The Search/Nomination Committee and the Transition Committee are providing updates on the Search Process through these regular emails.
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TRANSITION COMMITTEE UPDATE
In less than two weeks, the nominees for Bishop and their spouses will be visiting the Convocation for the walkabout weekend:
Town Halls:
- Thursday, September 27, at 6:00 p.m. (reception from 4:30 p.m.) American Cathedral, Paris
- Saturday, September 29, 12 noon, Church of the Ascension, Munich
- Sunday, September 30, 3:00 p.m., St. Paul’s Within the Walls, Rome
We are looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the town halls!
Thank you for all your proposed questions
. We received nearly 50 suggestions. Some covered similar topics, but it was still not an easy task to choose the 12 questions (four per city) that the nominees will be asked to answer. The questions will cover the Convocation, Vision, External Relations and Personal. You can find them here: (
link to questions
)
At each town hall, written questions from the floor will also be taken after the planned questions have been answered (and within the timeframe allowed). If a certain question is not asked at your town hall, please remember that all the town halls will be recorded and you will have a chance to see the nominees answer different questions online. This is a really great opportunity, giving you more time to study and learn more about our Bishop nominees.
Now that the town hall events are almost upon us, the election itself is coming into focus.
When the newly founded Episcopal Church organized itself after the American Revolution, it had to decide how to choose its bishops. The then-Church of England system (Crown appointment) was no longer available or desirable and, due to the constitutional separation of church and state, neither the new United States executive nor legislature could play a role. Instead, reverting to the practice of the early Church, church leaders decided that bishops would be elected.
Our election takes place during our annual Convention in Waterloo from October 18 - 21.
The electorate consists of the two lay delegates selected by each Convocation parish and organized mission (currently 20 delegates in total), the lay members of the Council of Advice (four in total) and all canonically resident clergy registered to attend the Convention (currently 24 are registered). A subcommittee of the Transition Committee drafted a special rule of order (basically a set of rules prescribing how the elections will be run) that was approved at the last meeting of the Council of Advice and will be presented to the Convention for delegates' approval on the first day.
According to item 8:
- “The Convention shall vote by ballot and by orders, with the lay and clerical members voting concurrently and separately. …. The concurrence of a majority of each Order shall be necessary for an election.”
What does that mean?
The laity and the clergy vote separately (but at the same time) and a nominee is elected when he receives a majority in each order (laity and clergy). We don’t know how many ballots we will need. The first ballot is on Friday morning. We currently have up to nine ballots planned, but balloting will continue until the election of new Bishop in Charge.
One last comment:
The delegates will want to hear your opinions, and many parishes are organizing events at which the videos of the town halls can be watched together and the different viewpoints gathered. But they vote according to their conscience and as guided, in prayer, by the Holy Spirit. For that reason, the election will be embedded in prayer and worship and, according to item 9 of the rule of order,
- “The President may at any time in the President’s discretion interrupt the proceedings of the Convention for discussion, prayer, meditation or such other form of Divine Service as the President may deem necessary or appropriate to keep the mood of the Convention oriented to the important spiritual task confronting it.”
If you have questions on any of these topics, or generally about the process, please send them to the Transition Committee email,
transition@tec-europe.org
Thanks,
The Transition Committee
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Prayer for the Convocation
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O God, we pray for the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe as we discern and elect a Bishop to serve your people, build up your Church and proclaim boldly the Gospel to the world. Send us, we pray, an apostle who is a wise counsellor, a merciful pastor, filled with your joy and grace. May your servant have the abundant gifts needed to lead your flock and the strength and courage to administer them. And may we renew and rededicate our lives to your will and service. All this we pray in the Name of our Great High Priest and Servant of the servants of God, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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NOMINEES FOR BISHOP IN CHARGE
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The Rev. Mark D.W. Edington
Rector, Saint John’s Church, Newtonville, Massachusetts, USA, and Director, Amherst College Press
The Rev. Mark D.W. Edington is an ordained Episcopal priest, higher-education executive, social entrepreneur, writer, and editor. Appointed in 2014 as the founding director of the Amherst College Press, he has spearheaded the creation of a 54-college consortium supporting Lever Press, an open access, peer reviewed scholarly press. Prior to his appointment at Amherst he served as the senior executive officer of interdisciplinary research centers at Harvard, including the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory. His work in academic publishing has encompassed directing the publications program of an independent think tank focused on issues of international security and foreign policy, and as a consulting editor at Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ordained in 2001, Mark served as the first Epps Fellow and Chaplain to Harvard College in The Memorial Church of Harvard University, living in residence as visiting scholar in Adams House. Subsequently appointed Associate Minister for Administration, he served as the chief operating officer of one of the largest and most influential university churches in the nation. In addition to undergraduate ministry, his responsibilities included serving as the point of contact between Memorial Church and the body of more than thirty chaplains from all denominations and faith traditions accredited to serve communities in the university, and oversight of the field work program for training seminarians. More recently, as rector of Saint John’s in Newtonville, Massachusetts, he has authored Bivocational: Returning to the Roots of Ministry (Church Publishing, 2018;
www.bivocational.church), an exploration of alternatives to the received economic model of congregational life based on the expectation of a full-time, benefited professional as the ordained leader of a community.
