The Holy One hath glorified...
Following is the text of Archbishop Lewis's charge to the Xl Provincial
Synod, delivered Sept.  27, 1995:
    There are many old, familiar faces in the room that take me clear back 
to the very first Provincial Synod at Dallas, not all that happy a one, 
I'm afraid.  But the Church has taken its name from that Synod and has 
survived - and grown, grown beautifully.  I remember one person whom I see 
often, whom I met at that first Dallas synod, and that's John Omwake.  We 
were riding in an elevator together at a time when we weren't sure we were 
going to go away with a Church or not.  And I know there are others of you 
in this room who were there at that time and shared those same worries. 
Isn't it wonderful to be here now in this happy condition? 
    The Lord indeed has been good to us.  We have come to the point now 
where we are taking ourselves seriously.  And I'm pleased to see that we 
are not over working at that.  We've kept our sense of humor.  We don't 
take ourselves too seriously, but I have a personal feeling that there is a 
ealthy calm and sense of rest in the Church. 
    We have survived and dealt with a number of very unpleasant things, but 
our faith and our fellowship and the grace of the Holy Spirit of God has 
sustained us.  And we realize that if we do God's work, we'll continue to 
be held up in His hands and carried in His arms. 
    We are now at a place where we must begin to make serious plans for the 
life and continuing future of this Church.  There will be opportunity to 
say a good deal about this later on, but one of the most important things 
that I think we are here to do is to devote ourselves to a pension plan for 
our clergy, and I say that knowing that none of the clergy in this room are 
likely to benefit very much from it.  We are doing something for a time to 
come when the man whom you call Father in your parish to-day is gone.  He 
will have been replaced by some fine, loving, caring, trustworthy, younger 
shepherd.  And this person needs to have an assururance for his future.  I 
do hope that, in whatever form we finally deal with it, we will come out of 
this synod with a pension plan with protection of our clergy and the 
Church's future.  I looked in the Prayer Book and then into the Bible for 
what's provided in the wisdom of the Book of Common Prayer for such an 
occasion as this.  And I found the fifth verse of the 55th chapter of the 
Book of the Prophet Isaiah:  "Behold thou shalt call a nation that thou 
knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of
By the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel, for he hath glorified 
thee." 

    By now, you have all seen 'The Trinitarian' and you know that the 
Church has gained by 19 petcent.  Now, frank;y, I think that's close enough 
to 20 percentto use the larger figure.  But the Church is, thank heaven, 
being counted by more honest men than I, And so 19 percent, let it be. 
    Growth has to mean some success in evangelism.  You've noticed a very 
great deal being said on that subject.  The Church has grown because we've 
begun to take evangelism seriously. 
    I have to comment that, in the statistics that produced that 19 percent 
figure, there is one category in which the numbers fell.  All other things 
showed gains, but the number of baptized, not confirmed, shrank 
considerably.  This, happily, does not mean a loss; it just means that we 
went and got a whole bunch of those folks confirmed - because, in the 
final analysis, there are a whole lot more people than there were before. 
I'm sure Bishop Stephens is willing to testify to that, because he 
confirmed 191 of them in one day. I hope his arms are rested up by 
now. That's a long time to be laying your hands on young folks' head. 
    This is the sort of thing that's happeed.  We are increasing in the 
ways in which we should. 
    The results of evangelism certainly do show.  Four years ago we had no 
overseas dioceses in this province - none.  The Church was pretty much just 
the lower 48 plus one priest and his parish in Alaska.  Now the Church is 
in England, Australlia, New Zealand and South America, and there is 
additional work in Sweden, France, Germany and Spain, with yet further 
evangelism in Korea about to begin -and who knows where we may next be 
asked to go after that!  It's been a thrilling four years. 
    Now, one of the reasons for this is that we have been very much blessed 
with people who have produtive ideas.  We have taken up ways of reaching 
the waiting needy world that would not have though of just a few years ago. 
    When we though about advertising and looked it, we could only think in 
terms like 10 column inches, and the cost for ads of that kind was totaly 
beyond consideration.  But we have learned that a tiny, little one-sentence 
classified ad in a single magazine with an 800 number can take our reach to 
nations - well, people that we knew not.  And even whole congregations have 
come from this. 
    We were thinking that this ad would chiefly attract unhappy 
Episcopalians and, of course, it has.  But just lately we have made contact 
with unhappy people who were never Episcopalians at all, people to whom 
what happened in 1976 was completely meaningless. 
    Such a person visited me just a few days ago.  And when I found myself 
talking about the woes of the '70s and our former allegiance, he didn't 
have the faintest idea what I was talking about and he did not care.  cause 
we are doing what God wants and so He rewards our effort.  But He also expects  
us to go on more and more in what we are doing. 
    The Church is coming into its own and it's thinking of itself.  We are 
not standing behind a tree anymore, afraid that some lion or tiger is 
about to get us, because we believe in the faith because they too seek the 
Lord.  The Holy One of Israel has glorified us and we must glorify Him in 
all our work. 
    We have found, thank the Lord, that evangelism was not the painful 
thing that we always thought it was going to be.  It's rather happened in 
spite of ourselves, but from here on it must happen because of ourselves. 
           The Most Rev. William O. Lewis was Metropolitan of the 
            Original Province of the Anglican Catholic Church, 
                 Sr. rector of St. Stephen's, Athens, GA. 
        This article appeared in December issue of The Trinitarian, 
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