[Dialogue] Spong Worth a read!

[KroegerD at aol.com]

February 14, 2007 
An Audacious Institution  

The Episcopal Church has been in the news recently. One diocese on the west  
coast, led by its bishop, has amended its canons to remove every reference to  
the Episcopal Church to deny that it is bound by that church's constitution.  
Eleven Virginia congregations have voted to depart from the Episcopal Church 
in  order to become part of the fundamentalist Anglican Church of Nigeria. 
These  dissident groups state that two issues are driving them to schism. I think 
it is  essential to put both of these issues into the perspective of recent 
church  history.  
First, the Episcopal Church, after having debated the meaning of sexual  
orientation for more than thirty years, has finally formed a clear majority in  
favor of full inclusion of gay and lesbian people. It will baptize all who come  
seeking baptism; it will confirm all those who are prepared; it will continue 
to  bless the sacred unions of all couples while allowing the state to define 
which  blessings carry with them the legal meaning of marriage, and it will 
ordain as  priests and bishops those whom it deems qualified without regard to 
sexual  orientation and without imposing on them the rule of celibacy. These 
issues are  now clear and operative in the life of this church. Adjusting to 
these realities  has proved more than the dissidents are able to do.  
Second, after debating the role of women in both church and society for  
almost fifty years, the Episcopal Church has decided that it will no longer  
pretend that this issue is still an open question. Some lay people, clergy and  
even a few bishops engaged this issue by retreating to hide in ever shrinking  
corners of this land where they believed they could avoid the "polluting  
presence" of a woman. Those hiding places no longer exist so reality is now  forced 
upon them. They are confronted by these facts: some 40% of our clergy and  
more than 50 % of our theological students preparing for ordination are now  
female; some 15 of these women priests have been elected to the office of bishop  
by the clergy and the people in a variety of dioceses across this nation from  
urban New York to rural Nevada; the House of Bishops has now elected one of  
these women to be the Primate and Presiding Bishop of this Church and that  
election has been confirmed with the almost unanimous vote of the clergy and lay 
 deputations from all over the United States at General Convention. This 
issue is  no longer debatable.  
The vote on both of these issues was far more impressive than most people  
seem to realize since they do not understand that the voting procedures at this  
church's general convention are designed to require super majorities before  
changes can occur. It would be informative to take a moment to explain this  
system. Every Episcopal Diocese is represented at General Convention by its  
bishop(s) plus four priests and four lay deputies elected at local diocesan  
convention. Any proposed action must pass with a concurring majority among the  
bishops, the clergy and the lay deputies, voting separately. Each body thus has 
 veto power. The other feature not understood is that the four clergy and the 
 four lay deputies actually cast only one vote per deputation. This means 
that  for a positive vote to be cast, at least three of both the four clergy 
deputies  and the four lay deputies must vote yes. A deputation split two to two 
is cast  as a 'no' vote. Thus a positive clergy or lay vote must have a 75% 
super  majority. The dissidents can no longer with any integrity claim that the  
positions of this church do not represent the consensus of the vast majority 
of  the people at its decision making councils. That is why those who cannot 
adjust  to these new realities now want to leave. They can neither win nor find 
a hiding  place in which to conceal their prejudices. Their present strategy 
is thus to  try to destroy the church in which their point of view has been 
thoroughly  defeated.  
These dissidents form about one percent of our membership. Fully half the  
bishops, who are now seeking to leave, are already retired. However, the media,  
loving conflict and not understanding how the church works, has given them  
enormous publicity in front page stories, on radio and TV. Such a mighty 
vehicle  as the Washington Post even gave them op Ed space. This has made their 
voices  seem more significant than they really are. Now they threaten court action 
to  enable them to take the property of the Episcopal Church with them into 
their  self-imposed exile. They do not seem to recognize that this property was 
 developed by the Episcopal Church and is held in trust for the Episcopal 
Church.  While individuals are clearly free to leave a church with which they no 
longer  agree, congregations are not, since congregations do not own their 
property in a  non-congregational church. Indeed these negative voices are now 
using the threat  of forcing the Episcopal Church to defend its assets in court 
as a bargaining  chip. It is nothing less than ecclesiastical blackmail, "do 
as I want or I will  try to destroy you."  
