BISHOP GLENDA S. CURRY’S OPENING ADDRESS AT THE 194TH DIOCESAN CONVENTION

This version has been slightly edited for clarity in this print edition.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Your prayers and love are consistent, deep, and enduring. For these last five years, you have freely given those to me and Bishop Prior every time we have visited. I don’t know a single visit that I have made that I have not felt overwhelmed by both your ministry and your heart.

Welcome to this 194^th gathering of our diocese. You know our theme already: “Go ahead to Galilee”. It’s the direction that the angels gave the frightened women and apostles when they found the empty tomb on Easter. “He’s not here; he’s been raised,” they said. “Come and see the place where he lay, and then go quickly and tell his disciples he has been raised from the dead, and indeed, he is going ahead of you to Galilee, and you will see him”. This is my message. So, they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. Before he died, Jesus promised them that he would go to Galilee and meet them there after he was raised. Our theme reminds us that all our ministry together is meant to reveal the risen Christ – alive, active, and walking with us every moment.

In those days, there were lots of gods that people were prone to worship, appease, report to, and obey, not like today. Those pagan gods occupied a distant and unreachable realm, but there was really only one God, one God that claimed to be Emmanuel, who claimed that he would be alive and touchable and with us wherever we were, and that was Christ Jesus. The angel says, go to Galilee; you’ll see him there, and when they encounter Jesus only two verses later in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells them, “Do not be afraid. Despite what you’ve just seen and heard in the last few days, do not be afraid”, he says. “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and they will see me there.” As I travel the diocese and visit our 87 parishes, our four worshiping communities, and our Camp McDowell, our beloved Camp McDowell, I see Jesus everywhere, healing and loving and at the same time challenging us to keep following, to never stop. Our job is to hope, to believe, to lead others to faith and the reality that Jesus has risen despite all other signs. No one else in the world can do that job but us. Everything we do should point to the reality that Jesus is with us, alive and living, right now.

So welcome to this bishop’s address, or my chance to share the big picture of who we are, where we started, and where we’re headed in our common life and ministry as I see it. I feel blessed to have the seat that I have and the chance that I have to see so many of you all over the place so regularly. In my first two years, we lived and learned and loved under the shadow of a terrible pandemic. I think less than 60 days after my election, one of the first meetings people were invited to was on the phone, because then we didn’t use Zoom, and we talked about how we had to close our churches. Those were uncertain, scary, sad times and no one had a playbook for that. Yet God was with us, blessing our ministry and teaching us so many new things. If you stop and think back, there are so many things we might not have learned. Today, we are well beyond COVID-19, and we’re going into a new chapter rapidly, but our church in Alabama has changed. It has grown in numbers and vitality in many ways. Since sometimes numbers can give us one picture, just one dimension of our vitality, let’s look for a minute at our financial picture.

Our trust funds invested dollars overseen by a great, mighty, fine group of advisors led by our treasurer. Our trust funds for the diocese were at $9,215,871.11; in 2024, those had grown to $10,329,495.75 for a gain of $1.1 million. The parish trust funds in 2020 were $16,472,135.30; in 2024, they are $19,816,819.11, a gain of $3.3 million. This is a sign of your generosity, a sign of the trustee’s careful management, and a sign that you are investing in your church.

Our average Sunday attendance through 2023 (because we don’t have the numbers for 2024 yet) from the previous year was up seven percent. The number of pledging units was up one percent; the pledges were up three percent. Everything is moving and trending up. Next year, I expect we will exceed the pre-pandemic numbers we all knew and loved. I told you two years ago that I wanted the diocese to be a resource to you. So, how are we doing? Well, these are the parishes that reported growth last year beyond pre-pandemic numbers. There are quite a few, and the trend is that there will be many others by next year. We should give praise to God for those right there.

