The Battle of the Bishops

Already the mainstream U.S. Episcopal Church is distinctly out of step with the worldwide Anglican Communion, headed by the archbishop of Canterbury and made up of 38 independent, self-governing provinces or national churches. While the Americans’ acceptance of homosexuality is the liveliest source of controversy at present, the broader issue is their drift from orthodox teaching generally.

The task of the new upstart bishops — Charles H. Murphy III, a priest in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and John H. Rodgers Jr., dean emeritus of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania — is to plant Anglican missions in areas where there are receptive communities in the United States. They will seek to win converts, minister to believers, and found churches without regard to existing diocesan boundaries — and even on the turf of leftist bishops.

“Crossing diocesan boundaries” is breaking the last taboo in the Episcopal Church, and the threat of such incursions has elicited hostile reactions — these from a church establishment that hardly blinks at the installation of openly homosexual deans of cathedrals or at bishops who deny basic Christian teachings such as the Resurrection of Christ. The response of North American left-wing clerics has been colorful, if hysterical.

“Bishops are not intercontinental ballistic missiles,” said Archbishop Michael Peers of Canada, “manufactured on one continent and fired into another as an act of aggression. The recent irregular ordination in Singapore is, in my opinion, an open and premeditated assault on Anglican tradition, catholic order, and Christian charity.” The dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego, John Chane, contemptuously called it “‘Dial-a-Bishop,’ . . . the latest service provided by a few Provincial Bishops of the Anglican Communion to those Provinces they presume to be wayward.”

“Some real smart prelates have come up with a novel idea,” observed Bishop William Swing of San Francisco in an online opinion piece. “Let’s start an Anglican Airlines and fly in peculiar bishops for special occasions, they suggest. If in your diocese, you want a bishop who is more charismatic than the one you presently have, just dial 1-800-Rent-A-SCAB, and one will be flown in to you. . . . For more bargain information about Anglican Airways, see our advertisement under Apostolic Succession: Cheap.” Bishop Swing is probably best known for organizing something called the United Religions Initiative. Presumably, his tone is more charitable when he is seeking unity with folks in religions other than his own.

Frank T. Griswold, the presiding bishop (or archbishop equivalent) of the U.S. Episcopal Church, immediately wrote his fellow American bishops: “I am appalled by this irregular action and even more so by the purported ‘crisis’ that has been largely fomented by them and others, and which bears very little resemblance to the church we actually know.”

Griswold was so distressed he flew to London on February 7 to consult with George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury. Carey is theologically orthodox and upholds church teaching on sexuality, but his traditionalist instincts also extend to matters of church structure. Ten days after his meeting with Griswold, Carey sent a letter to the world’s Anglican bishops. He recognized Rodgers and Murphy “as faithful and committed ministers of the gospel,” but concluded, “I cannot recognize their episcopal ministry until such time as a full rapprochement and reconciliation has taken place between them” and leaders of the American church.

Carey wasn’t the only conservative disturbed by the consecrations. Three conservative archbishops from Australia, Africa, and South America expressed their disapproval of the consecrations, while also noting their “regret that pressures upon traditionalists within the Episcopal Church in the U.S. should have accumulated” to provoke them.

Those pressures are epitomized in the person of John Spong, the recently retired bishop of the Diocese of Newark. Spong’s penchant for offending ordinary religious sensibilities has led him to deny an escalating series of doctrinal points — most recently, the very existence of a transcendent God. For all his efforts to shock, Spong is greeted in the church more often by fawning deference than by robust critique. Griswold need look no further than Spong and his followers to discover the crisis that eludes him.

In short, Bishops Rodgers and Murphy say they want to “provide pastoral support, guidance, and oversight” to congregations that choose to “continue in the doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as the Anglican Church has received them.” Already they have seen some success. As of early April, at least three local congregations had broken with the U.S. Episcopal Church to join the Anglican Church of Rwanda: St. Andrew’s Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Church of the Holy Spirit in Roanoke, Virginia, and St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Morehead City, North Carolina. Arguing that the unity of the church has already been violated “by the unrebuked ridicule and denial of basic Christian teaching,” the dissidents aspire to “give the faithful in the United States a place to remain Anglican.”

But why, one may wonder, would the church in Rwanda — whose ministers have their hands full in their own land dealing with perennial poverty and the terrible aftermath of genocide — bother with theological controversies in North America? Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini explained: “At the genocide in 1994, the whole world stood back, and no one came to Rwanda’s aid. We will never stand back when others are similarly threatened, physically or spiritually.” In fact, most of the current bishops of Rwanda are themselves the product of extraordinary, irregular procedures. Their predecessors were removed by action of the archbishop of Canterbury and the East African House of Bishops for complicity in the genocide.

The scope of ministry of the new American bishops remains to be seen. In late March, the heads of the 38 Anglican provinces gathered for their biennial consultation, this year in Portugal. While deploring the rogue consecrations, they called for dialogue that could lead to regularizing the new bishops’ status. Ominously, the Anglican leaders warned that pro-homosexuality actions in the American church “have come to threaten the unity of the communion in a profound way.” That’s a clear warning to the General Convention of the U.S. Episcopal Church, which meets this July to consider whether to authorize local dioceses to bless same-sex unions. Whatever the fate of Murphy and Rodgers, the intrachurch battles that sparked their consecration are not going away.

Diane Knippers is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.