By Jim Naughton

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Michael Gerson once again takes Sen. Barack Obama to task for his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In breaking with Wright, Gerson writes, Obama has woken from a theological slumber. But contrast Wright’s words and actions with those of Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the leader of Gerson’s church, and ask yourself who has been sleeping.

Gerson is a member of the Falls Church in Falls Church, Va. His congregation and the nearby Truro Church, played the key role in leading 11 Virginia parishes out of the Episcopal Church after the Church consecrated Gene Robinson, an openly gay man as bishop in 2003. Most of these parishes joined the Church of Nigeria, which Akinola leads.

The relationship between Akinola, Truro and the Falls Church is a close one. The American churches provide important financial support for Akinola’s ministry, and American clergy frequently write his papers and speeches.

In February 2006, 10 months before Gerson's church made the final decision to affiliate with Akinola, Bishop John Bryson Chane of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington (full disclosure, he is my boss) published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post calling attention to proposed Nigerian legislation (here, on page 12) supported by Akinola that –interpreted as narrowly as possible—would have significantly curtailed the rights of gays, lesbians and their supporters to speak about their lives in public, assemble or practice their religion. Interpreted more broadly, language that aimed at stopping any displays of same-sex affection, public or private, direct or indirect, was a prescription for home invasion.

One of the more objectionable clauses in this legislation reads:

Any person who is involved in the registration of gay clubs, societies and organizations, sustenance, procession or meetings, publicity and public show of same sex amorous relationship directly or indirectly in public and in private is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a term of 5 years imprisonment.

Akinola’s supporters argued that Muslims were behind the bill, but human rights activists in Nigeria told a different story. The legislation was advanced by a Christian president, and supported by the Christian Association of Nigeria while Akinola was its president. The bill’s key parliamentary opponent was a Muslim.

The legislation was vigorously criticized by 16 international human rights groups, the European Parliament and the U. S. State Department. It eventually died, but Akinola never backed away from his support, even after human rights groups explained the potentially devastating effect the law could have had on groups working to prevent the speared of AIDS.

In the midst of this legislative struggle, Akinola gave an interview to The New York Times, which appeared on the paper’s front page on Christmas Day, 2006.

The way he tells the story, the first and only time Archbishop Peter J. Akinola knowingly shook a gay person’s hand, he sprang backward the moment he realized what he had done.

Archbishop Akinola, the conservative leader of Nigeria’s Anglican Church who has emerged at the center of a schism over homosexuality in the global Anglican Communion, re-enacted the scene from behind his desk Tuesday, shaking his head in wonder and horror.

“This man came up to me after a service, in New York I think, and said, ‘Oh, good to see you bishop, this is my partner of many years,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh!’ I jumped back.”

Akinola's allies in the United States had worked hard to soften his image and distance him from the bill (very, very hard.) but the published record was against them, and after the Times' interview, Akinola stopped speaking to reporters in the U. S.

If Gerson had any trouble with Akinola's behavior, he did not voice it in a column he wrote five months later. In his first effort as a Post columnist, Gerson described Akinola's decision to consecrate Truro's former rector, the Rev. Martyn Minns, as a bishop in the Church of Nigeria, as an "epoch-dividing event," and praised Akinola's vibrant brand of Christianity.

Gerson may have been referring to the failed Nigerian legislation when he offered these highly-qualified reservations, but they are so vague it is impossible to tell:

This emerging Christianity can be troubling. Church leaders sometimes emphasize communal values more than individual human rights, and they need to understand that strongly held moral beliefs are compatible with a commitment to civil liberties for all. Large Pentecostal churches are often built by domineering personalities promising health and wealth.

(The Post printed my letter responding to Gerson’s piece. However, I was unsuccessful in persuading the paper to acknowledge that Gerson had hidden a conflict of interest from his readers in failing to disclose that his parish was involved in litigation over church property on Archbishop Akinola's behalf. This still seems to me a fairly obvious and signficant violation of journalistic ethics.)

In May, The Atlantic magazine raised new and more troubling concerns about Akinola. In “God’s Country,” the writer Eliza Griswold, daughter of the Rt. Rev. Frank Griswold, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, describes a retributive massacre in the Nigerian town of Yelwa carried out in 2004 by a well-organized band of men, wearing clothing and tags that identified them as members of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Akinola was president of CAN during the massacre, which Human Rights Watch reports claimed the lives of approximately 700 Muslims. Dozens of others were kidnapped, raped or maimed. (The relevant sections of the article and the HRW report are excerpted here.)

Eliza Griswold visited Akinola in 2006. She writes:

When asked if those wearing name tags that read “Christian Association of Nigeria” had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. “No comment,” he said. “No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet.” He went on, “I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”

When these remarks came to light, Akinola’s spokesman released a statement that had nothing to do with the incident at Yelwa, but with later riots over the publication of Danish cartoons, that Muslims viewed as insulting to the prophet Mohammed. Neither the archbishop nor his American followers have offered further elaboration.

Akinola's handling of the massacre in Yelwa and his incendiary comments during the cartoon riots contributed to his defeat when he ran for re-election of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Indeed, members of the Association took the unusual step of denying him the vice presidency, which is usually awarded to the candidate who finishes second in the presidential balloting. His anti-gay crusades, and his efforts to split the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality led to the defeat of Akniola's handpicked successor, in the voting for president of the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa. Yet, members of his American flock, which is concentrated in Northern Virginia, but includes a congregation with close ties to the Family Research Council, and other conservative political groups, continues to support him.

These congregations are involved in a high-stakes effort aimed at either driving North American churches out of the Anglican Communion for their acceptance of same-sex relationships, or, failing that, splitting the Communion in two, and claiming leadership of a potentially large faction centered in Africa. This movement is financed by Americans who, with help from British evangelicals, are also its chief strategists. Public fealty to Akinola and one or two other African archbishops is essential, however, or the effort is unmasked as a largely Western enterprise, and loses credibility among Anglicans in the developing world—the very constituency for whom it purports to speak.

As a result, the Nigerian archbishop, whose influence is on the wane among Christian leaders in his own country and among Anglican leaders on his own continent due to his extremism, remains the spiritual leader of Michael Gerson’s parish, and in similarly-minded congregations in Northern Virginia.

Gerson may hold views very different than those of Akinola—just as Barack Obama may hold views very different than those of Jeremiah Wright. But given Gerson’s repeated criticism of Obama over his relationship with Wright, it seems fair to ask whether anything that Wright has said or done is as destructive to the human family or reflects as poorly on the Church as the word and actions of Peter Akinola, and why Gerson is able to pronounce with such supreme condescension on Obama’s failures when his own are so much more damning—and enduring.

Jim Naughton is editor of Episcopal Cafe.

By Donald Schell

Like many Anglicans I’ve got the Windsor Report’s phrase, ‘Bonds of Affection’ rolling round in my head like a melody from the radio that won’t be dismissed. I think about affection and whether it makes relationship or just happens sometimes in it. What sense do we make of people who say affection is fleeting? Does good affection bind? That gets more wondering about choices and how we make them, and how bonds and choices live together. And that brings an old personal story to mind.

For eighteen months after she got her R.N. my wife Ellen worked nights caring for sleeping and sleepless patients at teaching hospital near our home. When she was on, I’d walk her over to the hospital, leaving our children sleeping for ten minutes. There had been some late night muggings in our neighborhood and I didn’t want her walking over alone. Ten minutes to eleven I’d steal a good-night kiss from my lovely nurse in uniform and walk home to sleep alone while she worked the shift that hospitals don’t call ‘graveyard.’ Next morning at 7:15 while I was making the kids’ breakfast, we’d listen for her key in the door and her weary "Good morning." Then it was breakfast together and, if it was a weekday, I’d deliver the children to school and child care while Ellen slept.

Regular weekdays I plunged into the priestly and missionary tasks I’d taken founding a new congregation from the ground up, leaving the house to Ellen as a temple of silence. With earplugs and a sleeping mask, she could sleep, more or less, and be ready to greet us in the late afternoon for tea and dinner together before my evening church meetings. Whenever Ellen had a week night off work, I’d take off the following day (with the children off at school) and we’d do something outdoors in the daylight (rain or shine) and enjoy lunch together.

On the weekends that Ellen worked, my task was to keep an intense three-year old son and our more contemplative seven-year old daughter happily occupied away from home so she could sleep. Wherever I took the children on Saturday, our company was divorced dads, men and their children haunting the hands-on Exploratorium, the zoo, the beach, the park. Ellen would make herself stay up for church if she’d worked Saturday night, so on Sundays, our outings were in the afternoon.

Night shift made Ellen’s weekends off important events to us. The Saturday I’m remembering we’d planned a hike and picnic to Tennessee Beach, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area just north of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful place and the long gentle hike to Tennessee Beach was a favorite for us and the children.

