September 5, 2026

Season After Pentecost

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

May God’s grace and peace abound to you through our Lord Jesus Christ!

The past three weeks have been a season of weakness, solitude, reflection, and prayer for me. I underwent significant spinal surgery on August 13th and spent 4-5 days in the hospital before returning home for further recuperation on August 17th. Over these weeks, I have experienced pain and weakness in my physical body unlike anything else I have known in the past 71 years. I do not share this to you to garner sympathy. Rather, I write this as a point of context for my reflections on gratitude and prayer concern this quiet Saturday morning.

Gratitude

I am grateful for God’s healing grace through your prayers, a skilled surgical team, excellent hospital and follow-up care, and especially for the loving care of my wife and family. I am thankful for the excellent ongoing work of a committed diocesan team working for God’s glory. I think I am even thankful for Zoom and my mobile phone that allow me to begin to slowly transition back into ministry work. God demonstrates his lovingkindness to me daily and I trust his faithful care for the weeks and months of full recovery ahead. God is good and he does all things well.

Prayer Concern

Over these days of slow, quiet, recovery, I have had much time to reflect, meditate, and pray. I love the Body of Christ constituted across the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes. I rejoice as God manifests his strength among us and I feel the pain when this body suffers the effects of human weakness. 

Among the things that have occupied my prayers, none looms larger than our 2026 Mission Conference and Synod beginning 40 days from now. This time of gathering for the councils of the Church is marked with extra significance as we do the work of our Diocesan Synod together and seek God’s guidance in the selection of a Bishop Coadjutor who will become the fourth Bishop Ordinary of the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes upon my retirement. I know full well that such transitions can be unsettling. I am aware that uncertainty can all too easily creep into otherwise trusting hearts in a Diocese like ours marked by a broad range of distinctives in theology and churchmanship that inform strong convictions on a number of matters, especially women in holy orders. My heart yearns that all of our clergy and laity will experience the depth of God’s grace and peace and be fully assured of the faithfulness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who alone is the Head of the Church and always leads his Church well.

I have reflected on how Jesus brought together twelve apostles spanning chasms like a Roman sympathizing tax-collector named Matthew and a Jewish zealot named Simon. I have meditated on the witness of the Acts 6 account of God granting wisdom and grace to a fledgling church to select the first deacons in a way that healed the tensions between the Jewish and Hellenized believers. I have been contemplating Paul's letter to the Ephesians with its powerful testimony to how God in Christ Jesus removed humanly insurmountable ethnic and cultural barriers between the Jewish and Gentile believers and miraculously formed them into one body that was being built up in love.

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2)

This morning I am praying that each and every one of us will be shaped, strengthened, and formed by God ‘s Spirit in accordance with our Morning Prayer lesson from Ephesians 4:

“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” 

I urge each of us to live in this admonition over the coming weeks. May God’s Spirit continually form us in Christlikeness that we would be clothed in humility, gentleness, patience, and loving forbearance as we participate in the regional walkabouts and assemble at Synod. 

Please pray with me:

“O God, by your grace you have called us in this Diocese to be

a good and godly fellowship of faith. Bless our Bishops, and other clergy 

and all our people. Grant that your Word may be truly preached

and truly heard, your Sacraments faithfully administered and faithfully received.

By your Spirit, fashion our lives according to the example of your Son,

and grant that we may show the power of your love to all among

whom we live; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.“

Your servant for Jesus’ sake,

+Mark

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