Greetings!
It will be a real joy to welcome you all to New Haven in just over a week to renew friendships of long standing and to meet others for the first time. The Society has awakened a great deal of excitement and hope- and wonderful range of expectations as to how it will sustain and fulfill those hopes- of what it will look like. The Board is grateful for the response of so many in this Church who want to create collegiality and centeredness that grows from a spirituality that is sacramental and creedal.
The conference will not be a long one, but it will accomplish a great deal. We will worship and pray together, reflect on the ways we inhabit scripture, carry out pastoral care, and the interplay of a parish and priest's spirituality. We will approve a provisional manual and look to the process that will develop one out of the experience of local chapters. Those of us who are provisional officers will offer ourselves to be elected as the first members of what will quickly become a rotating board.
Perhaps as important as any of that- the conference will be the means of new and re-connected friendships. It will, I hope, set a pattern for the Society that leaves us at ease with each other as friends and colleagues and it will lead us to focus our common life in the joy of sacramental grace and on continuing the rich theological and spiritual heritage that is ours as anglo-catholics with honesty and integrity.
We will gather aware of those who are not with us- though united with us in prayer. We will gather with any number of distracting concerns for our own particular ministries and for the state of the larger church. We are all clergy, so there will be an infinite range of ideas of how liturgy, programming, and the like could have been carried out (and can I say now, how easy it is to create leaflets for services without the need to explain everything?)- but beneath all of that, from what the board has heard from people, we will gather with hope for this new beginning. And I do so look forward to seeing you all and to watching those hopes find the beginning of fulfillment.
With every prayer for safe travel,
David Cobb+
Convener