I can’t remember how the morning went wrong except that something Ellen said as we were packing the picnic angered me. I made a tentative statement of what bugged me and why and quickly decided she wasn’t listening. So I decided to sit on my anger and say nothing about it. Of course, I was absolutely certain I was right, that Ellen was wrong, and furthermore that by not listening to me she essentially conceding that I was Right about The Very Important Point I Was Making. Happily casting myself as a righteous victim, I concluded that her evident wrong-headedness gave me no choice but to claim the intellectual and moral high ground and hold it in silence. I didn’t say, "Fine, have it your way," but I thought it.

However, not wanting to be a jerk, I decided to pity her for a long week of working nights, by doing my duty as a dad and father in every particular, being exquisitely nice and helpful as I did it. I agreed with absolutely everything she said, and I smiled a lot and kept busy. I felt Ellen picking up on my rage as we were walking from the ridge down to the beach where the Gold Rush era S.S. Tennessee was wrecked in 1853. My first indication was a look from her – angry, hurt, reproachful, and questioning all at once. The children seemed to be enjoying dad’s catering to them and had a great time. Since I wasn’t making conversation but only responding to Ellen’s or the children’s questions, I had some quiet time during the picnic to think about the early steamship whose wreck had given the beach its name.

Coming up from Panama finding the Golden Gate enshrouded in heavy fog, the Captain was counting on dead reckoning to establish his position. He knew there was land just to the north of him and thought he was entering into the Golden Gate to make anchor in San Francisco Bay, but the sound of waves breaking directly ahead told him his navigation calculations had been disastrously wrong. Through the mists a high cliff appeared, now directly astern. Turning the ship hard away from the cliff and driving the big steam-driven sidewheels full speed he struggled against waves and current and until he saw the other cliff that defined the little cove directly ahead. No way forward and no way back, each succeeding wave drove the ship closer to the beach until finally the sand caught it broadside. More than five hundred passengers and all the U.S. mail were successfully brought ashore. The Tennessee’s owners came out to find their ship beached, but still sound. Soon they had tugs and cables and workmen on the shore trying to re-float the ship, but a couple of days after the Tennessee was beached, a big storm blew in from the Pacific and fierce waves pounded it to pieces.

Three hours or so into my folly of forced niceness, fake smiles and cold helpfulness, I thought I was as trapped as the S.S. Tennessee had been, a nearly new ship, best technology of its era, now little left but rusty boilers buried beneath this beach. As the kids explored the quiet beach and played at the sea’s edge, Ellen asked what was going on. "Nothing," I insisted with all the warmth of an airline steward. Did I actually think I could fool her? Probably not. "Everything" was what I really meant, and she heard me.

We packed our picnic and hiked back to the car. I was impeccably helpful, showily available to the children, excruciatingly respectful and solicitous of my wife. And I knew as I did all this that I was trapped in my own folly and doing us serious damage. All the work of parenting had Ellen stranded too - baffled and frustrated with her incommunicative husband.

Finally, after a dinner at which I tried to channel Ward Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver, and then cheerily took dish duty while Ellen put the children to bed, she came back to the kitchen, stood looking at me for a fierce, loving moment and said, "We don’t do it this way. Tell me what’s wrong."

Words of a response lined up in my head, ‘Well, this is how we do it now!’ but I hated those words and knew I’d regret them for ever, so I left them unspoken. She had me. I was immediately embarrassed to recognize that I’d long since lost track of the fine points from our morning’s conflict, but knowing I was as trapped as the captain of the doomed steamship, I welcomed her direct appeal to unbreakable bonds of affection. I’d never heard us say it before, but she was stating an immediately evident fact – we had tried to shape the course of our life together from a steady intention to grow in love and truth. She was offering us what the S.S. Tennessee could not find, a way forward.

I told her what remained from our conversation that morning, how I’d felt unheard and not taken seriously. She replied describing the scene I’d actually witnessed that morning – her very steady focus on all it took to get the picnic made and us out the door and in the car.

What generated the strain of that day was real bonds of affection we’d forged in the eight years before. I felt the painful bind with which wisdom and the force of my loving her cramped my self-righteousness. Like St. Paul in Acts (26:14) I was straining against the constraints of love. Real bonds of affection are like the muscles and sinews of our bodies, and like those living bonds, practicing relationship makes the bonds more flexible and effective through the strain of use.

Taking ‘bonds of affection’ seriously gives the lie to the old, neat distinction between agape and eros—Christian love and erotic love. Ellen was calling on our established practice of disciplined affection. Letting her touch me with that reminder validated our history together, good memories, and hopes we’d shaped over some years. Her demand rested in the delight in each other’s presence and voice and yes, in the flesh she knew I treasured. She was asking me to use the blessed, powerful bond we’d forged together to break the bind I’d created that morning. We needed to talk. She appealed to what we knew but had never declared before. This new phrase, "How we do it," refused to accept that there were any disagreements we couldn’t talk about.

I am grateful for every liberal and every conservative in our Anglican Communion who is saying now, "That’s not how we do it." With cliffs behind ahead of our ship, there’s no way forward in the righteous certainty than "I’m right" or "She’s wrong." Genuine bonds of affection demand what forged them, the commitment to keep talking, graceful conversation, through whatever conflict we face.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity, building community through music, and making liturgical architecture a win/win for building and congregation. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Jered Weber-Johnson

The Anglican Covenant Conference closed Saturday in New York City following two full days of intense discussion, deep analysis, and passionate exchange from a diverse range of perspectives, all related to the St. Andrew’s draft of the Anglican Covenant. What began Thursday evening, at the Desmond Tutu Conference Center with the provocative comments of the first keynote speaker, Archbishop Drexel Gomez (see Friday’s post), continued in the ensuing day and a half with presentations by lay and ordained representatives from several seminaries and Anglican bodies from across the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as a few representatives from organizations within the wider Anglican Communion (over 40 contributors in all). Within that diversity, a few similar themes were echoed in both the papers presented and the questions posed in response.

Not surprisingly, a few of the presented papers rejected the idea that a covenant was “necessary” in order for the communion to stay together, as asserted in the opening remarks of the conference by Archbishop Gomez. While rejecting this notion of necessity, there did emerge consistently a sense among speakers and responders alike that an Anglican Covenant was probable if not inevitable. Many of the comments thus assumed the character of advice, pointing toward what a beneficial covenant might include in, and excise from, its content in future drafts.

In his comments Friday afternoon, titled “The Covenant, the Quadrilateral, and Balance” the Reverend Dr. Robert Hughes, professor at School of Theology at the University of the South, argued that in its present draft the Anglican Covenant gives too little weight to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, a statement, he said, that has been used primarily for outlining what was essential to forming communion with our ecumenical partners. The current draft said Hughes “is both less and more than the Quadrilateral.”

Hughes claimed that it was ‘less’ because it deemphasized or undervalued the role of the sacraments and creeds as essential to communion. The current draft is ‘more’ than the Quadrilateral argued Hughes, by “placing sources of secondary authority, at best, on the same level as essentials, and thus burdening the free consciences of Christian people beyond what our reformed Catholic tradition allows.”

Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, addressed the conference from his paper “Whose Covenant? The Anglican Covenant, the People of God and History from Below”. He also echoed the sentiment that the current St. Andrew’s draft was lacking. Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s contention was that the ethos of the current draft and the whole process leading up to it seemed to reflect a top-down ecclesiology which emphasized the needs of the institutional Anglican Church to the detriment and neglect of the contextual needs of local churches.

Said Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, “If the drafters of the Anglican Covenant can come up with a way to frame the importance of this document for those people of God who experience the church ‘from below’ they will go a long way to making this text relevant to their lived contexts.”

In a similar vein, the second keynote speaker of the conference, Canon Dr. Jenny Te Paa, a member of the Lambeth Commission on Communion that produced the Windsor Report in 2004, addressed the concept of a potential Anglican Covenant from the perspective of indigenous peoples, the poor, women, and young people. Canon Te Paa found “the galvanizing of the entire leadership of the Anglican Communion into responding, into reacting in a very intentional, sustained and extraordinarily costly manner” to the issue of homosexuality to be troubling when compared with the disproportionate reaction of the same leadership to the reality of global poverty, war, and the abuse of the environment.

Te Paa went on to argue that it seemed to her that “institutionalized dominant male power has been and still is being exercised in an exceedingly unjust manner” particularly in placing the issue of sexuality over all other issues facing the church. Further, she argued that same power is being used to “concentrate precious communion wide resources in the form of people and money to advance a proposal which essentially, at least in its first draft, served to protect and enhance that same dominant male leadership.”

This, for Te Paa, was tantamount to “the establishment of hegemony”. She said “I am speaking here of the Primates Meeting”. Canon Te Paa noted that rather than being a communion-wide issue of paramount concern for the entirety of Anglicanism, the issue of sexuality, particularly homosexuality, is an issue of “potentially schismatic proportions” only for this small group of the powerful elite within the communion.

While Te Paa had been supportive of the concept of an Anglican Covenant in her time on the Lambeth Commission on Communion, she claimed that because of what she saw as a move toward hegemony among the Primates particularly in the process of creating a covenant, that in the end she had changed her original position.

