Morning of Day Nine

And looking back on the significant events of Day Eight . . . .


This Thursday morning is Day Nine on the Legislative Calendar of the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church. I'm taking part of the morning off--having exchanged status with our second Clergy Alternate, Vicente Santiago.

Our two Clergy Alternate Deputies (Vicente and First Alternate Lou Hays) have worked very hard and participated in an important way in the life of our deputation, and I'm glad they've both been able to spend a little time on the floor of convention as well.

A lot going on, of course. Continued reverberations over the approval of D-025 and, in the House of Bishops thus far, of C-056. The "hot button" issues of this Convention. I was very pleased yesterday with the passage of resolutions approving a new Health Insurance Program for the Episcopal Church and making mandatory a Pension Program, through the Church Pension Fund, for Lay Employees.

But the hot-button issues have certain taken center stage, and I think appropriately so. This has been a big deal.

Briefly, D-025 restated the non-discrimination language of our ordination canons for "all orders of ministry" specifically without reference to the contexts of Resolution B-033, as approved at the 2006 General Convention, or to the statement of the House of Bishops at New Orleans in 2007.

B-033, a response to the Windsor Report's call for "moratoria" on specific actions that have causes disruption to Communion life, urged bishops and standing committees to show "restraint" when considering consent to the election as bishop of any person whose "manner of life" would cause further distress in the wider Anglican Communion. The bishops at New Orleans reaffirmed this resolve, and indicated specifically that openly-partnered homosexual persons were included in the group referenced in B-033.

D-025 did not explicitly reverse or even mention B-033, and some comment from bishops and deputies in the couple of days since it was passed seems to suggest that some will hope to continue to urge that "restraint" is still our formal policy.

This seems something of a stretch, to me anyway. Speaker after speaker in support of D-025 in the House of Deputies referenced B-033 as a source of frustration and named D-025 as a vehicle that would allow the Episcopal Church to "move on." It seemed clear to me that the whole purpose of this resolution was to provide specifically the framework to push against any Windsor/Communion-inspired "restraint," if and when another openly-partnered homosexual person is elected bishop.

It's true that the moratorium on those consents will remain technically in place until such an event actually happens, but I think the spinning of D-025 as something other than a clear distancing from B-033 is mostly politics: bishops trying to mitigate whatever negative push-back might come from their more conservative or Communion-oriented clergy and people.

C-056, which was approved by the Bishops yesterday and which will come to the House of Deputies today, seems also to me to be a clear step back from the Windsor-inspired moratoria.

It has always been the case that priests have broad discretion in pastoral ministration, and in many places especially in recent years that discretion has included some kind of recognition and "blessing" of non-marital relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. A priest might tell a story, for example, of being invited to a dinner at a home, with a gathering of family and friends, and then at the time of the meal the couple would share a few words of commitment, followed by a prayer and benediction by the priest. This essentially a private pastoral act.

When those recognitions and blessings have taken some kind of more formal liturgical action, as announced services at a church or in a public environment, they would by canon and rubric become subject to the oversight of the bishop of the diocese. At the General Convention in 2003 the Convention recognized that some bishops had given their clergy permission to conduct these more formal liturgical "blessings," and indicated a kind of general, neutral acknowledgment that this was happening in places in the Church, and that there would not be any negative disciplinary consequences for the bishops who gave their approval.

The Windsor moratoria asked that the "blessing of same sex unions" be left at least at the informal, pastoral level, and indicated that the trajectory towards a more formal, officially authorized liturgical form for these blessings would cause further stress in the Communion, as there was and is no broadly shared agreement in the Communion about how these relationships should be understood pastorally, theologically, or sacramentally.

C-056, under consideration now, in fact doesn't go so far as to authorize an official form or implied theological statement about these relationships for the whole Church. But it does specifically give a "generous" indication to bishops to begin and continue formal local authorizations, then calling for a study to be received at the next General Convention for further review.

Again, like D-025, C-056 doesn't actually "change" anything except context. Bishops in some parts of the Church have been "authorizing" liturgical blessings for some time. But it will now be the case that they are doing so as part of a formal process of development affirmed by General Convention, renewing movement along the trajectory which will doubtless result in strong efforts three or six years from now to authorize one or more same-sex union liturgies for use in the whole Church--and even to revise the order for Holy Matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer to allow for the "marriage of two people" for use in states where civil law allows such marriages.

