Only a short time ago, spending twelve days in a hotel in Columbus, OH, would have sounded to me like the 2nd prize from the punch-line of a bad joke. I’m coming to see, however, what people who had traveled to, and been sequestered at, the Council of Nicea or the Synod of Whitby must have felt like. Although they and we may not have realized it at the moment, we’d just been privileged to be present when history was made – and Columbus, OH, turned out to be a fine place to have been when it happened.
The commentary on this 75th General Convention will continue, I imagine, literally for decades. If you want to know how the Episcopal Church ‘officially’ reports the important events that occurred in response to the Windsor Report, read Matt Davies’ current Episcopal News Service article. It provides a lucid overview of the facts and also gives you an idea of how the national church is framing their significance.
The best I can offer now are some of my observations from within the maelstrom. As Frederick Buechner says of good preaching, the only voice you have is your own; so this is my take on what happened in Columbus, as seen from as inside as I could get. I don’t pretend to be even a cub reporter, just an observer with eyes and ears wide open – and laptop at hand.
First, some context for those of you who have never been to a General Convention.
About 1,200 of those doing similar time in Columbus hotels were deputies or bishops.
That left about 8,000 of us in various support roles, or as visitors, partners, or spouses.
General Convention is unique in the Anglican Communion due to its being such an amazingly democratic affair, functioning sometimes like congress, sometimes like a parliament – it’s reputed to be the largest bicameral legislature in the world. Each diocese sends 4 clergy + 4 laity all elected by the Diocese + 4 alternates + their main or Diocesan Bishop + any other bishops functioning in the diocese.
It is crucial to remember that this entire group has been “deputized” by the diocese; they are not there to “represent” us but to act on our behalf according to their knowledge of the issues and the dictates of their consciences. The deputies and bishops take this with utter seriousness – they all spent literally hundreds of hours preparing for convention and taking part in a ritual that began for many at 7 a.m. everyday and ended for many between 10 and midnight.
The process is easy to state, and complex and sometimes infuriatingly cumbersome to watch. It is designed to assure two things, which it accomplishes remarkably well.
- One is to give every voice on an issue a chance to be heard, which is a slow process.
- The other is to make it necessary for a supermajority of the deputies to approve any resolution; each deputation votes as a body of four, three of whom must agree for their vote to count as a YES; a tie of 2-2 in a delegation is counted as a NO vote. Thus there’s no way to squeak things through with a razor thin popular majority.
Each issue that was considered had been proposed in advance and most had been through a lengthy review process in a committee for months – in some cases years — before Convention. A typical day began at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m. with committees holding open hearings on the issues before them; microphones were open to deputies and visitors alike. Many availed themselves of the opportunity! Committees then crafted final wordings of resolutions in light of the testimony they had received. And then each resolution had to be passed by both the House of Bishops (about 190 strong) and the House of Deputies (about 800 voting members at any given time). Amendments by one house required reconsideration and vote again by the other house.
No viewpoints are suppressed. Yet nothing is frivolously presented much less adopted – and passage and defeat can often hang on a single word or phrase in a resolution. All the language is symbolically loaded for someone, and negotiation isn’t optional, but necessary. We weren’t there to find or legislate Absolute Truth but to discover how best to live together as the fallible Body of Christ in a world groaning and crying for the most basic of human needs to be met.
I belabor the point because part of the experience of living through Convention is the process of participating in and watching this laborious – and yet faith-driven — process. Most mornings there was a full Holy Eucharist with sermon, attended by more than a thousand people. Each session began with prayer, was punctuated by daily offices or other prayers at noon, and then again in the afternoon and at the end of the day.
This is the church at its best when trying to concur as a body about what we will commit ourselves to undertake in the upcoming three years until the next General Convention.
So you can’t underestimate the importance of personal relationships in church governance.
- At its worst in the Episcopal Church, our emphasis on relationships turns ‘clubby’ and can feel very ‘exclusivist’ if you’re not already a part of the club.
