Difficult Dialogue: Episcopal Adversaries Grudgingly Earn Respect

A rare public face-off between conservative and liberal Episcopalians on the grounds of an evangelical Episcopal seminary grudgingly earned respect from the liberal camp, yet rattled seminarians who questioned whether the seminary should “dialogue with the darkness.”

At issue are widely divergent world views that have caused division within the 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church. While one wing of the denomination leans toward the extreme theological and political Left, Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, has been a bastion of biblical orthodoxy. Founded in 1976 by a group of Episcopal evangelicals, including evangelist John Guest, it has become the denomination’s training ground for evangelical leaders.

That is why Trinity faculty and the dean, former Colorado Bishop William Frey, were amazed when the school was approached last spring with an unusual request. The Witness, the 4,200-circulation monthly voice of the Episcopal Left, wanted Trinity as the site for the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration to challenge the views of its readers.

“The intent is not to reconcile our communities,” said editor Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann. “It is not to reach consensus. It is not to convert. All we can hope for is that adversaries within the church can meet.… It is possible that we share neither a Lord nor a faith, only a baptism that is laden with irony.”

Facing The Opposition

The request was discussed among Trinity faculty, staff, and students, some of whom expressed reservations about allowing Witness on campus. They feared the school’s supporters would not back the conference. But Frey and most of the faculty believed otherwise.

“If students only have the opportunity to articulate the faith in a warm, fuzzy environment, we are not teaching them to survive in the world,” Frey said. “To have to articulate that in the midst of detractors and the opposition is essential.” About the only two things Trinity and Witness were able to agree on were the October meeting date and using the same Episcopal prayer book in worship.

Not until a few weeks before the event did Trinity’s 80 full-time seminarians learn that a conference panelist would be evangelical author Virginia Mollenkott, an English professor at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey. Mollenkott, who coauthored Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? with Letha Scanzoni, talks in her latest book, Sensuous Spirituality, about her lesbianism and monist beliefs in a female God.

Ninety-two Trinity students, faculty, staff, and alumni came to the conference, along with the 80 Witness delegates for 11 hours of workshops, Bible studies, and worship.

Whether both parties had a common Lord was questionable—that they had distinctly different faiths was beyond doubt. Trinity students came away from the conference convinced there are two religions in their denomination and that everything Episcopal is not necessarily Christian. “They worship a different God than we do, that was clear,” said one student.

According to Wylie-Kellermann, Mollenkott privately commented later that had the seminarians been her students, she would have been proud of the way they defended themselves. However, other Witness delegates felt students were rigid and unwilling to listen to their views.

“Now I know what we’re up against in terms of theological controversy in the Episcopal Church,” said Witness board member Reginald Blackston.

“It was a difficult day,” said Mary Meader, a doctoral candidate from Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led a workshop on sexuality and feminism for Witness. Several students cornered her on theological points that she seemed unprepared to defend.

“If we’re going to be a church, we’re going to have to learn to speak to each other, but we’re coming from different starting places, which makes dialogue particularly difficult,” Meader said.

“It was,” joked Witness contributing editor Jim Lewis, “like having the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republican party at Democratic headquarters.”

A Spiritual Assault?

Two days later, the campus was in such an uproar over the conference that Frey scheduled two special sessions to discuss it. Several students said they felt spiritually assaulted during the conference. Seminarian Mario Bergner suggested the seminary had been made so spiritually toxic by the conference that it should be reconsecrated. Frey retorted that he had reconsecrated it earlier that morning.

Both sides left the conference as polarized as ever, unable to speak a common language of belief, much less work together in the deeply divided denomination. The only clear word on the question came from an African student who stood up during the debate, obviously angry with Mollenkott’s praise of lesbian love.

“You are entertaining sin,” he said with a gesture that encompassed the entire room, “and God does not compromise.”

The only response he got was silence.

By Julia Duin in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.

Sociologist James Davison Hunter says electoral politics has become an important field of conflict in the struggle for American values. Last month voters in many states weighed in on a series of ballot initiatives that raised social and moral issues that are contested turf in what Hunter calls “the culture wars”:

• Euthanasia: In a surprise upset, voters in California rejected a measure that would have allowed doctors to assist the terminally ill to commit suicide by lethal injection or overdose.

• Abortion: Two abortion-related initiatives went solidly to the prochoice side. Maryland passed a measure that prohibits abortion restrictions, while Arizona rejected a measure that would have banned most abortions.

• Homosexuality: In Oregon, voters defeated an initiative that would have barred the state from recognizing homosexuals as a protected class under civil-rights laws.

The measure would also have required public schools to set standards declaring homosexuality “abnormal, unnatural, and wrong.” However, voters in Colorado adopted an initiative prohibiting government from adopting or enforcing any law or policy giving minority rights to homosexuals.

• School choice: Colorado also rejected a proposition that would have given parents vouchers to use at the public, private, religious, or home school of their choice.

• Gambling: Idaho voted to ban casino gambling; Missouri voted to allow riverboat gambling; Nebraska approved a lottery. Georgia narrowly approved a state-run lottery. Mississippi voted to permit lotteries, but the legislature will need to take further action to establish one. Kentucky approved charitable bingo. And South Dakota defeated a measure to repeal the video lottery.

• Death penalty: The District of Columbia defeated a congressionally approved death penalty. And voters in New Jersey voted to expand their death-penalty provisions to include killers who intended to cause serious injury.

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