The Diocese by The Numbers: Prelude to 2016

Well, I discovered in check a few parishes last night that R&S has (mostly) put up new charts. I say "mostly" because, as was the case last year, South Carolina's diocese chart is missing, and it appears that St. Savior at St. John the Divine in NYC has been bad and didn't report numbers this year, because there's no change in their chart.

In good news, it looks like replacing the dean at National Cathedral is continuing to pay off in increased attendance: ASA is up 20% from its 2014 low. Grace Church Brunswick also continues to climb, though we'll have to see how things go now that Anjel Scarborough is moving to a new parish. Other than that, the news tends to be lackluster performance in all directions. For the national church I'll be waiting for the tables, but spot checking shows that dioceses tend to be showing slight declines, with Nevada again the conspicuous exception; Maryland, however, is showing the increase we were promised a year earlier, and Washington may also have posted a small increase, so it's possible that this may be the first year in a while that the church as a whole doesn't post a 3% loss. I'll have to go through all the parishes again to see where the Maryland increase came from but I can tell you that my home parish was not one of those contributing.

2017 will be a Christmas year for ASA, so if we get better numbers this year, we might get two years of apparently good news in a row. Or at least, perhaps not consistently bad news.

The Diocese by the Numbers: Next Door

I have run some of the same analyses on the Diocese of Washington, and have come up with some quite surprising results: although some of the aggregate numbers are similar, the details are almost entirely different.

Let's start with some geography, and then some history. The diocese of Washington was carved out of the Diocese of Maryland because what at its peak was over two hundred parishes (and probably close to it, back in the day) is way too much for one bishop to administer. (Easton, the eastern shore portion, was split off much sooner, I would guess due to travel issues during the Civil War.) Back then, both dioceses had an urban core surrounded by a great sea of rural space, but this similarity was deceptive, and the evolution of both the city and especially the suburbs would lead to very different social contexts for the two.

Washington, now, consists of a central mass of urban density wrapped by a blanket of outer suburbs that fades to nothing on the south side, and bracketed by two very different rural areas. The Western end is like Diocese of Maryland territory, with a mixture of farm and outer suburbs and a sprinkling of late Vicky carpenter gothic town churches. The southern one contains the oldest settlements in the state and is served by scattered chapels of ease, mostly Georgian in style. The diocese also contains the black heartland of the state. Maryland by contrast has a large rural western area which is isolated, very white, and Appalachian more than farm rural, and the built-up urban area is much smaller, but also poorer. Howard (in the diocese of Maryland) and Montgomery (in Washington) are at the top of the income pyramid in the entire country, but Montgomery is much larger, and over a third of it is essentially city, whereas Howard has no truly urban area at all (Columbia being, when all is said and done, an experiment in making a really large subdivision). Economically, DC and its suburbs have waxed and waxed, while Baltimore has waned.

In the orthodoxy wars, the two dioceses were both focal points, but with very different issues, policies, and outcomes. The big story in DC, of course, was the fight over imposing Jane Dixon on several conservative parishes; the diocese won, in the end, and I don't know of any parishes which left all or in part. Maryland, on the other hand, was a focus of resistance, as symbolized in the Baltimore Declaration, but also as realized in the departure of two parishes and the riving of St. Peter's Ellicott City, which has suffered through other crises since and is only now, perhaps, showing signs of recovery.

And then, of course, there is the National Cathedral, which shows something else about DC: it has big destination parishes.

So, enough prelude, and on to the music. Washington also shows ASA loss through the decade, but not to the same degree: 23% to Maryland's 27%. It lost fewer parishes as well, three to Maryland's ten, though in the latter case there were actually twelve losses and two missions started. I don't have information on whether any of the Washington parishes started in this time frame, but there's nothing to suggest that any did. Now, the cathedral, in 2005, accounted for more than 10% of diocesan ASA, so when it is excluded, the two dioceses have close to comparable attendance, with Washington running about 2,000 larger at both ends of the decade. But the cathedral's attendance tanked starting in 2012, which perhaps not coincidentally is when Gary Hall arrived as dean, so that attendance in 2015 was about two-thirds that in 2005. The rest of the parishes declined, in the aggregate, 21%.

In the midst of this, another number stands out: parishes in Washington are just bigger. I didn't go through the work needed to get specific numbers for each parish, so I cannot give a median, but the mean parish in Washington (ignoring the cathedral) had an ASA of 163 in 2005 and 135 a decade later; Maryland's average parish started smaller (113) and shrunk more, to say nothing of the closures.

Staffing is another area where there are conspicuous differences. Washington doesn't do permanent deacons, and thus I found a single deacon listed in the entire diocese. I didn't keep track of associate positions, but I did some of the same analysis for rectors and priests-in-charge that I did for Maryland, and found strikingly different patterns. Maryland, recall, has a lot of home-grown priests and many cases where the newly-ordained stepped directly into being the sole priest in a parish. Neither pattern obtains in Washington: half as many rectors in Washington were ordained in that diocese, and only five went directly from being ordained to running a parish. (One of the latter was ordained in Maryland by, yes, Eugene Sutton.) Beyond that, Washington rectors represent a wider range of dioceses, with the more conservative dioceses better represented (which is to say, at all): Two were ordained by Duncan in Pittsburgh; one from Salmon in South Carolina. But then there is not a lot of commonality between the lists for the two dioceses: the total number is about the same, but only eleven show up in both lists, and other than the two home dioceses, only Virginia has more than one in both lists, no doubt due to the bishop there accosting VTS graduates. Only five parishes were in transition (I think-- there was one person whose peregrinations greatly confused this) as compared to three times the number in Maryland.