- At its best, which was almost always the case in Columbus, relationships with real people with faces and lives were the context for everything that was done.
The Exhibit Hall, where a couple of hundred church groups and organizations – representing every issue and cause and perspective you ever imagined – showed off their ministries and sold their wares (books, vestments, Tibetan prayer bells, Palestinian pottery – just to name a few of the booths to which I succumbed during my time there!).
More importantly, the Exhibit Hall also served as a crucial third place between the temporary-home of a hotel room and the church-temporarily-gathered-in-convention. It was a grand ecclesiastical Starbucks, caffeine swilling, laptop and Blackberry wielding patrons mixing for conversation and commerce, of things and ideas and proposals.
Friendships were renewed with people I literally hadn’t seen in decades; new friendships were begun with people I discovered to have interests that overlapped with mine. Many conversations were casual. Many others were utterly serious and a few dramatically personal. A priest in the church who’d illegally fired me from a job twenty years ago discovered I was there and came and asked me to lunch to ask my forgiveness for an action that had tormented him for all that time. We didn’t just talk of the need for reconciliation in Columbus; there were people there actually trying to live it out with one another.
Relationships, and all their workings and celebrations and struggles, were the air you breathed whatever you were doing regarding resolutions and votes. After all, these were the people who would be affected by what you did, and they had to go home and talk with their friends and neighbors, as did I, about the effects of Convention on their lives as Episcopalians.
Anonymity was impossible. Vote counts were tallied and reported. The thing that drove deliberations, however, was that every vote had a face. A sea of faces.
The House of Deputies gathered in a huge ballroom at the Convention Center – ages, races, colors, orientations galore – was such a graphic reminder that weaving together all our differences, baptism really is at the heart of our identity as Episcopalians – the laity, the laos tou theou, the people of God, were gathering and it was glorious.
Many in that sea of faces would have been easily recognizable to those in my home congregation, St. Thomas’ Parish, who I am gratified now to know were following my blog, souljournal, daily to stay even more connected.
- John Johnson was everywhere in his official capacity as a domestic policy analyst in the Episcopal Church Office of Government Relations in Washington, D.C. John was on my plane going to Columbus, and beginning there he seemed visible all the time, and despite looking increasingly unshaven and sleep-deprived as Convention proceeded, he was always available to share information, new, a hug, or a shrug.
- Dustin Cole, a young adult leader in my parish and diocese, flew out and paid for his own hotel as a visitor and to attend the Young Adult Festival that was part of Convention. He, like so many of the young adults there, made clear that they are not the church of the future, but very much a part of the church in the present. I could always find the heart of the young adult action in a group by looking for Dustin standing on top of a bench or a chair or in the circle of the most interesting conversations.
- Our diocesan Bishop, John Chane was remarkably available and frequently in the midst of conversations, a fact much appreciated by those there representing the dioces, especially given the brutal schedule the Bishops, too, kept. Karen Chane, too, was a significant and active presence, along with the twelve clergy, deputies and alternates who were deputies from the Diocese of Washington.
The first official meeting that I got to attend was the big briefing held on the Sunday night before Convention officially opened by Integrity, the national Episcopal LGBT group. Three important themes of the whole convention got named there.
· The first was the impossibility that the Episcopal Church could do as the Windsor Report had asked and repent for our decision to consecrate Gene Robinson as a Bishop. It was clear that language of repentance used in this way was just not going to happen; we were not about to turn back the clock however painful people knew the American church’s recent decisions had been to others in the Anglican Communion who are not at the same point in their journeys with God.
· The second was simply the importance of the language we use to talk about anything at all. As Michael Hopkins said at that briefing, for example, “Let’s stop speaking of blessing same-sex-relationships; it sounds like something that came out of the swamp! Let’s talk instead about equal-marriage-rights or blessings of committed relationships.” The words we use matters. And we are responsible for the ones we choose.