Recently, I had the honor of baptizing a man named Tom. It’s not his real name. He found the church through its online presence. He had never been inside it. He is living with autism. This made it hard for him to go into a place where there were a lot of people. Joining a church community was beyond what he imagined, but he showed up and wanted to be baptized. That’s the power of the Lord. I was touched by his great courage because he was clearly working hard to find a comfort level among all these people on that big Sunday and he wanted to be part of this new community somehow. But when we went through and practiced the baptismal promises where he proclaimed Jesus as Lord, his budding faith showed everyone there how to stand tall against our limits and how to share our best. Without our online worship, without our internet and active website presence to introduce him to the parish, we might’ve missed him. I’m sure maybe God could have gotten him there a different way, but we might’ve missed him. The tools we developed because of COVID helped lead this man to Jesus. He’s just sort of an icon for me of how the church has changed in the past five years.

The way we lead now that we can have online committee meetings gives us a broader representation from all parts of our diocese. We have classes where people can now come more easily, and it’s more flexible. Some have changed the focus of their services, so we even look better on TV. I highly recommend that! We’re still experimenting with our online ability and keep adding capacity. We’ve upgraded websites that help us communicate more easily. And as we experimented with encouraging folks to return after the pandemic, we added innovative services we’d never had before. We started approaching our campus ministries from an ecumenical standpoint. A few have made space for children inside their naves, creating places for them to play – something the English call “messy church.” Others have added all kinds of outside lighting and landscaping, as well as better signage. Some are even experimenting with, dare I say, more singable music.

This year, we have completed nine clergy searches. Nine new clergy have been welcomed to the diocese; we’ve had 31 parish consultations and held eight vestry retreats. And when I say “we”, I mean myself and all the people that work at Carpenter House. 15 mutual ministry reviews. Bishop Prior and I have done 127 bishop visits to parishes. 135 staff visits have been accomplished with the help of the Diocesan staff. We’ve had eight racial healing events, and we have 40 new parish websites working. We have an able staff of volunteer consultants who will come to help you, walk alongside you, and work with you to make a ministry action plan. All you have to do is call and ask for help.

We have strengthened our offerings by training lay preachers and worship leaders, and all of this is part of something I’ve come to think of as a step toward a culture of unreasonable hospitality. That idea comes from a man whose restaurant came in last in the top 50 in New York City. Unreasonable Hospitality came from Will Guidara, who wanted to be number one, and he was invited to a meeting of the top 50 restaurants in New York City. While he was sitting there, he learned that he was last on the list, and he didn’t like it, so he decided he would do something to understand how to be first. Not a bad impulse.

He found that the human desire to be taken care of never goes away. So, if he could create a culture of hospitality that was so over the top, people would love to be in his restaurant for something more than food. That might be important. “How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?” he wondered.

Rich Webster at Saint Luke’s, Birmingham thought Will Guidara’s magic sounded an awful lot like love one another as I have loved you, and a chance for them to create a welcome culture at Saint Luke’s. He can tell the story much better – I don’t know a story Rich can’t tell better – but suffice it to say church size is not the point. Church size doesn’t matter if you focus on a welcoming culture and not a welcoming committee. Rich says there are two central catalysts – breakfast all day from the minute the church opens, not just in that hour. Wherever we have, it should be easily accessible – pre-wrapped breakfast biscuits to be exact, coffee, water, and they have a QR code where they invite payment, but they don’t require it. You put those out in the hallway, you get a few high-top tables, and you let people serve themselves and it gets really messy, but that’s okay. Folks pay through the QR code whatever amount they want, and usually, they pay more than the food is worth. Then, they take the proceeds and dedicate them to outreach efforts or another ministry. A second catalyst that he talks about is that Saint Luke’s has tightened their liturgy carefully to make every service one hour long. That might mean reducing the readings to two, which the rubrics allow. And on Christmas Eve, they began celebrating at 10:00 AM with a new service, and they got 500 additional people on Christmas Eve.

