Andrew Doyle, Episcopal Bishop of Texas 
Peace be with you. And also with you. Unless you're gay.
Last year, after the Episcopal Church installed its first openly homosexual bishop, a group of dissenters, led in part by conservative Texas clergymen, vowed to put up a fight. And did they ever. Will their new alliance destroy the 215-year-old denomination?
zoe says: Changing the rules of a 215 year old doctrine for worshiping God is wrong, as it would be in any cercomstance. To ask perishes’ to ignore the teachings of generation after generation about the Episcopal Doctrine is wrong. If openly Gay and proud of it persons want to worship God, let them create their own church and their own beliefs instead of trying to change our doctrine. We are who we are because of our beliefs and changeing those beliefs means to change who we are. And I proudly follow the commandments and teachings of our lord Jesus Christ. False Proffits’ are here so be very sure who you follow because it could quite litteraly mean your very soul. (October 24th, 2011 at 8:33am)
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PERHAPS THE MOST PERNICIOUS EFFECT of the General Convention's votes was that they forced Episcopalians to take sides. The result was to tear congregations apart, sometimes pitting members against each other, sometimes pitting them against their own clergy. Even in an overwhelmingly conservative parish like Roseberry's, the votes produced dissenting voices. A member of Christ Church's congregation, J. K. Ivey, was so disturbed by Roseberry's reaction to the General Convention that he wrote a letter of resignation. "Each time I open my mailbox," he wrote, "there is another 'hate-gram' from my beloved church that I no longer recognize . . . You have posted several documents on line and by mail that call upon all members of Christ Church to 'Reject any position or policy of lifestyle which is contrary to scripture.' . . . Please let me know when you plan to advocate stoning, burning at the stake, and otherwise inflicting the death penalty, as required for some 37 different sins (homosexuality excluded)." Roseberry replied, "I must make a simple statement. The General Convention has erred in electing a man who cannot uphold the historical teaching of the Christian Church. Whether he is a homosexual or not is beside the point . . . Your letter characterizes me as arrogant, judgmental, intolerant, and condemning. This is the same spirit of hate that you accuse me of." Ivey says he received "tons of hate mail" after his letter was posted on the Internet. "At first it ran 8020 hate-to-good," he says. "Then at some point it reversed."
That sort of polarity made it harder for Episcopalians to do what they have long been famous for: finding common ground between extremes. Church members even use the Latin term for it: "via media"—"the middle way." It dates to Elizabeth I, who managed to hold Papists and Puritans together in the sixteenth century by insisting that they use a Book of Common Prayer while allowing wide latitude for personal beliefs. "A lot of people feel they are being forced to take a position they are not ready to take," says Father Chuck Treadwell, the rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in McKinney, whose congregation is mostly conservative. "They feel they are being drawn into a battle they don't necessarily want to fight." Treadwell was a delegate to the convention and voted against Robinson but was unhappy that the church had forced the issue. He shared his feelings with his church. "When I spoke to the issue, I came out of the pulpit and said, 'I do not know what the mind of God is.' We were open; we talked about it. I did a lot of one-on-one counseling. Three families left because of it."
There were those like Father Fred Barber, of Trinity Church in Fort Worth, who took a stand of deliberate ambiguity on the issue. Barber is the fairly conservative rector of what, by Fort Worth standards, is a liberal parish. "I am ready to stay ambiguous here," he says. "I told the congregation in a sermon that if I had been a delegate at General Convention, I would not have voted for Gene Robinson's consecration. I got applause. Three days later a gay congregation member stood and said how she valued being here. She got applause too. That is ambiguity. I may have lost some parishioners because I said I would not perform same-sex blessings. But I have also said that I have gay people here, and they will continue to be welcome."
In Houston, conservative bishop Don A. Wimberly voted against consecrating Robinson's ordination and then wrote a letter to everyone in the diocese saying so, which angered many liberals. He then did something that many of his conservative counterparts elsewhere found difficult or impossible: He said he was not going to make an issue out of it. There would be no gay ordinations in his diocese and no same-sex blessings. But there would be room for everyone in the church. "I am not throwing people out and showing them the door," says Wimberly. "This is my understanding of Scripture, and it is the way I approach it. But that doesn't keep me from loving you or welcoming you into the community." When he visited liberal churches and was asked about his position, he explained it. At the annual diocesan council, in February, Wimberly's approach was to defuse the issue by urging delegates not to vote on whether to condemn the national church. "If I had not learned anything else at General Convention," he says, "I learned that when you vote, there are winners and losers. I said, 'I don't want the diocese to divide itself up like that.'" He says that he has received more than one thousand e-mails since Robinson's election—both for and against the church's position. But even with Wimberly's conciliatory approach, there are casualties. A recent one was the Reverend Paul Fromberg, a gay priest who chose to leave as rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, in the Heights in Houston. Fromberg, who is heading to San Francisco, told the Houston Chronicle, "It is easier to be gay and a priest in the Diocese of California than it is in the Diocese of Texas."
