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R. William Franklin Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, United States of America In this essay, I reflect on the identity and tasks of my episcopate; my reflection is rooted in my historical studies of the nineteenth-century American bishop Charles Chapman Grafton (1830–1912) and in my scholarship and research on the Oxford or Puseyite Movement in the Church of England (1833–82). My becoming a bishop is closely related to my previous life as a scholar and teacher of the nineteenth century and to the contemporary demographic and economic challenges to the Anglican tradition in my region of the United States, the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York. In the spring of 1969, I came to the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac in Wisconsin as a Northwestern University undergraduate to do research on Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton in the diocesan archives. My subject was the Belgian Old Catholic communities in Door County with specific reference to Grafton’s deposition of the later wandering archbishop, J. Rene Vilatte. I was attracted to Fond du Lac by clerical scandal, but I went back to Northwestern transfixed by Grafton’s vision of the mission of a bishop in changing times. A seed was planted within me: Grafton’s definition of the mission of a diocese and of a diocesan bishop, particularly in times of crisis, and how that is applicable to the crises of the Episcopal Church in the twenty-first century. I studied next at Harvard University, where my Anglo-Catholicism was nurtured, as was Grafton’s. Grafton was born in Boston in 1830. At the age of fourteen, he was attending the Church of the Advent, which became the principal centre of the Oxford Movement in New England. The Tractarian who most deeply influenced Grafton was E. B. Pusey, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, and in 1850 Grafton had already purchased and embraced Pusey’s Paradise of the Christian Soul. Dr. Pusey was also a focus of my PhD dissertation at Harvard and of many of the books and articles I wrote as a seminary professor until 2002. My scholarship acknowledge that from September 1833 John Henry Newman fashioned the Oxford Movement’s Tracts for the Times into instruments for a second, and catholic, reformation. In the Tracts, Newman revived the notion of a communal dimension of the church as the firmest bulwark against ‘all-corroding, all-dissolving skepticism’.1 Yet I wanted church people of our time to recall the many actions that Dr. Pusey took from September 1833 until 1882 to express this recovered communal dimension of Anglicanism through a revival of Eucharistic worship linked to a campaign for building and sustaining parish churches in the new industrial cities of England. For adherents of Pusey, soon known as Puseyites, the Eucharist gave new significance to earth as well as to eternity, to matter as well as to spirit. In Puseyite parishes justice began to flow from the Eucharist: funds for workers’ compensation, funds for worthy burial and distribution centres for clothing, food and other necessities. From 1840 to 1889, the bond between worship and social justice was dramatized in Puseyite parishes in commercial districts. In 1865, Grafton went to England to learn this missional model of Puseyism, which he believed to be the new effective way to operate a parish in an industrial, democratic society and to insure its survival. Grafton discovered the Christian humanism of Puseyism. He wrote, ‘The Movement, of which Dr. Pusey was the center, sought the elevation of mankind and, filled with the love of God, it glowed with an enthusiasm for humanity.’2 Bishop Grafton brought Puseyism to the Diocese of Fond du Lac and to Wisconsin in 1889. As a college senior in 1969, the words and actions of Grafton attracted me as a revolutionary Christian response to an age of revolution. I use this term ‘revolution’ because in 1969 I was right in the midst of the age of the Vietnam War. I was facing the draft and I did not know if I would be shipped far from home. Our great American cities were burning. Even Harvard blew up in the student occupation of University Hall, the police bust of Harvard Yard and all of the chaos that followed. Much that I held to be sacred seemed to be falling apart: the university, and our nation. And yet the Episcopal Church seemed a 1. R. W. Franklin, ‘Pusey and Worship in Industrial Society’, Worship, 57.5 (1983), pp. 386–411. 