· The third was the significance for the whole church of the need to stop scapegoating gays and lesbians for everything that’s problematic about the church today. I had this vision of a spaceship swooping down and carrying away every gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender person on the planet, and every person who had ever tolerated or supported them. And I realized the American Anglican Council and the Anglican Network wouldn’t suddenly become progressive 21st century Christians! Or be satisfied that the church now ‘lived up’ to their standards.
The thing still to be decided was not whether gays and lesbians could serve as lay leaders or deacons or priests or bishops – the room was full of faithful people fitting every one of those categories — but how we are going to commit ourselves as a church to living into the reality of continuing to become God’s people as the church. No one at that briefing imagined that it was ever going to be easy – and many believed it almost certainly happen in their lifetimes. There was, however, no sense that anyone in that room was thinking of ‘walking alone’ apart from the community of the church. Rather they were gathering to reclaim the blessing of being on this journey together and to reclaim our mutual sense of all the places God is calling us to be God’s people in a world of need. There was no smugness. No self-righteousness. Yet there was a clear sense of calling, and of the presence of God’s Spirit in the midst of this journey.
Not everyone at General Convention was on this bandwagon; and I don’t want to gloss over that.
However, the vast majority of Episcopalians there — from all over this country and at least fourteen others where the Episcopal Church is found – understood themselves to be on the same journey towards the same goal of the reign of God, although from a bird’s eye view different ones of us are at significantly difference places on the road to getting there, and a few of us at any time may have erred and strayed from the path.
As a result, most of the time in Columbus was spent with few passionate disagreements about any fundamental issues being visible. There were serious issues by the bucketful, yes – AIDS, malaria in Africa, Millennium Development Goals, status of children, changing demographics with increased Latino presence in the Episcopal Church. People could argue about what to do to address them, and they did. There was little argument, however, that we all shouldn’t be about this business of being God’s peoples – plural – with faithfulness that none of us had yet been able to adequately muster alone. The Kingdom of God is a group activity.
Another reason for the lack of contentiousness was that most people, I think, had arrived knowing where they stood on the big issue of the boundaries of hospitality of the Gospel.
There were the Big Tent majority – approaching perhaps 80-90% — and the Narrow Gate minority – probably no more than 10-15% maximum. I don’t agree with the image of a left-wing and a right-wing and a broad middle. There was a small but frustrated and vocal minority of conservatives hacking away from the fringes. The rest of the gathered Convention ranged all over the map in beliefs, piety, social activism, you name it.
And so although it was tempting to succumb to the lingua franca of Fox News and speak in red-state, blue-state terms – or to dismiss the gay and lesbian community and supporters as a liberal fringe group – the reality was far different. Get away from the microphones and there were never two sides to any issue – there was the whole range of perspectives that always make up the church. And there was little bile for divisiveness.
Most commentators appear to expect a religious convention like this to be one sea of sanctimoniouness. One young acquaintance, however, described her own experience at Convention in terms that are far closer to what I saw in Columbus: “Episcopalians just get to be themselves when they get together. There’s no mask of piety or holiness that people are required to put on and then later take off. I’ve heard Episcopalians talk about not having to ‘check anything at the door’ when they come to church. But it’s also really clear that you don’t have to put on any act when you arrive. You’re just allowed to be who God made us to be.”
I’ve written elsewhere about the Integrity Eucharist and my worship experience there. Let me just add this one note here: If you don’t believe in saying, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You,” then don’t. The Integrity Eucharist was wondrous because it felt like a glimpse of the kingdom – we opened the doors of the church, and everyone felt welcome to Christ’s table. Not everyone was there, yet, but no one would have been excluded because their theology is yet sophisticated enough to capture the grace and mercy and love of God in Christ. Rather, we gathered to confess the mystery of it all, and to express our own wonder, love and praise.
At the end of General Convention, in the emotional and spiritual chaos of the final day, I was to have my own dedication to this journey together sorely tested. It was the still fresh memory of the Integrity Eucharist, and Gene Robinson’s sermon that night, that called me back to a realization that to abandon the church for any reason is to abandon those in the church and the world who need most for the church not to become the bastion of the intolerant alone. To remain in the church right now is to commit ourselves to a most painful process where faithfulness cannot be had without cost.