Mark serves as an officer or director of a number of non-profit organizations. Since 2014 he has been a trustee of Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, where he sits on the Academic Affairs and Strategic Planning committees. From 2013-2016 he served as well as a director of the Harvard University Employees Credit Union, where his work encompassed service on the institution’s audit committee. As a member of the founding board of three NGOs, he has a deep commitment to civic engagement with foreign policy and interfaith engagement in both dialogue and service. A founding director of the 2Seeds Network, he was part of a team focused on creating a new path linking the need for strengthening ethically grounded leadership in the developed world with the need for improving self-sufficiency in the world's poorest countries.
Mark writes frequently on issues at the intersection of public policy and religion. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other national publications. He has blogged on The Huffington Post and on WBUR’s Cognoscenti, and is a frequent commentator on New England Public Radio. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is active in the Religion and Foreign Policy program.
Mark is a graduate of Albion College, where he received the A.B. in philosophy and political science summa cum laude, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa; the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; and Harvard Divinity School. He has studied in programs focused on European integration at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and on post-Cold War European security at Christian-Albrechts-Universität. He is married to Judith, a graduate of Albion College, Boston College, and Harvard Law School, who is Counsel in the Tax Department of Sullivan and Worcester, Boston. She is admitted to the bar in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of Illinois.
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The Rev. Canon Paul-Gordon Chandler
President/CEO, CARAVAN, an international peacebuilding ministry, appointed mission partner with The Episcopal Church, based out of the greater Chicago area, Illinois, USA
The Revd Canon Paul-Gordon Chandler is a US Episcopal priest, author, interfaith advocate and art curator. Having grown up in Senegal, West Africa, he has lived and worked extensively in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe in leadership roles with The Episcopal/Anglican Church, Christian publishing and ecumenical relief and development agencies.
Previously serving as the rector of two international churches, from 2003-2013 he was the Rector of St. John’s Church/Maadi in Cairo, Egypt, an historic international English-speaking Episcopal church with a congregation of over 35 nationalities from numerous faith traditions, primarily from the diplomatic, academic, NGO and business communities.
From 1993-1995 he served in Tunis, Tunisia, North Africa as the Rector of the St. George’s Episcopal Church, the only English-speaking church in this Muslim-majority country, with a congregation of over 30 nationalities.
Currently based out of the greater Chicago area, as an Appointed Mission Partner with The Episcopal Church he serves as the President of CARAVAN, an international peacebuilding non-profit affiliated with The Episcopal Church that uses the arts to build bridges between the creeds and cultures of the Middle East and West.
Paul-Gordon is a Canon at All Saints’ Cathedral, Cairo, Egypt and has authored four books in the fields of Christian-Muslim relations, Global Christianity and the Middle East.
Prior ministry roles have included serving in the arena of Christian publishing, such as SPCK in London, England where he was the Director of SPCK Worldwide, an historic international publishing ministry of the Church of England,
involved in the U.K. and throughout the Global South. He was also U.S. Chief Executive Officer (CEO)/ Int’l Executive Vice President of IBS Publishing, an ecumenical Christian publishing, distribution and translation non-profit that has published the Bible in more than 500 languages worldwide.
Paul-Gordon has also served in the field of relief and development. From 1999-2003 he served as the President/CEO of Partners International, an international ecumenical Christian non-profit that exists to assist and empower indigenous faith-based development organizations in over 70 countries.
