My Mentors, Part 5
Richard Henry Baker
He may have had fewer obvious gifts than any person I ever watched in a position of significant power and authority. He was not an impressive personality. One would describe him more as homespun than as notable. He was more like a favorite uncle or a comfortable neighbor. He was not particularly tall, perhaps stretching to five feet and nine inches. What one noticed at first about him was that he walked with a slight limp, the result of a World War I injury. He had little oratorical power. It would not occur to most people to want to listen to a speech he might deliver. The public speaking required of him in his profession was experienced by him as a chore. He did it, but he did it rather poorly. Audiences were seldom moved; endured would be the word they would have used. He had few administrative skills and was looked upon as one who was never quite organized. On more than one occasion, enough to form a pattern in the minds of some, he got his schedule confused and showed up at the wrong place on the wrong date and at the wrong time. He ran his organization as if it were a family, feeling it was everyone’s duty to bear one another’s burden. That of course could not be done unless people’s burdens were well known. He was not malevolent, but confidentiality was not his strong suit. He frequently sought to encourage one person by telling him or her about another person, who had confided in him and who, in his opinion, had much the same problem.
I do not mean to be critical, but to be descriptive. This man, now deceased, was a bishop, elected bishop-coadjutor of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina in 1950 and succeeding to the diocesan bishop’s office in 1959. He filled that office until 1965, not a long term as those things are normally measured. He ordained me deacon on June 24, 1955. Today I regard him as the most influential bishop under whom I ever served. His name was Richard Henry Baker and he helped me understand the complex nature of effective leadership. He modeled a leadership style that is absolutely unique. So let me tell you the story of my fifth great mentor and, in the process, help you, my readers, to understand that genius comes in many forms.
Richard Henry Baker came to the Episcopal office after a long rectorship at the Church of the Redeemer in a rather fancy suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. When he went there in the early1930’s, Redeemer was a little country church, well suited to Dick Baker’s informal, one on one, personal style. Prior to and following World War II, however, the suburbs around the great cities of America exploded. Great farms were carved into beautiful sculptured lots, roads were paved, trees were planted, homes were built and shopping malls were erected. The face of America was dramatically changed and the little Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore County evolved into a large, wealthy and influential suburban church. Its rector, Richard Baker, grew with them. He was there for so long that children he had known in the Sunday school and various youth groups left home for universities and graduate schools, got married, began their families and then returned to the neighborhood and the church of their upbringing, but now as admired, successful professionals. They were among Baltimore’s leading citizens. Many were doctors whose careers at Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital achieved national recognition, but they were still known to Richard Baker as little Earl or little Billy. The Church of the Redeemer expanded its physical facilities time after time to accommodate its growing congregation. The staff at this church also grew to meet this congregation’s expanding needs. At this faith community’s center, however, was still this simple man who knew everyone and who was, it seems, loved by all. No one expected him to be what he was not. Everyone was quite pleased that everything was changing except Dick Baker. He was an anchor in a swirling sea.
His Sunday sermons were brief and practical. No one would mistake him for a scholar. As a pastor he was more an advice giver than a skilled counselor. He was a comfortable part of the furniture at this increasingly affluent and dominating congregation.
Meanwhile, in the Diocese of North Carolina, the bishop, whose name was Edwin Anderson Penick, was approaching the mandatory retirement age of 72. He had been elected bishop when he was only 35. Most of the people in that diocese had never known anyone else in that office. He also filled that office magnificently. He was a powerful speaker, a respected intellect and a master administrator. He was known as “Prince Bishop,” a larger than life ecclesiastical figure. He was accorded honor and status in whatever setting he entered. When the time came to choose his successor, it was clear that the diocese wanted someone just like him. The nominees were of that mold. One was the dean of an Episcopal theological seminary, a scholar, a published author and one whose skills in leading clergy were already established. Another, the rector of a large Virginia Church, who bore a name that reflected the ancestry of Virginia’s landed gentry, combining in his three names three distinguished Virginia family lines. To speak his full name was like a roll call of the “first families of Virginia.” The third nominee was a rector of a large church in Richmond, Virginia, a city that, probably more than any other, gloried in its history. Anyone of these would have been a fitting successor to Bishop Penick.
