Bishop Laurie’s 2024 Assembly Reflection

On June 1 we held our 2024 Synod Assembly.  As you may be able to imagine, this is a BIG event that requires a lot of volunteer leadership to pull off.  Thank you to everyone who participated in creating and facilitating this year’s event.

Every year at Assembly, I present a Bishop’s Report. Creating this presentation gives me an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going, and I look forward to it every year.  You can watch the live report here.

Our 2024 Assembly theme was The Way of Jesus: Embodied Spiritual Friendship. God often works through friendship, often profoundly. And that friendship is often embodied. Over coffee. Or at a graveside. With soup or Kleenex or a walk in the rain. It is these sacred encounters that often result in mutual transformation.

Our keynote was a conversation with Rabbi Benjamin Barnett. In the conversation Rabbi Benjamin and I explore:

• Havruta: The Jewish practice of learning in pairs;
• Hitbodedut: cultivating an intimate relationship with God;
• What it means to lovingly witness another and the need to provide both comfort and feedback to encourage growth;
• What it means to prioritize friendship in a transactional culture;
• The emotional vulnerability and risk required to be open to the transformative power of friendship and the discomfort of having our worldview challenged.
• How friendship with people of other faiths can strengthen our own faith.

Our post-Assembly survey revealed that this conversation was the top Assembly highlight for participants.

Friendship can be between groups as well as individuals. My sense of call from the beginning has been to help strengthen not a mix of separate churches but a communion of communions, diverse and distinct, grounded in God’s grace and open to the wild movement of Spirit and Life across our state. To weave a wild web of relationship between and among churches in Klamath Falls and Astoria, Pendleton and Cave Junction, Eugene and Bend and Portland and Vale.  A tapestry of strength and connection with the power to help us do all things in Christ Jesus our Savior.

Thanks be to God; we are not all the same. Our churches, our cities, our gifts and our passions differ. Seven of our congregations are intentional ecumenical communities resulting from years of collective collaboration and discernment. Six congregations have started a “friendship process” to explore deepening relationships with one another for the sake of Christ’s life and life abundant. When our sacred encounter is full of depth, vulnerability and Spirit, then inevitably vitality, hope and possibility emerge.

Song of Songs is unique in scripture – an ancient love song, pointing at love of one person to another and one soul to the Divine. It is enfleshed and poetic and ancient and yet rings to true to what embodied spiritual friendship means.

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm,
for love is strong as death …
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
the very flame of our God.

Song of Songs 8:6

You might have noticed that I like to sign my emails and letters “With you on the Way.” The earliest friends and followers of Jesus did not call themselves Christians. That came later. Scholars tell us that after Christ’s resurrection, his disciples called themselves people of the Way. Followers of the Way of Jesus, the Way of forgiveness, the Way of steadfast love, the Way of resistance to empire, the Way of refusing to participate in injustice, the Way of recognizing the face of God, the shimmering dignity, in every other human.

I’ve been blessed to be on the Way with you. It is an honor to be your bishop. During the last six months I’ve been in a season of personal discernment about my call. After much deliberation and prayer, and conversation and journaling and more prayer, I have discerned that if nominated, I will stand again for election as your bishop in 2025. We’ve been doing amazing work together, weaving a tapestry, a quilt, of deep connection, courage and care. And we’ve been doing it all in the name of Jesus, who accompanies us no matter what!

With you on the Way,
Bishop Laurie Larson Caesar