Convocation Newsletter
(COVID-19 special edition #14)
June 19, 2020
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A Newsletter for Members and Friends of the Convocation of
Episcopal Churches in Europe
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"Ordinary Time" in a time of crisis...
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A Prayer for Understanding
Almighty God, through your Holy Spirit you created unity in the midst of diversity; We acknowledge that human diversity is an expression of your manifold love for your creation; We confess that in our brokenness as human beings we turn diversity into a source of alienation, injustice, oppression, and wounding. Empower us to recognize and celebrate differences as your great gift to the human family. Enable us to be the architects and bridge-builders of understanding, of respect and love; Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the ground of all unity, we pray.
Amen.
- Author Unknown, (This prayer was offered at a recent Bishops and Canons meeting.)
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Third Sunday after Pentecost:
O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
In Time of of Great Sickness and Mortality....
O most mighty and merciful God, in this time of grievous sickness, we flee unto thee for succor. Deliver us, we beseech thee, from our peril; give strength and skill to all those who minister to the sick; prosper the means made use of for their cure; and grant that, perceiving how frail and uncertain our life is, we may apply our hearts unto that heavenly wisdom which leadeth to eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
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(1928 BCP, 45)
The photograph is of a the large banner which now hangs in front of the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. It is a joint effort by the Convocation and the Cathedral.
Bishop Edington: "Racism is a sin present, in different ways, in every place where humans make community. As followers of Jesus, we are always called to stand with thise who are marginalized and degraded. In our context, that especially means standing with communities of color who have long suffered the injustices of racism. Our church is listening to, and learning from, Black Lives Matter."
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Academy for Parish Leadership Online
Registration for remaining sessions: June 20, and 27
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APL 2020 is online: Remaining sessions: June 20, and 27
(Register for all or some of the remaining online sessions)
Registration and Information
here
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The online sessions will include speakers from within and outside of the Convocation
who are motivated by their faith commitments to engagement in activism and witness. We will have online breakout sessions to discuss and explore both the spiritual underpinnings and look at concrete, practical steps so that we can live out our commitment in 21st-Century Europe.
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Racism and Reconciling the Beloved Community - Saturday, 20 June, at 10:00 a.m.
The session will include sacred stories from task force members on their experiences with inclusion and exclusion, an introduction to the Convocation wide survey on diversity and inclusion.
Our presenter,
the Rev. Edwin Johnson,
will speak on Building Beloved Community, the Episcopal Church’s framework for reconciliation and healing the wounds caused by racism. This will lay the ground work for delving deeper into the roots and modern day manifestation of racial discrimination in Europe. Johnson is
rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Dorchester, Mass, from Costa-Rica and Montserrat heritage who is providing some guidance on direction for the task force.
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Youth and Children in our church today - the future or the present?
Do they belong? How can we engage them? How can we learn with and from them?
Saturday, 20 June at 4:00 p.m.
Hear from speaker
Bronwyn Clark Skov,
Officer for Youth Ministry, The Episcopal Church.
Bronwyn will share about the impact of child/youth hood on one’s participation in church as an adult, ideas for a Christian formation plan strategy,
as well as examples of models that are doing well across the Episcopal Church.
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"Living Out the Holy: "
Engaged Spirituality for Concerned Christians
This edition of the
Academy for Parish Leadership
offers a range of speakers and resources on four topics at the center of the Convocation’s work and witne,ss in the world:
- Refugees and Migrant - June 6
- Climate and Creation Care - June 6
- Racism and Reconciling the Beloved Community - June 20
- Youth and Children: The Church of Today - June 20
- Final plenary, reporting back, next steps, worship - June 27
These four priorities were set at the 2019 Convocation Convention. See Bishop Edington's Address
here
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During the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Major Renovations at
St. Paul's Within the Walls in Rome
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While the COVID-19 pandemic closed the church for worship and other activities, St. Paul's Within the Walls has been able to use this time to greatly accelerate its ongoing renovation work, which will reach its completion in late September when the church reopens for worship. Here is a report from the Rev. Austin Rios, Rector...
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Restoration Update
June 19, 2020
Dear People of St. Paul’s,
Over the past few weeks, several of you have asked, “When are we going to be able to re-gather for worship in our church sanctuary?” After the initial lockdown in early March to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in Italy, our worship has had to move online. But now that restrictions are starting to loosen across the country, religious services are allowable following strict guidelines of social distancing.
In our worship tradition, so much of what makes our in-person celebration meaningful is now legally prohibited: choral and communal singing, normal distribution of communion, and passing the peace. But it isn’t simply this dearth of normal liturgy or the stringent precautions that are keeping us from re-gathering in the sanctuary.
