The 75th Episcopal Convention and Triennial Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, was held the same week in June as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly in Birmingham. Since our usual representative to ecumenical bodies, Stated Clerk Cliff Kirkpatrick, could not attend. I gladly accepted the role as the Presbyterian ecumenical partner representative.
Amidst all the other issues coming before the Episcopalian delegates at their bicameral bodies, the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops, were two larger issues: The election of a new presiding bishop, and their response to the Windsor Report from the wider Anglican Communion.
The Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, 52, bishop of Nevada, was elected presiding bishop, the first female elected to this position in the 400-year history of the church. She succeeds the Rev. Frank T. Griswold, whose nine years of liberal leadership saw the elevation of V. Gene Robinson, an active and openly gay priest, to the office of bishop in New Hampshire. Bishop Jefferts Schori was elected to the nine-year term from a slate of seven on the fifth ballot. She is a private pilot and a former oceanographer and stands in the liberal tradition of the increasingly fractured denomination. (She was consecrated as presiding bishop Nov. 4 at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.)
The Windsor Report is the response of worldwide Anglican bodies to what is perceived to be the American church’s “maverick” reputation, especially in the matter of the election of Robinson.
As I sat in on the debates in both houses it became clear that beneath the many black-shirted clerical collars, the magenta shirts of the bishops, and the other glorious attire of worship, the Episcopalians looked, spoke, apologized, and fought just like Presbyterians. As people lined up at the microphones, the language regarding gay Christians in a non-welcoming environment, to choose one notable topic, were exactly the same. The apologies to, and the regrets about, full acceptance of gays were spoken as eloquently as the resistance to further inroads of the gay community into the church. If there was a difference at all in presentation and substance from the same words and attitudes at our Assemblies, it was not noticeable. They are as homogeneous in race and ethnicity as Presbyterians, and just as concerned and defensive about that condition.
The anguish among Episcopalians about sailing through our complex post-modern world is as vivid as our own, yet because of the nature of their polity, more public. In one instance a candidate for bishop coadjutor in California, the Rev. Barry Beisner, was approved by a joint committee but with reservations because of his two divorces and third marriage. Beisner was required to address the issues before the committee.
The Windsor Report led, inevitably, to what is called the “Windsor Process,” which includes a panel of Reference and Listening, which of course involves a great deal of “listening” to one another, leading, it is hoped, to an Anglican “covenant” in the next six to eight years. At the heart of all of this is the growing concern of worldwide Anglican leaders from conservative dioceses in Africa, Melanesia and other third world lands directed toward what they see as the radical drift of North American churches from biblical prescriptions in the matter of sexual identity and practice, and in other accommodations to the world. In the midst of the exquisitely polite hostility among the several camps at the Convention, I ran across a daily publication from “Center Aisle” of the Virginia Diocese, an opinion journal whose thesis is: “The middle is not the midpoint on a line between two extremes. In the life of faith, the great bulk of people are at the center, and that center is faith in the Risen Christ.”
May it ever be so, for Episcopalians and for us.
PHILIP M. HAZELTON is the senior minister of Worthington Church in Worthington, Ohio, and was the Presbyterian ecumenical delegate to the 75th Episcopal General Convention in June.