- To be the church today is to remember the cross, God’s willingness to be in pain for us, despite the pain being caused by us. To be the church today is to remain church “no matter what,” and thus to be icons of Christ who loved us, too, “no matter what,” and despite the great costs of doing so.
- To be the church today is to remember Easter Sunday, not with the self-righteousness of “We Win!” but as the symbol of the undying power of radical hospitality and love that intolerance and enmity cannot destroy.
- To be the church is to remain with one another through the power of the Holy Spirit for the sake of the least of God’s creatures. Now is not a time when “being the church” is about comfort and self-interest. But it is indeed the time to stand up and “be the church,” not because we’re right, but because we’re so sorely needed – if not us, who?
Two other events, each of which took up only a portion of a day’s work, have dominated both the news and our own energies and attention to the accomplishments of General Convention 2006. The first was the surprise election of the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori as the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. The second was a highly unusual show of arm-twisting and unprecedented interference by the Presiding Bishop and Presiding Bishop Elect in the decisions of the House of Deputies who were considering a newly submitted resolution from the House of Bishops that would affirm something twice-denied earlier in the week: the church’s willingness to refrain from consecrating as bishops anyone “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church,” whatever exactly that means, or doesn’t.
- Barely more than a week ago, despite the church and the press continuing to conspire to try to keep homosexuality at the forefront of our attention, the Holy Spirit surprised us all by inspiring the House of Bishops to elect on the fifth ballot The Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori to be out next Presiding Bishop. If you want to know how this is playing “back home,” just know that when I spoke that sentence in my home parish this past Sunday, there was a spontaneous ovation for Bishop Jefferts Schori that lasted for quite a long time. I’d be willing to bet that happened a few other places as well.
- But back to Columbus for a moment. The election of +Jefferts Schori took place at historic Trinity Church in downtown Columbus, right where the Integrity Eucharist had taken place only a few days before. The bishops were locked inside, supposedly without any form of communication with the outside world, and were pledge to stay there until a new Presiding Bishop had been elected.
- On the fifth ballot, a seven-way race that had been narrowed to two – Bishops Schori and Parsley (from Alabama) – was suddenly over. Katharine Jefferts Schori had a majority of the ballots that were cast. It was done. The Bishops had just elected the first female primate in the history of the Anglican Communion and thus the first female Presiding Bishop as well. As several bishops later told the story, there was a moment of stunned silence, and then “the whole place broke into applause and cheering, because we suddenly realized – however any one of us had voted – that we together had just done an amazing and remarkable thing.”
- Although the Bishops were supposed to keep silence and not communicate with anyone outside Trinity Church, some did not. As a result I was I think the first blogger to report Katharine Jefferts Schori as the new PB, thanks to the talkative cell phone devotees at the American Anglican Council booth next to me who were among the first to get the news from “one of our bishops”. I put this “rumor” on my blog, then raced down to the House of Deputies, meeting Karen Chane as I went in. As I told her what had just happened she said, “Oh, my God, no; that’s not what was supposed to happen. Even the Committee on the Consecration of a Bishop hadn’t been informed, and then they were the ones to inform the House of Deputies.
- Rumors were flying around the House of Deputies room, the 800-900 deputies still oblivious to what was transpiring. Throughout the Convention Center the word of an election was out. When the word was officially delivered and announced, the 500-600 people who had joined the 900 deputies in the ballroom where they were meeting joined in a collective, simultaneous gasp – and then pandemonium ruled.
- Anglican religious women in full habit were jumping up and down and crying. A young man with multiple silver safety pins in his left eyebrow was crying with joy. Women priests were dancing around together. Grow men of undecipherable sexual orientations were hugging and crying. It was an ecstatic moment – one that stands out of normal time, where the clock is suspended and so it might have lasted fifteen minutes, or it might have been three.