This year, Saint Luke’s has about a hundred more people every Sunday. People gather in the halls to eat, and they make friends, and then they go worship. The QR code also works for visitor cards and there’s a free Google form that helps you set the whole thing up. He said last Sunday, an 18-year-old brought 12 of her friends to church to celebrate her birthday. It’s not breakfast hour; it’s breakfast all morning. After COVID-19, Saint Luke’s noticed that attention spans are shorter, people are more comfortable with technology than they ever have been, and they want earlier events. Services of an hour with no dead air helped them. We’re in a post-Covid world now. Rich says to ask yourself what works for growth, not what works for us, and the average age at Saint Luke’s has dropped from 52 to 40.

Unreasonable hospitality, though, comes in many, many forms. St. Stephen’s, Birmingham, picked up the breakfast all-day idea, and they’re seeing the same energy. They worked hard at helping and healing from the tragedy of three years ago when we lost those three faithful people. Yet God has given them a vision for turning that tragedy into a welcome to the community around them. First, the memorial to the martyrs is a labyrinth open to all and right by their playground. You can see that it’s inviting the kids and the community to come and play and pray. Most recently they’re working to establish the Threshold Center in the former St. John’s For the Deaf building. It’s a place where people who are curious about their faith from many perspectives can gather. They can ask questions, they can study, explore, and I like to think of it as a giant arrow pointing to the worship of Jesus across the street.

You may remember a couple of years ago when Jason Byassee, who wrote “Northern Lights” challenged us all to lower our thresholds, meaning do all kinds of things to make our front door a lot easier to get into. St. Stephen’s has added a service with a Celtic feel and the Threshold Center and that’s their response. Christ Church, Tuscaloosa has been experimenting with concerts outside in warmer weather using John Prine and the Beatles and Grateful Dead music as a way of introducing the outside world to our liturgy. Rector Paul Pradat says, “The concerts have become a bridge to meeting church people when otherwise those people would not darken our doors.” Typically, over 300 people of all ages come, and the musicians come from four different parishes.

Many of you are offering all kinds of creative new ways of introducing people outside our church to the gifts we bring to following Jesus. Don’t stop. Keep doing things. Trinity, Florence has helped us nourish an ecumenical campus ministry that has grown rapidly, bringing students of all kinds of faith traditions into their church for worship and service. Their ecumenical work extends across the Shoals, building bridges for youth across traditions, inviting diversity, and sharing resources. Speaking of sharing resources, this year, we have given $337,970 in grants. Those grants included Creation Care, Outreach, and Refresh and Renew grants for the second year in a row – Refresh and Renew 2.0. People have used those little bits of money between $250 and $5,000 for AV equipment, microphones, landscaping, lighting, and repairs of everything from kitchens to bathrooms. Do you remember Diaper Row at St. Peter’s, Talladega? As of the end of January – hold your hat – they have welcomed 1,948 guests, served 3,189 babies, and distributed 121,230 diapers and 18,400 pull-ups, all in two hours a month. That’s a lot of diapers and a lot of pull-ups.

The Church of Epiphany, Leeds, is on Highway 119. It’s a busy road, but you can see the sign in the dark. They got a $250 solar-powered light paid for with a Creation Care grant, and now they can be easily spotted at night. $250 made that much of a difference, but I think what made a difference was looking outside and saying, “How can people find us?” They’ve got to be able to see us to do it. Emmanuel, Opelika, the little church I told you about that was in the dark in May of 2023, came into the light and now has 40 people on Sunday and growing. The city took notice. They awarded them the best historical building and invested $250,000 to build sidewalks around the building. That building was once completely landlocked, so they’re moving on.

