Episcopal Church Faces the Sexual Divide

As an estimated 70,000 gay-rights advocates gathered in   Rome this July for World Pride 2000, some 10,000 Episcopalians thronged Denver, Colorado, to attempt to sort out, among other things, the church’s mind on same-sex unions. The other things addressed by the Episcopal Church U.S.A. (ECUSA) at its 73rd triennial General Convention included a full communion agreement with the 5.1 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and far-reaching goals for evangelism, but sexuality issues inevitably took center stage. ELCA Presiding Bishop H. George Anderson, who made an appearance near the close of the convention, told reporters the sexuality debate within the Episcopal church would have no bearing on the full communion agreement between the denominations. “We’re having the same kind of discussion within our own church, and we would take our own decision on the matter,” Anderson stated.

In the eyes of some, ECUSA’s most recent decision concerning same-sex unions amounted to a nondecision. The 2.3 million-member Episcopal church was the third Protestant denomination to grapple with sexuality issues this summer. At its quadrennial general conference in May, the United Methodist Church affirmed its traditional stance on homosexual practice, calling it “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The Presbyterian Church U.S.A.’s General Assembly passed an amendment banning same-sex union ceremonies. ECUSA’s action was ambiguous by comparison. After three days of impassioned dialogue, the church’s bicameral legislative body overwhelmingly passed a resolution, D039, that officially acknowledges the existence within the church of committed relationships other than those established under the marriage covenant. The resolution then holds up the church’s standards for marriage as criteria by which such relationships should be judged. The language of D039 does not refer specifically to homosexual relationships, leaving the door open for the church to recognize extramarital heterosexual relationships, but conventioneers understood the resolution as primarily referring to same-sex couples.

The controversial portion of D039 didn’t make it through the convention. A hairbreadth vote in the House of Deputies, which is comprised of some 800 lay and clergy members, deleted an eighth resolve from D039 calling for the development of liturgical rites to be used in blessing the non-marital relationships described in the first seven resolves, though the word “support” was used rather than “bless.” After the deputies’ action, the nearly 300-member House of Bishops voted by a wider margin against tacking the eighth resolve back onto D039 but not without first engaging in a grueling, hours-long debate. Both houses must endorse a measure for it to be adopted by the convention. Had the eighth resolve been approved, in the words of a spokesperson for the conservative American Anglican Council (AAC), it would have “portended huge consequences” for the Episcopal church and the worldwide Anglican communion. As it stands in its truncated form, said numerous convention-goers, D039 merely “describes where we are as a church.”

A House Divided?

Even as Pope John Paul II told a crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square that the summer’s Gay Pride event in Rome constituted an “affront to the Great Jubilee of the year 2000,” ECUSA—in the wake of what Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold deemed its “Jubilee” General Convention—finds itself as entrenched as ever in what has become a decades-long “conversation,” to use a favorite term in the Episcopal lexicon, about human sexuality. In 1976, the Episcopal church officially welcomed homosexuals into the fold through a resolution stating that “homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church.” Since then, disagreement over the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions has persisted, if stubbornly.

Throughout this year’s debate in both houses of the ECUSA convention, a listener was besotted by comments like “We’re a divided church,” “We really are not of one mind, we are of two minds,” “[This] will divide my congregation,” and “We’ll divide ourselves from the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and most Protestant churches.” Less menacing were some of the observations made by press briefing officers after the bulk of the debate was over with: “The Church is not of one mind…but we are not divided,” Bishop Clifton Daniel of East Carolina asserted at a press conference. “We are not of one mind, but we are of one heart,” opined Catherine Roskam, bishop suffragan of New York.

Speaking to the House of Bishops after two days of debate, Griswold went the way of the softer line: “This is not a divided house. We are divided on certain questions.” Elected at the 1997 General Convention in Philadelphia, the presiding bishop has undertaken the herculean task of holding together a church that contains people of wildly divergent views. The sexuality conflict was acute coming out of the 97 convention, observers said. It was exacerbated the following year when the Lambeth Conference—an assemblage of Anglican bishops convened every ten years by the archbishop of Canterbury—passed a resolution by a vote of 526 to 70 calling homosexual practice “incompatible with Scripture.” The Lambeth resolution is not binding, but it carries the weight of moral influence. Since the resolution’s passage, several ECUSA dioceses have openly challenged it.

Compounding the strain, a group of Anglican bishops gathered in Singapore this January and, in a startling move, ordained two Episcopal priests, Charles Murphy and John Rodgers, as missionary bishops to the United States from the dioceses of Rwanda and Southeast Asia, respectively. Both men are theologically orthodox. Opponents of the ordinations called them unprecedented; many conservatives called them unproductive. Griswold repudiated the action, while Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, a traditionalist, also looked on the consecrations with disapproval. A handful of churches have fully affiliated with Murphy and Rodgers, coming under the oversight of their dioceses abroad.

Considering the prelude, it would seem in the wake of this year’s general convention that Griswold has managed remarkably to hold the pieces together. Despite the peaceful arrest of demonstrating members of Soulforce, a gay and lesbian activist group; a protest by Fred Phelps, the notorious, anti-gay demonstrator; a ritualistic sprinkling of salt by a Dallas deputy under the tables of his cohorts in what gays and lesbians considered an outrageous act of aspersion—despite all of this, most convention participants and attendees noted the absence of “rancor” this go-round, which many say is an advancement in light of the decade’s previous conventions, though the word “fractious” did turn up in some press reports and in newsletters handed out daily in front of the convention center.

Daily Eucharists that included midservice table discussions for congregants on Jubilee themes like forgiveness, compassion, reconciliation, and listening seemed to help matters, according to some. In an unusual move, Griswold preached at each of these Eucharists, taking on the mantle of what one bishop called a “spiritual guide” at a gathering usually reminiscent of a political convention. But even in an atmosphere of so much civility, where the call for conversation was issued more frequently by delirious, sleep-deprived deputies and bishops than the call for coffee, the inexorable fissure between those of differing views became more decidedly manifest as the debate over sexuality unfolded. While people on both sides of the aisle credit Griswold’s leadership and determination with helping stave off schism, division over sexuality issues bespeaks what many call an unbridgeable theological rift in the church. Quoting an oft-used expression, Very Rev. Canon David C. Anderson of Newport Beach, California—an AAC board member—said that listening to the dialogue, you might think you were listening to “two churches instead of one?’ During debate in the House of Bishops, Andrew Fairfield, bishop of North Dakota, described what he called ECUSA’s “tectonic fault” this way: On one side you have those who rely “through the Holy Spirit” on “a reasonable understanding of Holy Scripture”; on the other, those who rely on a “feeling reaction to contemporary experience?’ According to Fairfield, the eighth resolve of D039 “force [d] the issue?’

Redefining a Sacrament

Resolution D039 acknowledges that “while the issues of human sexuality are not yet resolved, there are currently couples in the Body of Christ and in this Church who are living in marriage and couples…who are living in other life-long committed relationships.” The church “expect[s] such relationships will be characterized by fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful, honest communication, and the holy love which enables those in such relationships to see in each other the image of God,” states the third resolve.

The fourth resolve “denounce[s] promiscuity, exploitation and abusiveness in the relationships of any of our members.” The fifth resolve declares the church’s intention “to hold all its members accountable to these values” and makes provision for “prayerful support, encouragement and pastoral care necessary to live faithfully by them.” The seventh resolve maintains “that those on various sides of controversial issues have a place in the Church” and reaffirms the “imperative to promote conversation between persons of differing experiences and perspectives, while acknowledging the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of marriage.”

The omitted eighth resolve asserts the church’s wish to ((support relationships of mutuality and fidelity other than marriage which mediate the grace of God” and “directs the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to prepare for consideration by the 74th General Convention rites for inclusion in the Book of Occasional Services by means of which the Church may express that support.”

In both houses of the convention, debate over the first seven resolves was virtually nonexistent. During an hour-long exchange on the floor of the House of Deputies, little of substance was said to controvert the first seven resolves specifically; the deputies went on to approve the first seven easily by a voice vote. In the House of Bishops, Gordon Charlton, retired bishop suffragan of Texas, argued against the first seven as harmful to the institution of marriage. Speaking to the implications of the third resolve, he contended that if extramarital relationships were “capable of everything we hope and expect to find in holy matrimony…the church’s blessing…becomes unnecessary, if not superfluous.” Otherwise, the bishops mainly referred to the first seven resolves in context of discussion about whether to include the eighth. Most seemed able to tolerate the passage of the first seven—or, at least, no one seemed inclined to fight about it.

Bishop Charles Duvall of the Central Gulf Coast called the first seven resolves “a description of what is true in our life as a church…. It doesn’t condemn either side.” The first seven constitute “the work of the Holy Spirit among us,” offered Bishop Arthur Williams, suffragan of Ohio, who co-chaired the committee that drafted D039. He added that while the twelve members of Special Committee 25 had voted unanimously for the first seven resolves, the member bishops had split over the eighth.

But if the first seven amounted to a consensus statement about where the Episcopal church stands on sexuality issues, then some argued the resolves were not without consequence. While it is widely conceded that Episcopal bishops and priests in some dioceses have been quietly blessing same-sex unions for years under the auspices of an unofficial “local option” principle, Duvall of the Central Gulf Coast, one of the convention’s press briefing officers, contended the formal admission “that there are people who live differently than the stated teaching of the church” represented a considerable change in ECUSA thinking. “That’s a fairly significant admission,” he told reporters.

Rev. Canon Elizabeth Kaeton, a deputy from the diocese of Newark and a practicing lesbian, claimed the approved version of D039 signified an advance for gay and lesbian advocates in the church. Conceding she wouldn’t be able “to sell this back home” without the eighth resolve, Kaeton argued that in the first seven resolves, “we now have a working definition of the sacramental nature of a relationship.”

“Now gays and lesbians have a standard, a definition,” she said. “We can come back in three years and say, ‘This is what you said, and this is how we met your criteria.'”

On the other side, AAC board member Rev. Martyn Minns of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, told a crowd at one of the daily lunches sponsored by his organization that “the first seven resolves don’t fill us with joy.” He noted later that the language of the resolves “draws a parallel between the relationships of gay couples and holy matrimony, which is a moral equivalency problem.”

Stalemate to Schism?

The eighth resolve sufficiently exposed the disunity in the church. In a move without known precedent at the general convention, the House of Bishops suspended its activities so that bishops could attend the House of Deputies’ D039 debate, which at its end left numerous people stranded at the microphones hoping to get their points across.

From deputies opposed came cries of concern that parishioners would cut ties with the church on theological grounds if the eighth resolve passed. “Look carefully around this hall and understand well,” Rev. Kendall Harmon of South Carolina said, “that if we pass this…there are people sitting here today who will not be with us at the next convention.” Rev. Sharon Lewis of Southwest Florida claimed “one-half to three-fourths” of her parish would “walk out” if the last resolve went through.

Supporters of the resolve contended that a vote for eight was a vote for justice. “The first seven resolves…speak to a love we have for our brothers and sisters,” one deputy argued. “The final resolve speaks to justice, and it is time for this church to speak with justice.”

Pointing out that people in his state had used Scripture to justify slavery and racism, Rev. Stan Runnells of Mississippi declared, “There finally comes a time when faithful people must risk for the radical gospel of love, justice, and grace.”

“We in this church are not of one mind,” an opponent stated. “That division should tell us that this is not the Holy Spirit…. To act apart from the Spirit only brings judgment, not justice.”

The vote on the eighth resolve in the House of Deputies was taken by orders, a procedure that gives advantage to the status quo. The final vote, which had to be recounted, showed the clerical order as having approved the resolve, while the lay order defeated it by three votes. Both orders must approve a measure before it can be sent to the bishops.

During a press conference immediately following the action, deputy briefing officers compared the vote to a similarly slim vote over a liturgical rites resolution at the 1997 Philadelphia convention. “This makes me wonder,” said Ian Douglas of the Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts, “as we wander about this wilderness, where we are.”

Briefing officers referenced an article from the June issue of Episcopal Life, the national newspaper of ECUSA, in which Bishop John-David Schofield, who himself did not attend the convention due to ill health, reportedly told deputies in San Joaquin, California, “that 25 bishops will sign a statement, breaking communion with the church if any resolution accepting homosexuality is adopted.”

Said Rev. Gayle Harris of Rochester: “The threat of schism doesn’t help the conversation.”

Questioned later about the Schofield comment, AAC board member Bishop Keith Ackerman of Quincy, Illinois, claimed there was no such “organized effort” by bishops to walk.

But Scott Larsen of Integrity, a 26-year-old Episcopal gay and lesbian affinity group, cited the “25 bishops” statement, together with the resounding claims of deputies that parishioners would cut ties with the church over the rites issue, as evidence of bad faith on the part of conservatives. “We’ve never said that [we would walk],” Larsen argued. “We’ll be there tomorrow morning at the table sharing the Eucharist. We’ve never used that tactic.” He added that gays and lesbians had not “heard from the conservative side any proposal for how we [homosexual persons] can remain in loving relationships and stay true to our Christian beliefs. We compromised a number of things at this General Convention hoping they would come to the table.” Larsen’s call to conservatives: “Show me the love.”

Rev. David Anderson conceded that conservatives were unable to compromise on the issue of same-sex unions. “We care about gay and lesbian individuals, but it is hard to make a compromise…when it involves some form of authentication for what we really do not believe is right…or the best that God has to offer. And we say that out of our own sexual brokenness…. We’re offering to listen, to hear their life stories, their pain, to enter into dialogue, to get to know and love them.”

The following day the House of Bishops took up the first seven resolves of D039 as passed to them by the deputies. Debate among the bishops followed a line similar to that of the previous afternoon. In the bishops’ case, the question was whether to amend D039 by reattaching the eighth resolve.

Bishops opposed to eight argued on behalf of the unity of the church. “The closeness of the vote [in the House of Deputies] …speaks to the division of the church,” argued Bishop Duvall of the Central Gulf Coast. “The church is almost evenly divided, therefore it is not ready for a call for rites.”

Between six and ten congregations could leave his diocese over the passage of the resolve, claimed Bishop Bertram Herlong of Tennessee, noting that some of his parishes had been in contact with the bishops recently ordained in Singapore.

Bishop William E. Swing of California, who avowed to have ordained more gays and lesbians than anyone else in the history of the church, said he would vote against eight because the first seven resolves alone are “a stretch for a lot of dioceses in the country.”

Referencing the full communion agreement with ELCA, Bishop Herbert Thompson of Southern Ohio said: “This has been a great convention…. [The church] is speaking unity into a fractured world…. Why this house would at this point choose not to follow [the House of Deputies] …baffles me.”

The task, said Bishop Henry Parsley of Alabama, echoing one of Griswold’s Eucharist meditations, is “to stretch the bow, but not break it.”

A Crisis in Leadership

Some bishops in favor of eight described what Bishop Robert Ihloff of Maryland called a “crisis in leadership” in the church. The possibility that parishioners might leave the church over the same-sex blessing issue must be “laid at the doorstep of leadership,” he said. “If it is true” that there would be an exodus from the church over eight, argued Steven Charleston, president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School and former bishop of Alaska, “…then we’ve failed in teaching the Gospel.”

Bishop John P. Croneberger of Newark exhorted his peers to “proclaim that this church will not sell out to a culture of fear or hatred or violence or rejection.” He said eight would “make real what is already true.”

“Every time I bless a couple of men…or a couple of women…it becomes a political act,” said Otis Charles, retired bishop of Utah, who described himself as the only openly gay bishop. “I don’t want to be that way in the church. I want to be one with you.”

“Our conversation…is at odds with gays and lesbians who are suffering for lack of full inclusion,”Roskam said.

At the close of day, the bishops voted 85 to 63 against adding eight back to the first seven resolves. The following morning they concurred with the House of Deputies on the first seven by a vote of 119 to 19 with four abstentions and unanimously passed a “mind of the house” resolution “to continue study and be in conversation regarding issues of human sexuality by making use of the theology committee” consisting of “lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.”

Minns said he believed the prescribed theology committee represented a “genuine attempt to come to a theological consensus” on issues concerning human sexuality. “But they’re not going to come up with anything new,” he argued.

If foundational theological conflicts remain or deepen as the debate over sexuality continues, then one wonders whether the Episcopal church is careening unavoidably toward schism. “The same-sex unions issue is a potential earthquake for the Episcopal church and for the Anglican communion,” AAC’s Anderson observed. “At some point, if you pull hard enough in both directions, the fabric will begin to tear.”

Schism, however, is a word that “sends a chill” to most, ECUSA spokesperson James Solheim noted. To be a schismatic “would mean you were no longer in communion with the See of Canterbury…. You’d be outside of the family,” he said.

AAC President Bishop James Stanton of Dallas went on record before the convention as flatly opposed to a schism in the church. “Our commitment has always been to hold the church together,” he told the Episcopal News Service. “A split is something we don’t either anticipate or think about dealing with, or greet with any kind of joy.”

Louie Crew—a veteran deputy from the Newark diocese and founder of Integrity—pointed out that Episcopalians of manifold stripes have coexisted under the same spiritual roof for hundreds of years. “We’ve never had agreement on theological issues [related to sexuality],” he said. “We’ve agreed to disagree.” Crew cochairs a reconciliation task force formed within the church this spring.

Looking Ahead

Few are willing to venture predictions as to where the church may be heading. Minns pointed to what he saw as a conservative shift in the House of Deputies from the 1997 convention, during which a liturgical rites resolution lost by a margin of fewer votes than D039’s eighth resolve. Minns noted the discrepancy in this year’s vote on rites had occurred in spite of the absence of four orthodox Central American deputations and the inclusion of softer language than was written into the 97 resolution.

Crew, on the other hand, contended the Episcopal church had “come much farther since 97” in the direction of gay and lesbian advocates. He said the progress wasn’t something you could evaluate “by numbers of votes” so much as by encounters with “one person at a time.” “We were hearing from bishops we haven’t heard from before; there was tremendous support for the first seven resolves; overall there was more compassion,” he said.

Yet neither Crew nor Minns said he knew what was ahead. “God is often able to surprise us,” Minns said. “I suppose [same-sex union rites] could go the way of the Equal Rights Amendment,” posited Crew.

In contrast, Bishop Swing articulated a forthright pre-diction on the floor of the House of Bishops: “We know where we’re going. There isn’t a bishop in this house that doesn’t know where we’re going to be on this issue ten years from now…. Personally, the eighth resolve is fine with me,…but we’re the whole church of God, and we have to…move together.”

William Skilton, bishop suffragan of South Carolina, rebuked Swing without naming him: “I don’t know where the church is going in eight years. Maybe somebody does. But…we need to be open and say that God works in mysterious and powerful ways.”

In the midst of the fray, Bishop Duncan Gray III of Mississippi, just three weeks a bishop by the general convention, noted what he recognized as a “new thing” taking shape in the life of the church, something “not related to the litmus issues we’ve fought about for so long,” he explained, but having to do with “a radical understanding of community and human relationships in general.”

His perception, Gray said, had to do largely with the sharing of the daily Eucharist, the spiritual leadership of the presiding bishop, and Griswold’s presentation of the Jubilee “in terms of fallowness—which is about letting things sit so they will grow in ways we don’t see and, perhaps, about having a willingness to defer an absolute decision for the sake of something being birthed we don’t yet see.”

“If we let [the sexuality conflict] live with us long enough,” Gray proffered, “we’ll find a way to get into a discussion of heterosexual marriage, which we’ve been afraid to touch because of our large number of divorced folks…. If the church doesn’t get scared of its anxiety, that anxiety can be a creative thing for us. The Holy Spirit is able to do infinitely more than we can think or imagine.”

Author

  • Stacy Mattingly

    At the time this article was published, Stacy Mattingly was a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia.

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