- Then the deputies had to ‘debate’ whether or not to concur with the bishops and vote. The Bishops literally were waiting at Trinity Church to get news of whether the concurrence vote was in the affirmative and we really had a woman PB. It took a while. I can remember only one person who stood up at a microphone and said straight out that this was a bad decision and we should refuse to concur in this decision. Even Bishop Francisco Duque-Gomez’s wife came to a microphone and through an interpreter offered her joy and congratulations. (Later the wife of the sole negative voice prior to the concurrence vote was contacted by the press and evidently said without hesitation that she was really excited and please by the news. Before leaving at the end of Convention the next Wednesday, her husband only half jokingly announced to the House of Deputies that he was pleased to be able to say he could go home and that his wife was willing to talk about a reconciliation!
- When the vote actually was taken, +Katharine receive 90% of the votes in the affirmative. We had a new PB. And she arrived a few minutes later, accompanied by almost a dozen of present or retired women bishops. I honestly don’t remember what she said when she spoke. I was still reeling from the realization that here support had come not just from the gay and lesbian community but from Latin American deputations from Central and South America to whom +Katharine spoke in Spanish in her acceptance remarks. The stunning realization was that in the vote just taken 9 out of 10 deputies of all persuasions had enthusiastically embraced this election. The church had actually come together.
The next three days, though, were like a side-trip to Wonderland, where Alice, you remember, found that each time she went down the rabbit-hole she emerged in a place where the rules had changed and nothing was as it seemed.
- We committed ourselves to the continuing interdependence of the Anglican Communion
- We committed ourselves to the process of developing over the next nine years some form of deeper covenant among the members of the Anglican Communion
- We refused to express regret for consecrating Gene Robinson as a Bishop
- We refused to deny to dioceses the right to elect gay and lesbian bishops
- We refused to commit ourselves to a moratorium on same sex blessings
· And then last Wednesday, the final day of Convention, we relearned how precarious all decisions really are in the world we currently share with other human beings. Anything decided can be undecided; any wisdom can be replaced by folly; courage fails; the doors of hospitality can slam on your fingers.
- The House of Bishops sent to the House of Deputies a resolution that was an alternative to the recently defeated resolution on consecrating further gay or lesbian bishops.
- The language was supposed to be better because it no longer singled out gays and lesbians when the Bishops asked one another to “exercise constraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopacy “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church.”
- It was supposed to buy time; it was intended to guarantee +Katharine an invitation to the next Lambeth Conference in 1998. All that sort of outcome is still uncertain. The signs aren’t good if you try to read the tea-leaves from the first responses from Peter Akinola and Bob Duncan and the other usual suspects.
- The thing that was indeed certain was that an extraordinary amount of pressure had been placed on Bishop Griswold, the current Presiding Bishop, presumably by the ++ABC (Archbishop of Canterbury … gets two plusses!), who in turn displaced that onto the Presiding Bishop Elect (or by other accounts the ++ABC himself spoke by cell phone directly with Bishop Schori.
- Whatever the precise chain of events, Bishop Schori made the unprecedented decision to interrupt the House of Deputies debate on B033, the Bishops’ alternative resolution, and speak to them directly, in person herself, to persuade them to make it possible for her to attend the only Lambeth Conference that will occur during her tenure as Presiding Bishop.
- More than 70% of laity and clergy, including many if not most of the gay and lesbian deputies I knew, voted in favor of this resolution, which was diametrically opposed to the one that they had soundly defeated by a 2-1 margin only days before.
- No one, however, was happy. People were sobbing even while voting Yes, knowing they had just been placed into the absurd position of choosing either to destroy the Anglican Communion (or at least make it a wholly intolerable place for the new woman Presiding Bishop they had just elected) or once again to buy a shred of hope for the enduring unity of the Anglican Communion by shredding the hopes of the gay and lesbian community that finally, once and for all, they could walk away from a General Convention not having been made to be the scapegoat.
- And even that shred of hope was small, fragile, and will not be enough to sustain the unity of the Anglican Communion. Just electing a Presiding Bishop who is a progressive, smart, left-coast proponent of GLBT full inclusion in the church will be enough, it appears, to drive away those who wanted Windsor-or-nothing.
