General Convention 2003

Do Justice, Make Peace, Be Accountable

by Katie Sherrod

The Episcopal Church will come together for General Convention July 30 through August 8 in Minneapolis. The theme is Engage God's Mission.

The presiding bishop's staff works very hard in the years between General Conventions to convince everyone that the PB's idea of God's mission is what we all are to engage. The House of Bishops is generally on board with this, given as they are to forgetting that they are not "the church." In recent years, that unstated but very clear mission nearly always has been "Don't Rock the Boat." This is because conservatives have become increasingly nervous about changes admitting women, minorities and lesbians and gays not only to full membership in the church but also to leadership roles once reserved for white men. First, women became deputies. Then women could be ordained, and the language in the prayer book began to acknowledge their existence, albeit timidly. What's worse, in their eyes, lesbians and gays have been getting increasingly uppity about wanting to participate fully in the life of the church, about having the church acknowledge and value them and their relationships.

Many conservatives have responded with threats to leave if these kinds of changes continue. Because no presiding bishop wants schism to happen on his watch, a relatively small but highly vocal group of conservatives has managed to influence a generation of nervous leaders who appear to be willing to make peace on the backs of women and lesgays.

Thus any issue that threatens the "unity of the church" is to be avoided at all costs. This means anything dealing with the bishops who continue to refuse to ordain women, and any issue involving human sexuality.

But let's be clear here. What the conservatives are asking the church to do is close itself to any transformative workings of the Spirit. That they dare to clothe this in words such as "remaining faithful to the Faith as once delivered to our fathers" takes one's breath away with its arrogance.

Sadly, it seems to work with the PB and much of the House of Bishops. That's why we had a special committee in Denver to deal with resolutions having to do with same-sex blessing. That's why we have the mealy-mouthed report of the A045 Task Force and an Executive Council resolution urging yet more conversation about women's ordination. That's why we are seeing a ramping up of talk about "reconciliation" from the Presiding Bishop's office.

"..simplistic union built by sacrificing one or two groups in the church is a betrayal of God's mission, not an engagement of it."

But to talk of reconciliation in the context of some simplistic union built by sacrificing one or two groups in the church is a betrayal of God's mission, not an engagement of it. To do so in Minneapolis seems particularly heinous.

When the church last met in Minneapolis twenty-seven years ago, the all-male leadership in the House of Bishops was still in high dudgeon over the irregular ordinations of the Philadelphia Eleven. These women had dared to act on their own. They had not asked permission. They had brought about change, Pamela Darling writes in New Wine, "on their own timetable."

At that 1976 General Convention, bishops opposed to the ordination of women threatened that people would leave in "huge numbers" if women's ordination passed. The threat of schism was heavy in the air. But the amendment to the canon did pass--and the huge defections never happened. This was partly because the House of Bishops acted unilaterally to appease those bishops who were opposed with the infamous "conscience clause." But by and large it was because most of the threats were nothing more than hot rhetorical air.

That Minneapolis General Convention embraced the watershed moment in which it found itself and allowed God to transform it.

By their prophetic act, those eleven women in Philadelphia set in motion a whole new way of "doing church," a lesson not lost on their spiritual daughters and sons. Carter Heyward wrote of the journey toward that ordination: A movement is in process--from "May I please be who I am?" to "Dammit, let me be who I am!" to "I am who I am."

Increasingly, all manner of people are saying, "I am who I am" to the church. They are claiming their God-given selves, striving to grow into the fullness of their baptisms, not by closing themselves to the Spirit, but by being boldly open to becoming agents of transformation in the world. They have brought the church to another watershed moment.

"...if the church opts to protect unity rather than do justice,
it will doom itself to
institutional maintenance as its primary mission."

That's why the Consultation, of which the Caucus is a member, declares in its Platform for General Convention that the mission of the church is "Do Justice, Make Peace, Be Accountable."

The Consultation asserts that this is a moment for courage and risk in the church, not a time to seek "a simplistic unity that includes some at the expense of others." If the church opts to protect unity rather than do justice, "it will doom itself to institutional maintenance as its primary mission, a project that can only lead to eventual death."

"While we welcome church growth, we reject a focus on it without a parallel emphasis on radical discipleship. Spirituality, evangelism and justice are coequal partners in a Church striving for wholeness and a transformative witness."

When justice issues such as racism, sexism and heterosexism continue to be contentious over long periods of time, as they have in our church, they become accountability issues.

"In order to do justice and make peace, both within the Episcopal Church and in the world, we are called to be accountable one to another," the Platform states.

