IF EPISCOPALIANS DREAM OF PRETTY CHURCHES-and believe me, they do-then one of the pretty churches they dream about is Christ Church, in Accokeek, Maryland, 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. Built during the Revolution and renovated before the Civil War, it stands today in a grove of towering cedars off a country two-lane, ringed by ancient gravestones and a low wall of red brick. On Sunday mornings, from late spring till early fall, the leaded glass windows are thrown open to let in shafts of sunlight and wisps of birdsong and breezes off the Potomac River nearby. Unless, that is, the bishop shows up. Then the doors are shut and the locks are changed and the congregation forces the bishop to celebrate mass on an adjacent basketball court, out beyond the parking lot. Not that this happens very often. But it did happen a few weeks ago, on a Sunday morning in late May, when the Rt. Rev. Jane Dixon, acting bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, showed up in Accokeek. She was uninvited but not unexpected, and a large contingent of reporters, from print and TV, were there to greet her. Their presence and hers was testament to Christ Church’s sudden and unexpected celebrity, which is now international in scope. For the Anglican Communion, the worldwide federation of churches of which the Episcopalian is a part, Christ Church has become a symbol of the conflict between the church’s remaining traditionalists, who cling to an orthodox reading of the faith, and revisionists, who hope to bring the church more in line with the modern world. Christ Church is becoming the stuff of only bad dreams. Sectarian differences within the Anglican Communion are an old story-dating back 400 years, give or take a century or two-but how they came to embroil a little rural parish in southern Maryland, with no more than 150 members, is a newer and more unusual tale. It began at the end of last year when the vestry, or governing board, of Christ Church set about to find a new priest. This is a dicier matter than you might suppose. The vestry is theologically orthodox, but the bishop, who according to the canons of the national church must approve the choice of rector, is a theological liberal, to the extent that she can be said to have a theology at all. Bishop Dixon is a large figure in the world of Anglicanism-the most prominent among a half dozen lady bishops in a church in which a committed minority of members still believe that women ought not even to be priests. When she was first named an assistant bishop of the Washington Diocese in 1992, she vowed to respect the views of the parishes within the diocese who deemed her appointment illegitimate on doctrinal grounds. She was, she said, an advocate of diversity, and her pledge not to force her annual “episcopal visits” on unwilling parishes was in keeping with the live-and-let-live civility that has historically characterized disputes among Anglicans, who are charged by God to be polite. Before too long, however, she reneged. It turned out she was using “diversity” in its contemporary sense, by which everyone, regardless of race, gender, social class, or sexual orientation, has an equal right to do exactly what the boss says. One by one, and always with a press contingent in tow, Bishop Dixon performed “forced visitations” on the parishes that had declined to invite her. Congregants responded with everything from passive resistance to frosty contempt. But she got her way in the end. Now everyone in the Washington diocese is diverse. When the top bishop of Washington resigned last year, he appointed Jane Dixon as his temporary successor. (She plans to retire next year, when a permanent replacement will be chosen.) Bishop Dixon declined to be interviewed for this article, but a good idea of how she sees her role can be got from her most recent monthly “Bishop’s Letter,” in which she pays tribute to the accomplishments of her predecessors. One forcibly integrated a local parish in the 1960s, she notes, and another refused to ordain any male priests in Washington for several years in the early 1970s until the national church approved the ordination of women. She recalls another local bishop, John Walker, for his courage in opposing apartheid from his office in Washington. “I joined many clergy and laity who were arrested with him in 1985,” she writes. “Bishop Walker also granted postulancy to the first openly gay woman in the diocese, a lesbian in a committed relationship.” And she praises Walker’s successor for the remarkable number of gays, lesbians, and people of color who became parish rectors during his tenure. Like most Episcopal bishops, who routinely issue bulls on the importance of energy conservation, Israeli concessions in the peace process, and increased funding for AIDS research, Dixon sees her mission as largely secular, politically progressive rather than spiritual, a matter more of reforming social arrangements than saving souls. A small number of her parishes, however, remain quaintly hung up on soul-saving, and Christ Church, Accokeek, is one of them. When they issued their “call” for a new rector, the vestry emphasized “preaching and instruction” and their need for a “strong and compassionate leader who possesses the ability to inspire the congregation to serve God.” They thought they’d found what they needed in Samuel Edwards, a priest in the Diocese of Fort Worth. In December, they notified the bishop they intended to offer him the job. Since his ordination in 1979, Edwards has spent most of his career as a parish priest, but for the last five years he has acquired a measure of fame as director of Forward in Faith, an organization of traditionalist Episcopalians. By Dixon’s account, not long after the vestry notified her of Edwards’s prospective hiring, unnamed members of Christ Church drew her attention to some of the more incendiary pronouncements Edwards had made in his role as activist. One sample: “When the ship has fallen completely under the control of pirates and mutineers who with supreme confidence are driving it onto the rocks, the only way members of the crew who remain loyal to its captain and his mission can stay and ‘work within the system’ is by gumming up the works and bringing it to a halt . . . ” He went on to call the Episcopal Church “hell-bound” and worse. It is, he said, “the Unchurch,” whose worldview is “derived from the kingdom of sin and death.” In keeping with her authority to reject a vestry’s hiring of an objectionable priest, Dixon interviewed Edwards in her office in February, and the priest refused to repudiate his earlier denunciations of the church; even more objectionable, he repeated his view that the bishop, as a woman, could not really be a bishop-or a priest, either, for that matter-and therefore he could not recognize her authority except in a strictly limited “institutional” sense. In early March, after Edwards had signed a three-year contract with the vestry and moved his family to Maryland, the bishop announced that she wouldn’t license him as a rector in her diocese. His appointment was rejected. He would have to go home. He didn’t. The vestry objected that the canons give a bishop only 30 days to reject a parish’s choice of rector-Dixon had taken more than three months to formally reject Edwards-and the disagreement devolved into an exchange of lawyerly letters on fine points of canon law. Not long afterwards, the traditionalist bishop of Edwards’s home diocese of Fort Worth, Jack Iker, interposed himself, offering “pastoral care” to the new rector and his congregation. Considering that Accokeek is 1,600 miles from Fort Worth, Iker’s gesture was a frontal attack on Dixon’s territory. The head bishop of the Episcopal Church, however, has loudly supported her, as have more than 60 other bishops of the church, while a handful of traditionalist bishops, most of them from outside the United States, have supported the vestry and Edwards. The dramatic highpoint came in late May, when Dixon undertook one of her “forced visitations.” She traveled to Accokeek one Sunday morning to force her way into the church to eject Edwards and perform a mass in his place. The congregation refused to let her in for her stated purpose. So she retreated to the basketball court nearby, set up a folding card table, and, amid catcalls from protestors and hymns from supporters bussed in for the occasion, celebrated the Eucharist on her own. In the m l e Dixon’s husband nearly came to blows with a pro-Edwards congregant, who has since sued him for assault. Episcopalians didn’t used to behave this way. They do now, however-though it’s generally true that lawsuits are still considered preferable to simple physical assault. Last month, Bishop Dixon filed suit against Edwards and the vestry in a Maryland court, seeking to depose Edwards, install herself as rector, and bring Christ Church, Accokeek, back into her flock. On legal grounds her claims look very strong. For more than 25 years, back to the mid-1970s, when traditionalists first began leaving the Episcopal Church in large numbers, the national administration has won nearly every lawsuit it has brought against local parishes that have tried to defy its will. Even though the church nationwide continues to shrink-most realistic estimates suggest it has lost half its membership in the last 35 years-its central authority has grown stronger, thanks to the very finest legal talent that tithes can buy. Of course, these developments may well be related: As traditionalists have drifted away, put off by the modernist revisions of the orthodox creed, the revisionists who rose to power in the church in the 1970s are freed to exert their influence with less fear of opposition, leading to the further revision of the faith and the exit of more traditionalists, and so on. Institutionally, the true anomalies in the Episcopal Church are no longer the “experimental” liturgies for gay marriage, or the high-church ceremonies in honor of Gaia the Earth Mother, or the by-now routine renunciations of the creeds by priests and bishops; the anomalies are the traditionalists who have chosen to stay. The vestry at Christ Church has made no public indication that it might secede from the national church, whose officers would employ their nearly limitless legal powers to keep it from doing so in any case. As membership dwindles, the lovely properties that the Episcopal Church owns around the country have become a particular point of pride. As for Edwards, who continues to enjoy the support of the vestry, he told me the other day that he “hasn’t heard the call” to leave the Episcopal Church and join, for example, one of the traditional Anglican churches that have formed in the United States since the mid ’70s. But neither, as Bishop Dixon is happy to point out, has he chosen to obey his bishop, as his priestly vows clearly require. This places him in an ambiguous position, needless to say, leaving his opponents, the entire hierarchy of the Episcopal Church, to claim that it is they who are the defenders of stability and order within the church. They’ve got a point, and you can’t help but admire their cleverness. Their predecessors-those jowly old WASPs who ruled the Episcopal Church for most of its history-were famously tolerant toward those who differed with them, and were viscerally unwilling to enforce church doctrine, and adamantly refused, on grounds of civility and good manners, to punish any transgression of canon law. As a consequence they were steadily supplanted by the present generation, whose attitude to this sort of diversity is quite different. They will not make the mistake of their predecessors. They will do what is necessary to preserve the church they have made in their own image. Which is why Father Edwards must go, and why that pretty little church in Accokeek must stay. Andrew Ferguson is Senior Editor at The Weekly Standard.