And then there is money. I have recently come across this table which is particularly interesting, as it reports non-P&P income, such as endowments. The range in the latter is extreme: ignoring Navaholand, which gets major support from the national church, on the one end we see New York in which P&P accounts for just under half of total revenue, and at the other Upper South Carolina, where P&P accounts for 95%. Now, the cathedral again undoubtedly skews Washington numbers, considering that out of P&P of $33M, it supplies $2M; I have no idea how much it skews endowment income but the contribution must be substantial. Nonetheless, again, in nearly every way Washington is more prosperous than Maryland: people give more, the pledges are larger, and the non-P&P income is larger; and all of this is spread across fewer parishes with more attendees. The only place were Maryland comes out ahead is in the plate, where the average attendee gives $371 a year versus $319 in Washington. One is tempted to assume this reflects the basic prosperity of the two regions.

The Diocese by the Numbers: Clergy

Let me say first off that this is largely going to be about rectors, vicars, and priests-in-charge, mostly because only twenty out of 104 parishes have more than one priest, though nineteen have a deacon (with some overlap with those with assisting clergy). I also counted associated retired clergy as best I could; these tended to be concentrated in a few parishes, and I'm pretty sure the list of supply clergy would add to that considerably.

Collecting data was a bit of an adventure; mostly I worked through parish websites, but resorted to the Parish Finder when I came upon a website that didn't say who the rector was. The diocesan parish finder is very good, featuring a Google-maps-enabled list that was easy to use. Every parish has a website; the diocese saw to that a long time back, but some are more forthcoming than others. The parish finder, however, has a lot of trouble with handling the problem cases, because of various naming inconsistencies, and in a number of cases I was forced to list all parishes in the Baltimore area and go through them by zip code.

Once I had the name of a priest, the clergy finder usually came up with a date for the current position, and ordination date, bishop and diocese. Usually. Finding people was made somewhat annoying because the search could not deal with dashes, periods, or apostrophes in the name anywhere; the flip side was that once I got those out, the search was very aggressive and generally found the person right away, and eventually I was able to find everyone. That didn't always mean I found good information: sometimes position data wasn't recorded, and for priests received or transferred I could not tell where they came from, though in half the cases I could get some idea from the parish website.

I counted people as follows: everything was based on the present head of the parish except that if someone had been named rector but not yet assumed the position, I still counted them. The alternative was a significant bump in the interim numbers, which I didn't see as helpful. I recorded the date they came, their ordination date, and the ordaining diocese, and also counted total priests ignoring retired associates, number of deacons, and other associates. Cases where I could not get this info were divided into interims, supply (some parishes only use supply priests as a going thing), transfers (i.e., not ordained in ECUSA, but this doesn't include those where I could find out where they came from), and no info at all.

So, the big numbers: of the 104 parishes, four use supply priests, twelve are in transition, and three I had no info on; three were transfers from unknown dioceses. That leaves 83 parishes where I had data on the principal priest. And here is where Maryland starts to look interesting: 38 of those were priested in the diocese, sixteen of them since Sutton's consecration. His hands must be burning.

What is more striking is that at least fifteen priests seem to have come into rectorship directly from ordination, including two cases where they were ordained after they took charge of a parish. There are five more who took a rectorship within two years of ordination. There appear to be some 4-5 cases where someone was ordained specifically for a particular parish. Median years from ordination to a parish charge is seven; the mean is much higher mostly due to a few very long-serving priests.

A similar pattern is seen when we look at tenure, in which we can see those few long-timers directly:

In fact the second and fifth longest tenures belong to a married couple, serving out in western Maryland, but they are quite exceptional: the median tenure is six years, and the vast majority of priests got their positions under Sutton. I cannot say whether this represents a change from the past; the large number of transitions suggests that it might be, but as I don't have a good way to get tenures for recent departures, I cannot say.

The priests I can get info on represent a relatively small number of dioceses. Maryland, as I mentioned, accounts for about 40% of the total; twenty-eight other dioceses accounted for the other others, including four outside ECUSA (two in Africa, one each in Canada and the Bahamas). Of those, eight dioceses supplied more than one priest, with Virginia ordaining five. They do not represent a particularly theologically diverse group, although Howe in Central Florida did ordain one, and there are some from generally moderate dioceses (e.g. two from Southern Ohio).

I have no word from Bishop Sutton or from anyone else for that matter about the strategy, but what we are seeing here is an experiment in a clerisy which is relatively inexperienced and locally made. But not necessarily all that young: I have no age statistics, but there is still a lot of "have a career and then get ordained" going on, though associate priests appear to tend young, and female. Women head 37% of parishes with a permanent head, but it's clear that this number is going to climb, and increasingly, prominent parishes are headed by women. How does this compare to other dioceses? Well, in my next post we'll be taking a look at Washington.