"This platform call to accountability is a call to take seriously the promises made by this church to engage in dialogue and conversation on divisive issues; to honor, respect and continue the empowering work done by the "ethnic" desks at the Church Center; to be mutually accountable with overseas partners, requiring budgetary accountability on the one hand and greater grant
support on the other."

The Consultation calls the church to carry out the mission of doing justice, making peace and being accountable in areas of civil liberties, a renewed commitment to anti-racism, and criminal justice reform.

It is in the spirit of this mission that supporters of same sex blessings proclaim that what they are asking for IS the work of the church. It is engaging God's mission.

It is in this spirit that exhausted people continue to remind the church that the work started in Minneapolis 27 years ago with the ordination of women has yet to begin in Fort Worth, Quincy and San Joaquin.

It is in this spirit that peace activists advocate that the curriculum "From Violence to Wholeness" be named a church-wide education project.

It is in this spirit that environmentalists push the church to reclaim stewardship of the earth with the same vigor they pursue parish stewardship campaigns.

It is in this spirit that women and men ask again and again for prayer book revision with inclusive and expansive language to reflect the reality of our multicultural church.

It is in this spirit that men and women stand together to reject the Executive Council's suggestion that the 2006 General Convention study the ordination of women. Instead the church should commit itself to the issues of inequitable pay, continuing deployment problems and the continued intransigence of bishops in Fort Worth, Quincy and San Joaquin. The dearth of female candidates for Episcopal election should be the subject of a House of Bishops' commission review of the election process. The House of Bishops should do an intentional inventory of its own sexism. The church should commit itself to highlighting the effects of fundamentalism on women and girls all over our world, including in our own church.

It is in this spirit that people ask that economic justice be recognized as the mission of the church, that living wages and campaigns for worker justice be top priorities all over the church.

Do Justice, Make Peace, Be Accountable: the words are stated in that order because only justice can make peace, and only those willing to be held accountable can be trusted to do justice.

Let us hope the Holy Spirit surprises us all once again this summer, and imbues this General Convention with the same transformative courage that was displayed in Minneapolis in 1976.

Katie Sherrod is editor of Ruach

Goodness is stronger than evil; Love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness; Life is stronger than death;
Victory is ours through him who loved us."
Desmond Tutu

Women's Work

the work of the Coalition at the General Convention

by Colleen O'Conner

It's not enough to sit back and expect women to keep progressing, experts say. "Women who went through the struggle in the secular world as well as the church world are very aware that it's two steps forward, then slip away back in terms of leadership and status," says the Rev. Jennifer Phillips. "You can't ever take it for granted."

If justice requires maintenance, then action is critical. Here is a roundup of the latest resources for promoting the equality of women.

• The Consultation, an alliance of progressive organizations within the Episcopal Church, is
putting together a women's section of its legislative platform to go out before General Convention.

• At General Convention there will be resolutions submitted about women's issues such as the problem of trafficking in women and children.

• There will also be copies of a new report from the Committee on the Status of Women, called Reaching Toward Wholeness II: the 21st Century Survey, that documents the progress of women in the Episcopal Church since 1987 when the first report was compiled.

• A new video called Women of the Table that spotlights women's ministries will debut at the Episcopal Church Women's (ECW) Triennial Meeting in Minneapolis in July 2003. Including specific stories of women ministering in a post 9/11 world, the project was coordinated by the Rev. Susan Russell, ECW board member-at-large for multi-media, and produced by Katie Sherrod, an independent television producer from Ft. Worth, Texas. The video will also be shown at General Convention.

• A committee of lay and ordained women is working to create the first fully endowed chair of women's ministries in an Episcopal seminary. The members include the Rev. Dr. Katherine Lehman, rector of St. Bede's Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, CA, and as co-chairs, the Rev. Rosa Lee Harden, vicar of Holy Innocents' Episcopal Church in San Francisco, and the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Lyman, the Garrett Professor of Church History at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) in Berkeley, CA.

The women have raised more than $500,000 for the St. Margaret's Chair for Women and Ministry at CDSP, a name that acknowledges the history of lay women's ministry in the church through St. Margaret's House, a training school for women that existed at CDSP prior to the ordination of women.

"We want to reclaim the historical ministry of women and also to anchor a chair in women's ministries in seminary, because feminist theology, methodology, and process are extremely important," says Lehman. "It affects how we study and do acdemic work, how we relate in community, how we do church--and how that affects the world."

Many women professors now teach in Episcopalian seminaries, but this will be the first endowed chair of women's ministries. Nearly three decades after the ordination of women, what does this say?

"It says that the feminist approach has not been understood as its own methodology or discipline," says Lehman. "To me, it says that even though this has revolutionized the church in the past 25 years, it has not been legitimated in that way."