All about evangelism

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry is seen during a 2017 trip to Asia. Photo: Tsang-Hing Ho

[Episcopal News Service] Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was elected and confirmed in June 2015 at the 78th General Convention, and on November 1 that year, he was installed as presiding bishop, becoming the first Black denominational leader of the Episcopal Church.

A lot has happened in Curry’s nine-year term, from natural disasters in many of the church’s dioceses to a global pandemic that upended much of parish life and forced the church to embrace new technologies to remain connected. Throughout, Curry has led the church in its focus on racial reconciliation, evangelism and creation care while preaching Christian love to counter the societal hatred that continues to fuel political divisions in the United States and beyond.

Curry also had the opportunity to address an estimated audience of billions when he was asked to give the sermon at the May 2018 royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. That sermon drew sudden worldwide attention to Curry’s Christian message of the power of love, while Episcopalians across the church continued to warmly welcome him for countless pastoral visits and revivals.

Many Episcopalians also embraced the Way of Love, a series of resources that Curry and his staff produced in 2018 to help Christians develop a “rule of life” around Jesus’ teachings. Those resources and other churchwide initiatives helped underscore the church’s identity as what Curry called “the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement,” and he has sought to keep the Episcopal Church connected to other provinces in the Anglican Communion despite tensions over some provinces’ theological differences.

Curry’s term ends October 31, after which he will hand the reins to Presiding Bishop-elect Sean Rowe. As Curry, 71, prepares to step down and spend more time closer to home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Episcopal News Service spoke to him by Zoom to get his reflections on his eventful primacy and the road ahead.

The following Q&A has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

ENS: Every nine years the Episcopal Church has the opportunity to ask what is the role of the presiding bishop, and who would be the best person to fill that role? I’m interested in your thoughts in general about that, but also, starting off with one specific canonical role, the presiding bishop “shall visit every diocese of this church.” You’ve traveled to more than 100 dioceses, finishing up with Wyoming.

Curry: Every one except Venezuela.

ENS: How important have those visits been, for you, but also for the church?

Curry: Remember, the church is large, dispersed. We’re in multiple countries, multiple time zones, multiple cultures. And part of the role of presiding bishop is to at least seek to be a kind of connecting person for the whole. You do that as the gatherer of the House of Bishops, who represent all the dioceses of the church. You do that with General Convention, where you have representatives of the whole.

But that visiting function—there’s still nothing like showing up in person. Online can supplement that, as we learned in the pandemic. The other thing is, a presiding bishop is the spokesperson for the church, charged with speaking both to the church itself, but also for the church to the wider world on behalf of the Gospel. Each presiding bishop has been called for a particular time and a particular work. And when I look back at each one, they actually served God’s purposes in that particular moment. I think I have, in a particular moment, but we don’t serve in the next one. A new voice is needed in the next one.

ENS: Did you sense nine years ago that you were being called for a specific purpose and time? Looking back, what was it about that time that you were the person to be in that role?

Curry: I think on some level, part of the reason that I was called and elected was to help the church to once again reclaim our faith, following Jesus of Nazareth, as God’s way of love being shown to us in his teachings, in his spirit, and believing that it can make a difference by the power of his resurrection.

To help us reclaim and build on and develop the work of racial reconciliation, but even more broadly, to help us reclaim how we are reconciled with his creation. Reconciliation with God means reconciliation with each other and all of God’s creation. And to live it, figure out ways to encourage it.

That involves evangelism. You know, time will tell how effective we were, but we gave it our best shot, and I hope we’re handing off to Bishop Rowe and [House of Deputies] President [Julia] Ayala Harris, a ship that’s sailing in the faith direction and ready to chart out into new waters.

ENS: Are there initiatives that you championed or approaches that you took that you think served that? Certainly people remember your appearances at revivals, or some of the racial reconciliation materials or the Way of Love.

Curry: I think that the church has at its disposal remarkable resources—Way of Love, evangelism training courses designed for Episcopalians, the whole Sacred Ground curriculum, materials for racial justice and reconciliation, the creation of the Coalition for Racial Justice and Equity, something that I pray will last long beyond any of us, or as long as the need is there to do that work.