The Diocese by the Numbers; Money

Let me start by saying that I have no idea how endowments fit into the money picture. "Plate and Pledge" tends to suggest that endowment income is not included, but if someone knows otherwise, by all means say so in the comments. Here's the thing: if they be included in the numbers about to be discussed, then we're looking at a worst-case analysis; they be excluded, then the will tend to ameliorate the results.

On the diocesan chart, one can see that P&P has hardly changed in a decade, and indeed as we shall see, parishes tend to show something of the same pattern. But there is a wrinkle in that, because, as we saw previously, attendance is almost universally shrinking. What's compensating for this is that those who are staying are giving more, by a factor of about 42%:

That produces the following chart, showing percent change in P&P, both with and without the 42% adjustment. Unadjusted, parishes tend to show a slight increase; adjusted, P&P shows losses.

I should say at this point that I do not know how the adjustment factor compares with inflation over the same period, but it isn't unreasonable to surmise that it reflects increases in attendee income. It is striking how close the adjusted 2005 distribution of P&P per attendee is to the 2015 numbers:

So now we get to the question of money as it relates to parish viability. One might crudely divide parish spending into four parts:

• Keeping lights on
• Keeping the roof up
• Keeping the priest going
• Outreach and charity

Please don't comment on this or that line item I've left out; I said it was crude. Anyway, the diocese does give guidelines for the third item, based upon the size of the parish. So here we have P&P versus attendance, with those guidelines marked:

In this case I have truncated the chart on the right to show only those parishes with ASA of 100 or less, in order to show the smaller parishes in greater detail. The general diagonal trend of the data points continues, rising considerably faster than the guideline trend, so that the bigger parishes are obviously not at financial risk. That's obviously not the case at the low end. The orange line represents the recommended total compensation, and the red line is the lower end of the range they give; the green line marks the border between the lowest and second lowest attendance categories.

Looking at this chart, it's hard to see how any parish with ASA below forty is independently viable; most of them cannot afford even to compensate the priest, much less keep the doors open, without considerable aid from the diocese. With ASA between forty and eighty, the situation is not so dire, but there are a large proportion which lack adequate income. Above eighty, the compensation standards retreat as a threat. OK, so here is where that fits into the larger picture: twenty-four parishes do not have an income sufficient to meet the standards, or somewhat less than a quarter of all parishes. Just looking at ASA, sixty-four parishes have attendance of eighty or less, or 61% of all parishes.

What this means in terms of diocesan finances is that, just to maintain the status quo, there has to be a substantial transfer from the larger, wealthier parishes to the small, even ignoring the possibility of priests working part-time or serving multiple parishes. And the situation is vulnerable to economic deflation on the one hand and further losses on the other.

The Diocese by the Numbers: Attendance

So, having looked at the diocese in the large, in this round we will be looking at parish attendance. For those who are new to these analyses, I reiterate my disregard of the membership numbers, because they are poorly maintained: they tend to change abruptly when a rector leaves because the interim directs someone to clean up the rolls, but as a rule there isn't much of a correlation between membership and attendance. Besides, parishes are dependent upon activity, not mere membership, and ASA is the best gauge of that activity we have.

First, the averages. Parishes tend to the small side: while the mean attendance in 2015 was 92 people on a Sunday, the median attendance was considerably smaller, at 67 attendees, and the largest parish (St. Anne's Annapolis) has ASA of 491, 50 more than the next largest (St. John's Ellicott City). A bit under three quarters of parishes have under a hundred attending on the average Sunday.

The shrinkage in a decade is striking, because it appears almost across the board. First of all, thirteen parishes closed, while only two were started: St. Hilda's, to replace St. Timothy's Catonsville, and Church in the Square, a mission in Baltimore which is too new to appear in the statistics.Working with the others, we find in 2005 a mean ASA of 120 and a median of 88. Now, this is biased by the losses: even considering the size of St. Tim's (it was a pretty big parish as those things go), most parishes which closed did so because they weren't viable, and therefore could be presumed to fall at the low end; it is likely that the averages for all parishes active in 2005 were someone lower than the calculated values. But the message for those that survived is clear: they showed considerable losses.

And indeed, very few parishes showed any gains, and these were all small parishes. Only thirteen parishes had gains, and all of them had ASA under 100; on a percentage basis, all the large gains were in parishes with small enough attendance to where even gaining a single attendee made a substantial difference. Three parishes showed no change, and all the rest showed losses. The pattern of losses is quite different from that of the gains: the biggest parishes tended to have somewhat smaller losses, but even so, excepting the top ten parishes, the losses are spread out evenly across a range up to 60%, and the number four parish (All Saints Frederick) showed a loss of 42%.