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Once it became clear that a return to normalcy was a long way off, I began to speak with our Wardens and the Board of St. Paul’s about moving forward with the decade-long restoration project in which we’ve been engaged.
This project began with the exterior of our church buildings, restoring surfaces and replacing roofs, and has been focused on the interior ever since. Four years ago, we cleaned and re-lit the Burne Jones mosaics in the apse and arches, and from November to February, before the pandemic struck, we restored a part of the side aisles in front of the organ and the aisle on the chapel side. Our chief architect David Yager and I had been in conversation for many years about the work that remained, namely the restoration of the main part of the nave from floor to ceiling.
This work was the most challenging because it would disrupt all of the activities that take place in our church on a daily basis, from worship services to concerts for the public.
And every scenario that David and I discussed was going to require us to sacrifice normalcy and be transformed for a season, both liturgically and budgetarily. For one phase, we even considered locating a temporary altar at the back of the church and facing westward, while work was being done on the first half of the nave.
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And then Covid-19 came, shutting down the whole country and ending all activities in the sanctuary. Once the initial shock from this dramatic change subsided, and the heavy lift of moving to online worship from in person worship lessened, we began to imagine a new possibility.
What if we could use this time of loss and the death of our old way of doing things to invest in a faithful future?
What if we could advance this restoration project now, while gathering in person was still prohibited, so that our eventual regathering would be in a church that was physically transformed for whatever ministries we will pursue in life after the pandemic? After much conversation, and after a generous gift to the restoration fund that made the work possible, the Vestry and I decided to move forward with this next phase.
On the first day that construction workers were allowed to resume activities, we began installing scaffolding in the nave. Patrizia Cevoli, a mosaic restoration artist began tracing the floor in front of the chancel steps and removing the damaged mosaic for repair. We worked out sanitization responsibilities and distancing plans while the work proceeded. The big surprise was that, uninterrupted by the need to sanitize every time a member of the public entered the sanctuary,
the workers were quickly ahead of schedule.
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So much ahead of schedule, in fact, that we began looking into the possibility of moving beyond the initial scope of the project (which was the first third of the nave) into completing an additional third. This increased work would mean that we would have to push back our initial expectation of using the space by the beginning of September to the beginning of November. One month more for another third of the church complete. The leadership of the church said yes to this tradeoff, and we proceeded with the new plan.
But the biggest surprise to follow was that the work was continuing to proceed so much faster than expected. In fact, it became apparent that the final third of the nave could ALSO be included in the revised timeline.
This means that by the end of September the entire nave—from the chancel steps to the bronze doors on Via Nazionale—will have been restored.
The only remaining area for restoration is a small section of the North aisle, which will be accomplished with minimal impact at a later date.
Beyond the scope of the restoration project, we are looking for ways to rewire our space for increased video streaming and audio recording capabilities that should benefit all those who virtually enter this sacred space. Having already agreed to an end date, and with another generous gift to fund the project, we enthusiastically said yes to expanding the work plan.
So that is the story of why we are not regathering in the sanctuary before the beginning of October, even though other churches in Italy are. We measured the capacity of the Crypt, we measured the capacity of the Sculpture Garden, we measured the capacity of the Parish Hall.
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We drafted detailed guidelines for how meeting in any alternate space on our grounds would require extraordinary work and cost from those who are able to attend, and we weighed the impact of alienation for those of us who are unable to attend in-person. Opening our gates, doors, and spaces all impact the timeline of resuming worship in the sanctuary because of the need to constantly re-sanitize for worker and visitor safety. We reviewed our mission statement, and evaluated every possible scenario against our call
“[to] bear witness in Rome to a dynamic and living faith, open to all and rejecting none.”
Remarkably, the list of what we can do within the walls is so much less than what we can do without them during this time, as long as you are willing to remain part of a welcoming and dynamic faith community.
While we are not meeting each other in the building, we are looking for the best ways to gather “Beyond the Walls,” in parks and safer outdoor spaces closer to where you live. No one denies that saying yes to this restoration work requires sacrifice and flexibility on our behalf. And yet, this time of transition, brought about by Covid-19, requires us to re-think how we do church anyway.
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What does it mean to be a community of faith without a central physical gathering place?
Can our community find ways to deepen connection and formation through online means, rather than just lament what we’ve lost in physical gathering? How can these new ways of being with each other now, and this restored space we will return to, transform the way we face the public and do ministry together in the years to come?
None of us could have foreseen or stopped the pandemic that has altered our world.
But we do have a choice in how to respond when faced with difficulty: to fixate on what is missing or to search for opportunity.
Through this restoration work, and as a general faith outlook, St. Paul’s desires to be a community focused on the latter.
