Dreams are powerful and compelling channels of communication. When our brains are resting, recovering, and rebuilding during our time of sleep, the ideas, fears, hopes, anxieties, fantasies and wishes all come to the surface.
Our scriptures are filled with dreamers and dreams. There are some 20 occurrences of dreams in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Many of these feature God speaking about the future action, giving encouragement, or direction. Joseph receives the news about Mary’s pregnancy in a dream; the Magi are warned in a dream to return home by another road after their encounter with the newborn Messiah. Scriptural dreams often involve a call to move forward into the unimaginable or the unknown. These dreams rely on faith and trust between dreamer and God.
And then there are the dreams of a people who are fully awake and alive to the voice of God and the desire of their hearts. And there is nothing more powerful than a collective dream—the yearnings and desire of a people who are committed to one another and a common future.
In the first few weeks after being elected your bishop in late October 2016 I was still in a state of euphoria and shock; expectation and wonderment. Throughout the discernment process I’d been dreaming about what our future might be like if you were to elect me. And when the dream came true, I was hoping the reality of being your bishop would be at least as good as the dream.
It has been even better. I thank God daily for the privilege of dreaming alongside you. I thank God daily for the privilege of standing shoulder to shoulder alongside you and doing the faithful, sacrificial, challenging, beautiful ministry that we share.
In all of your beautiful diversity, you faithfully show up again and again, across central and southern Indiana, as beacons of Christ. It is awe-inspiring to see you opening up your doors to your neighbors; serving and advocating for the care of the most vulnerable; guiding and raising up our young people; centering your lives and your congregations around Jesus and his ways of living and loving. I see you generously giving of yourselves as if your life—our lives—depended on it and it is extraordinary.
Ten years ago, I addressed the 180th convention of our diocese, my first as bishop, and offered the invitation to us to dream dreams worthy of the reign of God. I invited us to try new things, risk failing, and then to get up and try again. And after a decade we’ve learned some things, made mistakes, we’ve even made some dreams come true, and we continue to dream on.
Just a week ago, we held our third mutual ministry review as bishop and diocese and in the conversation about our future priorities someone noted that the future is always coming and we—as a diocese—need to get ready for the world that is coming. I want to continue dreaming and preparing for that future with you. My invitation is for us to dream forward. And not just dream, but to continue to work for the future we dream of.
In our polity, one of the ways we give structure to our common life is our constitution and canons. I continue to be grateful to those who served on our reunification discernment team and to our leaders on Executive Council and Standing Committee who saw that in addition to strengthening our ties with our siblings to the north, we also learned things that could make us a stronger, more nimble diocese. Our wholesale revision of our diocesan Constitution and Canons—an enormous amount of work—is the most substantial outcome from those years of discernment. This revision provides a good deal of the structure that will allow us to meet the challenges and the opportunities of the future. Over the past couple of years and as recently as last week, I’ve heard the desire to plant new missional faith communities, and to increase our ministry more intentionally with Latino communities across our diocese. If adopted, we will have canonical supports for that critical missional work. Dreaming dreams worthy of the reign of God doesn’t require canonical revisions but they can certainly help.
One of the most important dreams we hold as a diocese is the flourishing of our children, youth, and young adults. I’m so heartened by the early excitement of our Beloved and Empowered Endowment Campaign. We are only two months since our official launch of this campaign and the $1.1MM in gifts and pledges toward our $5MM goal puts us well on our way. I hope that when we gather for the 190th diocesan convention, we will be able to celebrate the success of this campaign to provide resources in perpetuity for youth and young adult ministry and Waycross Camp and Conference Center.
Just look around this room at the amazing young people in our midst. These young people and others across our diocese will be the future stewards of these resources as they seek to meet the needs and realize the dreams of those who will come after THEM. This campaign is doing what Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe calls genuine stewardship: in having hope for the future, we (and I mean GenXers and older) are building the church we will not live in; we are planting seeds for trees we will not sit under. We cannot predict the future, but we can plan for the church to have the resources necessary to meet the generations to come. This has always been our pattern, and we are blessed today to benefit from the hope our ancestors had for us long before we existed.