Partnerships with your community work. They value us, especially when we go and talk to them, and they see what’s possible. Our Refresh and Renew grant 2.0 stimulated many things in smaller churches. I blessed a new playground at St. Simon Peter, Pell City, and will bless another at St. Andrew’s, Montevallo. There are so many ways you can use these grants to encourage connection to the people around you—infrastructure, buildings, and grounds. 56 parishes received this money for programming, parking, and removing barriers to growth. Outreach grants built a community garden at St. Bart’s in Florence; Stations of the Cross at St. Michael and All Angels, Anniston; English as a Second Language classes at St. Michael’s in Fayette; and Memory Care Respite at Christ Church, Tuscaloosa. They also helped veterans at Epiphany, Guntersville. Nine grants went to expand our many feeding programs. One even helped with cognitive neurodivergent support at Holy Comforter in Montgomery, as well as laundry and clothing banks at Nativity, Huntsville, and Grace in Woodlawn. I want to give a shout-out to all our feeding programs. There are so many everywhere, all around us, feeding the hungry—from little boxes to hands-on efforts, passing out food.

Racial healing and pilgrimage continue to grow across our parishes. Sawyerville had a remarkable year this past summer. In its 31^st year, 270 volunteers served 525 campers. The summer learning program served 162 children. Breanna Mitchell, our Missioner for Racial Healing and Pilgrimage is now a certified practitioner for Courageous Conversations. This year, in our diocese, we studied Catherine Meeks’ Spiritual Guide to Racial Healing Together in 35 parishes with 450 people. 250 people walked the Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage. This year, 2025, the former Presiding Bishop (a cousin of mine), Michael Curry, is coming to preach. He’s still my cousin, even if he’s out of office.

Bre facilitated the 270 Sawyerville volunteer staff in a racial healing conversation for a day. Imagine those kids working together to understand each other—what might happen? Finally, our construction at Good Shepherd will begin shortly in a renovated and new space. Good Shepherd continues to thrive, grow, and tell its story, offering hospitality to many people who come to Montgomery on pilgrimage. St. Paul’s, Selma, also continues to welcome countless visitors to its doors to hear its story.

I want to make sure we all know that Camp McDowell recently welcomed a new Executive Director, Derek Hill, and his wife Beverly. Derek arrived here before his clothes, so he wore the same shirt for two weeks. We are excited that he has hit the ground running. He’s already working to guide our renovation of Epps Hall. The bathrooms under the pool are about to start. Then we’ll move across the way to Epps, and he’ll help us with the famous septic system in our quest to keep Clear Creek clear. Derek, we welcome you and Beverly. Derek lives in Scott House, which has also had a facelift, and there’s more to come.

We kicked off equipping the Saints, the capital effort that we spent so much time telling you about last year. It was a very busy season sharing the story of our ministry, which is not hard to do. The challenge comes in getting around to see everybody that you want to see. We went to three baseball games in three locations with 441 Episcopalians in the hot, hot sun. 40 parishes participated. We waited until it got really, really hot before we went. We visited 17 parishes, we visited Camp, and Sawyerville, and had 15 major donor events with 215 households attending. Our leaders were Tom and Cornelia Heflin and Will and Liesel French. We could not do it without them. They work diligently to invite all kinds of participation in a God-sized dream.

We had hoped to raise $7.5 million, and here is how it’s going. Thanks to the help of a million-dollar match and your giving of about 330 gifts, we are $548,000 away from claiming the full 2 million (if you put those two together) dollars. I’ll be looking around to see how we can get there. We can’t leave any of that on the table. That will fund a $4 million endowment for Congregational Vitality, which will allow the bishop, whoever that bishop is, to have some funds to use for the Refresh and Renew activities that we started two years ago and many other things like helping with leadership, helping with planning, helping with all kinds of dreaming. That money is something that we need to have if we’re going to help our small and medium-sized churches stay viable, active, and growing. We don’t know what God is doing. He places our churches where he wants them to be and it’s our job to go get the people.