And in absolute numbers, the losses in larger parishes dominated gains (note that the losers on top of the axis in this chart):

There is a distinct geographic pattern to the gains: six of the ten parishes showing substantial percentage gains are to the west, with Harriet Chapel Thurmont the only one east of Catoctin Mountain. By contrast, there is little pattern to the losers, but most of the closures were in or near Baltimore, the exception being in or near Frederick. The largest parishes are central, with two exceptions:

• St. Anne’s, Annapolis
• St. John’s, Ellicott City
• Redeemer, Baltimore
• St. Margaret’s, Annapolis
• All Saints, Frederick
• Cathedral of the Incarnation, Baltimore
• St. James’, Lafayette Square (Baltimore)
• Christ Church, Columbia
• St. Martin’s in-the-Field, Severna Park
• St. Thomas, Owings Mills
• St. James, Lothian
• St. John’s, Hagerstown

Again, the smallest parishes show no particular pattern.

While I cannot, with the data I have, show the closed parishes in the various breakdowns, we do know how much attendance these parishes represented. There is a difference of 565 in attendance between the total for diocese reported in 2005 and the sum for the 104 surviving parishes (omitting Church on the Square). The diocese reported 116 parishes in 2005, so the mean ASA for the departures and closures was about 47; together they represented a bit over 4% of the total. The loss of these parishes accounted for over 15% of the total loss, which was %27 of 2005 ASA; but the surviving parishes, themselves, had a 24% decline.

The overall picture is thus negative in almost every way. We are losing parishes, and our parishes are losing people. Unless the pattern changes dramatically, continued losses will lead to continued closures.

In the next post: money.

The Diocese by the Numbers: Prelude

Well, I changed my mind, and I have gone through all the parish charts, so I'm going to take a post or two to run over the diocesan statistics over the past decade (which is to say, from 2005 to 2015).

Before I talk methodology I would like to talk about some of the overall numbers from the diocesan tables. The diocese as a whole has seen losses in numbers characteristic of the church as a whole, with ten years of 3% per annum losses adding up to a loss for the decade of 35%. This includes the loss of fifteen parishes, of which two left and the others closed. One mission started, not counting St. Hilda's, the replacement for St. Timothy Catonsville; it will not post numbers until 2016.

So how do the parish numbers reflect this? Well, ignoring the closures and departures, only eight parishes showed increases in attendance. Parishes tend to run on the small side: there were only eight parishes with attendance over two hundred in 2015. Three parishes showed no change; all of the rest showed declines. Financially, plate and pledge (P&P) shows a consistent trend of a 42% gain per attendee, regardless of parish size; that said, a lot of parishes do not see P&P income sufficient to support a full time priest.

So now, some methodology. I used two main sources: the charts from Research and Statistics, and the diocesan journal, which lists parishes and closure dates, if relevant. I also had at my disposal a listing of current ASA from the diocesan convention. This last was used as a cross check on ASA as calculated from the charts. Now, the charts, as images, present some difficulties leading to some small inaccuracies. I calculated values by (effectively) counting pixels; it was not clear, however, exactly where the zero line was, and the number of people/dollars represented by one pixel varied according to the overall scale. The quality of these numbers was further reduced for ASA because the determining value for overall scale was membership, typically four to six times attendance. Comparison of actual and calculated numbers showed a slight tendency to undercounting, on the order of 1%. There are likewise errors of the same order, aggravated by difficulties in precisely locating the centers of the dots on the chart, for P&P; I had nothing to work with to check parish-by-parish values on this, however.

A more serious problem arises in counting parishes themselves. The numbers I calculated from the convention journal do not precisely correspond to the totals on the Red Book; it appears to be the case that parishes may continue to be counted for several years after their actual closure. The more serious problem is that there are plain errors in the journal, which get worse as one goes backward in time. In looking at parish websites I found one parish which it did not list, for example. It also does not give dates for foundation of parishes; this was less of a problem since very few parishes are newly founded. In the end I found it necessary to cut off counts of parishes at 1960.

The loss of parishes presents another issue: in some respects the numbers for 2005 are distorted because I do not have a source for those parishes which have disappeared from the records. This is ameliorated to some degree for attendance, because the total attendance for the diocese is recorded, and therefore I can work out how much is represented by the missing parishes; for plate and pledge, however, I have nothing. When we look at these numbers, however, it seems to me that this lack is probably not significant.

So let us start with three charts for the diocese in aggregate. The first is that from Research and Statistics:

Here we see the typical decline of a mainstream east coast diocese. And here we have the parishes:

Finally, we have the average attendance per active parish, by year:

This last chart is most significant, because it shows a more serious problem: it's not just closing parishes, but parishes shrinking regardless of closures.

Next we will look at attendance on a parish-by-parish basis.

Parish "Growth"

Lately there has been a trope in this diocese of stories about "growing" congregations. For instance, we have this ENS story joining St. John's Havre de Grace to Resurrection Baltimore; meanwhile we have this upbeat Baltimore Sun piece on St. Peter's Ellicott City.

So let's look at the history of these places, courtesy of Research and Statistics handy charts. The picture they paint isn't terribly upbeat: yes, these parishes show increases, but only if you look at the past few years. Starting with St. John's: ASA in 2005 was about 45, and ASA in 2015 was just under fifty. What we're seeing here may turn into growth in the long run, but what the chart shows is a marginal parish which had a brush with dissolution. Resurrection is a bit harder to puzzle out because the apparent metamorphosis into a Spanish-language mission isn't reflected anywhere that I can see. But there's that chart again, which shows a parish on the verge of extinction transforming into— well, into a marginal parish with negligible income, for with P&P of under $20K the diocese must surely be providing a lot of support.