Yours in Christ,
Austin +
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Bishop Edington's "A Word from the Bishop"
will return next week.
See also the Bishop's Pastoral Message
from June 5 on YouTube -
here
Read Bishop Edington's op-ed
from June 10 in
Le Monde
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here
(French and the original English version -
here
)
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Dean Laird is featured on France24
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The Very Reverend
Lucinda Laird
, Dean of our Cathedral, was featured on France24 this week in a program called "The 51 Percent" which focuses on women in leadership.
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Some 2.3 billion people identify as Christians across the globe and yet senior leadership positions in many churches are still prohibited to women. Annette Young meets the Reverend Lucinda Laird, the Dean of the American Cathedral in Paris who is a leading female priest in the Episcopal Church.
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The church as a refuge for all:
A prayer service for World Refugee Day
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All Saints Waterloo hosted a
European-wide virtual prayer service on Wednesday 17 June
during the week of World Refugee Day.
The service can be viewed
here
This year, the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe is organising a Task Force on Migrants and Refugees to create a community of practice across Europe. This service will engage spiritually and prayerfully with the four core questions of the Task Force; what does it mean for us, as Christians and church communities, to offer:
Charity
to migrants and refugees in need;
Witness
to their stories and their faith;
Outreach
to newcomers to our local areas and to our faith and;
Welcome
newcomers to our churches to become full members and leaders.
These questions remind us that our churches must think about how we can best offer everyone with the information and hospitality that they seek from our communities.
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Ordinations and Clergy Transitions
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Ordinations on Saturday, June 27, at 1:00 p.m.
Our transitional Deacons, the
Rev. Stéphanie Burette
and the
Rev. Jean Dumond Chavanne
will, God willing, be ordained Priests on Saturday, June 27, at 1:00 p.m. at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris.
The service will be broadcast live over Facebook
. A very limited number of family and essential personnel will be present in person for the ordination in the cathedral. These precautions are of course due to social distancing and health requirements resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
View the Ordination on Facebook Live -
here
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The Rev. Stéphanie Burette
Sponsoring Parish:
Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris
Dr. Stéphanie Burette completed her Master of Divinity degree at Yale Divinity School in conjunction with Berkeley Divinity School’s Diploma of Anglican Studies and ministry formation program. She completed master’s and doctoral degrees from the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and was a school teacher in France before attending to Yale.
Stéphanie received an appointment as the Porter Fellow at St George’s College in Jerusalem for the 2019-20 academic year. She has worked with pilgrimage groups and others, as well as contributing to the life of St George’s Cathedral and to the Jerusalem Peacebuilders (JPB) organization. She returns to Europe in mid-June.
Stéphanie has accepted a call as curate at St. Thomas' Church in Hanover NH, USA, which is adjacent to Dartmouth University.
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The Rev. Jean Dumond Chavanne
Sponsoring Parish:
Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris
Jean Dumond Chavanne came to us as an ordinand of the Diocese of Haiti. He was, however, later accepted into our ordination process, being sponsored by the Cathedral in Paris.
During his time in France, he has completed both a master in pedagogy as well as theological studies at the Institut catholique and the Institut protestant de Paris. In the summer, the European Institute of Christian Studies (EICS) administered the General Ordination Exam (in French) and has certified his formation.
Dumond and wife Rolande are active parishioners at the cathedral. Dumond and his family hope one day to return to their homeland and serve the Church as priest and teacher. After his ordination, Dumond will be working in French-speaking Episcopal ministry in France and Belgium.
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Online Worship in the Convocation
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Online Worship Opportunities for Sundays and Weekdays
With most of our church buildings closed to public worship, many of our parishes and missions have moved their Sunday and weekday Worship online. Consider taking part in worship with your sisters and brothers in Christ across Europe.
Times of in-person worship are also indicated.
All times are (Central European Summer Time (CEST).
Worship on Sundays and during the week:
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St. Paul's Within the Walls Episcopal Church
Rome, Italy
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Sundays
- Emmanuel Church, Geneva, SWITZERLAND
- In-person worship Sunday 8:30: Morning Prayer
- In-person worship Sunday 10:30: Morning Prayer (with instrumental music and cantors singing) - sign-up required
Mondays
Tuesdays
Wednesdays
- American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris, FRANCE **
- 9:00 a.m. Morning prayer live-streamed - here
- Compline available each day on YouTube - here
- Emmanuel Church, Geneva, SWITZERLAND
- 12:30 p.m. Noonday Prayer - Link
- Resurrection, Orvieto, ITALY
- Morning Prayer at 9:30 a.m. (in Spanish)
- St. Augustine, Wiesbaden, GERMANY
- Wednesdays at 11:00 a.m. "Word and Worship" - link
- St. James, Florence, ITALY
- Evening Prayer at 6:00 p.m.