“I believe the current Covenant proposal while not without much longer term potential merit is inevitably seriously negatively affected by all of this”, said Canon Te Paa. She continued, saying “it is becoming increasingly difficult for us ordinary Anglicans to take seriously even the very good rhetoric of Covenant when the very real reality of some very bad leadership behavior is still so pervasive, thus making the whole exercise so utterly contradictory and inexcusably, unjustifiably expensive.”

Ultimately, Te Paa argued that either a “moratorium” or a “slowing down” of the current Covenant process needed to occur, that input in that process needed to be intentionally sought among a broader diversity representative of the whole communion, that new avenues of reconciliation be explored outside the context of Covenant, and that ultimately there needed to be “an intentional focus upon reclaiming, re-strengthening and re-affirming the already existing and strongly regarded covenantally bound relationships that the majority of Anglicans already hold to with profound commitment and with unbreakable confidence.”

One of the primary responders from the floor of the conference to Te Paa’s remarks was Archbishop Gomez. He wished to respond to add a point of what he felt was necessary correction to Te Paa’s comments about the Primates alleged hegemony. Gomez categorically denied that there was any move toward consolidation of power by the Primates, and that any assertion to that end “is a lie” he said. Gomez further argued that so far the process of Covenant design has in fact been very inclusive, and, he said of Te Paa’s talk, “I don’t think you were fair in your account of the Primates.”

When asked if she would like to respond to Archbishop Gomez’s rebuttal, Canon Te Paa declined, thanked the conference, and went to sit with Gomez.

Picking up on a thread that had continued throughout the conference in several speakers’ comments about the relationship between mission and covenant, the Reverend Dr. Titus Presler, Sub-Dean of the General Theological Seminary, in his remarks Saturday, affirmed the potential benefit of a covenant to the shared mission of Anglicans wherever it sought to strengthen relationships and reconcile member churches.

However, he cautioned that wherever mission and unity “become matters of quasi-legal adjudication, especially across differences of culture and language, we may find ourselves not only crippling the affirmations and aspirations of a covenant, but sinning against the Holy Spirit, that Spirit who is the source and animator of the mission of God.”

For more about the conference and to read papers from all the speakers as they are posted, go to www.tutucenter.org.

Jered Weber-Johnson, a candidate for Holy Orders from the Diocese of Olympia, is a student at the General Theological Seminary.

By Jered Weber-Johnson

The Anglican Covenant Conference began last evening at the recently opened Desmond Tutu Center in New York City, with participants from across the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada as well as representatives from various bodies within the wider Anglican Communion. The General Theological Seminary convened this conference with the intent of engaging participants in dialogue and debate over the draft Anglican Covenant.

The format over the next day and a half includes panel presentations by theologians, scholars, and faculty from the several seminaries represented at the conference with responses by student panels. Each seminary was asked to select a faculty and student representative to send to the conference.

Interspersed between the panel discussions will be three keynote speakers. The first of these keynoters was last night, the Most Reverend Drexel Gomez, Archbishop and Primate of the West Indies and the Bishop of the Diocese of the Bahamas. Also on the schedule are Canon Dr. Jenny Te Paa, a member of the Lambeth Commission on Communion which produced the Windsor Report in 2004, as well as the Reverend Canon Gregory Cameron, Director of Ecumenical Affairs and Studies, and Deputy Secretary General in the Anglican Communion Office in London.

The question posed to the presenters and keynoters by the conference organizers was “Would an Anglican Covenant clarify Anglican identity and strengthen mutual interdependence? Or would it be a tool of exclusion and dominance?”

In his talk, “The Case for an Anglican Covenant”, Archbishop Gomez asserted that not only would it clarify Anglican identity, but, he further argued, “covenant is the only available mechanism” to keep us together as a communion.

The majority of Archbishop Gomez’s comments centered on the necessity and practicality of an Anglican Covenant, drawing heavily from Section C 119 of the Windsor Report, on Canon Law and Covenant.

Seeking to demonstrate prior precedent for covenanting in the history of Anglicanism, Gomez sited the Bonn Agreement of 1931 between Anglicans and the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht, noting that that particular covenant was brief due to the amount of trust by both parties entering into it.

Gomez argued, “brevity can only survive in a situation of complete trust. Where matters are disputed, the matters must be clarified.”

In his responding remarks, the Reverend Dr. Peter-Ben Smit, a priest in the Old Catholic Church and a student of the General Theological Seminary noted that rather, the tenor leading up to the Bonn Agreement was anything but trusting, and issues were far from resolved at the time of the agreement.

“Over seventy-five years of full communion, of which my presence here is a living example, show therefore that your premise that ‘where matters are disputed, the matters must be clarified’ holds not true”, said Smit.

Smit further noted that in lifting up the example of the Bonn Agreement, Gomez had not argued for a lengthy agreement such as the proposed covenant, but rather “for a short statement of fundamental agreement”.

John Lock, a seminarian from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry pointed out that he agreed with Gomez that an Anglican Covenant might be practical and necessary in troubled times such as these.

At the same time Lock argued, “we cannot achieve unity, the precious gift of the Spirit, merely on the grounds of Anglican polity.” Rather, “unity comes when” he continued, “we are reconciled to God and have peace with God, and as a result we can have peace and be reconciled to those who are redeemed in him.”

In perhaps the most pointed comment of the evening, Leonel Abaroa Boloña, a student at Trinity College, Toronto, stated that Archbishop Gomez had preached at the consecration of two bishops whose consecration was expressly for the purpose of pastoral care to Anglicans in America disaffected by the Episcopal Church’s stand toward homosexuality. Boloña argued that Gomez’s presence at the consecration, which took place in Kenya, seemed to be inconsistent with the stance of the Windsor Report and the Anglican Covenant, both of which Gomez played a part in producing and is expressly supportive of.

“I need consistency”, said Boloña, “and as the Primate of the West Indies and as a person who says he supports the Windsor Report, you are saying one thing and doing another.”
Gomez responded that his presence at the consecration was not as Primate, but as close friend of the two men being consecrated. He denied that his actions were in any way inconsistent with his words.

After the evening’s discussion the Reverend Dr. Ian Douglas reacted for Episcopal Café to the presentation and subsequent comments.

“I was quite impressed by the questions. People got right into it, and the questions people had were well researched.”

Noting the significance of the Anglican Covenant Conference: “I think it’s important to have substantial discussion, discussion that is considered and gracious, which surfaces valid and important differences. If we’re going to be genuine to the covenant process—these conversations are going to be necessary.”

For more information about the Anglican Covenant Conference, its keynote speakers and other presenters, and to look for papers as they are posted, go to www.tutucenter.org

Jered Weber-Johnson, a candidate for Holy Orders from the Diocese of Olympia, is a student at the General Theological Seminary.

By Howard Anderson

I was re-reading John Jewell’s Apology for the Church of England last night. Yes, I know, only a Church nerd would “re-read” something as ponderous as that. My seminarian daughter, Kesha, urged me to read it because she felt it was important. It isn’t exactly People magazine or even The Washington Post. But something struck me as I read his often turgid and convoluted arguments against the Roman Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome. He, as well as his student, Cranmer, and Hooker were the three individuals who put Jewell's thinking into a new formulation of reason, tradition and scripture; and that the Episcopal Church are another step in the Holy Spirit's guidance of the church councils.

Jewell was seen by many, especially the Roman Catholic Bishops in England, who argued vehemently in the House of Lords against Elizabeth’s “Settlement,” as merely another Protestant cleric. But in his defense of the Church of England he began to link the seeming opposites together. He was smitten by the sola scriptura (scripture only) focus of the Protestants, but was appalled by the Puritans who took things too far in throwing the Catholic baby out with the bath. His fixation on the primitive church, and their less hierarchical priesthood of all believers, reaching out to the world as a way of living into God’s reign, almost sounds like what the “emergent/emerging” church folk are writing and talking about these days. Of course it took a couple more centuries before our ecclesiology caught up with the ideal of the primitive or early church. But I think it has. And I admit that I, like Jewell, am enamored greatly by the early church, whose faults I candidly admit I have not explored as deeply as its enduring contributions to the Church today.

I remember sitting in a pub in Canterbury with several of the Cathedral Canons, and after the second pint, one said “You Americans need to get with the program and use the same polity as the rest of the Communion.” My response was something like, “Perhaps you forget, that there was a revolution in the colonies and I believe your side lost. And, as you tried to strangle the Episcopal Church baby in the cradle by withholding episcopal support, our friends, and your adversaries the Scots came to our aid.” I added, rather snidely I fear, “The Church of England and the whole Communion, will, within our children’s lifetime, adopt the Episcopal Church’s polity. My friends, if you think lay and ordained Episcopalians will give up their rights to vote on matters of import like electing their rectors and bishops, voting in General Convention and give them over to a bunch of bishops let alone primates, you are simply deluding yourselves!” Slurp, wipe the Guinness foam off my upper lip, “so there!”