The election convention got off to an interesting start when a North Carolina lay delegate extolled the virtues of the man with three noble Virginia names a bit too effusively, dwelling on the history of his three distinguished family lines. The next speaker, put off by this excessive tribute to blue blood, asked if we were interested in this man as our next bishop or were we bringing him to North Carolina for breeding purposes? The Virginia blue blood never had a chance after that. So the seminary dean was elected and the people felt good about their choice. The Dean, however, declined his election, an action that stunned the people of North Carolina and deflated their corporate egos.
A year later, another convention was called and Richard Henry Baker of Baltimore, Maryland, was chosen. The contrast could not have been more severe. The Diocese of North Carolina had turned to a man beloved in his community because he had been there for so long and they had thrust this wonderful, but limited man into a position of great power and influence to succeed an icon of respect and effectiveness. When Dick Baker began to be known in North Carolina, a sense of despair about the future of the diocese became palpable. How will we manage when this man takes over it was asked? It was a fair question.
It is said of bishops that upon election, they either grow or swell. Bishop Baker did neither. His great gift was that he knew who he was and he made no effort to become anything else. He certainly did not swell. He sat loosely to authority. He elicited gifts from others that he did not have. Some of North Carolina’s top business leaders, fearing that the diocese was in poor hands with this bishop, volunteered their services, taking over the business and financial leadership of the diocese. Senior clergy ceased to be parochial in their outlook and began to give this bishop the best leadership they had to offer. Bishop Baker kept delegating his authority to clergy whom most regarded as too young to be effective leaders and then he watched them grow. He trusted others to provide him with the talent he knew he did not possess. He empowered congregations and clergy to risk in dramatic ways. In 1959 when a group of young clergy simply closed the segregated camp the diocese had operated for “colored Episcopalians,” deciding that the one diocesan camp, known as Vade Mecum, would serve all the children of the diocese, Bishop Baker approved that decision without hesitation and rode out the storm that ensued among North Carolina’s “old white establishment” with a serenity that was impressive.. He never wavered and the attempt to overturn that decision made by those “young upstarts” failed because this bishop exercised veto power.
Another young priest, not five years out of seminary, became chair of the prestigious “State of the Diocese” committee, empowered to bring sweeping recommendations to the convention about future policy. Bishop Baker did not flinch when one of those recommendations was to close a hospital in Charlotte that it had run for years for “colored people,” thus forcing the city to provide public tax-supported medical care to blacks and whites alike. Bishop Baker empowered the clergy of his diocese to grow into who they were capable of being. He asked others to give gifts of leadership that he knew he himself did not possess. That was and is a tremendous gift of leadership. People today look back on that period of church history in North Carolina with some sense of wonder. It was a time of intense conflict over race and the role of women in the church. It was an era when angry people withheld their money from the church as a weapon to keep control and when congregations voted to withdraw from the Episcopal Church in order to keep their prejudices intact. In retrospect people were heard to say such things as “The Diocese of North Carolina got through those difficult days in spite of having such a weak man in the bishop’s office.” How wrong they were. We got through those days because we did have Dick Baker in the bishop’s office.
Today I am aware of the contributions that clergy developed under Dick Baker have made in the larger Church. They have become bishops, deans and rectors of some of America’s greatest congregations. One founded the Alban Institute, many were active in the Civil Rights movement, the movement for women’s equality in church and society and the movement for justice and full acceptance of the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender community. They are the results of the ministry of Richard Henry Baker, who assessing his weaknesses accurately, called many more into being something they did not know that they had the ability to be. I salute him as one of the great mentors of my life.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online
here.