A few miles away from Wimberly's diocesan headquarters, at the 2,700-member Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, in Houston, Father Jim Nutter struggled to arrive at his own version of via media. As a convention delegate when the resolution was presented, Nutter had voted against Robinson, though he says he found the whole idea of the vote "political, arrogant, unilateral, and a huge disappointment." He returned to Houston to a congregation that was deeply torn and addressed the subject from the pulpit on August 17. "The issue before us is not whether we are going to have gay priests and bishops," he told them in his sermon. "You do know that, don't you? . . . The issue is not whether we are going to accept them. We have. The issue is this . . . Are we going to move from tacit acceptance to explicit approval and support?" He then confessed his own mixed feelings, explaining that the priest who had sent him to seminary was gay, his two favorite professors at seminary were gay, and a priest who had been his spiritual mentor was gay. He also staked out a middle ground. "The conservatives, for the most part, are not pharisaical homophobes," he said. "That language needs to stop! The liberals, for the most part, are not a bunch of New Age flakes, soft on Jesus, soft on Scripture. And that kind of language needs to stop." Like Roseberry, but for entirely different reasons, he got a standing ovation that Sunday. He says it amazed him.
But Nutter says that a "firestorm" broke after an October meeting where, for the first time, he told his congregation that he had voted no to Robinson but that, as he says, "after twenty years with this issue, I think I can get there from here—to support and ordain a practicing homosexual and to somehow bless same-sex marriages." He points to a nearly foot-high stack of printouts of e-mail he received on the subject. "God, I had despair that week," he says. "When I look back, I realize I was caught by surprise by the pain that people spilled out. All sorts of pain. There were liberals who said, 'How could you vote no? You had an agenda. You lied. You've been duplicitous. You have betrayed us.'" In the end, he says that only 20 people out of 2,700 left Palmer Memorial. The church's membership has actually increased, as have financial contributions.
IN THE LOOSE CONFEDERATION OF DIOCESES that is the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, bishops wield enormous power. In Fort Worth, for example, Jack Iker is the chairman of the board of a corporation that owns all the lands, buildings, and financial resources of the diocese. He is elected by the clergy in his diocese. No matter how much presiding bishop Frank Griswold may dislike Iker's theology, there is very little he can do about it. Iker does not serve at his pleasure. And if Iker, or his compatriot James Stanton, in Dallas, chooses to try to break away and form a separate linkage to the Anglican Church, there may be little the denomination can do to stop him, particularly if the Archbishop of Canterbury approves it. There would be lawsuits, to be sure. The national church might try to claim the lands of Fort Worth's 56 congregations. Iker, of course, would likely have most of the world's 73 million Anglicans behind him. For now, Iker and Stanton and their dioceses are part of the Network, seeking realignment within the church, but there is always the threat that the twelve dissident bishops could pick up their toys and and go home.
The more immediate problem is how to handle individual conservative churches who find themselves unhappily saddled with bishops who voted for Gene Robinson. Here the spiritual and temporal sides of the church are already colliding—again, because of the awesome power of bishops. In St. Louis, Missouri, when the Church of the Good Shepherd voted to break away and affiliate with the Anglican Mission in America, the diocese sued it for its land and buildings. A non-jury trial is scheduled for this month. Last winter in Florida, two congregations voted to leave the church; one abandoned its property and buildings, and the other one was sued. These are just a few examples, but they underscore the church's main problem, which is how to keep dissident churches on board.
In March, at a meeting in Navasota, Episcopal bishops tried to do just that. The plan they approved allowed for what is commonly known as "alternative oversight" for those conservative parishes that were no longer on speaking terms with their liberal bishops. The key issue for conservatives was whether bishops had ultimate veto power over a congregation in selecting a bishop from a different diocese. The bishops said yes, which caused conservatives in the Network and elsewhere to condemn the decision.
If that system does not work—and from the dismal response of conservative church members it may not—then the church will have to put its hopes of avoiding a split on the so-called Eames Commission, appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the wake of the Robinson vote to figure out how the liberal American church can remain part of a generally conservative world communion. The commission, headed by the archbishop of Ireland, is expected to deliver its report this year. Regardless of what it says, the Archbishop of Canterbury has no actual authority over the American church. He can't make American presiding bishop Griswold—or any bishop, for that matter—do anything. It is unlikely that he would take the extreme step of saying that the Episcopal Church was no longer the expression of Anglicanism in America, though that is precisely what some conservatives are hoping for. The effect of that would be a real split, isolating the liberal American church in a world of conservative evangelicals.
Nor do conservatives show any signs of conciliation. In fact, the reverse is happening. The Network is still withholding money from the national church and seems more recalcitrant than ever. In impoverished Africa, Anglicans are so exercised about this issue that entire provinces are no longer accepting donations from some American churches. This is an astonishing and completely unexpected development. In March the newly consecrated bishop of New Hampshire could confidently state, "Some primates are declaring themselves in a state of impaired communion, but the fact of the matter is they're not sending our missionaries home. They haven't stopped cashing our checks." On April 15, however, Anglican archbishops from Africa said they would reject donations from any diocese that recognizes gay clergy and recommended giving the Episcopal Church three months to repent.
All of which leaves a global church with an apparently insoluble problem and millions of members holding their collective breath. "I have no idea what will happen," says Roseberry. "And I say that if you are not concerned about this issue, then you don't understand it."
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