The situation at St. Peter's is better-documented, not to say notorious. I don't have numbers from before when the rector and a chunk of the congregation went off tot he Antiochians, but ASA in 2015 was roughly two-thirds the 120 or so who attended on an average Sunday in 2005. In the middle the parish nearly came apart, what with internal strife and then the (probably unrelated) murder of one of the outgoing co-rectors. Again, the message is crisis survived rather than a model of growth, for ASA of around 70 is at the low end of viability, though at least their finances are sound enough. Meanwhile, St. John's Mt. Washington (actually a neighborhood in Baltimore) has abandoned its building in favor of the chapel at a nearby retirement community. This is being spun as a positive thing but ASA in the 30-40 range and P&P of $40K and dropping more or less steadily means a congregation that could no longer afford a building and was lucky to find another home.

Here's the ugly truth in this diocese: attendance has dropped, fairly steadily, over a decade, with attendance in 2015 about 73% of what it was in 2005. That parallels the drop in the national church. I'm not going to go through all 100-odd parishes and missions in the diocese, but I have yet to come upon one which has shown significant growth over the period. Some are stable, other erratic, some show declines; and of course, there are the closures.

Another Year in the Sausage Factory

So once again I was a delegate to diocesan convention, this time as an alternate. This year worship tended towards high-and-wide, pretty much straight out of the BCP except for the one spot anyone can guess (it was during Eastertide, so the other spot didn't come up). Musically it was all organ but there were a couple of quite unfamiliar numbers, particularly the opening hymn. If one is going to set Hyfridol, which is probably in the top ten in Episcopal hymnody however one slices it, it behooves one to make a text which is rigorously metrical. And for that matter, please come up with one's own tune, rather than reusing Sine Nomine (another case later on). At least the service music was almost all familiar.

A chart of parochial report data, if it be for 2015, does in fact report positive numbers: ASA of 10,273 compared with 10,256 in 2014. It's less than 0.2% gain, but any gain at all is an achievement after a solid decade of losses. This was against our new assistant bishop Chilton Knudsen's declaration that "ASA is passe." Is that so? The ongoing attempt to pretend that we don't have to take our losses seriously is a painfully destructive denial of reality, particularly considering the lack of interest in why people are leaving on the one had, and the self-congratulatory undertone of how it's the result of purification.

This was reinforced by our speaker, the Very Rev. Mike Kinman, dean of the cathedral in St. Louis, who also preached the eucharist. Between the two addresses, we got a Change sermon and a Social Action sermon. Anyone who has read this blog much knows how I abhor the former, and while there is a place for the latter, we keep coming back to the problem that baptizing people in the Triune name and bringing them into the church just never seems to be a priority, a problem reinforced when Bp. Knudsen blessed in the Modal name. Can't we get over that?

And so, on to the resolutions. I ended up sitting with a group from two churches at the far western end of the state, where even the city parishes are small and parish survival is a big issue. This came up twice in the resolutions, once in the obligatory compensation resolution and the other in a canonical revision which, among other changes, created a formal process for closing a parish from the outside. This, apparently was prompted by a lawsuit, but it was opposed by our table, who were surely concerned that central Maryland standards of viability might not reflect their situation. Another necessary resolution dealt with an amendment to the cathedral by-laws, which apparently we have to be involved in; it went through without comment.

Another inevitability was a alcohol policy resolution, which passed without difficulty. We also got a "let's shame everyone how hasn't gotten their anti-racism training" attempt which was not surprisingly muted to read "don't forget to get your anti-racism training."

The bishop of Puerto Rico was present for the occasion of setting up a companion diocese relationship. I have no idea what these do for anyone but there it is.

A particularly peculiar resolution was one to recommend putting Origen on the calendar. This was obviously way out of the competence of nearly everyone in the room; I could barely handle the materials myself. It's hard to say why this was brought forward, though it's possible his ideas about universal salvation might have prompted this, universalism being very popular now. At any rate it was very difficult for anyone to mount a contrary response, and only one person made a pretty limited attempt.

The big event was the last resolution, which was dealt with parliamentary procedure right out of Lewis Carroll. This resolution proposed that the diocese "give an amount equivalent to at least ten percent of the assets of its unrestricted investment funds to the diocesan chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians (UBE) as an initial act of reparation." We used the same procedure as last year of small table discussion and sending cards back to the resolution writers; for this resolution, however, each table got a representative (I presume from the commission that wrote this) as a facilitator. Mind you, I was sitting next to a retired state trooper from the extremely white and poor west end of the state. The word "privilege" was of course brought out.

The subsequent and irregular handling of the resolution demonstrated how problematic the whole thing was. The resolution specifically set no limits on how the UBE was to use the money, and this is probably what brought on the rewrite to dump the matter on diocesan council for further discussion. This was announced first, then voted; then we were to discuss the matter. Given the constraints this discussion was essentially impossible and therefore next-to-nonexistent, especially since it was the only "business" keeping us from closing up shop. In any case only two people spoke, the first of which pointed out that the original resolution was out of order from the beginning because it lacked certain requisites of a spending resolution. Oh the time this could have saved....

