV process to accept or reject that decision.

In the case of intake officers, the proposed changes specify that a bishop may not serve in this role. As Presiding Bishop Curry appointed a priest to that role, this would not create a change but would continue the practice of not having a bishop be the first person to receive complaints of misconduct by colleagues in the House of Bishops.

Additional related changes proposed in the resolutions would create timelines requiring a prompter response, as well as greater accountability in reporting any decisions to those who made the complaint. This timeliness and transparency are critically important to restoring trust in how we handle reports of misconduct by any member of the clergy.

Canons alone will never solve problems. Living into our disciplinary rules must always answer this question: “What does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?” The process will not always be easy, yet if we can ground this work in that ethos, the proposed changes will go further toward our being the just church for which we all long.

This overview of the proposed Title IV changes reflects Bishop Logue’s opinion on the work and does not speak for either body that submitted the resolutions.

This is the last article in a series of tributes to Presiding Bishop Curry, as published in the May 26 edition of The Living Church.

When I first became president of the House of Deputies, I imagined that my interactions with the Presiding Bishop would be somewhat formal, usually conducted in offices or conference rooms and accompanied by staff, chancellors, and official memos and reports.

I did not anticipate early morning FaceTime conversations about the Buffalo Bills and America’s Got Talent, or the relative merits of various brands of hot sauce. But from 2015 until 2022, the years that Michael Curry and I served together, that’s often how it went. Whether the issue at hand was big or small — and we faced some big ones as we led through a global pandemic — Michael’s love of laughter and unsurpassed skill at building relationships allowed us to navigate difficult situations, and even some disagreements, with good humor and affection. He knew, and he helped me know, that in the end our shared love for both Jesus and the church would see us through.

Michael loves deeply. He loves Jesus and his family most of all, of course, but his love of life makes him an evangelist not only for the gospel, but also for Bit-O-Honey candy, cheesy videos of small children singing with big voices on reality television, his beloved Bills, and Tarheel basketball. During our years in ministry together, he won me over to AGT, but was never bitter that I remain an unregenerate Cleveland Browns and Syracuse basketball fan. I think he was gracious in defeat because he is a generous and loving soul, but perhaps it was because I sent him boxes of Bit-O-Honey, which, to his sorrow, cannot be bought in Raleigh.

In fact, Michael loves so deeply that his love has changed our church. He has spent his ministry as presiding bishop proclaiming the power of love, because he truly believes that love is so deep and broad that it can change the world and each of us. As our chief evangelism officer, he has helped us learn to articulate our faith more clearly, to proclaim with him the power of God’s transformational and unconditional love for humankind and for all of creation. We Episcopalians talk about Jesus more easily than we did nine years ago, thanks to Michael, and when he asks us to imagine a world in which sacrificial, redemptive love is the way, we can more easily imagine what it would mean for us to become that Beloved Community.

When I was president of the House of Deputies, I was often called on to speak immediately following Michael, and I joked that it was the least enviable role in Christendom. But the truth is that I was lucky, because people who have just been bathed in the love of Jesus and Presiding Bishop Michael Curry are nearly always a happy and generous crowd. Michael loves so deeply and so persuasively that he has made us all love better than we used to, and that legacy of love will bless our church for generations to come.

This is one of a series of tributes to Presiding Bishop Curry, as published in the May 26 edition of The Living Church.

Presiding Bishop Curry’s winsome and wise leadership in inspiring, inviting, and authentically inclusive. In a world of cynical and sour leaders, the Holy Spirit has used Bishop Michael’s innumerable gifts to turn no into yes, can’t do into can do, will never work into let’s give it try, and I would think twice before attempting that into watch this.

For the first time in a long season, we have had a Presiding Bishop whose global appeal authentically and lovingly embraced left and right, Republican, Democrat and Independent, liturgically high and low, progressive, evangelical, revisionist, conservative, and all in-betweens. Like our Lord, when many told him “not to sup with them,” he resisted the call of whitewashed tombs who reveled in divisiveness and exclusion. He instead lived the words “Do not the sick need a doctor?” (Matt. 9:12) — placing no restrictions on defining the sick and no parameters on the circles of love that he drew around each person he encountered.

While my wife, Laura, and I have shared many special moments with our Presiding Bishop, one that stands out above all occurred during what was perhaps the most public moment in my years as a priest — officiating and preaching at the state funeral for the 41st President, lifelong Episcopalian George H.W. Bush, at Washington National Cathedral. The bishop and I were waiting in line with one another to greet the former and current Presidents and First Ladies. After all the powerful leaders had greeted us and shook our hands and moved to their seats, the Presiding Bishop said, “Come with me.”

He took me a few steps away and said, “I want to pray for you.” He made the sign of the cross on my forehead, held his hands on my head and offered an earnest prayer. He said “Amen” in that deep, rich voice, and then looked me in the eyes and said, “Now go preach the gospel, my brother.” In a sense, he freed me, in that prayer, from worrying about what others might think, and instead reminded me of the primacy of honoring our Lord and our faith. It is one of the few things I remember from that extraordinary day, and I will take it to the grave.

Bishop Michael Curry has shown us throughout his entire season of leadership how to preach the gospel — both in his powerful words, and perhaps even more in his powerful ways. For that we are all indebted to him, and we should all be grateful. May God bless Bishop Michael and the love of his life, Sharon — and all whom they love, and give them great joy in the years that unfold after his retirement.

Throughout the years I have known Bishop Michael, first as Bishop of North Carolina and then as Presiding Bishop, I have stood in awe of his giftedness as a preacher, his ability to call people to follow Jesus and take up his Way of Love in a way that they can truly hear and embrace. But even more, I have been touched to see him live the words he proclaims, sharing that love with every person he meets.

In the months and years that followed that “small chapel wedding,” as he has often described it, my colleagues and I have witnessed countless people approach him, in a restaurant or on the street or in an airport terminal, wanting to thank him for his message, and usually wanting to take a selfie as well. Every time, without exception, Bishop Michael focuses all his attention on that person, showing through his respect and care as much as through his words that the individual before him is a beloved child of God.

Like others who have known him well, I can also say that I have enjoyed the privilege of laughing with Bishop Michael. In my office, I have a framed photograph of the two of us on a boat moving along Hong King’s Victoria Harbour, laughing at who knows what. There is a joy in him that reminds me of other great faith leaders, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. You cannot be with Bishop Michael without a smile making its way across your face.

But make no mistake: like Tutu and other heroes of his, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero and especially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop Michael is earnest about the task before him, to work boldly and unapologetically for justice and peace in our world, to love and serve all God’s children. In A Case for Love, the recent documentary inspired by Bishop Michael’s teachings and witness, he says, “We were made for each other. And I believe we were also made for the God who made us. And that’s the ultimate community: all of us together and the God who made us.”

What, then, do I wish for Bishop Michael as he finishes his work as our Presiding Bishop and looks ahead toward a new phase of life and ministry? Using his own words, “God love him, God bless him, and may God hold him in those almighty hands of love.”