This harkening back, I admit often with nostalgia dimming the realities of the primitive church, has always marked much of classical Anglican thinking. The polity we in the Episcopal Church have embraced, coming out of our revolutionary culture is truly an American intervention into the wonderful world of polity. It is a reform that does take a step forward in the evolution of a church that is thoroughly Catholic, yet embraces the reformation thinking. I always add that TEC is “the last catholic church left.” Note the small “c.” But I can say that God willing, anyone I baptize could become our Presiding Bishop. There is no automatic roadblock to anyone who has the gifts for serving TEC as an ordained or lay leader, like there is in other branches of churches in the Catholic tradition, and these roadblocks of exclusion exist even in the normally inclusive mainline Protestant denominations.

TEC is much maligned in some Anglican quarters these days. But mark my words, this reforming Catholic/catholic church of ours is doing a great thing in following the model of radical inclusion that I believe Jesus called the early Church to, and stills calls us into today. Living in the tension of being a both/and Church is not easy. We, like Jewell, look backward for inspiration and forward to a church ever more being called by God into a bright and unpredictable future. It never has been easy to live in this tension. It never will be. But as for me, I am proud of this Church of ours that dares to risk persecution and having all kinds of evil muttered against it falsely on account of following Jesus.

The Rev. Dr. Howard Anderson is Warden and President of the Cathedral College at Washington National Cathedral. He was a long time General Convention deputy and most importantly, is grandfather to a five year old theologian, Will.

By Steven Charleston

What do you know about Joseph Stalin? I ask that odd question because a momentary glance back to his era in the old Soviet Union gives us a useful image (or perhaps, the lack of one) to use in considering our situation in the Anglican Communion.

Stalin liked for people to disappear. Those he purged actually did vanish in a very real physical sense because he had them executed, but they also vanished from memory by being erased from public photographs.

This idea was nothing new. Egyptian pharaohs had been chiseling out the face of unpopular or discredited predecessors thousands of years before Joe Stalin took the hint. But by the age of mass media, the process had become more refined. Historic photographs that showed a line of leaders waving to the crowd were simply “doctored” by having the offending person erased. It worked very well, with only one small detail: it left an empty space in the photograph where someone used to be standing. In some instances this was hard to detect, but in many others, it was glaringly obvious. Like a kid who has lost a front tooth, the line up on the platform looked odd with one big empty space in the picket-fence perfection.

What’s wrong with this picture? That became a sort of joke for Soviet watchers. You could tell, literally, who was in and out in Soviet politics by seeing who disappeared from the official photographs. The doctrine of erasing history like this seems ridiculous, of course, but it continues to be practiced under the rubric, “out of sight/out of mind”.

Now please don’t make any quantum leaps of comparison between Stalinist Russia and the Anglican Communion, because that would be silly, but also please do think about this one, small, but important point: when the official photograph of the bishops at Lambeth is taken, will we notice the person who has been erased (in advance) from the picture?

And if we do, what does that tell us about the integrity of the institution that would do such a thing? I am not attempting to make any exaggerated points here beyond holding up an image of the assembled bishops and asking: “what’s wrong with this picture?” Someone is missing.

As Anglicans, we should be ashamed that Gene Robinson has been disappeared from Lambeth, but we should keep that image always before us as a reminder: if it can happen to one, it can happen to all and to any. Gene was erased for pure politics, nothing more. His disappearance was designed to keep power in the hands of the status quo. His absence makes us all anxious, embarrassed and uncertain. Are we more secure now that we pretend one of us doesn’t exist? Are we more credible before the masses? Have we fooled anyone out there who is watching? Not likely. We are no more successful at doing this than Joe Stalin or Ramses II. We make ourselves look like what we are: a vacant space where leadership ought to be.

At the very least, the rest of us who still get to smile for the camera should acknowledge that as we wave at the crowd.

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, former Bishop of Alaska, is president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School, and keeper of the podcasting blog EDS's Stepping Stones. A citizen of the Choctaw Nation, Bishop Charleston is widely recognized as a leading proponent for justice issues and for spiritual renewal in the church.

By L. Zoe Cole

During the day, I write ethical dilemmas that are used as part of a web-based simulation that teaches ethical decision-making skills. One of the things we teach is that more often than not ethical dilemmas are choices between competing goods rather than between right and wrong. The other thing we teach is that although there is often more than one "right" answer, some answers are better than others. Virtually everyone does in fact have a personal value system, although most can't articulate it and to the extent that we make "good" choices, we do so by accident rather than a reasoned and replicable process.

In popular debate, those arguing for the maintenance of traditional notions of morality often posit the "anything goes" straw man as the only alternative to tradition. However, to reject traditional notions of morality (which are often simply about maintaining the power and privilege of one group over another) is not to reject all notions of morality or the value of morality. It is simply to suggest that a different set of criteria or understanding of the same tools (e.g. different interpretation of the same Biblical texts) be used to determine what is moral, ethical and why some choices are better than others.

As Episcopalians, we are sometimes criticized for a dearth of "official theology," but we do have lots of information about how to make choices that are life-giving, or proclaim the Good News or spread the Kingdom - or however one describes the end results that are desirable for Christians. We have a catechism that tells us what sin and redemption are (sin is "the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people and with all creation" and redemption is "the act of God which sets us free from the power of evil, sin, and death" BCP p.848-849); we have Eucharistic prayers that tell the same story of creation, sin, judgment and redemption in different ways; the Easter Vigil which goes through the same history using various passages of Scripture; the baptismal covenant; the Prayers of the People—oh! and then there is Scripture itself!

All these provide tools for discerning whether one set of actions or values or politics is better than another. They also provide a common language, and, to the extent we take responsibility for learning, a shared teaching. Some choices are a matter of individual conscience, but if we are the Body of Christ, then we are not free to operate only from a position of individual choice. We have responsibilities as members of the Body to fulfill the vocations given to us. I am an elected deputy to General Convention and therefore have a responsibility to consider what common choices and commitments are appropriate and/or necessary for this part of the Church (The Episcopal Church) to do the work God has given us to do (as distinct from the Church of England or the Anglican Church of Nigeria), as the Church (as distinct from what I am called as an individual to do).

Some complain that the fact that different members of the Church come to different conclusions using the same tools means that we have no standard or shared language by which to justify one practice over another - in fact, we use similar standards and shared language all the time, we just don't use it to justify the same practices. The fact that we understand these tools to point toward different decisions for different people at different times does not leave us to the "arbitrary rule of the majority," whatever that means. Presumably those who complain of such a standard are making some distinction between the way we currently make collective decisions and the way other Christians do or did in the past. Are those decisions somehow less arbitrary or less the will of the majority?

Although I hope TEC lives out the Church’s vocation to be prophetic, and know that some congregations are profoundly and transformatively so, my guess is that in reality we are no more nor less prophetic overall than any other group of Christians. I think the only thing we can be is true to our own experience, even when, or perhaps especially when, that experience is not the same as others. I suspect based on what I read and hear from both the conservative and liberal sides that many see the parallels between our current religious debates and problems and Jesus' criticisms of the religious leaders of his own day. For those who are called to live in the light, we still spend a lot of time in darkness of our own making.

Some complain that we merely mirror a liberal American culture in our insistence on full inclusion of all God’s children, regardless of gender, race, ability/disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. They argue either that these values are not intrinsic to the Gospel, or perhaps that our adoption of them is not theological, but a mere acquiescence in the questionable values of American liberalism or post-modernism (that dreaded and maligned antithesis of “orthodoxy” and traditionalism). While the claims are often over-inflated, the essential question is legitimate: we have no business as the Church in simply mirroring culture, even where cultural values are consistent with the Gospel. But often the claims themselves are not understood as a call to theological integrity, but simply reveal the critics as feeling out of sync with both the actions of General Convention and their experience of contemporary society.

I am frequently inspired by the thoughtfulness and learning of my sisters and brothers in Christ, especially my fellow deputies, in their approach to the issues facing the Church. They inspire me to work against my personal shortcoming of too often seeing those who disagree with me as taking unreflective positions. Often I find myself and witness others being pleasantly surprised by shared understandings among those of different theo-political positions. Therefore, what I experience as true of those with whom I find myself in alignment, I assume is true of those with whom I do not find myself in alignment: we are all seeking to serve the same God and we accept the responsibility as leaders to discern the will of God for the community, as well as for our individual lives; and even though we won't always get it right, we trust that God is working with us to accomplish God's purpose.

In the end I can trust God even in the face of the differences of others and my own fallibility because I know that (as former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said): when we chose wisely, God reigns; when we chose foolishly, God reigns.

L. Zoe Cole is a lay member of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Denver, CO and active in the Diocese of Colorado. Currently, she is a part-time municipal court judge and a full-time writer for EthicsGame.com, producer of web-based ethical decision making tools and training materials.

By Frederick Quinn

“To win the New Asia for Christ” was a widely employed missionary concept in the immediate World War II years. But half a century later less than two to five per cent of Asia is Christian. The number is still lower if the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines is excluded from the count. Having spent time recently in Myanmar, Indonesia, Singapore (as a tourist), and the Philippines (as a lecturer), and after talking with laity and clergy of different denominations, several observations come to mind:

1.) Asia has become a world-class exporter of theology. With the plateauing of major German and English language theological writers, names like the Sri Lankan Catholic Aloysius Pieris, the Taiwanese Protestant C. S. Song, and the New Zealand Anglican, Jenny Te Paa, have gained global recognition for their different contributions.