He studied Theological/Biblical Studies at Wheaton College, IL, USA and at Chichester Theological College in West Sussex, England, and French at the Alliance Française in Paris, France. He is married to Lynne Chandler and together they have two grown children.
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The Very Rev. Dr. Benjamin Shambaugh
Dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Portland, Maine.
The Very Rev. Dr. Benjamin Shambaugh's ministry has included living in and around New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, Paris, Barbados, and the National Parks, doing development work in Africa, Haiti, and an Indian Reservation in the American West, and leading study tours to the Holy Land. Ordained in 1988, he has served four congregations and has had a wide variety of mission experiences including time as a chaplain at the National Cathedral in Washington, as Canon Pastor to the American Cathedral in Paris, and his current position as Dean of St. Luke's Cathedral in Portland, Maine.
In the Diocese of Maine, Dean Shambaugh has served as President of the Standing Committee, the Chair of the General Convention Deputation, and numerous other positions. In Portland, he has served on the boards of Preble Street, the Religious Coalition Against Discrimination, and St. Elizabeth's Jubilee, been adjunct faculty at Bangor Theological Seminary, and actively worked on a wide variety of issues facing the wider community. For this work he received Preble Street’s Board Member of the Year, Integrity Maine’s Founders Award, and a commendation from the Mayor and City Council of Portland. For 10 years before coming to Maine, he served the rector of St. John's Church, in Olney, Maryland a position which included oversight of a K-8 Episcopal School and African Palms, an organization which raised roughly $100,000 a year for human need in Africa. The four years he lived in Paris were a time of transition for the Convocation which included two deans, four bishops, and the beginnings of the dream which led to the missions and the full-time elected bishop the convocation has today.
He has a BA (with honors) in psychology from Northwestern University, an M.Div. from the General Theological Seminary, and a D.Min. from Seabury Western Seminary. He is married and has two grown children. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, kayaking, and playing his tuba with the Maine Pops and other local bands.
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The Rev. Steven D. Paulikas
Rector, All Saints’ Church, Brooklyn, New York, USA
The Rev. Steven D. Paulikas is rector of
All Saints' Church, a diverse and growing parish in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Steven has worked with the people of All Saints’ to build a Christian community of welcome and uncompromising love for all, and parish worship attendance and membership have almost tripled since his arrival in June 2011. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Episcopal Relief and Development and the Board of Governors of the Episcopal Church at Yale, and he facilitates the process of discernment for holy orders on the Diocese of Long Island’s Commission on Ministry. He is a candidate for the DPhil in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford. While a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Steven co-chaired the New York Term Member Advisory Council. His opinion writing has recently appeared in
The New York Times
,
The Guardian, and
Quartz, and his essay on the political response to evil is featured in
Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments: A Stone Reader
.
Steven left his native Michigan to attend Yale University, where his involvement in campus chaplaincy helped nurture a call to ordained ministry. After receiving the MPhil degree in European Literature at the University of Cambridge, Steven moved to Lithuania, which his father’s family fled during the Second World War. He covered such historic events as Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and EU and NATO expansion as a Vilnius-based journalist for the BBC, Newsweek, and other international media. He returned to the United States to study at the General Theological Seminary and was ordained to the priesthood in June 2008 in the Diocese of Southern Ohio. Following ordination, he served as Assistant to the Rector at Grace Church Brooklyn Heights. He and his husband, Jesse Lazar, were married at All Saints’ Church in 2014. Steven is an amateur cellist.
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More Information is on Bishop Search Website
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For further information about the nominees, see the
This site includes:
- Biographical and other information about the nominees
- The Convocation Profile, which was developed by the Bishop Search and Nomination Committee, both in an on-line and a downloadable form.
- Information and registration for the Walkabouts and Town Hall Meetings.
- It also includes other information about the Convocation, which will assist persons who are interested in the bishop search process, including a description of the Convocation Parishes and Missions.
- As of August 30, there have been over 44,200 visitors to the website.
- The Bishop Search has engendered great interest in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere in the Anglican Communion.
Previous Bishop Search Update E-Mails....
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Timetable of the Search for the Next
Bishop in Charge
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September 27-30, 2018
- Presentation of Bishop Candidates and spouses:
- Thursday, September 27: Paris, France at 6:00 p.m.