2. C. C. Grafton, Pusey and the Church Revival (Milwaukee, WI: Young Churchman, 1902), pp. 280–281. solid rock. We had 3,615,643 members and we were growing. This is no longer true. At the present time we have fewer than two million members. Bishop Ian Douglas writes, ‘Seemingly innumerable congregations are struggling with declining membership while precariously eating away at their endowments in order to maintain buildings and programs that serve increasingly fewer and fewer people.’3 When I was elected Bishop of Western New York in 2010, I arrived to find a diocese that had lost 40 per cent of its members in the previous decade. The diocesan staff had been reduced to four full-time and two part-time officers. Fewer than half of our parishes are served by a full-time priest. I have sought to translate Bishop Grafton’s vision of how a bishop and a diocese can respond to such a crisis, a vision he brought to America from the Puseyite Movement in England into three goals for the Diocese of Western New York: 1. Be Sustainable: The primary mission of the diocese is the parishes, their growth in membership and their financial survival through Christian stewardship. 2. The Web of Grace: While dedicated to serving the parishes, the primary community of the church is the diocese itself, its parishes and congregations make up one family. This family must be engaged in the social and economic welfare of all who inhabit our region. The Bishop is Chief Evangelist and Chief Social Missioner. 3. Tell the Story: The glory of Anglicanism is our vernacular tradition. We must worship and preach in language that our contemporaries can understand. The Bishop aims to inspire such cultural translation. What in Grafton’s ministry as bishop speaks to the identity and the tasks of an episcopal bishop in the second decade of the twenty- first century? Grafton felt that his call to Fond du Lac in 1889 was imperative to what was practically a missionary district, not unlike Dr. Pusey’s mission field in the East End of London or to industrial Leeds, but the situation was worse than that. We speak today of the ‘missional church’ at a time of economic and demographic decline of the Episcopal Church. This is exactly what the Diocese of Fond du Lac 3. Ian Douglas in Dwight Zscheile, People of the Way (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2012), pp. xiv–xv. faced in 1889. Out of thirty-three clergy, only eighteen were actively engaged in ministry. Twenty parishes or missions were without clergy. In the whole diocese only nine parishes were self-supporting. In a number of small towns, missions no longer held services at all, and no one seemed to care that services be resumed. There were two reasons for this disaster. First, as Grafton wrote, ‘poverty was everywhere’.4 The diocese was in a region of economic decline. Once a great centre of the lumber industry, the pine trees of Fond du Lac had mostly been cut down, and the lumber industry was moving west. Lumber interests had built up the small Wisconsin towns, with their little episcopal churches, but now the ‘timber kings’ departed, taking their money with them and leaving behind poverty. Second, the people had lost hope in the church. Many lumber barons had paid for and run the small episcopal churches. There was little or no tradition of the people’s stewardship, so when the lumber barons left, the remaining population focused on their own business enterprises and their struggle for family maintenance. Grafton wrote, ‘The duty and privilege of giving to God, in the way of supporting His Church, was little appreciated.’5 These two points still today almost completely describe the economic and demographic context of my diocese of Western New York, faced with the decline of the steel and car manufacturing industries in the once great industrial city of Buffalo and the loss of shipping traffic on the Erie Canal over the last sixty years. With the collapse of the economy, there grew up a reluctance to contribute financially to an Episcopal Church that seemed to be losing its identity and disappearing in our region. In the nineteenth century, Grafton responded to these challenges in two ways. First, he reshaped the structure of the church’s worship and social justice witness, connecting to those outside the Episcopal Church. He was aware that 70 per cent of the population of the Diocese of Fond du Lac was made up of recent immigrants to the United States. He was willing to develop liturgical parallel developments to reach out to and attract these groups into the Episcopal Church. Former Roman Catholics, mostly Belgians, in Door County, Wisconsin, had broken from the Roman Catholic Church and had become Old 4. C. C. Grafton, A Journey Godward of a Servant of Jesus Christ (Milwaukee, WI: Young Churchman, 1910), p. 154. 5. Grafton, A Journey Godward of a Servant of Jesus Christ, p. 163. Catholics. Grafton permitted the use of the Old Catholic liturgy used in Switzerland in these Belgian parishes that formed a sort of Uniate Church within the Diocese of Fond du Lac.

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