Life’s Work: An Interview with Bishop Michael Curry

Vaulted to global fame by his rousing sermon at the 2018 royal wedding, the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry leads the U.S.-based Episcopal Church as Presiding Bishop. He is the first person of color to serve in the role and has championed a message of love and unity at a time of deep division. Victoria Will HBR: What made you want to become a priest? Did you ever consider another career? Curry: By the time I went to college, I knew that I wanted to do something that had a positive impact on the lives of people and on society. I considered public service, having worked on Bobby Kennedy’s political campaigns as a kid, licking envelopes and knocking on doors. But my dad was a priest, and his father was a Baptist preacher—that was in my blood. My daddy took me to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak once when I was about five years old. I shouldn’t say I actually heard him: He was the last preacher out of a whole bunch of them up there talking, and I fell asleep. But one day I read Dr. King for a course. It was different from hearing him, or hearing about him, and it made me realize that there was the potential to do real social good from within the Christian religious tradition. Since then you’ve become presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, an organization with 1.7 million members (including me). Did you ever have doubts about taking on that role? Anybody assuming a new leadership position with more demands and larger responsibility would have to be a fool not to go through moments of self-doubt. I still have those moments when I wonder whether someone made a mistake when they chose me, or whether I’m really supposed to be doing this. But I’ve never had a doubt about the reason I do what I do. My mission is to help people to find their way to a loving, liberating, and life-giving relationship with God, and with each other as children of God, and ultimately with the whole of creation. The clearer I am about that, and the more consistently I return to it, the more my doubts diminish, whether they be about the church and the world or my own abilities. If you’re clear on your cause, you can navigate anything else thrown at you. Years ago, I had a conversation with an older African-American gentleman who was shining my shoes. His wife had died, and he was raising his son, who was pretty smart and had just been accepted to a prestigious university. I remember him saying, “I get tired of shining shoes. It’s hard work, and you’re bent over all day long. But I’ll shine shoes till Jesus comes if it’ll get my boy through college. When an issue is divisive, how do you go about getting buy-in from people on both sides? If there’s a point of commonality—however small it may be—affirm that first, and then build from there. I’ve seen this work in the midst of discussions around same-sex marriage with leaders from the Anglican Communion, the larger global church we’re affiliated with. My first meeting with them—heads of the various churches, the archbishops, presiding bishops, and moderators from across the globe—was right after we in the U.S. Episcopal Church had changed our rules to allow for same-sex marriage, which was, and still is, seen by many in the rest of the Anglican Communion as deeply controversial. But we did have a point of commonality: our faith. I said, “What I believe we as a church are doing is following the teachings of Jesus, who told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. I believe that this change in our rules is a practical expression of that in our particular cultural context. I respect the fact that you’re in a different cultural context, so you have a different perspective, but I am serious about trying to follow the way of Jesus in my context and in my ministry.” Now, we didn’t all sing “Kumbaya” after I said that, but it was a point of commonality that was enough to contain the diversity and the difference. How do you stay steady in emotionally charged situations? You’ve got to just get honest with yourself. First, when you’re upset, acknowledge that you’re upset: My blood is boiling, my stomach is churning, my head is hurting—I’m mad. This doesn’t solve everything, but it helps, because it’s the stuff that we are not aware of in ourselves that has the power to control us in ways that we don’t intend. Then consider what you are upset about. The Buddhists are onto something here. The Buddha taught that self-centeredness is the root of all human-created dilemmas, and that if you can overcome the self, you can overcome these conflicts. If I can get over myself, then I can think about the situation instead: What’s actually being said? What’s the cause? What’s the truth? That gives me a better shot at being less reactive and more responsive. How do you encourage people to bring love into their workplaces? In the past couple years I’ve started thinking of love less as a sentiment and more as a commitment to a way of being with others. As a sentiment, love is more about what I’m getting out of it than what you’re getting out of it. But as a commitment, love means I’m seeking your self-interest as well as my own—and maybe above and beyond mine. That kind of unselfishness is actually how Jesus talked about love most of the time in the New Testament—the Greek word that’s used is agape. That’s the kind of love you see in a person who has done something selfless for you and affected your life for the good: a parent, teacher, Scout leader, or coach. Take that further and you realize that there has been no social good that’s been intentionally done apart from this kind of love. We don’t give people Nobel Peace prizes for selfishness. We recognize those people because they’ve given of themselves without counting the cost to themselves. So, I’ve been playing with the mantra: Is the action I’m contemplating selfish or selfless? I invite folks to just ask that question throughout the day: Selfish or selfless? How do you respond to critics of your message? I’ve had people ask whether the way of love is a realistic approach to life. If I’m a CEO, or a member of Congress, can I really build a life around love? Can I if I’m a prosecutor and I see the worst of human beings? My response is: If you think love is a sentiment, no. But if you understand that love is a commitment, the answer is yes. How do you prepare to speak in front of a big, diverse audience like the one at the royal wedding? With some anxiety and trepidation! But I prepare the same way I used to prepare to preach on Sunday morning as a parish priest. One of my congregations in Ohio had a lawyer, a PhD, a physician, and a couple of women in their 70s who had been cleaning houses all night long. I had to talk to all those people in one sermon! I figured out that I needed to find different ways to illustrate the message, but in the end it’s the same message for all. That congregation taught me how to preach to princes and paupers at the same time. Average Sunday attendance at Episcopal churches has dropped by 24% in the last decade. What strategies are you using to reverse that tide? None! Questions about church attendance and church decline are second-order questions. The first-order questions are whether we are helping our people—Episcopalians—to have living relationships with God and with other people. If the answer is yes, then issues of church growth will take care of themselves, or we’ll figure out how to handle them. The first Christians—the first followers of Jesus—never had a discussion about how many people they had at church on Sunday. But they kept following Jesus and his teachings, and eventually they turned an empire upside down. How do you decide which aspects of church tradition to keep and which need to change? Often change is not so much about discarding the past as about reinventing it in a new way for a new time. You need to go back to the real original mission of an institution or a tradition, not just how it manifested itself at one time. Ask what was driving this tradition at its best, and then ask what that would look like now. It won’t look the same, but there you’ll find the energy that can give it new life. For example, the Episcopal Church supports several historically black colleges and universities [HBCUs]. As demographics in the U.S. are shifting, I’ve advised them to go back to their original mission and ask, “Why are we here?” Most HBCUs were started after the Civil War to provide advanced education for the children of newly freed slaves. At the time, these people were at the bottom of society, and HBCUs helped them find a new place in that society. Today, maybe raising people up means that these schools focus not just on descendants of slaves but also on people who speak Spanish as their first language. You are the first person of color to lead the Episcopal Church—a majority white denomination—as well as having been the first African-American diocesan bishop in the American South. What advice do you have for black leaders or for other minority leaders? Stay on the mission that called you. I happen to be African-American. I happen to be male. I happen to be married. All that is part of who I am. But the driver for me in my job as bishop must be the mission I see myself on.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Bishop Michael Curry

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