Pieris for linking the social-economic emphasis of Latin American Liberation theologians with Asia’s poor, whom he contends must be the center of any missionary effort.

Song as a leader in the widespread contextual theology movement that allows individuals and communities to tell their deeply meaningful stories with religious implications, relate them to the life and teachings of Jesus, and from the ground up build theologies derived from them.

Te Paa as a respected voice in the global Anglican Communion. Her bridging of Maori and white New Zealand cultures and their complex race relations serves as a model for similar efforts elsewhere.

2.) Hunger for contact with Western churches is widespread. Priests and laity often shared details of their lives in long and heartfelt detail. An Episcopal Church “Fulbright Program” would have real benefits. While many American parishes, dioceses, and seminaries already have such exchange programs with overseas partners, they could be greatly increased as a way of promoting wider understanding.

3.) On the one occasion when the subject came up, there was real interest in and support for ordaining women and persons of single sex orientation to ministry and episcopacy. Ex: before discussing these issues with a group Asian church leaders, I spent the previous evening rereading To Set Our Hope on Christ, the Episcopal Church’s much-neglected but comprehensive response to the Windsor Report. I expected questions about the biblical justification for such ordinations, but none were forthcoming. Instead, participants (about half women and half men) wanted to hear details of the Episcopal Church’s half-century struggle toward fuller acceptance of women and gays and lesbians as children of God and ministers of the church.

4.) Asians note that Asia’s major religions were long established centuries before Christianity and Islam arrived. As for the latter, one class in the Philippines described numerous cooperative efforts at the local level, such as jointly sponsored primary schools, credit unions, medical clinics, agricultural cooperatives, etc. Following a period of warfare in the southern Philippines, local Roman Catholic bishops and Muslim leaders created a Bishops-Ulama council that meets four times a year.

5.) After witnessing the vitality and diversity of religious expressions in Asia, the Global South Anglican advocacy group’s claims to be representative voices of this vast segment of the developing world appear increasingly thin.

6.) Nor does the oft-invoked North/South divide hold up under scrutiny. Instead, a careful look at different countries reveals multiple social, ethnic, and religious groups defying easy generalization. The observation of Pakistan-born Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence is apt here that such simplistic generalizations reflect “extraordinary descriptive crudeness and historical innocence. Many of the significant diversities within each civilization are effectively ignored, and interactions between them are substantially overlooked.”

7.) Many deeply devout Asian Christians accept the idea that other valid paths to salvation are represented in the different religions around them. Ex: a leading Indian Christian, Rammon Panikkar, wrote metaphorically of his own religious experience, “I ‘left’ as a Christian, I ‘found’ myself a Hindu, and I ‘return’ a Buddhist, without ever having ceased to be a Christian.” Panikkar is a deeply devout Roman Catholic who over a half century has come to appreciate and use elements of the prayer life and wisdom of other religious traditions. Asian religious pluralism is grounded less in doctrine and more in experience. This includes sustained encounters with other religions, building trust among faith communities, and accepting the different histories and contexts from which they emerge. “We are right side of the brain people,” I was often reminded.

A leading voice in the Asian-American religious encounter, Peter Phan, is a Vietnamese priest who teaches world religions at Georgetown University. Recently he wrote in Being Religious Interreligiously, Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue, “It is useful to recall that Jesus did not and could not reveal everything to his disciples and that it is the Holy Spirit who will lead them to ‘the complete truth’. It is quite possible that the Holy Spirit will lead the church to the complete truth by means of a dialogue with other religions in which the Spirit is actively present.”

Asia has moved to a new place religiously during the last half-century. New theological voices are emerging, as compelling as their European and American predecessors. It is not a fading West/ Rising East scenario, but one of Westerners broadening their study of and respect for the riches of Asian religions. Rooted deeply in tradition, yet adapted to local settings, Asian Christians seek a wider understanding of the life and ministry of Jesus and a broader exploration of the central concept of the Reign of God.

Focusing on current controversies in the Anglican Communion distorts the wider possibilities of such a potentially rich religious encounter, one that can benefit all participants.

The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn is a former chaplain at Washington National Cathedral, a retired Foreign Service Officer, and the author of numerous books on law, history, and religion. His most recent work is The Sum of All Heresies, the Image of Islam in Western Thought (Oxford University Press).

By Marshall Scott

As was recently reported in The Lead, a new "Anglican Catechism in Outline" (ACIO) has been published. It is a part of " The Interim Report of the Global South Anglican (GSA) Theological Formation and Education Task Force" In addition to ACIO (contained in a section titled, “Key Recommendations”), the Interim Report includes a section of Commentary, several Illustrations of catechesis in Global South settings, and two brief Appendices.

I've been spending some time reviewing ACIO and the Interim Report. I have been surprised that more people haven't looked at it and commented on it. I suppose some might wonder why we should care. After all, it's from "those folks" in the Global South. What, after all, can we expect from them?

But that sounds all too much like, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" I think we do need to take an interest in this, and to look at it closely.

First, notwithstanding their discomfort with us, "those folks" are still our siblings in Christ and in the Anglican Communion. Indeed, the Task Force expressed the intent to produce a document "for the whole communion," one not caught up in current issues. By the same token we in the Episcopal Church have said again and again that we want to maintain conversations across the communion. We have continued to say that in all humility we can learn from them. One way showing that we mean it, of meeting their good faith with our good faith, is to read and reflect on documents like this Interim Report.

I will also allow that in our current difficulties we need to know the concerns of those with whom we disagree. ACIO and the process by which it has been developed have been endorsed by the Steering Committee of the Global South Primates. A final report is to be released this year, and ACIO may well be an influential document at GAFCON. While they are not our enemies, we might well "keep our friends close and our critics closer." So, once again, it is well worth it to take an interest in documents like the Interim Report.

Moving from general principles to specifics, this Interim Report has much to commend it. The Anglican Catechism in Outline itself is worth our time and interest. The Task Force decided not to produce a complete Catechism, and instead chose to produce a "catechetical framework," adaptable to many contexts.

What ACIO offers is the framework, no less and no more. The catechesis embodies the faith the church has received from Christ’s apostles (1 Corinthians 15:1-2). This deposit of faith is the foundation upon which the church upholds right teaching and right worship under different circumstances in all places and in all generations....

At the same time, communicating Christianity well requires sensitive understanding of the particular missionary situations. Provinces are in better positions to attend to such tasks. Provinces should also make every effort to understand the social contexts of their mission. They should teach the Christian faith in creative ways.... Therefore different provinces should find suitable ways to implement the recommendations.

Organized under the categories of Faith, Hope, and Love, and incorporating expositions of the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, the Summary of the Law, and the Ten Commandments, the framework is worth study as to how it might inform and complement our existing catechetical efforts.

In addition, I think the Illustrations are worth our time and attention. Having said that we want to maintain conversation, these Illustrations can offer us concrete examples of specific catechetical programs. More important, they can offer us better understanding of the contexts for those programs, and the challenges our Anglican siblings face. We value from the Quadrilateral, "The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church." We value it as much for that phrase, "locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples," as we do for the concept of the Historic Episcopate itself; and we are sometimes concerned that there is not enough respect for our own locale and our local adaptations. It is incumbent on us to understand these locales of our sibling Anglicans. Studying these Illustrations can only help.

That said, there are also those specifics within the Interim Report that I, at least, think are problematic. The three papers in the Commentary section are not the products of scholars from the Global South, but rather of scholars of the "Global North" who are sympathetic. The topics of the papers are Holy Scripture, the Creeds, and the Anglican Formularies. All are distinctily evangelical in their orientation. The paper on the Creeds by Bishop Paul Barnet, retired of Sydney, is distinctly Evangelical, but not notably partisan about our current differences. On the other hand, the paper on the Holy Scriptures by Professor Oliver O'Donovan of the University of Edinburgh takes a position on Scripture that is explicitly inerrantist and implicitly literalist. The paper on the Anglican Forumlaries by Peter Toon, President of the Prayer Book Society of the U.S.A, is less informative than polemic, so philosophically focused on the particular experience of the Church of England in Empire and Commonwealth as to largely ignore any real "local adaptation" and to imagine the experience of the Episcopal Church as literally "beyond the rim."

These commentaries are not explicitly part of ACIO, and arguably do not necessarily detract from its usefulness. At the same time, these papers were included by the Task Force in the Interim Report. They were obviously acceptable to the Task Force. If they were seen as important in interpreting and adapting the "catechetical framework," I think they would seriously undermine its usefulness across the Communion. It will be important to note how those who celebrate ACIO specifically also respond to these papers. Those attitudes will certainly affect the climate within which we might still seek conversation and mutual recognition across our differences.

