Bishop Visitors, Prophetic witness, & creative submission
Living in an Episcopalian Benedictine community has afforded me the gift of observing and learning from the ancient wisdom of monastic traditions interpreted into modern life. In recent years, it’s been my privilege to meet this community’s bishop visitor. What is a bishop visitor, you ask? Never heard of one? It’s been a new concept to me as well. Here’s a (very likely inadequate) observational explanation from someone whose primary church experience has been from without these traditions.
RADICAL FAITHFULNESS
Monastic communities formed during the fragmentation and decline of the Roman Empire and more particularly in response to the prevailing church’s alliance with empire. As the empire cracked and tried to regain power, so did the church. This led to greater and greater aberrations from Christian faithfulness as some grew in desire to rediscover the way of Jesus. People mistakenly think of monastic communities only as places of retreat from empire, but this is too simplistic. While monastic communities were retreats from the seductions of empire in a time of the church’s compromise, they retreated for the purpose of rediscovering faithfulness, including faithfulness in mission. These burgeoning communities became prophetic glimpses - particularly as they embodied and enacted the way of Jesus in love and mission within empire. They weren’t just recluse communities; they were missionary communities.
I use the word “radical,” but the way of life modeled by these monastics perhaps only seemed so because the wider church had become so unfaithful. Perhaps it was radical to empire and an empire-seduced church but not so radical in terms of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. As long as empire is a thing, it will always be radical to actually try to live the way of Jesus within it.
Nonetheless, radically recapturing faithful Christianity became core to monastic identity. Of course, these communities failed many times in many ways in their aspirations, but at the core of their enterprise was pursuing faithfulness to Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom as a prophetic witness to the world and the church. In their presence, ministry, and way of life, these communities reminded the wider church where compromise had taken place with money, politics, or worldly power. They were constantly saying to the church in their way of living, “Hey, remember, we can live a different way. Look here. We don’t have to live how empire tells us to live. We can try to live the way of Jesus together.”
PROPHESYING WITHIN EARSHOT
But of course, living as a prophetic witness meant staying within sight and earshot of both the world and the prevailing church. Yes, there was a kind of a retreating, but at its best this retreating wasn’t escaping. Like John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness near enough to the villages so people could come and see, monastic communities demonstrated a new way of life and corresponding call to repentance within sight. So a total retreat wouldn’t do. Distance was needed, but not estrangement.
So monastic communities remained part of the church. Of course, there were various groups that independently broke off from the church, and eventually the leaders of the Reformation were expelled or concluded that leaving was unavoidable. But many of these monastic communities both left and stayed. They left life and church as normally experienced to carve out space in the wilderness where God could do a new thing in barren landscapes or among the poor outside of empire’s interest or reach. And yet they remained in relationship with and even submitted to the church.
These tensions became a defining feature of monastic spirituality. The staying and leaving. The retreating from empire and serving within it. The challenging of structures while still submitting to them. They were purposefully unresolvable tensions, ones that agitated the status quo to create space for God to enter into the unanswerable and do His own creative work.
FREEDOM AND SUBMISSION
Many monastic communities throughout history have wanted to remain submitted to a bishop in their ecclesiastical structure. Attempting to live “radically” has its own dangers, and history is replete with the difficulties. A charismatic leader abuses or leads people astray without accountability, there’s a plunge into heresy, a cult is formed, or a splinter group embraces the spirit of empire on its own and enacts its own version of violence. Sometimes communities have been unable to resolve their internal conflicts and descended into endless power struggles absent of outside counsel or authority. Jesus Himself prayed for the unity of His church, not its splintering. All of these reasons and more made some kind of submission desirable.
Just a note here. History shows us the prevailing church’s structures have not been able to protect us from these dangers either. All of them are present in the history of our more traditional church institutions as well. Perhaps avoiding the dangers has something more fundamentally to do with submission itself and its work on our hearts. When we submit to someone or something - even better, when we submit to one another - we enable a posture in our lives that somehow works against these destructive tendencies. Mutual submission means God must be in charge, not ourselves - and we are all submitted to Him. That changes how we treat one another. It’s not submitting to the prevailing church that saves us as if it somehow has more power to avoid these dangers. Rather, it’s submission to God that saves us, but we very often embody this reality by finding ways to meaningfully submit to one another even in our many imperfections.
So monastic communities still wanted to submit to the church, but there were always dangers of losing their prophetic potency if they got too cozy with the church’s prevailing structures. At worst, some monastic communities eventually became violent zealots of imperialistic leaders to reinforce the church’s institutional and political power. Gross. And tragically radical in the wrong way. It seems to have actually been in the church’s best interest for monastic communities to retain their prophetic voice and something of their distance.
In relationship with, but not swallowed up by. Not controlled by, but in submission to. Faithfully distant, but not disappearing. It was a nuanced balance to achieve.
