Living Together

Beloved in Christ, 

I am currently serving on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Constitution, Canons, Governance, and Structure. I realize not everyone would find this to be a riveting assignment, but I actually love the work and am grateful for the trust placed in me in the appointment. 

I think nearly all of us would agree that the last thing Christianity needs is more rules and layers of structure. This is a season when we are being called to dream and experiment. Why bother about rules at a time like this?

In the Hebrew Bible, the Law given to Moses is not God wagging a finger at the people and telling them they had better shape up. In giving the Law, God is trying to form an alternative community that lives together in a new way, in order to reflect the love, peace, and justice of God to the world. As I have learned well from several rabbi colleagues over the years, the law isn’t kept to earn God’s love, the law is kept as an act of thanksgiving for the love God has already shown. 

Part of Jesus’ ministry was to renew and recapture that spirit in his own day. Neither Moses nor Jesus were so much articulating new rules as they were trying to shape a new way of living together.

One of the things I appreciate about our complex polity is that it helps us hold in mind the spiritual truth that “we are” always comes before “I am.” That complexity is a reflection of our sincere theological grounding: our system does its best to ensure that all orders of ministry are represented in decision making, and that authority is dispersed across a diversity of orders and offices. To be a follower of Jesus is to be joined inevitably and inseparably to a community, one which together discerns how God is calling us to reflect God's love to the world.

Diocese of Minnesota: it is an unspeakable gift to be bound together with each of you, as messy and complicated as it may sometimes be, as strange as we may sometimes seem in our life together. We are bound together for the sake of showing God’s love through the imperfect and broken light of our lives. In a world of so much suffering and injustice, the strange and communal way of Jesus seems like good news indeed. 

Grace and peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop