A Church That Votes - the American Episcopal Church

Commonweal, Sept 12, 1997 by Antonio Ramirez

Episcopalians in convention

The American Episcopal church's General Convention meets every three years to elect officers, adopt a budget, enact canon law, and pass lots of resolutions. With 250-plus in the House of Bishops and 900 clergy and lay delegates in the House of Deputies, it constitutes one of the largest bicameral legislatures in the world.

It is no accident that the Episcopal church's governing structure resembles the organizational format of the United States government. Many of the church fathers who gathered in Philadelphia's Independence Hall in 1789 to forge a constitution for the new church were also present when the U.S. Constitution was drafted two years earlier. Having disposed of a king, the American Episcopalians decided against an archbishop. The titular head of the new, democratic, church (which retained spiritual ties to the mother Church of England) would be a presiding bishop.

When the Episcopal convention returned to Philadelphia in July of this year, the bishops and delegates found themselves struggling to find ways to maintain unity in the face of deep divisions on sexuality, women in the priesthood, and religious authority. Episcopalians go at it vigorously at conventions: four newspapers, two on the ecclesiastical right, one on the left, and one the church's official publication, are published and distributed each day, and the Internet carries hundreds of pages of commentary and news (Father John H. Gill, an Episcopal priest who surfs the Net with the grace of a California collegian hitting the big waves, helped me gather that material). Dozens of groups--gays, lesbians, prolifers, pacifists, conservatives, liberals, racial and ethnic organizations--set up booths and lobby the voters.

This year the divisions were so severe that the Committee on the State of the Church drew up a pledge that most delegates signed, promising to avoid using "pejorative labels" including "apostate, homophobic, heretic, and fundamentalist."

In this contentious setting, the bishops and deputies took, or almost took, some dramatic steps:

* On the ecumenical front, the 2.4-million member Episcopal church approved a concordat with the 5.4-million member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America calling for the recognition of each other's clergy and sacraments, and permitting the creation of joint congregations. The agreement, not a merger but certainly a high order of intercommunion, sailed easily through a convention that was clearly more interested in other issues than in crossing t's and dotting i's on matters of apostolic succession (which Episcopalians claim to possess and which Lutherans would acquire only as new ministers undergo the Episcopal laying-on-of-hands). At the Lutherans' August convention, the concordat narrowly failed to get the two-thirds vote needed for approval.

* On the ordination of women, all dioceses have been ordered to make it possible for women to gain ordination to the priesthood and the opportunity to serve parishes. The church began ordaining women priests in 1976 and consecrating women bishops in 1989, but the bishops in 4 holdout dioceses (of the church's 110 dioceses) refuse to ordain or deploy women priests, and women with vocations are sent elsewhere. These bishops now have three years to comply; one has announced he will retire later this year; another, Bishop Jack Iker of Fort Worth, Texas, says he will "resist," inviting disciplinary action.

* A resolution instructing the church's liturgical commission to prepare ceremonies for blessing same-sex unions for inclusion in the book of occasional services was narrowly defeated in the House of Deputies. The measure failed by only one vote in both the clerical and lay orders. Given a rule that split delegations are counted as "no" votes, the "ayes" actually had a numerical, though not a legislative, majority. Extension of health benefits to domestic partners of clergy and to lay employees of the church passed; a move to do the same with pensions failed.

* On social justice and human rights, the convention spoke out forcefully for decent wages, against unbridled downsizing, against welfare cuts, and in support of persecuted Christians and other religious groups abroad. The bishops narrowly avoided embarrassing themselves when a "sense of the house" resolution urging the United States not to "interfere" in Russia's internal religious affairs was withdrawn after they learned that Boris Yeltsin had vetoed a bill restricting the rights of Catholics and Protestants.

* The bishops elected Bishop Frank Griswold of Chicago as presiding bishop for nine years. Bishop Griswold, by all accounts a scholarly and even-tempered man, is a traditionalist in worship and a liberal on social questions. He was one of seventy-four bishops who signed a 1994 statement authored by Bishop John Spong of Newark, the church's outspoken radical bishop, in support of the ordination of gays and lesbians and the blessing of same-sex unions. Bishop Griswold has been a leader in Anglican-Roman Catholic talks.