- Saturday, September 29: Munich, Germany at 12:00 noon
- Sunday, September 30: Rome, Italy at 2:00 p.m.
- Election of the Bishop in Charge and regular convention business
Following the Election
- The Standing Committees of all the Episcopal dioceses and all diocesan bishops are asked to approve the election. This process can take several months.
- The Presiding Bishop, Deo volente, receives notice that consents have been received from a majority of bishops and standing committees of the Episcopal Church and announces the name of the Bishop-elect
- The Bishop-elect begins her/his transition to assume office.
April 5, 2019
- Worship Service and soirée honoring Bishop Pierre W. Whalon (Friday evening) at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris, France
April 6, 2019 -
Ordination and Consecration of the new Bishop in Charge
in the Cathedral in Paris, France
- The festival liturgy will be celebrated in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, France. The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church, will preside (Saturday at 11:00 a.m.)
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Left to Right:
Dottie Dunnam
(Florence),
Harriet Rivière
(Paris),
Ron Clingenpeel
(consultant),
Rob Warren
(chaplain; Clermont-Ferrand),
Christoph Herpel
(Frankfurt),
Anne Swardson, Co-Chair
(Paris),
Michael Rusk
(Geneva),
Andrea D'Agosto
(Rome),
Chris Easthill, Co-Chair
(Wiesbaden),
Janet Day-Strehlow
(Munich),
Steve Smith
(Munich),
Felicity Handford
(Waterloo), Not Pictured:
Alison Wale
(Clermont-Ferrand)
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Bishop Search and Nomination Committee
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Bishop Search and Nomination Committee
Left to Right:
Dr David Lee Williams,
Christ Church, Clermont-Ferrand, France;
Mr David Case – Co-Chair
, Church of the Ascension, Munich Germany;
Mrs Dagmar Hamberger
, St Boniface, Augsburg, Germany;
The Rev. Mark Dunham – Co-Chair,
Rector, St James, Florence, Italy;
The Rev. Austin Rios
, Rector, St Paul’s-within-the-Walls, Rome, Italy;
The Very Rev. Lucinda Laird
, Dean, Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Paris France;
Mrs Helena Mbele-Mbong
, Emmanuel, Geneva, Switzerland;
Mr John Adam
, St Augustine, Wiesbaden Germany.
Not Pictured:
The Rev, Richard Cole
, Emmanuel, Geneva, Switzerland;
Mrs Carole Ducastel
, All Saints, Waterloo, Belgium;
The Rev. Canon Michael Hunn
, Episcopal Church Center, New York, USA;
Mrs Nancy Janin
, Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris, France;
Ms Nancy Treuhold
, Board of Foreign Parishes, New York, USA.
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Further information on the Membership and the Duties of the Search and the Transition Committees
can be found here.
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The Episcopal Church in Europe
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The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe
is one of four Anglican jurisdictions in continental Europe. The other Anglican jurisdictions in Europe are: the
Lusitanian Church of Portugal
, the
Reformed Episcopal Church of Spain
, and the
Church of England's
Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe
. The Convocation is a jurisdiction of the Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church,
the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry
. The Episcopal Church is one of 39 provinces of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church is present in 16 countries around the world.
The Bishop in Charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, a suffragan bishop to the Presiding Bishop, is based at The American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. There are congregations in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. The Convocation functions both as a European Church with a legal corporate structure based in France, as well as being a diocesan-like jurisdiction of the Episcopal Church.
The Episcopal Church has been present in Europe since 1815. The Convocation was created by a Canon of General Convention in 1859, and Bishops in Charge were appointed by the Presiding Bishop. Some were diocesan Bishops or recently retired Bishops, who exercised oversight on a part-time basis. Bishops in Charge have been resident in Europe since 1960.
The first full-time resident Bishop in Charge was the Rt. Rev. Edmond Browning (1971-1974).
The first Bishop in Charge to be elected by the Convocation itself
and the first to be ordained and consecrated in Europe is our present Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Pierre Whalon, who was elected in 2001 and consecrated in St. Paul's Within the Walls Episcopal Church in Rome on November 18, 2001.
Bishop Whalon announced his intention to resign as Bishop in Charge effective July 2019. This initiated a Search Process for our second elected Bishop in Charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe.
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The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe | 23 avenue George V, 75008 Paris, France
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