Bishop's Column
Posted Saturday, July 01, 2006
General Convention a "Pentecostal Moment"
July 2006
Thirty years ago, building on our nation's bicentennial celebration of the revolution of 1776, I taught a course on liberation theology as part of an annual week-long adult education conference in the Diocese of Los Angeles. In those days liberation theology was novel, fresh, and provocative. Through a series of events - the approval of the ordination of women (1976), the consecration of Barbara Harris (first woman bishop, 1989), the consecration of Gene Robinson (first openly gay bishop, 2003) - today, in the Episcopal Church, God's liberating purpose in sending Jesus Christ is a basic assumption that at this month's General Convention became incarnate in historic event.
As I sat in Trinity Church, Columbus, Ohio, on June 18, for the election of our new presiding bishop, I thought about this history and how far we Episcopalians have come in a relatively brief period as I heard the opening tally and realized that as many as 44 of us had given Katharine Jefferts Schori an impressive plurality on the first ballot. As I cast my second ballot, I wondered, would there be yet more support for her, maybe even enough for her to be elected? The absence of politics from the electoral process had made impossible any prediction of what would eventually happen through our prayers and the Spirit's workings. On the second ballot, Bishop Jefferts Schori and the only other real contender each received 49 votes. On the fifth ballot, she was elected with the requisite 95 votes.
The jubilation in the House of Bishops was audible, palpable, and widespread. Most of us could hardly believe what we had done - elect the first woman to serve as our presiding bishop and be numbered among the primates of the Anglican Communion, many of whose member churches do not yet ordain women.
Bishop Jefferts Schori, seated behind me, looked stunned. Then Bishop Herbert Donovan escorted her to the front of the nave where she graciously bowed before the Presiding Bishop, turned and faced us, and spoke, first in Spanish and then in English, thanking the others who had allowed themselves to be nominated and telling us all, "You are not off the hook."
We definitely were not off the hook. We had yet to deal with a series of resolutions responding to the Windsor Report. The House of Deputies and the House of Bishops concurred in approving Resolution A166 supporting the process of developing an Anglican Covenant that would bring more unity and order to Communion-wide work, Resolution A159 setting forth our commitment "to seek to live into the highest degree of communication possible," and Resolution B032 reiterating the historic separate and independent status of the churches of the Anglican Communion.
It was Resolution B033, calling for restraint by not consenting to the consecration of bishops "whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church," that was most difficult, painful, and controversial. Designed the evening before the final legislative day of the Convention after the House of Deputies had defeated a similar resolution, B033 was to be a response to the Windsor Report's suggestion that the Episcopal Church "effect a moratorium on the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate who is living in a same-gender union until some new consensus in the Anglican Communion emerges." During the debate I supported an amendment that would have had the resolution ask for the exercise of restraint "when giving consent" (rather than "by not consenting").
The amendment, however, was defeated, and with notable reluctance the original adopted in an effort aimed at assuring a) our bishops' place at the table when the Lambeth Conference meets in 2008, and b) the new Presiding Bishop's acceptance among the Primates. Both assurances were seen as necessary for the conversation about the place of gay and lesbian persons in the life of the church to continue. While the so-called "moratorium" may appear to some to be a set-back, liberation from exactly the kind oppression it effects is the motivation of the majority of those who voted for it.
Besides the election of the Presiding Bishop and the responses to the Windsor Report, the most significant action of the Convention was shaped by Katrina Browne, who grew up at St. Peter's, 3rd and Pine, and arrived at Columbus with the rough cut of a documentary film she is making about her family's complicity in the illegal importation of African slaves into New England through Bristol, Rhode Island, in the 19th century. Viewed by the entire House of Bishops and hundreds of deputies and visitors, "Traces of the Trade" had a tremendous emotional impact by exposing what one person in the film calls "a stomach for violence."
The bishops and deputies subsequently adopted Resolution C011 "affirming our commitments to become a transformed, anti-racist church and to work toward healing, reconciliation and a restoration of wholeness to the family of God..." The resolution urges "the Church at every level to call upon Congress and the American people to support legislation initiating study of and dialogue about the history and legacy of slavery in the United States and of proposals for monetary and non-monetary reparations to the descendants of the victims of slavery." The resolution arose out of the recognition that the Episcopal Church benefited from the slave trade and the practice of slavery and that it has a moral and ethical responsibility to acknowledge its role in this injustice, to repent, to offer apology, and to "repair the breach" (Isaiah 58:12). Representative John Conyers has introduced H.R. 40, a bill to create a commission for the study of reparations, in each of the last eight sessions of Congress, but to date, it has failed to make it out of committee. Our church now stands in support of it.
Let me end this letter where I began - with a story from the election of our new Presiding Bishop. As Bishop Jefferts Schori walked back to her seat following her acceptance speech to us from the floor of Trinity Church, the other women bishops present came out into the center aisle from their pews, threw their arms around her and around one another, and huddled in the midst of 175 men who were at once clapping and crying for joy. Days earlier the House of Deputies had elected Bonnie Anderson, a lay woman from the Diocese of Michigan, as its new president. In but thirty revolutionary years the Episcopal Church had come to be led by two outstanding women. It was a Pentecostal moment that I shall never forget, one reminding me that the Spirit blows where it will. We do not see whence it comes or with whither it goes.
But we do hear the sound of it. If I heard correctly when the seven nominees for Presiding Bishop addressed the House of Bishops in March, there was a difference between Bishop Jefferts Shore and the others. In one way or another, the others seemed to be concerned to unify the church by upholding what during Bishop Griswold's tenure we have come to call "the diverse center." Bishop Jefferts Shore, by contrast, seemed to envision a church united by a wide embrace. The difference is subtle, but it is there. She is, after all, an oceanographer who has been to the bottom of the deep. She is also a pilot who has flown to the heights of the heavens. She is from the wide open spaces of the West. She is fluent in several languages. She is as attentive to nature as to history. Capable of seeing the truth in claims that appear contradictory, she may prove to be our first truly post-modern PB. Who really knows? The wind blows where it will.
One thing we surely know, of course: she needs our prayers, as does her husband Richard, her daughter Katharine, and the clergy and people of the Diocese of Nevada. I ask that you now include her name after that of Frank, our Presiding Bishop, in your prayers.
— Charles E. Bennison, Jr.