The other speaker foolishly pointed at the elephant in the room. I personally could not see this as anything as a symbolic but ineffective act, and I said so in table discussion. I was not so foolish as to point out the bigger problem: that we are so very deeply out of touch with the lower classes. One clause of the original resolution "encourage[d] all congregations to examine how their endowed wealth is tied to the institution of slavery and consider returning a portion of that wealth as part of this initiative." OK, so the patriarch of my branch of the Wingates is supposed to have emigrated to North Carolina back in the the 1740s, and if you want some slave-generated wealth, consider that "Old Brick" in Columbia had space in the balcony for said slaves. All these years later, though, my father's mother family were workers exploited in the same cloth mills managed by my great-grandfather Wingate; I remember my grandmother's pride in managing to escape the factory floor for the offices. In any event, my parish was started in the 1880s. And my mother was from a broken farm family in Ohio; her grandfather was a Dutch immigrant.

Really, we could liquidate every asset of the diocese and not make a dent in the poverty and suffering of blacks in Maryland, for we have neither the wealth nor the influence. And we talk about the problem as outsiders, all around, when we talk at all. Thus, one person stood up to the microphone and spoke of our lack of interest in poor whites, and how his parish was much more recently founded, and finished by stating that he was not racist. The whole performance was met with embarrassed silence, and that was the end of the discussion.

Diocesan Convention: The Aftermath

I confess to my bishop and my parish that I didn't stay to the bitter end of diocesan convention. I had planned from the start to skip the workshops, seeing as how they were more directed toward clergypersons and others with pastoral duties, and the second day was already interfering with another appointment. I bailed out in the middle of the discussion of the "death with dignity" resolution (about which more later).

The convention eucharist was in fact fairly Anglo-Catholicized, to the point of "big six", smoke, and dropping the RC prayer for the acceptance of the sacrifice in at the offertory; we also dropped the Prayer of Humble Access. It was a bit fussy for my taste, but then A-C often is. The singing (all warhorses from the 1982) was strong and enthusiastic, except that for some reason we did the Meerbecke service, which apparently is unfamiliar enough now (and especially with the 1982 hymnal's musicologist-friendly rhythms) to dampen singing somewhat.

The sermon was more an address than a homily on the text, and I must give credit to Bishop Sutton credit for walking right up to the elephants and acknowledging them all. Indeed, one might think he was reading this blog, although I think if he were reading it he might not have commended Dean Markham's preposterous address on church statistics. Nonetheless the fact of our decline was noted, and moreover seen as something to be addressed.

The main speaker, Becca Stevens of the Magdalene Communities and Thistle Farms, was quite stirring, and if it feels a bit churlish to have to say this, nothing she said had me gnashing my anti-heretical teeth.

As for resolutions, we had an extra slipped into the very back of our convention journals, to authorize appointment of an assistant bishop. This passed readily, allowing Bp. Sutton to announce in his Saturday address that Chilton Knudsen, former bishop of Maine and since assistant in several other dioceses, had been asked to take the position had convention passed the resolution. It's hard to imagine that there is anyone left for whom Bp. Knudsen's gender represents a stumbling block, but her position as one of the official consecrators of Gene Robinson represents either some impressive tone-deafness, or more likely, a calculated statement that theological discussion of sexuality and gender is closed. As to core theological matters, I haven't managed to find significant documentation, but historically, clerics who are aggressive on gender and sexuality have had a bad track record. I suppose I shall just have to see.

Compensation was passed as a matter of routine; regions were rearranged (and taken out of the budget process, not that they had real input before) with one tweak to put all of Baltimore City in a single region. These resolutions and those that follow were put through a preliminary by-table discussion phase which produced cards asking questions and giving comments to be sent back to the resolution proposers. This was supposed to reduce "wordsmithing on the floor"; I think it sort of worked part of the time, but I don't know how well Robert would have countenanced such a thing.

In the case of the anti-fracking resolution the process produced a substitute resolution asking us to tell the governor to sign the moratorium bill that the legislature had already passed, the earlier version of the resolution having been overcome by political events. I sent in a card expressing my opposition to this sort of resolution, but did not rise to express my opposition on the floor. It could also be argued that, as this asked us personally to act, this version passes Scott Gunn's political resolution test. At any rate, it passed. Expect Gov. Hogan's mailbox to explode.

The resolution on, well, something having to do with the Sandtown mess was also heavily reworked, but the resulting resolution now read (freely interpreted) "the situation with the police in Baltimore City is atrocious difficult but we still don't have any idea of what do about it but mouth somewhat revised platitudes." (my alterations in italics) This also passed, though again without my vote.

I left as the deliberations on the "death with dignity" resolution debate got started, with the tone (as I expected) set by one of the first contrary speakers noting that the phrase "is a euphemism for physician-assisted suicide." Instead of getting a resolution to think about the matter, however, I'm told that the matter was tabled, effectively turning it into a resolution not to talk about the matter. The rector told me that he voted against this, because he wished the debate be worked through; I'm guessing that the desire of others beside my self to be elsewhere triumphed over moral debate. I would feel better about it if I had been prepared to offer a thought-out position, but I was not.