The care of creation—there’s a new curriculum that’s now available for that. We’ve tried to put some good stuff in place and tried to build on the good stuff that was already there. And I hope the stage is set for the next generation. I hope that they’ve got a good foundation in the faith that they can build on.

ENS: You mentioned one other canonical role of the presiding bishop: to speak God’s word to the church into the world. There was no greater stage for that than your sermon at the royal wedding in 2018. Looking back, how significant do you feel that moment was for the rest of your time as presiding bishop?

Curry: You know, I remember when I was working on that sermon. I really made a decision that I had to do a sermon that actually gives voice to the core of what it means to be a Christian, to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That way of love, which was what the message was built around, was an attempt to do that, to give voice to that, both for the church and the wider world.

And I know I’ve said this on other occasions, but I heard more people come up to me and say something along the lines of, “I didn’t know Christianity was about love.” I don’t know why I was surprised at that. I was surprised at the level [of response]. So, my hope then was that that sermon would help to kind of be a mid-course correction in terms of who we are perceived to be, and help us to be correct and clear about who we really are called to be.

You know, none of us are perfect. We’re not. We all make mistakes. And we’re all sinners. But we’ve got a North Star to follow, and that North Star—Jesus and his way of love—is the way of life.

ENS: Was that moment also about reinvigorating the church itself, the Episcopal Church?

Curry: I think it was more about telling the wider world community what the Christian faith is about, what it really is about, and what God’s dream for this creation and all of his children, what that’s about. That’s really the message I wanted to send.

ENS: One other development was just the way that the pandemic really upended everything about the church, at least at that time in 2020, but we’re still sort of feeling the aftershocks. Do you think that experience set a new course for the church? Or did it get the church moving a little faster on the same course it had been going, for better or worse? There’s been a lot of talk about church decline. On the other hand, there are encouraging ways the church is responding to this new time.

Curry: Yeah, it’s a mix of all of that, I suspect, and time will tell. But certain realities that were already there came to the surface. You know, in the Bible, in the Noah story, they don’t know whether there’s land. They keep looking for land. And finally, there’s a bird flying over and has a sprig, which is a sign that there’s some foliage somewhere, which means there’s probably land somewhere. It’s kind of a sprig of hope.

I think we saw some sprigs of hope, both for a wider human society but also for the church, in the sense that we did some things that we probably never would have done in terms of finding ways to worship, finding ways to take care of each other, finding ways to do our work and witness in the wider world, in both service and witness to justice and compassion. There were sprigs of hope all over the church. And they weren’t just in big churches and big cities.

I’ve talked about a wonderful congregation in Colorado [St. George’s Episcopal Church in Leadville] that figured out a way to keep their feeding program going. There are churches like that all over. There were sprigs of hope in that pandemic, which tell me that the Holy Spirit is not finished with this church yet, and that there’s a future.

One of my favorite passages has been in the Last Supper, in John 13-17. And there’s this moment where Jesus says, “There are many other things that I could tell you, but you cannot handle them now. But this much you will know: The spirit of truth will lead you into all truth.” That same spirit will now lead this church into its witness and its way of following Jesus of Nazareth and his love in a brand-new day that none of us dreamed of.

ENS: I’m sure you don’t want to preempt your successor, Sean Rowe, and I wouldn’t expect you to put any expectations on him. However, given that you mentioned each presiding bishop is called for the church at that time, I’m wondering what kind of church and what is this time that now needs someone like Sean Rowe?

Curry: Oh, I wouldn’t even presume to know. That’s going to be between Bishop Sean Rowe, the people of the Episcopal Church and the Holy Spirit. And I am positive that the Spirit is going to work with him and with this church and this world, and lead this church, lead this new presiding bishop, lead him into God’s truth.

I know he’s going to do that. I mean, I did in spite of myself. My predecessors did in spite of themselves. I know he’s going to lead us into both a more faithful and a more effective church for the time in which we find ourselves, whatever that is. I really don’t know what that looks like. I think he’s got some sense, I really do. And I think the bishops elected him and the church consented, sensing that this is the leader we need, as it says in the Book of Esther, “for such a time as this.” I believe that Sean Rowe and [House of Deputies President] Julia Ayala Harris have been called to this kingdom for such a time as this, and I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do.

—David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.