It is not as if the Episcopal Church has not dealt with this mentality  
before. A splinter group that called itself "The Reformed Episcopal Church," led  
by an assistant bishop in Kentucky, broke away in 1873 over the issue of  
churchmanship. They objected to what they called "the introduction of papist  
practices" into Episcopal worship as a result of the "Oxford Movements'" attempt  
to recover the catholic side of Anglicanism that had been so fully repressed in 
 the more extreme elements of the reformation. Today this splinter has all 
but  passed out of existence and the things to which it objected have long since 
 ceased to be matters of controversy. In 1976 when the church endorsed its 
new  prayer book on first reading and voted to open the priesthood to women, 
more  splinter groups formed. They too are today hardly noticeable. Then in 2003 
with  the confirmation of the election by the Diocese of New Hampshire of Gene 
 Robinson, an openly gay man living in a publicly acknowledged monogamous  
partnership, to be its bishop, the howls of protest from this vocal but tiny  
minority once again broke out. Because our world has grown so small and  
communications are so rapid, this internal debate has been joined by  
fundamentalist/evangelical bishops in the third world, who still think one can  quote the 
Bible to condemn homosexuality and that is all that is necessary. They  seem to 
forget that this same Bible was quoted just a couple of centuries ago to  
endorse the slave trade. Even their voices are not as unanimous as they like to  
pretend since three great African Anglican archbishops: Desmond Tutu,  
Njongonkulu Ndungane and Khotsu Mkullu have been vocal in their support of the  full 
inclusion of homosexual people. Retired Archbishop Tutu recently told his  
African colleagues that their attitude toward gay and lesbian people was simply  a 
new form of "apartheid," a word his people clearly understood.  
Recently, I had the occasion to sit with about twenty Episcopal bishops in an 
 informal discussion about the state of our church. This conflict has clearly 
 weighed heavily upon them. Ecclesiastical politics can be as negative as any 
 other kind of politics. Many of them are facing a barrage of character  
assassinating rhetoric with their integrity, and even their faith, being  
attacked. Their critics, some of whom seem not to have read any biblical  scholarship 
that has been abroad at least 200 years, accuse these modern leaders  of 
destroying either biblical or creedal inerrancy. It is all a smoke screen as  they 
seek to legitimize their deep-seated sexist and homophobic prejudices.  These 
decent bishops with whom I met seemed to be defensive and even hurt by the  
barrage of negativity they were receiving. I am not a stranger to that kind of  
negativity, but since I am now seven years retired from the bishop's office I 
do  have some objectivity. It is my firm conviction that they do not need to 
fear  negativity, they just need to stand firm in the integrity of this 
church's  decision-making process. Thirty years from now a debate on the full 
acceptance  of gay and lesbian people will be as dead as the debate on the role of 
African  Americans or women in public life is today. At this moment, this 
country is  asking itself if it is ready for a woman or an African American 
president. The  polls give a resounding yes to both questions. People who cannot deal 
with new  realities never recognize that when a prejudice is publicly debated, 
it is well  on its way to becoming a dead prejudice.  
I wanted these former colleagues of mine to look up from their desks, turn  
away from their hostile mail and feel an enormous sense of pride. I grew up in  
an Episcopal Church in North Carolina where segregation was thought to be the 
 will of God and when my diocese decided to admit black kids to its diocesan  
camp, there was the threat of schism. We weathered that storm by simply 
ignoring  the hostility and doing what was right. Today, an African American of 
great  talent has been elected bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. In the 
church  of my childhood a girl could not serve as an acolyte; a woman could not 
be a lay  reader or sit on any decision making church body. We even called the 
women of  the church "the Auxiliary." Today, a woman bishop presides over the 
entire  church. In the church of my childhood we were taught that 
homosexuality was  either a disease that needed to be cured or a manifestation of moral 
depravity  that needed to be converted. Today, gay and lesbian priests are not 
even  regarded as unusual and one of them now serves as bishop of New 
Hampshire. He is  not, I hastened to assure them, the first gay bishop of this church, 
but the  first honest gay bishop. We have had countless closeted gay bishops 
in the past,  some of whom have served with great distinction. We have more 
gay bishops than  Gene Robinson today, indeed some of our most rabid critics of 
homosexuality,  both yesterday and today, are gay bishops.  