And thus we rolled over the diocesan odometer. And if the direction be positive, the indication of this was more a lack of some common negatives. No liturgy was emasculated (though Rite I makes this moot in any case); other than a couple of Romanisms, the liturgical texts were straight from the BCP. Hymns were sung with far more gusto than were praise songs, though unfamiliarity and some definite confusion on the part of the projection squad undoubtedly contributed to that. Bp. Sutton expressed the hope, not entirely explicitly, that the homosexuality controversies were dropping into the past. And yet at the national level I see that the latest round of the same-sex rites hew to the Enriching Our Worship pattern of 1970s radfem deviations and heresies. There was also a strong sense that the diocese was well rid of the dissenters on these issues, which is surely not a positive message for those who hold on. Bp. Knudsen's appointment is a rebuke to any conservative as well. But still, Bp. Sutton radiates a sense of vitality, which may serve the diocese well.

Diocesan Convention: In the Elephant Pen

It surprised both the rector and me that the sole mention of the suffragan mess in the diocesan pre-convention journal is the following entry in the list of standing committee actions: "Requested the resignation of bishop suffragan." Well, and perhaps the announcement in the schedule of two local AA meetings on Friday night might count, though it invites a number of other peculiar interpretations. At any rate, there is nothing else recorded on the matter, and nothing on the schedule except possibly the bishop's address to the convention or a resolution from the floor. This diocese has enough parishes that, with a single bishop, it's hard to arrange a visitation to each in the canonical three years, much less the preferable per annum visit. Even with two bishops we have had to press one of the canons into service as a third visitor, and I at least have no idea what arrangements are to be made; nor has there been word one about electing another suffragan.

Leaving that behind (or trying to, at least, with the word that Cook has been deposed and has resigned), we have the report of the Horizons 2015 group/committee/task-force (it's not immediately clear which title applies). As I appear to be among the 99.95% of laypeople in the diocese who have never heard of this, permit me to list the bullet points of this Great Leap Forward:

• By 2015, in response to the call to proclaim the Good News and make disciples of all nations, the diocese will grow its average worship attendance by 10 percent.
• By 2015, the diocese will have equipped every member of the diocese to express his or her faith story by words and actions.
• By 2015, the diocese will be an agent for transformational change in the State of Maryland and local communities and be recognized as such.
• By 2015, every congregation will have 40 percent of worship attendees of all ages participating in a Christian formation program.
• By 2015, provide every region in the diocese training and strategies for advocating for the poor in education.

Now, as we say in the testing world, only two of these offer any metric for evaluating success. And in the headline goal, we are, as the representative for this effort admits, abject failures. I can do little better than to quote them: "The diocese not only did not grow by 10%, but we lost 9%." But I would add that the last time the diocese saw increase in ASA was the year Before Gene: ASA in 2013 was 70% what it was in 2002. Five parishes were closed since 2009, but more significantly, two parishes left. Mount Calvary was quite small, but St. Timothy's Catonsville was not. Most parishes in the diocese show either slow decline or if they are very small an erratic struggle to survive; nobody shows a steady increase, however slight. We've also been running budget shortfalls for some years, though at least the size of the deficit has been diminishing.

And of course, well, um, religion. I was astonished to pull up the convention booklet today and find that the convention eucharist is going to be Rite I; perhaps there is some hope that the diocese can pull away from the destructive and self-absorbed gender theology of the 1970s. At GC, it appears, we still have much to fight on this, given that all the same-sex rites have options to omit "Father" and "Lord" almost everywhere. A diocesan convention is mostly about business, but perhaps there is hope that the attendees will recall that our first function is religion.

Diocesan Convention: Reports and Resolutions

So I am the lay representative this year for diocesan convention (Maryland), and having looked over the convention journal with the rector and talked strategy, I thought I'd give a few thoughts about it and diocesan business. Now, to me the most interesting stuff is in the supporting material, where there is a lot of informative stuff that the average parishioner is completely blank about. For instance, there is a complete list of parishes, and by "complete" I mean that it includes all the closed an merged parishes too, with dates of demise. There are quite illuminating reports of what the bishop and the standing committee did in the year, and a list of all clergy including ordinations, transfers in and out, licenses, and the like. There are reports from various ministries, some of which are illuminating in perhaps the wrong way: did you know that there is a national white privilege conference?

It's a terrible temptation to snark mercilessly at what is an earnest attempt to do right on the part of (one hopes) well-meaning people. And yet, the resolutions. It's always the resolutions. So, we have six resolutions, one of which is the inevitable and necessary compensation resolution which sets forth expected rates for clergy and employees as well as the standards for supply priest pay. Two more have to do with rearranging the system of regions we have (something like deaneries in some other dioceses) and adjusting their function a little. These are the real business and can be discussed on their merits.