In sum, then, the news from the General Convention 2009, spin aside, seems to me clearly to be that the official leadership bodies of the Episcopal Church have asserted an unwillingness to be restrained by the requests and counsel of the leadership of the wider Anglican Communion.

What the impact of this will be is as yet unknown. It seems to me, again, unlikely that there would be no impact. The Archbishop of Canterbury has already expressed his "regret" over the actions of Convention, and other world Anglican leaders are chiming in as well. Things won't happen uniformly or overnight, but I would imagine that in the season to come and the next months and years, absent an unlikely sea-change either here or elsewhere--we will see further distancing of relationships with many Anglican Churches and a re-ordering of the role of the Episcopal Church in the governing bodies of the Communion.

A friend of mine wrote last night that he felt that we as Episcopalians are charting a course away from a sense of our identity as a national Province and local expression of worldwide Anglicanism and toward an identity as an independent "denomination" informed by Anglican heritage. That's fairly nuanced, but I think it's about right.

For many American Episcopalians, who think of themselves essentially as belonging to a Protestant Church with a rich sacramental and liturgical life, this will be an easy course to follow. For those of us, though, who are more deeply committed to the catholic and Catholic character of Anglicanism, with a commitment to maintaining a living sacramental and theological connection to apostolic antiquity and to the discipline and gift of a diverse global Communion, it's going to be a way rougher road.

This will probably be especially true for us in Pittsburgh--and in other places where various separating groups have been establishing what I guess we might call "alternative Anglican" entities. After the passage of D-025 I overheard someone at a table nearby say, "Bob Duncan is sending out for cases of champagne," and I'm sure in any case that our former bishop, now the Archbishop of the new Anglican Church in North America, and the leadership of the congregations of that body, will seek to highlight the actions of General Convention as a way to try to appeal to more conservative congregations and individuals who may have thus far decided to remain within the Episcopal Church. Interestingly, one of the responses to D-025, by a minority, to be sure, at the General Synod of the Church of England, which has been meeting more or less simultaneously with our Convention, was to circulate a petition seeking to recognize Full Communion between the Church of England and the ACNA. For the moment that initative seems to have been set aside. However, I will not be surprised at all to see similar efforts in England and elsewhere in the time ahead . . . .

I would mention just in passing that if there is in any sense, optimistically perhaps, a "mixed signal" from this Convention, it would be found in the passage in the House of Deputies at the end of yesterday's afternoon session of D-020.

I had a hand in this resolution, as it was authored by my friend Dan Martins, a priest in the Diocese of Northern Indiana, and then co-sponsored by Chris Wells, a lay deputy from that diocese, and by me. (Each Resolution considered by the House of Deputies must have at least three sponsors.)

In our original language D-020 called for the Episcopal Church over the next three years to receive the Ridley-Cambridge draft of the emerging Anglican Covenant, to study it carefully, and to begin to order our life as a Church within its framework--which describes a more formally interdependent and mutually-accountable relationship between all the Churches of the Communion.

It is expected and likely that all Provinces of the Anglican Communion will soon receive from the Anglican Consultative Council a final version of the Covenant, with a request that it be either accepted or not accepted within a five-year timeframe--which puts it in front of the next General Convention.

It wasn't much of a surprise to me that the language we proposed didn't make much headway in the committee (World Mission) to which it was referred. But I was pleased that the committee did decide to work on a revision, which retained at least a part of our initial concern: calling on parishes and dioceses to receive and study the Covenant, and then to report to Executive Counsel their responses to that study prior to the next General Convention. I had the opportunity to speak briefly in favor of this "reduced" Resolution, and I was pleased that it was approved by a strong majority (though not unanimously) in a voice vote. It will go on to the House of Bishops, and I hope it will be approved there.

My guess is that the majority of my fellow deputies, deeply aware of the gathering storm of negative response about D-025 and C-056, wanted to be able to leave Anaheim with some token of a desire to "continue the conversation" in the wider Communion. I'm glad of that, of course, but I'm not really sure, even if D-020 gets us "to the table," that there will be much for us to talk about once we get there . . . .

Bruce Robison