So … how did the Diocesan Convention go?
Well, first off, bear in mind that 90% of any of these sorts of gatherings are deadly dull. Addresses. Reports. Presentations. Reports on Reports. Awards. Reports of the Committee Reporting on Addresses Regarding Reports. Real “kill me now” moments, stretching into hours (and many cups of Lemon Zinger tea from the back of the room).
Another 5% of the time, in something like this, is actually inspiring. Occasional prayers, in particular at the beginning, middle, and end of each session — we were there for a reason beyond bureaucratic, after all. And there was a good deal of singing. That was an effective way of getting things moving, transitioning between activities, getting bodies in motion, substituting for “get up and stretch” exercises. There was a good band and the Episcopal hymnal has some great tunes in it. For all that there may have been division over various things at the Convention, the music we could all join together in wholeheartedly.
And then there’s the juicy bits, of course. The remaining 5%. The politics, the disputes, the apoplectic diatribe sorts of moments that sell newspapers — and this convention was noteworthy for the one we had and for the one we didn’t have.
The diocese, and the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion as a whole, remain all a-twitter over the last General Convention in 2003, where the national church confirmed the election of Gene Robinson, a gay man in a committed (non-marital, obviously) relationship, as the new bishop of New Hampshire. The initiation of gay marriage rites in the diocese of New Westminster, Canada, was also part of the general brouhaha.
At the end of 2004, a group of primates from around the Anglican Communion met in Windsor and, after deliberating, issued a report. The Windsor Report, a 93-page tome, basically said that ECUSA and the Church of Canada had seriously disrupted the Communion by acting presumptuously and without consideration of others, that they should apologize and have a moratorium on such consecrations/marriages. Oh, and by the way, bishops from other provinces (national churches) of the Communion should not be poaching conservative parishes/dioceses within those two North American churches, because that’s pretty rude, too.
The conservatives in ECUSA have seized on the Windsor Report as the marching orders that the Episcopal Church ought to be going by (albeit sometimes conveniently ignoring the burden placed on other provincial bishops). And so when the diocesan convention had a single resolution identified before it started, basically calling Bishop O’Neill to uphold his previously stated support for the Windsor Report, everyone looked at the signatories to the resolution, and nodded, and waited for the firestorm to hit the convention.
See, one of the really unfortunate things about the current disunity within ECUSA is not so much the disagreement itself, but the mistrust it spawns. Conservatives are sure that liberals are plotting to outmaneuver them and send the church into ruination based on their own nefarious ends. Liberals, likewise, are positive the conservatives are going to do whatever they can to pick a fight that give them an excuse to break from the church.
So when you see a bunch of noteworthily conservative folks co-signing a resolution for the convention, the assumption is that it’s being done to some end (either worthwhile or dastardly, depending on your own position), and if it’s not an obvious end, well, ad hominem, it must be there somewhere, if you just imagine hard enough.
In this case, it seemed to me (and some others on the liberal side of things) that the resolution was meant to try to bind the bishop to a particular course (regardless of whether he’d indicated that was his course previously or not), in particular trying to make far more explicit the diocesan support for the Windsor Report and its need for apologies and moratoria. The idea seemed to be that this would then allow the conservatives to lambaste Bp. O’Neill should he (in their view) falter from his support of the Report, as they saw it, or if similar resolutions got passed in enough other dioceses, it might either twist the arm of the national church to knuckle under, or else demonstrate to one and all how the national church was out of touch with the local dioceses and parishes.
Conservatives, on the other hand, simply saw it as reaffirming something the bishop had already said. And if liberals opposed that, then clearly they were laying the groundwork for Bp. O’Neill to disavow the Windsor Report, etc., etc.
Everyone gathered in Grand Junction, waiting for the fireworks when the resolution would be brought forward Saturday.
And then … something happened. Word began to circulate around on Friday that a compromise was being sought between the “conservatives” and “progressives”/”liberals” for language that both sides could stand behind. Dialog was occuring. A search for unity.
And then …
… then on Saturday morning, we all woke up to this newspaper story in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel:
Sexuality “shouldn’t pose barrier,” the headline read.
Homosexuality shouldn’t pose an obstacle to the ordination of priests in the Episcopal Church, the head of Colorado’s Episcopal body said Friday. The Episcopal Diocese of Colorado?s annual convention brought the Rev. Robert O’Neill to town this weekend.
The 50-year-old bishop took the diocese’s reins in January 2004, shortly after the elevation of the nation’s first openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.
“Human sexuality shouldn’t be a barrier to ordination,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill said he’s never minced words when it comes to telling people where he stands on the issue. “It’s fair to say that I fall on the liberal side of moderate,” he said.
Well, you can imagine the spit-take that caused the conservatives over their coffee that morning.
Bp. O’Neill was, as you can can imagine, not pleased. He had evidently spent a fair amount of time the previous day interviewing for the story with a local reporter — which story was, as he told it, about the convention and the issues it faced. He’d talked to the reporter at length about the themes of the convention — Proclamation, Discipleship, Servanthood. He’d talked about the challenges facing the diocese, about the work of trying to build trust in a divided community. When asked about the Windsor Report, he’d noted (rightly) that it was not about sex per se, but about accountability, authority, and interdependence.
And when asked for his own opinion, he had (couching it, as he always does, as being his personal opinion, vs. the policy he, as bishop, pursues in the name of the unity of the diocese as a whole and as part of the national church and the Anglican Communion) given his personal (and previously publicized) thoughts …
… which is, of course, what led the headline, of course, and most of the story. The subtleties of what the convention was about, and what the Windsor Report was about, or what his official policy was about, were, of course, lost. If “if it bleeds, it leads” is a truism in journalism, “if it’s sex, it sells” is the Second Commandment.
Rob spoke to the convention both during a pre-convening meeting that morning (talking about the resolutions) and as the gathering reconvened, making clear his position and how that story had come out.
And that was the excitement for the day. At least the lurid, political, cynical, issues-driven excitement. Folks took what Bp. O’Neill said seriously — helped by a general skepticism amongst conservatives and liberals alike that the media can be trusted to report truthfully or completely on anything anyone says (both sides having been burned before in similar ways). That was the end of it. And the beginning of something else.
Because the folks that had come together to discuss a compromise resolution — representing both the original writers of the resolution and several prominent diocesan voices on the “left” and “right” of the sexuality issue — had come up with one, and had stuck with that compromise, despite the headlines. They mounted the stage together to discuss it with the convention attendees, to support it, and to urge votes for it. They refrained from posturing. They declined to describe the arguments pro/con the original resolution.
They acted in unity. They trusted that all the parties involved were approaching it in good faith. They submitted a substitute resolution that supported the bishop’s previous statements, but went further to ask all the diocese to consider the Windsor Report and issues of unity and so forth. The compromise changed the focus to be what individuals in the diocese should be doing, and it made that focus non-partisan and prayerful.
And, most importantly, it represented common dialog and common action by people who felt very differently about the the underlying subject. It did so without tearing the convention apart, but instead by pulling it together. It was utterly unexpected, and terribly heartening.
And that was, in itself, the most exciting — in a good way — and moving thing about the convention. And it made sitting through interminable reports about other various outreach activities and budgets and org charts and ministerial this and that and so forth more than worth it.