MAKING ROOM BY CAUSING TENSION
Enter bishop visitors.
I do not know the history of bishop visitors, the timeline of their apperance in various traditions, or when they became a widely embraced feature in monastic life. I only know that in some traditions this structure has become a way to embrace the fruitful tension I’ve described here. Other traditions, including my own, no doubt have their own ways of accomplishing the same things. Here’s how I understand the bishop visitor concept to work.
Firstly, monastic communities are often recognized by a body of bishops - sometimes called a “house of bishops.” Through a gathering of bishops, the wider church goes on record to say, “We see this group of radical Christians, and we believe they are attempting to faithfully live the way of Jesus. They are different, but they are part of us - truly part of the church.” Monastic communities haven’t retreated so far to as to no longer be known or seen - in fact, being known and seen is partly the point. Bishops can see them. They are aware of their presence and recognize them. As the church observes these monastic communities it can then be called back to repentance, and the church welcomes their special role.
Secondly, monastic communities often have both a diocesan bishop and a bishop visitor. More conventionally, different geographies (a “diocese”) have a bishop responsible for the nurturing and protection of the church in that region. Of course, if a monastic community lives in that region, it hopefully has a meaningful and charitable relationship with that particular bishop. But monastic communities often submit to a “bishop visitor,” not their diocesan bishop. Why?
Bishops - selected by the wider Church, sometimes therefore connected to the Church’s politics, at times managing the Church’s finances, and feeling the daily pressures and opinions of the Church’s less-radical constituency - might at times succumb to empire’s seductions themselves. Then they might therefore feel tempted to pressure monastic communities away from their radical witness and into conformity. Indeed, the relationship between monastic communities and their diocesan bishops, while ideally wholesome, has historically been fraught with disagreements and tensions.
But the tension is embraced - it’s chosen by the church - because the monastic community submits to a bishop from another diocese, a bishop visitor. This bishop still carries the spiritual authority of the church, the wisdom of leadership, and the pastoral responsibility to care and protect - but apart from the pressures of their own diocese. Perhaps the bishop visitor is more likely than a diocesan bishop to encourage and protect a monastic’s community more radical expressions since it’s not happening in their own diocese. Likewise, perhaps a monastic community is more likely to find support and care in a bishop visitor rather than a diocesan bishop since the bishop visitor doesn’t feel the need to apply local church pressures to the relationship. In this arrangement, there’s both prophetic tension in the monastic community’s relationship with the wider church as well as meaningful connection to it but without unnecessarily provoking the diocesan bishop directly responsible for local geography or facing retaliation for doing so.
So the church developed a mechanism to provide for both the radical nature and the submission of monastic communities. I imagine this is a tension regretted thousands of times across the years by many bishops with a monastic community present in their diocese that is a thorn in their side, but it’s a way the church made room for prophetic witness to speak even to its own leaders. It’s a kind of church-sanctioned confrontation of the church’s own leaders by different expressions of the church that are prayerful and missional.
INSTITUTIONAL HUMILITY
That feels to me like some form of institutional humility. I really believe that “institutional humility” will always eventually descend into new forms of empire. There will always be need for reformation, renewal, and repentance. No structure, no matter how virtuous, will save us from our own pride and idolatries. We need a better Savior. But I’ve also become curious about these historical examples of Christians attempting, albeit imperfectly, to embody humility in their very organization rather than simply adopting or curating empire’s models of leadership. Why not try to imagine something altogether new? I’m sure this whole “bishop visitor” thing has failed many times over. Somehow it’s not hard for me to imagine at some point in history a diocesan bishop pulling the strings from the shadows and influencing the mind or pockets of a bishop visitor. Nonetheless, the attempt feels worthy to me as an imaginative way of wanting to live out the Sermon on the Mount in our own church communities.
For those of us involved in church systems and denominations, the bishop visitor concept leaves me asking a certain set of questions. How do we intentionally create room for prophetic people and reform movements we might be tempted to control or eliminate because they are stingingly calling us to repentance? How do we stay in relationship with those who don’t fit our structures - in fact, aren’t supposed to fit our traditional structures - because God is revealing something through them? How can those with a prophetic voice remain in relationship and healthy submission to the wider church? And how do we build points of embraced tension in our systems, leadership, and decision-making - tensions we choose as unresolvable and therefore help keep us dependent on God’s own work and direction? Not all of us serve in church systems that have bishop visitors, but it’s the modeling of institutionally embraced humility that intrigues me. I wonder what it might mean for the family, neighborhood, work, educational, and church systems were we lead.
Doubtless, someday I will need a prophetic voice to call me to repentance and back to the way of Jesus. I hope on that day I haven’t used my leadership or built structures to eliminate the prophetic voices God sent to deliver salvation. Instead, I hope I’ve made room for these voices in a disciplined and principled way. Otherwise, the silence may reveal how my little corner of the church where I lead has begun to look a lot like empire.