Speaking of our ancestors, we are the vibrant diocese we are today because of wise, forward thinking, and generous leaders of past generations. For over 60 years our diocesan budget has covered the in whole, or as is the case now, 75% of the health insurance premiums of eligible half and full-time clergy. We are just one of two dioceses in the entire Episcopal Church to handle medical insurance in this way. We have a classic adaptive challenge before us—meaning, there is no clear and immediate solution that can come down from on high. Our adaptive challenge of securing financial sustainability in the face of ever-increasing insurance costs while protecting congregational vitality will require deep and broad thinking, the willingness to experiment, the openness to learning and doing something new; and engagement from various groups in our diocese. The Executive Council, Standing Committee, Investment and Finance, and Personnel and Compensation committee have all begun to get a sense of the scope of our challenge. Over the next year or so, we will spend time working on this so that we can do what is in our realm of power and capability to the give future Diocese of Indianapolis a solid financial footing.
I continue to be grateful for the ministry that is made possible by our Lilly Endowment funded grants. This year we conclude six years of our Church Buildings for Collaborative Partnerships grant and continue with our Centering Children in Worship; Christian Parenting Initiative; and Strengthening Stewardship and Deepening Connection Initiative. These grants have enabled us to use the buildings stewarded by our faith communities—sanctuaries, houses, and church school buildings— in ways that strengthen both our congregations and the neighborhoods we serve. We are a model for the entire Episcopal Church, as well as other denominations, for how to engage our communities faithfully while maximizing our space for mutual benefit.
And none of that really matters if our people—of every age—are not strong in their faith. The Christian Parenting Initiative helps us to empower parents and caregivers to pass on the faith we proclaim with confidence. Centering all God’s Children in Worship helps us to gather for worship and faith formation in ways that honors our neurological, spiritual, cultural, and age diversity. And our Strengthening Stewardship and Deepening Connection Initiative will give the diocese as a whole and our congregations support in growing and stewarding the financial resources needed for our ministries.
We are blessed to have the Rev. Ian Lasch, our Missioner for Formation, who joined us this year to provide care and oversight over these grant-funded programs. All of these are in addition to our steady commitment to support clergy and lay leaders through our College for Congregational Development, Lay Preaching Cohorts, annual vestry leadership day, campus ministry presence, and the rapidly growing ministry to young adults across our diocese. And thanks be to God, next month we will ordain four transitional deacons and one priest next month—the largest ordination cohort in years.
We have so much to celebrate. Our continued support of these projects and programs are essential to shoring up the foundation which is vital to our health as a diocese. We are immeasurably blessed by the resources to keep us strong and stable giving us firm footing with which to step into the future.
And we need so firm a foundation because from Mount Vernon to Muncie, from the Southside of Indy to West Lafayette I’m hearing you dream. Dreams of our diocese being adaptable for this moment and the future; dreams of strategically planting new communities while supporting smaller congregations and those in the middle range of size and resources. Dreams of growing our justice and advocacy work as well our relationship is to partners who might collaborate with us. Dreams of a vibrant and effective neighborhood structure to provide purpose and critical mass to our efforts. Dreams of Waycross as a sustainable, beautiful, and inspiring spiritual hub for all members of our Diocese. Dreams of a church and a world in which are young people and our elders are safe, known, loved, and empowered to make a difference. These are worthy dreams. They come out of deep discernment, faithfulness, and commitment to the body of Christ.
What makes these dreams worthy of the reign of God is that they are yours—they are ours.
But these dreams are not for us alone. They are for those who are seeking renewed hope in trustworthy human institutions to act with mercy, care, and compassion. Our congregations have been places of spiritual and temporal refuge, sanctuary, and safety. Now, after this past week of elections, our country has some rebuilding to do, and we have our role to play. Our faith communities can continue to be places where we practice the holy habits of reconciliation; hospitality, and relational repair. And most importantly, as Canon Brendan recently reminded me, “the church is uniquely important as an institution that has a long view – connecting people of all ages (but especially young people) to the love of God that is from before time and for all time, with the assurance of a hope more durable than the adversities that come at us every day.” Our dreams are to the end that in Christ, dreaming would not be the privilege of the few, but the birthright of all God’s beloved.
So let us dream forward. In the living of our collective dream, we will take some risks. We will make mistakes. We will learn some things. And with God’s help, we may even make some dreams come true.
