Meriden — The church no longer stands at the center of American life, but Bishop Ian T. Douglas, one of four candidates to lead the nationwide Episcopal Church, sees that change as part of God’s work in the world.

He says it gives Christians the opportunity to shift from worrying about the church and to focus more on what God wants them to do.

“For me what’s fundamentally important is that our vocation as followers of Jesus is to participate in what God’s doing as far as bringing new life into the world, what I often describe as God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation,” said Douglas. “By virtue of our baptism, we’re called to participate in that work. … But that’s different than keeping the church in business.”

A large part of the Episcopal Church’s business will happen over the next two weeks as the national church holds its General Convention in Salt Lake City. It will produce the next presiding bishop of the church, which, besides the United States, includes parishes in Haiti, Taiwan, Latin America and Europe. If elected, Douglas would succeed Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori for a nine-year term.

While the church no longer is central, especially in New England, the most unchurched section of the country, Douglas says that’s part of the Christian story.

“It’s the prime narrative of who we are. In the face of death and dying is new life and new possibility in the reign of God,” he said. “That’s not a message that people often hear in the world, and sometimes we don’t even hear that in the church, I’m afraid to say, because we can become so preoccupied with keeping the church of the past going rather than seeing the new life of God in the Holy Spirit right now, right here with us.”

Douglas, 57, has been bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut for five years — Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached at his consecration — and one of the most visible actions he’s taken has been to move diocesan headquarters from “a mansion in the West End of Hartford to a former ball-bearing factory in Meriden,” a rented space called The Commons.

It has an open floor plan that Douglas designed and which he calls “iconic of the move that we in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut believe we need to make, from being a church that historically enjoyed some of the privileges and the power and the prestige of Christendom, of the establishment, to a place where we are much more called to be in the world and of the people.”

Douglas says “Christendom” is “the overlap of cultural, political and economic power with the institution of the church. That’s the way I define it. One manifestation of it is the established church,” which held sway in Connecticut until 1818 and still does in England.

The decline of that power and prestige, which has occurred since the mid-20th century and is accelerating, offers both challenge and opportunity, Douglas says.

“We can’t just assume that people will find us or that they’ll be attracted to the church simply by our beautiful liturgy and wonderful music. We need to be much more engaged in the pain and the possibilities of what God is doing in the neighborhood,” Douglas said.

Joyous and sad

The bishops at the bicameral General Convention will elect the presiding bishop by secret ballot; their choice will then go to the lay and clerical deputies for confirmation. The other candidates are Bishop Thomas Breidenthal of Cincinnati; Bishop Michael Curry of Raleigh, N.C., who would be the first African-American to lead the church; and Bishop Dabney Smith of Sarasota, Fla.

Douglas said he’ll be fine with whatever the outcome of the election and is “very calm and collected” about it. He predicted he’ll feel both happy and sad whether he is elected or not. “If I am elected it’ll be a positive and hope-filled new opportunity, and if I’m not elected I get to stay in a place that I love and working with people that I love,” he said.

Either way, he plans to remain a resident of Essex, commuting to the church’s offices in New York during the week if he is elected. His wife, Kristin Harris, is school nurse and health educator at Achievement First Amistad High School in New Haven. They have three adult children.

A former professor of world mission who has worked for both a former presiding bishop and for the archbishop of Canterbury, Douglas was on the road for three weeks a month. “So much of my work was in the global sector … so I went from the global to the local and the presiding bishop would be someplace in between those two,” he said.

Whether he is the 27th presiding bishop or remains the 15th bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut (the first ever elected without having first served in the diocese), his goal will be the same, Douglas said.

“My fundamental vocation is to invite people to participate in the mission of God,” Douglas said. “And then God will have the church God needs. The question is, will the Episcopal Church be part of that or not? I believe that completely, and whether I do it here in Connecticut or whether I do it with the Episcopal Church as a whole it’s all the same.”

