The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church has decided, faced with insistence from the Anglican Communion that it not appoint any new gay bishops, to not appoint any bishops for at least a year.
Interesting.
It’s sort of a passive-aggressive response — it accedes to the demand, but does it in a way that is clearly temporary, and that makes it clear that the underlying demand is not something they’re willing to go along with.
Singling out gay bishops would have “placed an unfair burden on a group of people in this church, which would be the gay and lesbian contingent,” said Bishop Chane, who holds liberal views on homosexuality. “We believed that needed to be a burden shared by all of us in the church.”
[…] Six Episcopal dioceses scheduled to elect new bishops in the next year will be affected by the moratorium on new bishops, said the Rev. Jan Nunley, a church spokeswoman. They are the Dioceses of Eastern Michigan, South Carolina, Southern Ohio, Southwest Florida, Tennessee and West Texas. Episcopal Church dioceses elect their own bishops, but the selections require approval by broader church bodies.
And it puts the whole subject back in front of the triennial General Convention in 2006.
The 140 bishops at the meeting, in Navasota, northwest of Houston, also pledged not to bless the union of same-sex couples for a year, or to authorize “public rites” for such ceremonies.
But the wording of their statement, which they called a “covenant” and issued late Tuesday, left open the possibility that priests who believed that blessing same-sex unions was “pastoral care” could still do so.
Depending on where you stand on the issues, you can see all this as being conciliatory, defiant, unresponsive, or passing the buck. But it’s not clear how they could have done much else without seriously torquing off one or the other side in this matter; this way, at least, they only (hopefully) mildly torque off both sides.
Rough(er) times ahead, I suspect.
What’s happened is that the right wing, pro-schism folks have been thwarted in their attempt to fracture the Anglican Communion. The idea was to force a withdrawal, but the result has been a very clever response that preserves the Communion’s integrity while still asserting the authority of the North American churches to do as they will in this matter.
If rough(er) times are ahead, I suspect they will involve the pro-schism churches’ departure from the Anglican Communion. Rather than forcing the progressive churches out, they will have isolated themselves. Which is a bit of delicious irony that I am not above appreciating.
While unsympathetic to the conservative theology, I can appreciate their perspective. For the Anglican Communion to be meaningful, it has to mean something. If you felt that some province’s actions and theology were beyond the pale (e.g., if the Church of Scotland started practicing actual human sacrifice), you would hardly be “pro-schism” if you demanded that they stopped and that they withdraw from church councils until further reflection took place, and you would hardly be isolationist if you declined to associate with them.
If the conservative churches decide to withdraw from the AC, or somehow change its nature so that the “progressive” churches (e.g., ECUSA) are excluded from it, I’ll not be crowing about delicious irony. It’ll be rather sad.
While you are entitled, of course, to be sad about whatever you like, the utter collapse of this power play is not worth your melancholy. I’d check out “Fr. Jake”‘s excellent recap of what’s being going on with this whole mess. He exposes exactly how a splinter group of reactionaries in the US wishes to destroy the Episcopal Church and replace it with something entirely more right-wing and exclusionary. The various African clergy and dioceses are merely a means to an end.
This has nothing to do with anything so polite as theology, either of the right- or left-wing variety. It has to do with power and accumulation of assets. I’ll be happy to see these people, who think so little of Christianity that they would use the act of taking Communion itself as a grandstanding ploy, marginalize themselves.
Hmm… that should read “what’s been going on with this whole,” not “what’s being going on.” I really shouldn’t post when I’m tired.