Election season is here! And I’m not talking about the next President. I’m talking about the election for our next Bishop.

People often ask me what makes the Episcopal Church or the Anglican tradition different from the Roman Catholic Church. If you’re reading this email, you probably know that there are many different ways to answer that question. But ultimately, the answer is “polity.”

Not “politics,” as in how our churches’ values correspond to different political parties. But “polity”: how we organize ourselves as a church body, and how we make decisions about our lives together as Christians. Since the time of the Catholic Reformation (or “Counter-Reformation”), the Catholic Church’s polity has been basically top-down and centralized: authority flows from the Pope down through Archbishops and national councils of bishops, down to diocesan bishop and on to parishes.

But for the whole history of the Episcopal Church, since its inception after the American Revolution, our polity has worked in the other direction, from the bottom up. Our church polity reflects the representative ideals of our Republic. So the laypeople of our parishes elect Vestries that meet monthly to govern our local churches, and our churches elect delegates to a Diocesan Convention that meets yearly to govern life in our Diocese, and our dioceses elect delegates to a triennial General Convention that makes binding decisions for our whole Episcopal Church. (There is, for better or for worse, no pan-Anglican body that can make decisions that are binding on, say, both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England.)

This description may already have put you to sleep, but it’s really important. In fact, this difference in polity has directly enabled the more visible or obvious differences between our churches. How is it that Episcopal priests can marry, or that women can be ordained as bishops and priests, or that our church affirms the identities, lives, marriages, and transitions of LGBT+ people? Because we decided to! Churches can argue back and forth about the theology underpinning any of these things, but what gave us the freedom to embrace each one of them was the fact that we organize our church’s life as a representative democracy, and that we—the ordinary lay and ordained people of this Church—decided that they are right.

The same goes when a Bishop retires.

Our current bishop diocesan, the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates, plans to retire at the end of 2024. His successor as our spiritual leader will not be appointed from above or selected by a secret committee. His successor will be elected by the people of God, guided (we pray) by the Holy Spirit of God.

This is literally true: at our Annual Meeting this winter we’ll be electing lay representatives to vote to elect our next Bishop in May. And it’s also true in a broader sense than just that technical one. Our diocesan search process has begun, and the Nominating Committee wants to hear your voice! As they begin developing a profile for the search, they are inviting input from people around our Diocese via a series of listening sessions, to which you are all invited.

Each session is located in a different reason, and some are especially intended to hear from people representing different demographics. Here are a few of the sessions that might be convenient for members of our parish:

Lay Session	Sept. 23	10-11:30 a.m.	St. Stephen’s Memorial Church, Lynn	Northern & Western Region
LGBTQ+ Lay Session	Sept. 25	6:30-8 p.m.	Church of the Good Shepherd, Watertown	All Regions
Sesión Laica en Español	Oct. 1	11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.	Grace Church, Lawrence	Toda
Lay Session	Oct. 2	6:30-8 p.m.	St. James’s Church, Cambridge	Central Region
Lay Session	Oct. 3	6:30-8 p.m.	Via Zoom	All Regions
Lay People of Color	Oct. 5	6:30-8 p.m.	Trinity Church, Boston	All Regions
Lay Session	Oct. 11	6:30-8 p.m.	Christ Church, Quincy	Southern Region
Lay Session	Oct. 14	1:30-3 p.m.	Christ Church, Needham	Central Region

I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to attend one of these, in person or by Zoom, to share your hopes and dreams for the future of our church, and to connect with Episcopalians from around Massachusetts. It is an incredible gift to have this kind of say in the way our leaders are chosen; I hope you are able to be a part of that process.