Then the House of Deputies had to get back to work for a final four hour session of legislative debate and votes. And did they ever work hard. We voted to
- move into a period of Shared Eucharist with the United Methodists.
- oppose all legislation criminalizing homosexuality.
- reaffirm our understanding of the historic separate and independent status of the churches of the Anglican Communion
- set up a task force to continue revising our disciplinary canons for clergy (and laity?)
- decided not to shorten Convention to eight days (which was good given the fact that we weren’t going to finish everything even as it is)
- create a Standing Commission on Lifelong Christian Education and Formation
- approve new entries into the commemorations of Lesser Feasts and Fasts
- acknowledge the authority of the triune God (whew!)
- respond to the crisis of seminarian debt levels
- require visitations to parishes be by the diocesan bishop, not an assistant bishop
- start raising money to start new congregations
I went and got my two bags I’d checked at the Hyatt next door, got in a taxi and went to the airport. As I went out of the Convention Center, The Rev. Martyn Minns of Truro Parish held the door for me and Canon Kendall Harmon. He smiled.
I wrote a quick blog-of-despair, lest my plane crash on the way home and people be unsure how I felt about The Final Day. I hit the “publish” button on my laptop just as the gate announced final call for boarding. The plane didn’t crash, I’m quite happy to report.
The question remains: did the church? Was GC 2006 merely a smooth takeoff and rough landing? Or when we all flew away over the next two days, had we left never to return under one roof again as Episcopalians?
Now comes the
a) $64,000 question
b) Final Jeopardy
c) The last five minutes of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Your age and susceptibility to inflation will determine which metaphor you choose.
The Question: What did I learn on summer vacation in Columbus?
After five days back I can already name two things. Maybe with time there’ll be more, like an amnesia victim recovering memories lost to a trauma.
For now here’s what I know better now than when I first went to General Convention.
- If we see things as coming in just two flavors or two colors — black and white, good and evil — then when someone knocks at your door you will never know the miracle of meeting a stranger there. Everyone will be only a friend or foe. No one can arrive sharing news of some other world that we had not known of before – or, if they do, we can only ask: are you one of us, or one of them? A narrow-gate, one-way world never opens the door with anticipation, with the joy of discover, asking tell us who you are? Show us what you believe and care about and tell your children at bedtime and say in your beloved’s ear and care about enough to die for? Tell us? We wait to learn. We, too, want to be fully alive.
- The way we handle leavetaking tells a lot about who we are. Long after we are gone few will remember who we were, but many may still suffer the consequences of a leave-taking handled badly. The Celts pushed out of the British Isles? Native Americans slaughtered in our own (with no intended irony) so-called “home-land.” When jobs end or relationships break apart or people move away, we do not care so much in the end, I think, about why they do, but how they do – with what grace did people handle their own leavetaking or that of others?
I end with the Psalm actually assigned by the lectionary for the Sunday I delivered this report of General Convention 2006. The Epistle was about reconciliation; the Gospel was about Jesus calming his followers fear. Either would have provided an apt epitaph for the 75th General Convention. But the Psalm (107) stuck in my throat. It read in part:
He gathered them out of the lands;
from the east and from the west,
from the north and from the south.
Some went down to the sea in ships
and plied their trade in deep waters.
They beheld the works of the Lord
and his wonders in the deep.
Then he spoke, and a stormy wind arose,
which tossed high the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to heavens and fell back to the depth;
their hearts melted because of their peril.
They reeled and staggered like drunkards
and were at their wits’ end.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He stilled the storm to a whisper
and quieted the waves of the sea.
Then were they glad because of the calm,
and he brought them to the harbor they were bound for.
General Convention ended in media res, before deliverance is known. Or how high the waves still may mount before God quiets the storm and brings all God’s peoples to the harbor they were bound for.
Wayne Whitson Floyd
Director, Cathedral College Center for Christian Formation
Washington National Cathedral
