Lawrence Hitt II

Why do you feel called to serve the Church as a Deputy to General Convention?

I have been hugely blessed by serving on our Diocesan deputations to General Convention and as a newly elected member of the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church, I promise that if I am elected as a Deputy to be a good listener and hopefully bring some experience, energy, enthusiasm and a heart for mission to our church at all levels. I also continue to believe that the Episcopal Church is called to provide Spirit-led, perhaps prophetic, leadership to other churches in the Anglican Communion, and General Convention has an enormous role in that undertaking.

What life experiences and/or training can you offer as a resource to the Church?

In addition to my work as Chancellor of Colorado, I served for several years as President of the Episcopal Chancellors Network, working with lay and clergy leaders, other chancellors and bishops throughout the church. I taught Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion canon law and church governance in the Anglican Studies program at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, so I have a good understanding of how the church is governed. I have also served on several interim bodies of the Church, such as the Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons and earlier this year I served as Vice Chair of the General Convention legislative committee on Constitution and Canons in Baltimore.

Describe your ministries, participation and experience in the Episcopal Church.

At the parish level I have served as Senior Warden and Co-Chair of the Building Project which renovated and expanded Good Shepherd. I also helped out with legal work on the major renovation of St. John the Baptist in Breckenridge. At the Diocesan level, in addition to my work as Chancellor, I served on the Steering Committee for the Cathedral Ridge capital campaign and I provide training for ordinands, clergy new to the diocese, and for the Disciplinary Board. At the national/churchwide level, I currently am a member of the Board of Archives of The Episcopal Church and I was on the Task Force to Assist the Office of Pastoral Development, which is focused on assisting dioceses in finding, vetting and electing new bishops. In the past I served on the Blessings Task Force, and the Nathan Network for a Safe Church. At the Anglican Communion level, I am a member of the Anglican Communion Legal Advisors Network, the Ecclesiastical Law Society and served several years on the steering committee of the Anglican Safe Church Consultation/Network.

What aspects of our corporate life or issues facing the Church today hold particular interest or importance to you?

I believe that we continue to see the essential need to address race relations in our church and in this country. Accordingly, I am very excited about the new Episcopal Coalition for Racial Equity and Justice and the program and funding to research TEC role in the indigenous schools scandals.I think we need to continue to ask ourselves if our governance structures are working and how they can be improved. For example, we should seriously address how General Convention itself can be re-structured to make it more accessible to more and younger deputies, and how it can be more efficient with respect to how resolutions are introduced.
Our highly unusual General Convention this past July taught us some valuable lessons, I believe. First, we can accomplish our work in a much shorter time period – less than one week – if we do more online hearings and meetings prior to the actual convention and if we limit the number of resolutions. A one week General Convention, rather than almost two weeks, makes it much easier for younger members of the church to participate as deputies and alternates, and the cost savings to TEC and the dioceses is significant. I think we need to continue to work towards cutting the number of resolutions (over 400 in 2022) so that we can address them in greater detail and depth.

In addition, the church needs to constantly review and renew what is working and what is not working in evangelism and spreading the Gospel. We may still be dealing with pandemic-related issues in 2024 and beyond. We very much need to address how to provide clergy support to smaller, declining churches and how to successfully merge ministries and churches where that is the primary option to keeping them alive.

How will your participation as part of the deputation enhance the life, mission and ministry of our diocese?

I have been very fortunate to serve at several General Conventions and I hope that I am able to bring some institutional memory of how we got to where we are today, as well as some new suggestions on how to make our ministries work better. Another important task is to help identify, train and support new deputies from our deputation as we continue to raise up new clergy and lay leadership.

All of us on past deputations have brought a genuine and deeply-held love for the church and a willingness to seek out and be led by the Holy Spirit. I hope that I also bring an understanding of how our church governs itself at various levels and experience as a deputy to help bring back to the diocese and our congregations specific ways in which we can fulfill our role as part of the greater church community.