In our desire to embrace and celebrate a Communion that is theologically and culturally diverse and inclusive, we need to be attentive to and thoughtful about ACIO and the Interim Report, and about similar scholarly efforts from those with whom we disagree. At least we will know what our critics say, and can decide how to respond. At best we will demonstrate our own commitment to a diverse and inclusive Communion, and our humility and willingness to learn from those at times seem so distant and so different as to become for us "those folks." They are still our siblings in Christ and in the Anglican Communion. It is important for us to listen to and learn from their best efforts as much as their harshest words.

The Rev. Marshall Scott is a chaplain in the Saint Luke’s Health System, a ministry of the Diocese of West Missouri. A past president of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains, and an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, he keeps the blog Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside.

By Lauren R. Stanley

RENK, Sudan – We gathered in church this week to talk about forgiveness, a good topic to tackle on the last Sunday of Lent.

Far too often, when we talk about forgiveness, that’s all we do: talk. It’s usually nothing more an intellectual exercise for us, because heaven forefend that we should seek forgiveness for the wrongs we have done, heaven forefend that we should forgive those who have wronged us.

But in Sudan, a land that has been at war for most of the past five decades, forgiveness is a much more immediate issue. This is a place where religious, tribal, ethnic, language and gender differences have resulted in the deaths of millions of people. This is a place where land has been taken, families have been split, livelihoods have been destroyed.

Talking about forgiveness here is all the more poignant because everywhere you turn, there are reminders of the wars, reminders of the deaths, reminders of the devastation that has sundered this land.

On this past Sunday, our preacher at the Cathedral of St. Matthew was The Very Rev. Martha Deng Nhial, possibly one of the first African women to become a cathedral dean in the Anglican Communion.

Using texts from Luke on forgiveness and Matthew on temptation (“lectionary” frequently is a loosely followed word here), Mother Martha got right to the point:

We have to forgive, she said, because Jesus said so. If we don’t forgive those who have wronged us, she stressed, why should God bother to forgive us?

And then she brought in the devil.

The devil, she said, doesn’t want us to forgive. So the devil instead comes into our lives and tells us that we don’t have to forgive, because the other person isn’t forgiving us.

“The devil is not far from us,” she said. “He will be with you, eat with you, sit with you all the time. And because the devil is right there in our lives, we don’t forgive.”

Forgiveness – with all its attendant difficulties – is a very personal, absolutely urgent issue here. Every single Sudanese sitting in the Cathedral on Sunday has lost family members in one or more of the wars that have plagued this land. A culture of hatred has grown up over the last several generations, hatred between North and South, East and West, between the tribes, between the different religions. It almost seems ingrained some days.

Asking people to forgive those who have killed their families and friends, or who have denied them jobs or education, or who have striven to keep them from simply enjoying a life of peace and prosperity is hard, very hard.

Forgiveness in this place is not some intellectual exercise; it’s reality. It’s a daily need. Mother Martha wasn’t discussing some esoteric theological point; she was directly telling the people in her care to work at something some of them don’t want to even consider.

But in this place, a place of war and death and destruction, forgiveness is the only thing that will save this land. True forgiveness – the kind that hurts, the kind that stretches you beyond anything you’ve ever conceived – is the only thing that will heal this land.

So on the last Sunday of Lent, preparing ourselves to go into Holy Week – where forgiveness was modeled for us in the most memorable way possible – talking about forgiveness was real, poignant and necessary.

If the people take to heart that which Mother Martha preached, there is a chance that one day, Sudan will be healed. But only if the people start by forgiving.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Liturgy and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

By George Clifford

In private conversations, Episcopal Church (TEC) leaders from various dioceses, both lay and clerical, tell me that two important reasons for lawsuits to retain title to the property of parishes and dioceses that wish to disaffiliate with TEC are fairness to the remnant that remains faithful to TEC and to deter other parishes from leaving. At first blush, those rationales may appear to justify TEC filing the lawsuits. However, neither rationale withstands careful scrutiny from a Christian perspective.

Quite simply, Christianity is about grace and love. For we who seek to follow Jesus, grace should take precedence over law. TEC operates through democratic processes. When a majority of a parish (or a diocese) votes to leave TEC, those who leave should recognize that the property belongs to TEC and, if they wish to have the property, offer to purchase it at fair market value. However, if those who wish to leave insist on keeping the property, grace demands that we accept that selfish decision rather than holding to the letter of the law. Although TEC may likely prevail in the courts, it will have further alienated the disaffected, turned its focus away from the gospel imperative, and wasted precious resources on an issue that is ultimately of little importance for God's business.

This choice may seem unfair to the minority who wish to remain with TEC but is gracious towards the larger number that decided to leave as well as to those whom God's love will touch because of TEC’s focus and resources invested in mission rather than legal actions. For example, the Diocese of Virginia has probably expended more than $1 million in lawsuits to retain the property of a number of parishes that recently voted to leave. The Diocese recently obtained a $2 million line of credit to further finance those suits. Although $30 million to $40 million of property is at stake, for those $3 million, and the countless hours of time the suits will require from bishops, priests, and laity, the Diocese of Virginia could fund several new missions to meet the needs of those who wish to remain and others. Successfully retaining large buildings for small congregations by winning the suits will burden those congregations with excessive overhead and probably instill a maintenance rather than missionary orientation.

Love between consenting adults does not seek to manipulate by using incentives or disincentives. Love wants what is best for the other, a choice that only the other can make. In human relationships, the unrequited lover who genuinely loves will sadly but freely permit his/her beloved to choose another. The same standard should apply to the community of God's people known as TEC.

Individuals who vote to separate from TEC are consenting adults. By so voting, they spurn TEC’s love for them. TEC may not have always communicated its love for those who vote to separate with sufficient ardor, frequency, or effectiveness. TEC may have failed to provide those who vote to separate with a leader or leaders committed to TEC’s vision of God's inclusive love. Representatives from other Churches in the Anglican Communion may have mischaracterized recent events within TEC or the Communion, seeking to fragment TEC. These representatives may have funded or employed manipulative tactics to encourage votes for disaffiliation. None of that diminishes the demand of our Baptismal Covenant in the Book of Common Prayer to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

Individuals, parishes, and dioceses that choose to leave TEC further fracture the Church’s already badly broken unity. Departures spiritually weaken TEC, leaving us bereft of the unique gifts and contributions that those who depart bring to the Church. After all, people, not physical plants or financial funds, are the Church’s most important resource.

Nevertheless, departures are not without precedent. The most notable Anglican precedent was the excommunication of the Church of England by the Church of Rome. Although this departure was not voluntary, the English knew that failing to alter their course would most likely force the Pope to act. King Henry seized excommunication as an opportunity to expropriate church property, disestablish monasteries, etc. Reform-minded clergy similarly saw a window of opportunity to make what they perceived as badly needed changes to liturgy and canon law. Following the American Revolution, Anglicans in the United States had to choose between swearing allegiance to the British crown and becoming U.S. citizens. If some had not chosen the latter course, TEC would probably not exist. Those who chose to depart from the Church of England took title to the Church’s property in the U.S. without paying compensation to the Church of England.

Anglicans from other provinces who have crossed jurisdictional lines to organize missions, receive parishes, or ordain clergy in the United States have certainly violated existing Anglican Communion structure and protocols. As much as I find such activities reprehensible, those activities do not result in those provinces or individuals losing their identity as members of the Anglican Communion. Likewise, those who leave TEC when accepted by a non-TEC diocese or another province do not cease to be either Christian or members of the Anglican Communion.

Establishing procedures for an orderly transfer of property and funds when a TEC parish or diocese votes to affiliate with another constituent member of the Anglican Communion and refuses to honor TEC’s right to the property will represent a costly gift of love. That gracious gift, whether it costs tens of thousands of tens of millions of dollars, honors and respects the dignity of those who have chosen to depart. That gift also emulates God's great gift of love in Jesus, a gift given in the full knowledge that it would be costly.

Sometimes, an unrequited lover’s beloved will desire, in retrospect, the gift of love that he or she earlier spurned. If that should happen among those who have chosen to depart from TEC, or who may do so in the future, then TEC’s gracious love in allowing them to go may inspire hope of a warm homecoming à la the parable of the prodigal son. To let go reluctantly and unwillingly of the beloved who spurns our love unintentionally sends the opposite message. God calls us to value persons, not property. Those leaving TEC should go with God's blessing and ours, albeit a blessing given with tears of sadness. We who remain must remain faithful to our calling and understanding of God's Word, treating all persons – members of TEC and others – with the dignity and respect due a child of God.

The Rev. George Clifford, Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years, with tours at sea, with the Marine Corps, on the staff of the Chief of Chaplains, on exchange with the Royal Navy in London, as the senior Protestant chaplain at the Naval Academy, and as the senior chaplain at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The Cafe welcomes several new contributors this month, including Adrian Worsfold (known online as Pluralist), who offers a view from England.

By Adrian Worsfold

I am an independent-minded Anglican at the northern edge of the Canterbury province before the land becomes, over the River Humber, part of the province of York. In this part of England, which is a notorious area for low percentage churchgoing, I'd say that at the very best five per cent of the population enter all churches of all denominations.