As you listen, I hope you’re getting a picture of our vitality and health. The Episcopal Church in Alabama is a leader. It’s a leader in Province IV; it’s a leader in the church. It is strong, and it has completely recovered from COVID. Besides the bad memories and the mourning, we are finding ways to grow and change and share the love of Jesus all around us. We have a new church named Riverside in McCalla, with an average Sunday attendance of 29. They have had 36 services and have newly rented space in a strip mall close to the heart of the community traffic pattern. There are not that many churches in that area. Planting a new church was part of reclaiming a strategy to grow intentionally. As far as leadership goes, our infrastructure for governance is stronger. Our Commission on Ministry is really busy. We have 14 people in seminary preparing for ordination. Two more were just approved for seminary. Four others are about to take the next steps to enter formal discernment. We could take double that and have a place for people to be. We’re blessed with a brilliant group of examining chaplains to help us prepare our ordinands. They do lots and lots of behind-the-scenes work.

We have completed 31 clergy search processes in three years, bringing 21 new clergy who were not previously residents in our diocese and relocating six within our ranks, making the number assuming new leadership positions 27. I want that to soak in. 31 completed search processes in a very competitive environment, and we came away with 21 new clergy members and six who took new jobs within our diocese. In other words, they weren’t recruited out of our diocese. That is a ton of hard work by Canon Geoff Evans, who guides and assists all of these processes. He’s built a great recruiting network and knows a lot of people around the country who help us. That will leave us with only three vacancies for full-time clergy at the moment. When I started, we had 14 vacancies, and it was almost a crisis, so it feels like we’ve really moved ahead.

Our Honduras companion relationship has grown, with several churches sending medical teams, and the Rev. Olga Barrera is here somewhere. Welcome to our diocese! The rector of St. Michael’s in Fayette, Danny, is in Honduras now. We’ll see if he comes back. The language is not the issue. He’s learning about the culture and the vestry of St. Michael’s, is taking lessons in the language. It’s a great relationship, and we’re glad to have it. St. Francis, Indian Springs; Grace, Woodlawn; St. Thomas, Birmingham, and others are all making progress in serving our Hispanic neighbors. We have over 25 beans and rice ministries and several large feeding ministries, including St. Mary’s and Jasper, and they have a Christmas toy and food drive, which this year served 1,000 carloads of people. Feeding the hungry is flourishing. The Cathedral Church of the Advent is making wonderful strides focusing on spiritual hunger, aspiring to be a place of gospel, rest, and encouragement for the city of Birmingham. And they feed a lot of hungry people, too.

There’s so much happening that is making the love of Jesus visible and touchable. It’s hard to report it all. When I start listing names like this, I really get nervous. I must remember what my mom told me: “I love all my children equally”. When All Saints, Montgomery closed last year, their members were well received by Holy Comforter, Montgomery. They even relocated their memorial ash garden so that it could be in Holy Comforter’s garden. All Saints, Montgomery gave away many of the things they owned. They gave St. Andrew’s, Montevallo, some small acolyte torches for their littlest acolytes. They gave them almost-new linens, alter linens, and some of their almost-new prayer books and hymnals. St. Andrews decided they would retire their older books in favor of the new gifts and their priest tells me that when she asked who wanted a prayer book, all nine students in their college ministry program raised their hands. They took those retired prayer books, and then one young woman returned and wanted to be baptized.

Maybe you get a sense of how the network works. We are a network of faith communities, and what happens to one happens to all of us. Apostle Paul tells us, “There is one body and one spirit. There is one hope in God’s call to us. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.” Our common life and our faith are made stronger and more loving by our many different gifts, which are needed. That’s what Paul’s metaphor for the body is all about. Read 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a. If we see differences and are disturbed and strife with one another, we cannot carry the message Jesus gave us when he said, “Do not be afraid.” If we can’t carry it, let me ask you — who will carry it? If we’re distracted by conflict, we might forget that Jesus is alive and that his life and death are about unreasonable hospitality.

