New York, USA - Responding to an ultimatum from leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion, bishops of the Episcopal Church have rejected a key demand to create a parallel leadership structure to serve the conservative minority of Episcopalians who oppose their church’s liberal stand on homosexuality.
The bishops, meeting privately at a retreat center outside Houston, said they were aware that the stand they were taking could lead to the exclusion of the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion, an international confederation of churches tied to the Church of England.
They said they had a “deep longing” to remain part of the Communion, but were unwilling to compromise the Episcopal Church’s autonomy and its commitment to full equality for all people, including gay men and lesbians.
“If that means that others reject us and communion with us, as some have already done, we must with great regret and sorrow accept their decision,” the bishops said in a statement released late Tuesday night. The bishops’ recommendations will be taken up next by the church’s executive council, which is expected to generally agree.
The bishops also called for an urgent “face to face” meeting in the United States with the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, as well as a committee of the church’s primates, who head the international provinces. The primates, at their meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, last month, issued the ultimatum to the Episcopal Church, and imposed a deadline for a response of Sept. 30.
The primates had also asked the Episcopal Church to pledge not to consecrate partnered gay bishops, and to stop authorizing blessings of same-sex couples. The bishops, while not addressing those demands for a moratorium directly, reiterated their commitment to the full inclusion of “all God’s people,” including gay men and lesbians, in church life.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said the bishops would spend the summer consulting with church members to develop a more complete response to the primates by September.
She said that she had previously asked the archbishop of Canterbury to visit the United States and been told that his calendar was full, but that she would ask him again.
“There is some belief in this house that other parts of the Communion do not understand us very well,” she said at a news conference after the bishops’ meeting.
The archbishop of Canterbury issued a two-sentence response on Wednesday, saying that the bishops’ statement was “discouraging and indicates the need for further discussion and clarification.” He added, “No one is underestimating the challenges ahead.”
What really agitated the American bishops was the primates’ insistence that the Episcopal Church accept a parallel authority structure composed of a “primatial vicar” and a five-member “pastoral council,” a majority of whose members would have been appointed by the primates. Bishops said they had a sense of urgency because names of potential pastoral council members were already being proposed.
Several bishops at the meeting said there was an overwhelming aversion to this plan, shared even by some of the theologically conservative bishops. The Episcopal Church defines itself, in part, by its democratic approach to decision-making, in which the bishops share power with the clergy and the laity. Many bishops feared that this new arrangement would grant too much power to foreign primates, many of whom have a more authoritarian approach to church leadership.
Bishop John Chane of Washington, D.C., said in an interview, “It was very clear that the majority of bishops, wherever they were on the theological spectrum, agreed that this scheme doesn’t match with who we are as the Episcopal Church.”
In a strongly worded assertion of autonomy, the bishops said in their statement that any attempt to impose this scheme “violates our founding principles as the Episcopal Church following our own liberation from colonialism.” The bishops included a reminder that the Episcopal Church long ago declared itself independent from the Church of England.
Several bishops also said in interviews that they believed that the pastoral council arrangement was intended to strengthen the position of conservative parishes or dioceses that want to leave the Episcopal Church and take their property with them. The breakaway parishes could claim that they came under the new pastoral council guided by the primates, and that the council was the highest authority in the Episcopal Church’s hierarchy.
Bishop Mark Sisk, of New York, said in an interview, “The concern is that that would indicate we are, in some sense, subservient to the primates, rather than simply a church in fellowship with them. And that could have significant legal implications.”
Reaction in the church was complex. Some liberal Episcopalians applauded the bishops for standing up to the primates.
“It’s a good day to be an Episcopalian,” said the Rev. Terry Martin of Holy Spirit Church, Tuckerton, N.J., who writes a liberal blog that is called fatherjakestopstheworld.
“Many priests have been writing or talking to their bishops, and it felt like the bishops heard the church. This is what many of us have been saying, that if we give the primates this power, they’re going to keep it forever.”
Response from conservatives ran the gamut from anger, to confusion, to relief that finally now the Episcopal Church would be ejected from the Communion. Reached by phone as he was leaving the bishops’ meeting, Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, who leads a network of conservatives who have been asking for alternative structural oversight, said only: “I’m really thinking through what all this means.”