[The Episcopal News] Kindness toward immigrants is essential in daily practice and policy reform, Bishop John Harvey Taylor told Diocesan Council in its June 12 regular monthly online meeting with agenda items including favorable budget updates, local church planning, the bishop search process, and policy for mission congregations.
“This is where your ministry comes in as members of Diocesan Council,” Taylor said in remarks transcribed here. “Let’s make common cause with ecumenical and interfaith organizations in our communities. … Talk about these issues with other people and faith. See if you can decide on a way to advocate or at least care for our neighbors….
“Advocate for reform, or just for kindness,” Taylor added, his views prompting council consensus to draft and act on a related resolution to be presented in July. “If you don’t want to stand up for these workers at City Hall, I understand. So stand up for them by doubling support to your local food bank.
“I must insist on one thing,” the bishop said. “Disagreement about policy does not relieve us of our responsibilities as ministers of the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Beholding our undocumented sibling and saying they’re a criminal is a cop out. We know in our hearts they’re not. We know that if we took time to hear their stories, we’d take a more humane view. If this government continues with this policy, that’s what the church must do. We’ll lift up their stories and make the critics look them in their face and tell them why they shouldn’t have a shot at staying here with their families and the others they love.”
Turning to financial reports, Canon Andy Tomat, treasurer of the diocese, told council that overall diocesan operations are running on a break-even basis thorough April by minimizing discretionary expenses and holding off on budgeted capital improvements until later in the year, adding that the majority of bishop search expenses will be recognized after April. He noted that the diocese “has benefited from the generosity of individuals supporting our various special appeals.”
Discussion included bringing funds raised by the One Body & One Spirit Annual Appeal – to date, some $705,967 for fire relief and $385,178 for ministry projects since 2022 – into regular operating income reports received by council.
In addition, donations of $46,789 have been added to the diocesan endowment this year. Also, $164,470 has been raised in a special appeal for the IRIS, the diocese’s immigration and refugee ministry, for which income is currently greater than expenses due to a rollover 2024 reimbursements into 2025 and staff reductions.
“I’m going to insist that any line that’s called fundraising income is an appropriate bucket for all fundraising income,” Taylor said, “and that any nuances that need to be applied to that can be handled in footnotes or in financial reports. Summary documents don’t have to explain every single nuance. But we’re just underselling ourselves…. in view of the incredible generosity of the people of the diocese of Los Angeles and the institutions of the diocese of Los Angeles since the emergency appeal began in Lent 2020.”
The treasurer agreed to act on the bishop’s request.
He noted that assessment payments from congregations continue to track closely to the budget with receivables considerably lower than several months ago.
Tomat underscored that Seeds of Hope, the diocesan food-security ministry, is off to a strong start this year due to new or continuing grants from LACare, QueensCare, City of Hope, and Trinity Church Wall Street, along with fundraising in partnership with Netflix & Kaiser Permanente. New contracts also have been signed with St. Barnabas Senior Services (a former institution of the diocese) and Watts Labor Community Action, he reported.
‘Requiem or Renaissance’ progress, $250,000 grant application
The Rev. John Watson, diocesan missioner for new models of ministry, briefed council on progress with “Requiem or Renaissance” – an 18-month discernment and skills-building program that helps congregations decide between two paths: a “requiem,” signifying a holy ending of ministry in their current location, or a “renaissance,” a re-planting with a new vision.
Providing resources and guidance for congregations to explore options and build a sustainable future, the program was developed in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri by the Rev. Canon Whitney Rice, who keynoted last month’s diocesan clergy conference. Locally the program has been launched and is overseen by the Rev. Canon Melissa McCarthy, diocesan canon to the ordinary.
Watson – who also is priest-in-charge of St. Athanasius, Echo Park, and Epiphany, Lincoln Heights – said the diocese is applying for a $250,000 grant from Trinity Church Wall Street to advance the program locally in a two-year round and has received favorable response to initial phases of the application process.
Local training for the program began in January but was postponed due to the wildfires outbreak, Watson said, noting that sessions resumed in May with 12-15 participants. Moving forward, plans call for 14 congregations – a blend of parishes and missions – of the diocese to move forward with the discernment process, which is set to begin with a cohort of seven in September.
The six-session process starts with an “in-person retreat and training worship and spirituality in terms of biblical study and prayer,” Watson said, “and will continue over the 18 months to end with a similar retreat, in which these congregations will be asked for a decision. They’ll meet with the bishop and diocesan staff and come to terms with the decision that they’re making to travel through a period of training and discernment reflection alongside trained shepherds.”
“This isn’t off-the-shelf stuff.” Watson said of the program “This is being thought through and created by some very skilled people in this diocese. So we’re confident in the material that we have and the people that we have. … The program covers a whole variety of areas of church growth, of change management, of prayer, of listening to not just one another, but also listening to our community in one sense, also listening to our buildings as to what they’re telling us, how we are to engage with the challenges that are before us, and how that might inform the decisions that we need to make. We’ll be looking at helping congregations meet where they are.”
Watson added that replication across the diocese will be aided by the program structure of first and last sessions held in-person, with meetings by Zoom in between.
Thanking Watson and McCarthy for their work, the bishop said the program is “exactly what we need when we need it, and the news about Trinity Wall Street’s interest is especially encouraging. I have hopes, as I think perhaps they do, that this work we’re doing in Los Angeles could end up being a gift to the whole church.
McCarthy asked council to “pray for this program, and pray for the open hearts of the institutions being asked to participate, because it won’t always be easy work, but it’s all going to lead to a good place.”