- St. Paul's Within the Walls, Rome, ITALY
- Morning Prayer, Rite II at 12:00 Noon
Thursdays
- All Saints' Waterloo, BELGIUM (or on Facebook)
- 21h00 Compline
- American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris, FRANCE **
- 9:00 a.m. Morning prayer live-streamed - here
- Compline available each day on YouTube - here
- Ascension, Munich, GERMANY -
- 8:00 p.m. Compline - link
- Christ the King, Frankfurt, GERMANY - link
- 19:00 Compline
- Resurrection, Orvieto, ITALY
- Morning Prayer at 9:30 a.m. (in Spanish)
- Bible Study at 17:00 (in Spanish)
- St. Paul's Within the Walls, Rome, ITALY
- Contemplative Prayer at 12:00 Noon
Fridays
Saturdays
**
All live-streamed services are posted to the Cathedral
YouTube
and
Facebook
and may be accessed at any time.
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Upcoming Convocation Events
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- June 27, 1:00 p.m. Ordination of Priests - Cathedral
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- October 15-18: TEC-ELKB dialogue - Augsburg, Germany
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The Convocation Youth were invited to submit creative ideas for a project called “
Pentecost Project 2020
”, telling the story of
Pentecost
.
What a wonderful result:
a video featuring youth from throughout the Europe speaking the good news in the languages of our Convocation!
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A useful resources from the Youth Commission:
FAITH AT HOME - RESOURCES FOR ALL AGES
-
DOWNLOAD
For more information on youth events and registration, please visit the Youth Ministry webpage
HERE
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Convocation COVID-19 Webpage
Information in one place
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Convocation COVID-19 Response
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Please visit our
webpage
dedicated to our COVID-19 response, as well as other resources.
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Congregational Plans for reopening churches
- see the Bishop and Council of Advice directives
on
Regathering the Church Prayerfully and Intentionally
here
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About five years ago, Canon Jere Skipper began the work of expanding the Episcopal Asset Map to include our congregations and ministries in Europe to the church-wide resource.
All of the parishes, established missions, and other ministries are on the Asset Map. Much more information needs to be added. Please consider updating the Episcopal Asset Map entry for your church or ministry. If you need help contact the
archdeacon
.
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Convocation Communications Committee
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Trinité Magazine
Spring 2020 issue
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The Convocation Communications Committee (CCC) coordinates the communications of the Convocation. Special emphasis is given to Social Media, and close coordination with the parishes and missions of the Convocation. Existing modes of communication such as newsletters and the website are getting a facelift.
Members are: Thomas Girty (Paris), chair; Felicity Handford, Marc Smets-Tolley (both Waterloo), Walter Baer (Paris), Audrey Shankles (Wiesbaden), Helena Mbele-Mbong (Geneva), Maleah Rios (Rome) and Ellen Hampton (Paris), ex-officio. Others are being added.
The Convocation is now also featured with four pages in the cathedral's semi-annual publication
Trinité
, covering Convocation events.
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Did you miss Church?
Check out an on-line sermon:
See Bishop Edington's Sermon for Easter 2
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here
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Other pulpits in the Convocation:
Check other congregational webpages
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A la radio : le Magazine Anglican
Le « Magazine Anglican », animé par Laurence Moachon, paroissienne de la Cathédrale de la Sainte Trinité à Paris.
À propos du Magazine Anglican :
Depuis septembre 2012, Laurence Moachon présente le 4e samedi du mois, le Magazine Anglican. Avec l’objectif de faire mieux connaître la tradition anglicane au public français, elle traite de sujets d’actualité culturelle, historique, liturgique ou ecclésiologique dans la Convocation et la Communion Anglicane.
ÉCOUTEZ OU TÉLÉCHARGEZ LE MAGAZINE ANGLICAN sur :
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Regarding Allegations of Clergy Sexual Abuse
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Important information on the lifting of the Statute of Limitation regarding clergy sexual abuse...
Let it be known that for three years in the Episcopal Church there is no statute of limitation on clergy sexual abuse. Every diocese has a confidential way to make a report. In Europe here is ours:
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"Go forth for God; go to the world in peace; be of good courage, armed with heavenly grace, in God's good Spirit daily to increase, till in his kingdom we behold his face."
Hymn 347 - Holy Eucharist; Music: Litton
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The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe | 23 avenue George V, 75008 Paris, France
+33 (0) 1 53 23 84 06 | office@tec-europe.orgl | www.tec-europe.org
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