All of these positive changes have occurred over a period of about 50 years.  
That is an awesome achievement. I look at my church with enormous pride,  
remembering the words of my great mentor, Presiding Bishop John Elbridge Hines,  
who said: "When you do an audacious thing, you do not then tremble at your own 
 audacity." The time has come to celebrate both our audacity and our evolving 
 wholeness.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Steve Langley, via the Internet, writes:  
I am a 63-year-old man who was raised in the Pentecostal Church until I  
rebelled and forced my way out at about age 14. I subsequently have lived my  life 
with the existence of God as an open philosophical question to me and with  
utter contempt for all religious structures and teachings. I have always 
thought  they were self-serving as institutions and for the people who wrap 
themselves in  those teachings.  
I once had a conversation with two doctors who were both raised in the same  
Muslim faith. One remains devout in the most human way. The other has drifted  
from the religion of his birth. He now believes that "democracy" is the best  
religion. I have thought about his concept and your teachings as I have read  
them in your newsletter and several of your books. Democracy, in its purest  
form, and the Christ experience as you ponder and teach it. What a marvelous  
concept. In a pure democracy there would be neither "man nor woman" nor any  
other of the differences that exist now in our world and religions. For me, my  
recent reading of your teaching on Paul and the scripture quoted above seems 
to  make "democracy" and humanity the best religion. As for the Christ 
experience  and your teachings not just of faith but humanity in the Christ 
experience, it  is something I have started to think about. I must thank you for a 
lifetime of  faith, work and all that goes into it so that one day I might pick up 
your  writings, read them, and begin to think about WHY AM I HERE DOING THE 
GOOD  "CHRISTIAN DEEDS" IN MY LIFE WITHOUT THE SUPPORT OF RELIGION OR EVEN A 
BELIEF IN  GOD BECAUSE I BELIEVE THEY ARE RIGHT?? Maybe there is a new 
Christianity that  would reveal itself in me, but perhaps not in my lifetime. Thank you 
for  reaching out to people like me. I look forward to each newsletter.  
Dear Steve,  
Thank you for your letter and a description of your pilgrimage. You are  
certainly traveling in the same direction that I find myself walking. I think  
faith is a journey to be undertaken not a set of propositions to be believed.  
Religion always seems to begin in childlike immaturity in which God is  
portrayed as a being, supernatural in power, eager to bless, protect and care  for 
us in our childlike fear. As we mature, the need for the parent God fades  and 
the divine, as being itself or as that experience of transcendence, comes  
into focus. The boundary between humanity and divinity also fades and the two  
seem to penetrate each other, making the way into the divine and the journey  
into self-awareness quite similar. The goal of the Christian life then becomes  
not rescue from the bondage of sin, but expansion into a deeper sense of what 
it  means to be human.  
This approach represents, I believe, a significant shift in consciousness. It 
 also makes it clear that the content of the traditional religious myths is 
no  longer operative. Facing the end of traditional religious systems, we fear 
that  nothingness dwells at the heart of life and that drives us to create 
security  systems to protect us from our fear. Some are religious and they always 
claim to  possess inerrant truth or to be guided by an infallible authority. 
Others seek  to lose themselves in the pursuit of the idols of alcohol, drugs, 
sex, wealth  and pleasure. Still others sink into the despair of being alone 
in an impersonal  universe. I believe there is a better option.  
My sense is that the Christianity of the future must be willing to let go the 
 content of yesterday in a far more radical way than people have yet 
imagined,  but to do so without sacrificing the experience that created yesterday's  
content. Only then can we begin the slow and laborious task of developing new  
content to make sense of the eternal experience of being human.  
Long after fundamentalist churches have moved away from their excessive but  
uninformed zeal and long after Benedict XVI has discovered that no one can  
return to the Middle Ages without committing intellectual suicide, a still,  
small voice will speak and a new reformation will begin on the edges of  
yesterday's religious systems and slowly begin to make its way into the center  of our 
reality. I live for that day.  
John Shelby Spong
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