Bishop Search: Nomination deadline June 20
The Rev. KC Robertson, Bishop Search Committee co-chair and an associate rector of St. Matthew’s in Pacific Palisades, reminded council of upcoming deadlines: June 20 for nominations and June 27 for applications.
Noting that the diocesan profile was published June 3, Robertson said nominations and applications are coming in steadily.
“I encourage you to prayerfully consider and listen to the Holy Spirit if there’s someone who you would be interested in nominating,” she added. “Pray for whomever might become our next shepherd. …We’re now in a season of home and expectation. It feels like Advent in a way.”
Robertson added that a webinar on results of the diocesan survey conducted by the Holy Cow! research group will be rescheduled soon after being postponed due to a medical emergency in the presenter’s family.
Mission congregations policy, handbook updates
The Rev. Canon Gary Hall, chair of the Program Group on Missions, led council in reviewing proposed updates to the handbook for the diocese’s 36 mission congregations. He noted that while parishes are separately incorporated, missions are not, and most rely on diocesan funding. The bishop diocesan is rector of the mission congregations, assisted in most churches by vicars or priests-in-charge.
Hall thanked current council members Ann Seitz and Dan Valdez and the Rev. Canon Kelli Grace Kurtz, former program group chair, for their contributions to editing the handbook, some parts of which had not been updated for several decades.
“We feel that with a new bishop coming in a year, we really need to hand that person a snapshot of the way we actually do things,” Hall said, “and then really let that person and the leadership that that they choose sort of figure out the next steps in refining and developing mission congregation policy. So this is a kind of interim step.”
Hall then described edits and requested council feedback, noting that a re-draft of the handbook would be returned to council later in the summer, when any actions requiring a resolution of Diocesan Convention to move forward on that basis also involving consultation with the Standing Committee and Corporation of the Diocese.
One edit suggests removing the term “pre-parish.” “There are many missions that are self-supporting that are not particularly on track to parish status again,” Hall said. “I think we no longer assume that every mission congregation aspires to be a parish, or is in a place where they can retire their debt in order to be a parish. There are certain missions that are on track to be parishes, and they are self-supporting.”
Other proposed edits focused on delineating the roles and governance of ministry centers – outreach hubs currently located in Fontana, Riverside, and San Bernardino – and emergent worshiping communities, including Holy Spirit in Echo Park/Silver Lake and Thad’s in Culver City, which are not organized as missions at this time.
Further discussion addressed clarification in subsidizing missions in “places where there are underserved populations where we want to be … whether or not they can support themselves,” Hall said.
Other topics include regularizing practices around conducting Mutual Ministry Review evaluations of clergy; mission funding during clergy vacancies; management of grant funds while moving toward self-sufficiency; representation at Diocesan Convention; considerations regarding mortgage debt; and revising definitions of the roles of vicars and other clergy, including supply priests, serving mission congregations.
Reports of Corporation, Standing Committee, ECW
The Corporation of the Diocese and Standing Committee both approved a proposal to pursue development of senior housing on the campus of St. Michael and All Angels Church in the south Orange County community of Corona del Mar. A unique aspect of the project is the parish’s plan to convey 10% of proceeds to a diocesan real estate trust fund, said Dr. Charlotte Borst, reporting for the Corporation.
The bishop noted that the parish “will give the diocese a role in overseeing and managing the endowment, so that we can play a role in preventing them from doing what parishes sometimes do, and that is liquidating their endowments to pay for operations. So they’re being very accommodating, and it’s a fascinating project, and I’m very grateful for the corporation’s work on it.”
Reporting for the Standing Committee, Canon Janet Wylie said its last meeting included concurrence with the Corona del Mar building project, hearing a report on diocesan implementation of the Requiem or Renaissance program, and consenting to the election of the Rev. Robert Price as bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of Dallas.
The Episcopal Church Women will participate in an upcoming Province 8 retreat gathering in September at Fort Hall, Idaho, an Indian reservation of the Shoshone and Bannock tribes, Christine Budzowski, L.A.’s diocesan ECW president, told council. Information for registration, which is open to all women, is online at ecwprovinceviii.org. In other resources, the United Thank Offering is making a Vacation Bible School curriculum available, Budzowski said.
In her canon to the ordinary’s report, McCarthy noted the work of the Bishop’s Commission on Climate Change and said that a job description would soon be posted for a new missioner to assist the diocese with disaster resiliency and recovery, a position funded by Episcopal Relief & Development and designed to aid ongoing strategic response to the Eaton and Palisades wildfires.
Canon Steve Nishibayashi, secretary of Diocesan Convention, reminded council that there were 148 days until this year’s annual meeting, Nov. 7-8 in Riverside, and Samantha Wylie, assistant secretary, noted that nominations for elected offices and forms for the submitting of resolutions or amendments to the diocesan constitution and canons are on the Convention’s web pages at www.diocesela.org/convention.
Reports for the good of the order included an update on $72,000 in scholarships awarded by the Neighborhood Youth Association, an affiliated diocesan institution specializing in 100% college placement of under-resourced students, and the June 8 retirement of the Rev. Robert J. Gaestel after more than 40 years as rector of Pasadena’s Church of the Angels.
Underscoring the importance of council considering at its upcoming July 10 meeting a resolution responding to the bishop’s remarks on immigration policy, Hall observed: “This is not politics. This is doing public theology. We need to help our siblings in the Church understand that this is not partisan or political but just speaking the truth in the public square.”