By Howard Anderson
I’ve always thought that institutions should focus on what they are best at. When you don’t you end up backtracking. St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, banned Archbishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on their campus because he compared the treatment of Palestinians in Israel to the treatment of non-whites in apartheid-era South Africa. Banning a Nobel Peace Prize winner takes amnesia about academic freedom. They forgot what a university does. Happily, not everyone forgot, and they had to re-invite him when local Twin Cities Jewish groups, their students and alumni and scores of others advocated for St. Thomas to have the archbishop speak after all.
Now there are some institutions who have been very successful at keeping people out of their ranks. My wife, Linda, comes from a long line of Missouri Synod Lutherans. They have managed to keep women out of their ordained ranks as successfully as the Roman Catholics have. There doesn’t even seem to be much pressure to ordain women, even among female members and only very recently, in a very few places, have women claimed any significant lay leadership roles. Missouri Synod Lutherans also deny communion to those who do not believe as they do about matters of faith, and sometimes will even require an interview, in advance of a service, to determine if you are orthodox enough to be admitted to communion with them. They are very good at keeping people out.
How different we Episcopalians are from that. We are simply TERRIBLE at keeping people out. We banished African Americans to the balconies of our churches, only to find, somehow, before the end of the 18th Century even, Absalom Jones and a great host of gifted and committed African Americans not only on the main floor, but leading congregations with great skill. And when we tried to keep African Americans from the Episcopate with the clever little suffragan gambit, that didn’t work either. Some of the most effective, most inspiring bishops in the last century, and certainly today, were and are African American. What a failure we are at keeping people out of leadership in our church! Gee, we even elected the Rt. Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris the first female bishop in the entire history of the Anglican Communion…not only a woman, but African American to boot! We are the leaky sieve in the Anglican wall trying to keep people out of leadership! Thank God those Primates in the Global South are showing some ability to keep people out. We surely are not.
Up in the part of the world I come from, we tried to keep Native Americans out of the Church. Rascals like Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, the first Bishop of Minnesota, was encouraging Native people to become Episcopalians, at the time the state of Minnesota was perpetrating the largest mass execution in U.S. history on the losing side in the Great Sioux Rebellion in 1862. Why, Bishop Whipple was ordaining Enmegahbowh, and scores of other Native clergy, many trained at Seabury Seminary, which in the 19th Century was in Faribault, Minnesota. And across the country Native clergy were being ordained and giving fine leadership. Heavens, there have even been a host of Native American bishops, beginning with The Rt. Rev. Harold Jones (Lakota) of South Dakota, and including such bishops of native ancestry as Steven Charleston, (Choctaw), Mark MacDonald (several tribal lines), the late Steven Plummer (Navajo), Fred Borsch (Mohawk), Creighton Robertson (Dakota), Michael Smith (Pottawatomie), William Wantland (Seminole), Lani Hanchett (Native Hawaiian) and others whom I know I have forgotten. Better yet, we could not only not keep Native American men out of the episcopate, but the Rt. Rev. Carole Gallagher, (Cherokee) became the first indigenous woman to be elected bishop in the Anglican Communion. We are terribly inept at keeping anyone out. Why we tried to keep kids out of the General Convention and being considered full members, and now we baptize and chrismate them at Baptism, and we even succumbed and allow 16 year olds to vote. Once again, our ineptitude stymies our best efforts to keep people out.
Oh, but we can keep the gay and lesbian community out of leadership, right? Ooops…it turns out that while we all know we have always had gay bishops, we cannot even keep uncloseted gay folk from the episcopate. Gene Robinson is anything but the first gay bishop, but he was the first to be honest and out of the closet before his election. I guess The Episcopal Church is not only terrible at keeping people out of our pews and leadership ranks, we are also terrible at lying. No matter how hard we have tried, no matter how much pressure conservatives in our church or the wider Anglican Communion have tried, they cannot help us get any better at excluding people. People threaten us. People leave the Church. People withhold money, and darned if we still fail to figure out creative ways to keep people out.
Right from the beginning, when the colonies won the American Revolution and the Brits tried to strangle the Episcopal baby in the cradle, they failed to keep the Scottish Episcopalians from consecrating our first Episcopal bishops. We couldn’t even keep the Scots out of the U.S., and off we went on our long tale of woe and failure at keeping people out.
Maybe, just maybe, we should think about our Episcopal DNA . We inherited it from the British Isles. What were the British to do with Picts, Angles, Celts, Normans, Saxons of every stripe, some Vikings mixed in just for flavor. One size church did not fit all. And as the state church they had to figure out how to accommodate wide differences. So they took the only logical path, and began to accept differences as being okay. Militarily, they would like to have kept out all the invaders, but failed, and adapted. And when the English Reformation led to a period of see-sawing between Catholic and Protestant, with bloodshed and disruption being the result, it took a woman, Elizabeth I, to say, ‘Boys, boys, stop fighting. We are both Catholic and Protestant. Now go pray together! And don’t let me see you fighting over this again!” And The Church of England emerged as a non-confessional church that believed that praying shapes believing and did not require intellectual assent to a particular set of doctrines as a requirement for membership. Wouldn’t have worked if they tried. One also sees a great humility in our Anglican forebears about what we can know for certain about God. God is essentially a mystery in our tradition. And we still believe that the Holy Spirit moves in the Councils of the Church to guide us just as Jesus said.
We are a both/and church. It is in our DNA. We inherited it. We are just no damn good at keeping people out. Why not look at it this way. We are good at including people. Just like Jesus was good at including people the “decent,” law abiding Temple goers wanted to exclude.
Maybe the Holy One is saying, “My Spirit led New Hampshire to elect one of my dear ones as Bishop. He is a tiny bit different in one small way, and that has made the “decent” orthodox folks mad. But Jesus showed you that I rather enjoy breaking down barriers that you all set up thinking you are doing a good thing. Okay, just in case you thought Gene Robinson was a mistake, My Spirit is going to lead you to elect, oh let’s see, how about a Woman as Presiding Bishop. I think you are getting cold feet. You passed that B-033 at your convention restricting some people from being leaders in My Church (uh..remember, it IS MY CHURCH), so I thought it would be a good thing to burn some bridges so that you can’t go back to the same old ways you human beings have used to exclude people from leadership in MY CHURCH. Now-be MY CHURCH. Be the Church Jesus showed you–one where your petty little intellectual doctrines do not become more important than my love commandment. Be MY CHURCH and let all of humanity, gifted by My grace and able to lead can be called out by My Spirit and MY CHURCH to show the world that we are all one, that I love each and every one of you. I love those who are mad at you because you are following the guidance of My Spirit. I love them just as much as I love you. Don’t worry about them. I am God, you aren’t. Your Bishops aren’t either. I know they are trying to keep the family together. But right now, I want you to follow My Spirit, even if it is painful, and besides, you aren’t any good at keeping people out anyway. And that may just serve My purposes well.”
The Rev. Dr. Howard Anderson is Warden and President of the Cathedral College at Washington National Cathedral. He was a long time General Convention deputy and most importantly, is grandfather to a five year old theologian, Will.