Douglas’ first work for the church was as a missionary with the Episcopal Church of Haiti in 1983, and he laughs as he says, “I’m known as the mission guy,” whose focus is on serving God in the world. That’s how he would measure his accomplishments as presiding bishop: “At the end of nine years it would be wonderful if they said, ‘He was able to move the needle away from the baseline being the church to the baseline being the mission of God,’” he said.

The Rev. Ellen Tillotson, a convention deputy and former rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Torrington, said that, because of the need for the church “to find an authentic voice as we lose a culturally endowed place in the world, the church is suffering from high anxiety.”

She said the Diocese of Connecticut has followed Douglas’ lead to focus on being “transformative of the world.”

“Of the four candidates, he is the one who actually has experienced helping a diocese transform from an establishment way of thinking about itself to an entity that really frees people up to serve,” said Tillotson, who now works with parishes to resolve conflicts and crises. “We’re talking to each other in ways that we didn’t before … and frankly, parishes are paying less money in the central fund so they have more resources to deal with things at home.”

Describing Douglas’ potential as presiding bishop, she said, “He would be fabulous at it, and I would miss him deeply, both personally and professionally” as bishop of Connecticut.

Another deputy, Thom Peters of Cheshire, said Douglas “has done a lot in the Connecticut diocese to flatten the hierarchy” and he pointed to the bishop’s “record of reaching out to the more conservative members of the church and trying to include them in the dialogue. Those are strengths and I think that’s what the national church needs at this point.”

Ted Mollegen of Glastonbury, who will be serving his 12th term as deputy, said, “Ian would make a great presiding bishop. … Ian has more foresight than any of the other presiding bishops I’ve known. I think that long-range vision could help the church enliven itself and turn around the numerical decline we’ve experienced since the 1960s.”

Mollegen, who has published a “grand strategy” for increasing the church’s numbers at http://mollegen.net/GC2015, does have some issues with Douglas on his leadership style. “I don’t totally agree with the approach he’s been taking,” Mollegen said. “He looks for places where God is doing something and says the church should cooperate with that so we’re supporting God’s mission in a cause-and-effect basis. … I’m a little more inclined to think that God wants us to think about things and to plan, though I’ve heard that God laughs at man’s plans.”

Resolutions and marches

Like other legislative bodies, the convention will be focused largely on debating and passing resolutions, and there will be some that will be controversial. Among them are a resolution to eliminate gender-specific language from the marriage ceremony; one to divest doing business in Israel; and another to divest from fossil fuel companies.

Douglas wouldn’t say how he’d vote on a particular resolution, since they could be modified or even tabled in committee, but said in general that he supports the church’s position on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and said, “We in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut support marriage equity.”

Douglas is clear on one resolution, which he submitted to “support handgun purchaser licensing in order to prevent gun violence and save lives” and encouraging dioceses across the church to advocate for licensing.

The bishop, who is a convener of a group of more than 60 bishops who advocate against gun violence, will lead a march on June 28 called “Claiming Common Ground Against Gun Violence,” walking past the site of a mass shooting.

“We’ll be praying along the road, making a witness in the world, that gun violence is contrary to the reign of God,” Douglas said. “We’re doing that witness deliberately before we come together for our big Eucharist. And we’re hoping to turn out 3,000 Episcopalians to say that the epidemic of gun violence that is rife through our culture is not of God.”

He cited a study published in April that showed a 40 percent decline in gun deaths in the first 10 years after Connecticut passed its gun-licensing law in 1995.

“I believe killing over 30,000 people a year by guns in the United States is not something that God wants,” Douglas said. “How is that life-giving? We’re called to stand in the face of that and proclaim another way.”

Returning to his theme that the job of the church is to do God’s work in the world, whether in Connecticut or at a two-week-long legislative meeting, Douglas said, “If General Convention is fundamentally about ourselves and not about the mission of God, then we’ve blown it.”

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©2015 the New Haven Register