But if we hold fast to the baptismal covenant, if we respect, truly respect, the dignity of every single person – even the ones we do not like – then we become what Alan Jones called “The School of Love,” where we’re all learning to love each other across our differences. We are all learning together all the time, and Jesus is changing us all the time. We need each other desperately to be fully who God intends us to be, and we sometimes can’t see it. God created us to be in the body of Christ, and nothing can separate us from God’s love. We can live out loud. Our church lives with four theologies of the atonement, two theologies of marriage, and a creed that binds us together. As Archbishop Tutu once said, “Anglicanism is very messy but very lovable.” When we listen to each other and pray together, we’ll find ourselves accepting each other more deeply and able to look to the Lord for all we need, and true grace and mercy will flourish. Jesus says we must be wise as serpents and innocent as a dove. To me, what that means is we have to be gentle with each other, and we have to trust that God is changing, that he’s near, and that he is sovereign. That doesn’t mean doing nothing — quite the opposite. It’s harder. It means loving with everything we’ve got.

Six years ago, I read the bishop’s profile, searching for the 12th Bishop of Alabama and high on your list of priorities was living in the reconciling love of Jesus and being reconciled to each other and Christ in our ministry and common life. God has truly granted us that great gift of reconciliation in mutual respect and with great love. I have found incredibly wonderful partners in all our parishes, particularly at the Cathedral. Dedicated lay leaders and talented clergy there work tirelessly with many of you and most of our parishes in the diocese, supporting, sharing the gospel, and generously giving their time, talent, and resources. I am deeply grateful for their ministry and their faithfulness. Our parishes, our network of faith communities, are able and ready to be a blessing to a world in need – to spread love, embody hope, and reveal the light of Christ. That is an enormous gift from God that we can’t take for granted. We have to guard it and nourish it.

I mentioned our new church in McCalla called Riverside. They just moved from a Middle School to their first real home, a building inside a strip mall. Their new place is on a busy thoroughfare, and as they began to spruce it up, they removed some paneling to paint a wall, and underneath the boards, the wall was covered with pages from a hymnal. In his newsletter to his budding congregants, Geoff Evans wrote, was there a church here before? Was this a form of individual praise? Or was it simply an excess supply of hymnals and a corresponding shortage of wallpaper? We don’t know, but what we see is a breathtakingly good sign that God is favoring this move. Just like the high priest Hilkiah, who found the Book of the Law hidden in the Temple, this is a powerful reminder that this space is new to us but not new to God. He has gone ahead of us into this new space and the future of Riverside.

Why am I telling you all of this today? As we prepare for our next chapter as a diocese, I give you all this today so you’ll know who you are. You’ll remember it, and you’ll know how we’re really doing. In the last five years, we’ve weathered and navigated two years of a pandemic, two General Conventions in four years – something no one should have to do – a once-in-a-decade worldwide Anglican Communion meeting, suffered an unimaginable loss of three faithful people at St. Stephen’s, terrible tornadoes that went through and devastated Selma in the Black Belt, three epic hurricanes, two presidential election cycles, wars and tragedies breaking out all over the world and all over our country and all the known and unknown troubles that our parishes have faced. Through it all, each time I visit you, you show me unreasonable hospitality and abundant love. We know we can trust the words that Jesus gives us. God is with us, and He is risen, and He is indeed ahead of us wherever we go. We need not be afraid to follow, for we will see Jesus. Therefore, in accordance with the canons of this church and this diocese, I’m now officially calling for the election of the 13th Bishop of Alabama and inviting the Standing Committee to take charge of the process

God willing, I look forward to this convention next year when we will welcome our new Bishop-Elect. I ask your prayers for the Standing Committee and all those people working in the process. As Fred Rogers said, “Often when you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.” I believe we are. In the meantime, I will continue to serve every day – working hard to complete the good work we’ve begun. I will do my best to nourish and encourage your ministry in all ways because I believe with all my heart, as I did on my first day as your bishop, what our friend Sam Wells told us: “Our future is much bigger than our past.” We look to the future with the hope that God gives us and we seek to be a blessing to each other in our communities in the world. Someone once told me we are here to learn to endure the beams of love. This is a wonderful diocese. It knows Jesus and it has a tremendous love to share. It is an honor to be your bishop, and I’m grateful for your prayers and love. Amen.