It is such a different scene in the United Kingdom from the United States. The only real growth in churchgoing in this country is in London among black immigrant-based independent churches. There is also the result of Poland entering the European Union and perhaps some one million Poles coming more or less all at once into the United Kingdom, many of whom go to Catholic churches for communal reasons - rather a similar dynamic to background reasons for much churchgoing in the United States. This is not the dynamic of churchgoing in the UK, where people are generally not clubable and remain reserved, and who retain large areas of personal space around themselves as individuals.

My own background is religiously mixed. Without going into detail I was raised without any church upbringing, became confirmed at a university chaplaincy into the Church of England, but have had serious Unitarian (now exhausted) and Anglican involvement since. As well as this I have had intentional contact with Bahais, Western Buddhists and the liberal end of the Independent Sacramental Movement. So you know where I am coming from.

I suppose there are around a dozen people in my local congregation of approaching a hundred that I know about who show a regular knowledge and interest in wider Anglican affairs. I do because there has always been for me an issue in the local church and the wider church. I am happy with the local church but there are increasing problems with the ethical basis of the wider Church. This is the only reason why I write about it.

This is an age of increasing specialisation, as only a minority are committed to any sort of church life. Yet the Anglican Church is based on being generalist. The problem is that as we specialise our interests, and become more selective in what we do, the Anglican Church and indeed every broad historic denomination simply covers too wide a spectrum. While doing research for my doctorate, I interviewed three Christian ministers. There was a traditionalist Catholic Anglican, a strong evangelical Anglican and a liberal Methodist. On every issue they sometimes took completely opposing positions. With this and other research I concluded in 1989 that the old denominations were increasingly meaningless, and new ones were emerging inside the old. So only old institutional habits and some fashions and understandings of spirituality, and a lot of localism, will keep the old institutions going. This may be still be considerable, but it comes with an increasing number of speciality Christian labels, and many of these identities struggling to clarify, specialise and even break free. The party system in the Church of England hardly helps.

Then in 1993 the Church of England ordained women, and it broke the back of its Catholic party. The traditionalist Catholics have either left or become marginalised. The Catholics that are left are either sacramentally inclined liberals or are critical Catholics who are mistaken for liberals. What was a stable triad of Catholics, Evangelicals and Broad (or Liberals) has become an unstable dyad of Evangelicals versus liberals. However, the Evangelicals are themselves too broad. One lot of them cannot compromise with liberals or, increasingly, anyone else, and the other lot can. In this age of specialisation, they have to split. This split comes before any straight fight between Evangelicals and Liberals.

This is what the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) is all about. Via the presenting issue of homosexuality, they are organising a split from other Evangelicals. They want other evangelicals marginalised. What they will end up doing is marginalising themselves. At the moment there is a transient alliance of the dogmatic - marginalised extreme Catholics and extreme Evangelicals. It won't last, and like the Catholics before them, the Evangelicals in all their intensity must divide. It is quite painful for the compromising Evangelicals.

The result is a trimmed yet still broad Church. Some of the more intense liberal groups have shown the same tendency to divide between liberals and radicals. However, liberals have long put up with not getting what they want, and some have had an ethic of bringing others together. In England the Broad Church group contained, historically, compromisers and centralisers as well as radicals (those who sympathised with Unitarians, for example). That the Catholics and Evangelicals have split first and second may give comparative strength to the liberals and not lead to them splitting too. Also, the looser arrangement of liberals and their view of authority is more flexible about difference.

The core GAFCON body is basically an alliance of extreme Reformation Evangelicals, insigniicant in themselves, but allied with an up-and-coming Christianity made from a toxic mixture of out-of-colonialism religion with those literalist biblical words that reflect the kind of magical and crisis-ridden supernaturally haunted world they recognise.

My view is that each main Church should protect the integrity of the institution that the GAFCON people are attacking and will attack. It will be part of its existence to raid and to steal, should it be successful in setting up parallel but dogmatic Anglicanesque institutions. In the United Kingdom they will seek to redistribute Anglicans towards its leadership. However, there is a kind of inevitability about the breakaway, and they should be allowed to go. The attempt to centralise, to copy its agenda (as in the Advent Letter of 2007), to compromise with them, via this Covenant, is completely misconceived. Let those people go: producing another, smaller continuing Anglicanesque speciality as the main bodies trim themselves from their dogmatic extremities.

Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist) has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.

By Heidi Shott

In 1979 a small island in the Southern Caribbean made a bold move by designating the real estate between the high tide mark and 200 feet below the surface a national marine park. Rules require dive boats to use moorings instead of reef-damaging anchors and make illegal spearfishing and the use of diving gloves, lest divers be tempted to touch vulnerable coralheads.

Nearly 30 years later Bonaire, one of six islands that comprise the Netherlands Antilles, has done more to preserve the complex ecosystem of the coral reef and the variety and abundance of fish life than anywhere else in the Caribbean. Not only have the Bonairians preserved their natural resource, but they have also ensured steady economic growth by drawing divers to their pristine underwater park year after year. My family has returned to dive off the island ten times over the last 15 years. We’re in a rut, but it’s an awfully nice rut and very affordable once you get there.

Diving is something my husband Scott and I have shared throughout our life together. The thrill of seeing a sea turtle or a eagle ray or to swim in the midst of a huge, flock-like school of silversides or to have dolphins frolic along side our boat, binds us in a way that is hard to explain. Scott learned to dive at 14 in the mid-seventies in the murky lakes and frigid quarries of West Virginia. I learned in 1985 in the tropical waters off the Micronesian island of Saipan when we were first married and teachers at the island parochial school.

During our most recent trip in January, our twin 14 year-old sons learned to dive. Finally we could dive together as a family. We spent two weeks diving, reading, playing scrabble and gin rummy, and watching the sun set from our porch with boat drinks and snacks – no phone, no email, no computer games, no TV, no diocesan or hospital emergencies that required our response. When we awoke in the morning, the drill was not the mad morning rush to school and work but to drink some tea with a slice of toast, gather our gear bags, squeeze into the bottom half of our wetsuits, and make our way down the dock to the happy camaraderie of the dive boat. “So where we goin’ this morning?” the day’s dive leader would ask.

“Salt Pier!”

“La Dania’s Leap!”

“Carl’s Hill!”

“Anywhere, it’s all good!”

Under the Caribbean sun we would arrive at the dive site and hoist our air tanks onto our backs, the acrid smell of hot neoprene in our noses. How delicious to let the weight of the gear flip us backwards off the side of the boat into the cool ocean.

As a diver, one skill I’ve paid close attention to over the years is controlling my buoyancy. I’ve learned to rise and fall in the water by gauging the amount of air in my lungs and to control my pitch and yawl by the flick of a fin or the twitch of a hand in the water. I’m not an expert – I don’t dive enough for that – but after a dive or two the fluency comes back. By maintaining neutral buoyancy a diver can get close to things…really close. This is important because so much of what goes on in your average coral reef neighborhood is tiny and complicated and if you want to get a sense of the intricacies of life on the reef, you need to be as close and as still as possible.

What an honor to be a visitor to this little corner of creation. It takes hundreds of years for the coral reef to grow: one generation of a hundred of species of coral dies to form a minute layer over the great exoskeleton of the reef, a millimeter at a time. One of my favorite things to do, and I taught my sons to do it as well, is to kick back from the reef into the deep water and pause to take in the whole wide expanse of the scene. We’re looking at part of creation that was in this very place doing its silent, magnificent thing at the same time Henry VIII was beginning to grow a teensy bit dissatisfied with Catherine of Aragon, when our boys were shooting themselves to bits at Second Bull Run, and when my grandfather was in the trenches faraway in France. For millennia tiny blue-lipped blennies have bravely defended their two inches of territory, orange frogfish have extended their deceptive lures, the spectacular and shy spotted drum has swum in and out of the hollows of brain coral…over and over and over again. For the past 60 years, since M. Cousteau and his friends figured out how to breath underwater, we humans have been privileged to observe this world for up to 75 minutes at a time.

Last month, on the day before we were to fly home and resume our life in Maine, I jumped off the dock with my fins, mask and snorkel. We’d made our last dive earlier in the day and were now allowing all the dissolved nitrogen built up in our blood to dissipate before we flew." (Getting the bends in an airplane is a seriously dumb, seriously dangerous rookiesque thing to do.) Before long, I was swimming 30 feet above the terrain I’d dived inches from a half dozen times in the past two weeks. From the surface I recognized certain distinctive coral heads, a large prickly West Indian Sea Egg, brilliant purple stovepipe sponges and delicate, translucent vase sponges, five different species each of parrotfish, angelfish, damselfish, and butterflyfish, and little groupers called Rock Hinds. I recognized them from 30 feet above only because I already knew them intimately from close at hand. Fish we don’t recognize at depth, we study in our fish books when we surface so we will know them the next time. Divers sport the geeky enthusiasm of birders, we just don’t often talk about it in public.