After that, however, comes the other part. The fourth resolution asks us to "[support] all such measures prohibiting the Department of the Environment from issuing a permit to authorize the hydraulic fracturing of a well for the exploration or production of natural gas in the State until April 30, 2023 or until a specified panel is appointed, convenes, and reports to the Governor and General Assembly on the safety and environmental risks of such activities." Well. I personally am extremely wary of fracking; the fears of groundwater contamination seem to me to be well-grounded even if they haven't (yet) been demonstrated, and if contamination happens, it's likely to be widespread and extremely difficult if not impossible to undo. That said, environmental effects of industrial techniques are not even vaguely in our core competency. As my very liberal daughter observed (more pungently than I shall express it here), this is about making ourselves feel good about doing something absolutely ineffectual. really, nobody in the diocese who wasn't at convention will ever know that we passed this, and nobody can seriously believe that such a resolution will have any impact when general assembly meets— and the governor is a Republican, and appears to be a Catholic.

Next up is a resolution which asks us to "support the adoption of state legislation for “death with dignity” in the 2016 session" and "encourages on-going discussion of the issues surrounding this issue". OK, well, this is a little closer to stuff we actually know about, but "death with dignity" is after all a euphemism for physician-assisted suicide in the face of terminal illness. It's not something that we, as laypeople, are up on as to the moral and legal nuances. Half of us will want to oppose on the grounds of our inarticulate moral queasiness, and the other half will want to support on the basis of some relative's painful and undignified final days. Both sides will sigh in relief when the first clause is struck and we pass an ineffectual but self-affirming resolution to talk about the matter some more.

Finally, we get to a resolution which "encourages Episcopalians to build bridges that will foster positive relationships between residents and local law enforcement officers who are assigned to police neighborhoods where congregations are located" and which states that "community engagement such as this is in line with the concept of what it means to be a parish." This takes a bit of unpacking unless you have been following the news recently of the death of a man in Baltimore City police custody apparently due to their brutality. It's a serious social problem, made all the more dire given developments since the convention journal was produced; but again, we're outside our competence, and the impotent wording of the resolution shows this. OK, so this is turning out to be a big issue, but I fail to see how we in convention can contribute much, especially since few of us live in Baltimore City. And note the phrases used: what does "building bridges" mean? How about "foster positive relationships"? What's "the concept of what it means to be a parish"? These vacuities are progressive church buzzwords, rhetorical filler; they are about saying the "right things" without saying anything. So what it actually says is "the situation with the police in Baltimore City is atrocious but we don't have any idea of what do about it but mouth platitudes."

So we have three resolutions which amount to nothing but self-congratulation, and meanwhile there are three very big elephants standing in the room.

The Suffragan Mess

As a parishioner in the Diocese of Maryland, and especially as the parish delegate to the next diocesan convention, the accident in which the newly elected suffragan bishop killed a bicyclist has a double impact upon me. I have elided the bishop's name out of charity, though I will not paper over the facts of the matter by calling them allegations. The various witnesses are clear: on a Saturday afternoon, the bishop swerved and struck a man, then fled the scene. When she returned she was found to be deeply intoxicated, and was apparently texting at the time of the accident (I am unclear as to the source of this assertion); she was eventually arrested and is being held on bail. This is bad enough, but it has also come out that in 2010, while she was serving in another diocese, she was stopped by police due to her erratic driving and because one of her tires was shredded; the officer on the scene cut the coordination tests short for fear that she would hurt herself, and her blood alcohol was determined to be far in excess of the legal limit. Charges were eventually dropped on other charges of possessing marijuana, and the incident was eventually pleaded down to probation before judgement.

I am somehow managing to view the episode with an emotional detachment suitable to a Vulcan, and thus am not moved to expressions of moral outrage or judgement. It is clear, as Bishop Ihloff (MD ret.) says, that she cannot be allowed to continue as a bishop of this church; the disciplinary machinery of the church has begun to move in this direction, so we are told. Care for both the victim's family and for the soon-to-be-ex-bishop must proceed, and as I understand it, is being provided for. Justice will be done.

But what also will be done is a second election to replace her, for this diocese is simply too large to be served by a single bishop. And while I am not interested in assigning blame in the previous election, it is abundantly clear that The Process (or at least its execution) failed us. That process, at least as described in Rev. Anjel Scarborough's letter, seems to have invited someone deeply in the thrall of alcoholism to engage in a campaign of denial in order to advance her clerical career. Regardless of the conclusions of any psychological examination, any elector with full knowledge of the details of the 2010 incident would surely have to question how well-controlled the drinking was of a person who but three years before had to be pulled over before she hurt someone else (or herself, for that matter). And all the more so considering that she was not forthcoming to those electors about her situation: that should have been a red flag.

The "experts" have opined that really, nothing much more than a failure of judgement within the process was at fault. I am not convinced. And furthermore, this doesn't provide a route for correcting a patently faulty process. I'm not seeing testimony from people who are familiar with alcoholism and who look back at the older incident and say, "well, she could have been OK, from what we knew then." The testimony I have read is that everything about it, all the way to the election itself, should have told the search committee members responsible that her nomination should not have gone forward as it did.

The second search is going to have to be different. If nothing else, electors are going to have to be proactive in researching the candidates, because it is apparent that current processes do a poor job of presenting the candidates. What we had here was a situation in which someone was implicitly encouraged to hide the truth about herself in favor of presenting a facade in a few short written statements (none of them, to my mind, particularly demanding) and to show up at various public events and put on a good show. The potential for this to produce disastrously bad bishops ought to be obvious.