I’ve always been a fan of George Will. It is probably because my Dad reads George Will and the fact that George Will likes baseball and has written an excellent book about it doesn’t hurt either. While I don’t subscribe to his conservative views, I appreciate his perspective and opinion on the broad range of issues he decides to tackle. I genuinely believe that his voice enriches the debate over nation and politics regardless of what he advocates. His latest editorial, you can find it here, assess the current state of the Episcopalian denomination. It is a good quick read that rings true on many accounts. The Anglican faith in general is imploding on itself because of a number of issues, but of main import is homosexuality. Funnily enough, my faith journey has led me to the Episcopal Church as the starting point in my church hunt. We will see if it is still around by the time I find a church community.
The problem centers around the question of: With whom may we have fellowship? The Episcopal Church (the U.S. branch of Anglicanism) might have jumped the gun a little early and stated that homosexuals may be ordained and married and have fellowship in the Church. It looks like most of the African Anglicans, and now Pittsburgh have answered the question with a resounding no, they may not have fellowship on those terms. Their answer of no, at least for now, bears the implications that all those who condone the Episcopal Church cannot share in their fellowship either. Church divisions, especially ones as massive a scale as this one should not be treated lightly. Katie and I were troubled by a church we had hoped to attend shamedly and a matter of factly stated on its website, “church splits are a dime a dozen”. Surely we can do better than that.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has managed to change the question from “with whom may we have fellowship”, to “how can we best negotiate our differences and still call ourselves the body of Christ?” Unfortunately, the question is slowly being answered outside of such a context. For to locate our differences with doctrine in a context that places emphasis on unity does not resolve any differences at all. I think that is the point. We must learn to live in the buffer between question and answer, at least in the context of a multinational movement. As a body, we must always seek understanding of those that fall on other sides of issues, we must learn how to befriend and take communion with those who differ from us, not in the hope of changing belief or opinion, but to simply keep talking because the Church, as the approximation of the future Kingdom of God can never ultimately become the Kingdom of God. It is out of our purview and scope, and therefore, the barometer for “with whom may we have fellowship with” must be tuned to the virtues and actions that make us Christians and not who we declare may become Christians. Admittedly, that can only take us so far. And on those issues in which, centuries later, the answer has been resolved slowly, we must take heart in the belief, made famous by the Martin Luther King quote that: “The arc of the moral universe is long, But it bends toward justice”. Of course, if that is all that we’ve got, then we are in a very messy state indeed. But the Church is not a democracy; it cannot be governed by an oppressive majority or a progressive minority. It sometimes feels like, no matter if the denomination is Episcopalian or not, membership in a Church is like picking the wrong horse.
I keep going back and forth with these problems, and I don’t seem to be coming to any viable conclusions or even an agreeable state of mind. Have patience with this current attempt to broach a complicated issue, and keep in mind that I am still thinking and praying about these things.
2 comments:
It also makes me sad to see the Anglican Communion going through this. I have to say that studying Anglican theology and briefly attending our local Episcopal church for a while was highly instrumental in the development and maturation of my faith. I'd like to see them continue to bless others in the way they've blessed me.
I wonder if coming back to my free church roots is a way of copping out of having to deal with unity and division on a wide scale. In the Churches of Christ if we don't like what other churches are doing we can still do our own thing, or start our own church if we want and do it however we want. I like the freedom and autonomy to be able to do that, but wonder if we're stopping short of trying to witness to the world as a broad, unified but diverse Church, the way Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans have done so well in the past. Maybe we do have it right, and we shouldn't even try form a broad coalition of churches at all because it's doomed to failure. I don't know. I'd like to think that pragmatism and pessimism don't have to rule the day, and that we can strive for a vast Communion even if sociologists, statisticians and burnt Episcopalians are telling us it's not worth the cost of trying to reach so high.
I really appreciate how you pointed out that we continue to extend fellowship for the sake of keeping the conversation going. Lately I've been increasingly struck by the fact that one of the main facets of humanity is our linguistic nature. This is important because to deny someone their voice is to deny them their humanity.
I personally applaud the stance that the Episcopalian church has taken toward homosexuality. In fact, where I was once totally disinterested in "high churches" of any kind, this trend has managed to get me to rush a few Sunday mornings lately to drive to my nearest liberal Episcopalian church. I still have trouble accepting some of their doctrines, but I feel that they are one of the precious few churches close to me fulfilling any sort of prophetic role.
I tend to side with Walter Brueggemann that the polarizing over homosexuality has little to do with sexual orientation, and a lot to do with the dominance the male patriarchy and its system of values. I feel that this system is in many ways quite contradictory to the egalitarian ethos of the earliest disciples. I don't know if approval of homosexuality really corrects this, but it at least strikes me as a stumbling in the right direction. It is unfortunate, though predictable, that such a stance would result in a loss of a great number of members. Statistics, I have found, are utterly worthless in determining the faithfulness of a group to the message they profess.
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