As I paddled around in the gorgeous turquoise, warmer than our mill pond ever gets at mid-summer, I started to finger this essay in my mind. Out of habit and propensity, I often contrast whatever situation I’m find myself in to the state of the Episcopal Church or the nuttiness of trying to live like a Christian in this complicated world. It’s an annoying habit and I’ve tried unsuccessfully to break it. I’ve compromised by only writing about one in five ideas that wash over me. Still, what I was thinking was something like this: If one part of God’s glorious creation - such as the ecosystem of the tropical coral reef – is so amazingly complex and fragile, doesn’t it follow that other parts of creation – the family, the congregation, the diocese, the Church, the Communion – each would be just as complex. Think of how nuanced and complicated the life of any congregation or diocese is. Yet, if we’re on the outside, how easy it is, with a little bit of distant observation, to feel we have captured the nut of a place in the palm of our hands.

As a diver at depth, so careful with my breathing to remain close but not intrusive amid the life and death action of the reef, I can observe a world that I don’t belong to. I can learn a lot, but I’ll never be a fish. I’ll never know what causes the Pederson’s Cleaning Shrimp to climb onto that particular anemone. As a snorkler 30 feet above, I can see the bigger coral heads and the bigger fish, but I’ll never see the two-inch blenny defending his little home in the crack before darting back to safety or the baby spotted moray eel poking its head and mouth full of teeth from a burrow.

But my inability to really, really know doesn’t stop me from pretending I know the undersea world. In his song, “Laughter,” Bruce Cockburn sang, “A laugh for the dogs barking at our heels, they don’t know where we’ve been. A laugh for the dirty window panes, hiding the love within.” I’ve always loved that line because he calls us on how willing we are to be dismissive of people with whom we don’t agree or with whom we have little in common. We’re especially good at that in the Church.

I don’t know how to change that, but scuba diving provides some good lessons: control your breathing, be still, watch carefully, and, for God’s sweet sake, don’t open your mouth.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is also communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Kit Carlson

I don't care. I know I should. I know all the very, very, very, very important reasons why I should care about the proposed Anglican Covenant, the upcoming Lambeth meeting, the "anti-Lambeth" gathering in the Middle East, and all the machinations, argumentations, proselytizations, and disputations surrounding all of it. I know that it matters. It does. I know I could wake up in a year or two and find my beloved Episcopal Church on trial in some ecclesiastical, international tribunal that emerged seemingly overnight at the urging of a few fearful and angry Anglicans. I know, in my head, that it is serious business for the future of the Anglican Communion, how we relate to one another, and how we wield power over, or power with, one another.

Still, you know what? I'm tired of it. I'm tired of it, and I'm bored of it, and I am ready to move on.

I just don't care.

Here is what I do care about: I care about the very real people in my very real parish who show up faithfully, week after week, to receive the sacraments, to hear the Word of God, and to laugh and cry and support each other as they walk through life together.

I care about their spiritual health, their physical health, their mental health. I care about their dying dogs and their wandering children. I care about their cancer scares, their cancer cures and their cancer deaths. I care about their doubts and fears, their debates with God, their insights into some fresh word of Scripture. I care about their ability to be in healthy relationships. (And I don't care whether those relationships are straight or gay, as long as they are healthy.)

I care about my parish as a whole. I care about its ability to welcome the stranger, to serve the needy, to pray and to grow, to be a good steward of all its blessings, from building to staff to children in the nursery. I care about its future. I want it to grow and thrive for the next fifty years and more, and to become such a force for good, such a blessing to our community, that East Lansing would be bereft if it were suddenly to vanish.

I care about my bishop and my diocese. I care about the Episcopal Church. And I do very much care about the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Communion has blessed my life in uncountable ways, because my home church in Maryland is filled with people from all over that Communion, people who moved to the Washington area to live and work and to worship in the Anglican tradition. My world has been expanded because I have lived in community with Nigerians, Ghanaians, Bahamians, Chinese, Indians and Canadians. My vision of God's Kingdom has been broadened by seeing all sorts of God's children from all over the world come to the altar rail, week after week.

And I understand that a flawed and failed Covenant could put that at risk.

However.

I still don't care. Because I believe that, as the old hymn says, "the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind," and that what is good and true and Godly ... in my parish, in my diocese, in my beloved Church of Our Saviour in Hillandale, Maryland, is stronger than the division, confusion and darkness flying around out there in the rest of the Anglican Communion.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. In 2003, she played the apostle Paul on the world's first internet reality series, The Ark, a project of the Christian humor website Ship of Fools.

By Lauren R. Stanley

Sitting in a meeting recently, discussing issues relating to the great sexuality debate, I heard the old bugaboo raised once again:

“Please don’t do this,” one person said. “It will cause problems with the Anglican Communion.”

And there it was: the great “Anglican Communion,” brought into a discussion as though it were some giant standing right outside the room, ready to stomp us and gobble us up like Godzilla in those Japanese films of old.

Which is about the time I lost it. The aggravation caused by invoking the “Anglican Communion” was too much.

You see, I live, as often as is possible, in that Anglican Communion, and for me, it is not some amorphous monster lurking outside my door. It is my home. And I, for one, am getting very tired of hearing the “Anglican Communion” held up as some cudgel over our heads.

There are two things about this invocation that rile me:

First, we are the Anglican Communion, just as much as any other person who worships in any church that is part of the worldwide Communion. It’s not as though the Communion exists outside the United States only; those who belong to the Communion are not “other,” they are us.

Second, when the Communion is invoked in discussions on sexuality, it usually sounds as though everyone in the greater Communion is of one mind, that every Anglican around the world is standing against us in the United States and would like nothing more than to toss us out of the Communion.

The first objection is theological: There are no “us’s” and “them’s” in the Anglican Communion, anymore than there are “us’s” and “them’s” in God’s very good creation.

The second objection irks me because it simply is not true. The majority of Anglicans around the world do not care one whit about the sexuality debate. It’s probably safe to say that the majority of Anglicans around the world do not even know about the debate.

So, please: Let’s stop being so generic in our references. Please, let’s be a whole lot more specific.

Are there Anglican primates who are upset about the direction the Episcopal Church in this country is heading? Absolutely. Are there Anglican bishops upset as well? Yes again.

But the majority – the vast majority – of Anglicans could not care less about this debate.

Why?

Because far too many of our Anglican brothers and sisters around the world are dying, and people who are dying tend not to care one whit about someone else’s sexual orientation or activity.

Far too many Anglicans have to worry about where to get enough food to eat. They are struggling, on a daily basis, to care for their children. They don’t have health care. Far too many live in countries where AIDS is ravaging their societies. They don’t have clean water, or medicine, or education. There aren’t enough jobs for them; money is as scarce as food.

Listen to the Rt. Rev. Musonda Trevor Mwamba, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Botswana, who is but one of many Anglicans who have come to the United States in the last few years and said the same thing. Speaking at the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina in January, Bishop Mwamba said, “The truth of the matter is … we must understand the majority of African Anglicans, about 37 million, are not bothered by the debate about sexuality. The majority of African Anglicans … have their minds focused on life and death issues, like AIDS, poverty … and not on what the church thinks about sex or the color of your pajama pants. Villagers who live on less than one dollar a day aren’t aware this is going on.”

And yet, whenever sexuality is debated in this country, the “Anglican Communion” gets tossed into the argument, and suddenly, we think of our sisters and brothers in Christ as a monolithic “other,” existing somewhere beyond the boundaries of this nation, and the next thing you know, we’ve set up an “us” against “them” dynamic, which breaks community, which must, simply must, sadden our Lord.

Those of us who live “out there” in the Communion, meaning outside the United States, know that the Anglican Communion is made up of people just like you and me, people who want exactly the same things we want: Enough food to eat and clean water to drink; enough medicine so that when their children get sick, as all children do, they can get better; enough peace to be able to walk down the streets of their villages and towns and cities without fearing when the next attack might come; enough education so that their children will have a shot at a better life; enough money to pay for all the other things they so desperately want, just so that they can stay alive.

That’s it. That’s all most people in this world want: Enough. Not more than enough. Simply enough.

I know that as a missionary serving in Sudan, when the topic of sexuality is brought up, which is not very often, people will debate it. They will take their stands, based on Scriptures and culture and everything else upon which we take our own stands. But in the end, the argument is not important to them, because they do not judge the Episcopal Church on this topic only. They have a much broader view of the Episcopal Church than we tend to have of them. They, like so many other Anglicans around the world, see the American Church as a generous and loving one, filled with people who not only care about those in need but who also are willing to do something about that need.

So as we continue discussions about what is happening in the Anglican Communion, as we begin to respond to the latest draft of the proposed Covenant, as we prepare for Lambeth later this year, let’s remember that the “Anglican Communion” is not some monolithic Godzilla-like creature hovering outside our boundaries, waiting to chew us up and spit us out.

Please, let’s remember:

We are the Anglican Communion. And just as we are not of one mind on sexuality, neither are our siblings in Christ.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is temporarily serving in the United States because of the instability in Sudan.