Episcopalians in San Joaquin renew sense of mission
Episcopal News Service -- Bakersfield, California. February 3, 2009 [020309-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
In addition to measuring its growth in a number of common ways such as average Sunday attendance, Grace Episcopal Church has an uncommon yardstick: it has grown from a "church in a box" to a "church in a closet."
Two years ago, the accoutrements of what is now Grace Episcopal Church could fit in a box that traveled around town in the trunks of members' cars. Today, Grace's vestments, vessels, torches, processional cross, name tags, children's books, icons made by members of the congregation -- even the altar -- reside in two closets inside Huber Memorial Chapel at First Congregational Church in Bakersfield. Each Sunday, Grace's members unpack the closets and turn the building, which is normally used for concerts, into a worship space.
First Congregational Church members "just opened their hearts and this place," said Jan Dunlap, one of Grace's founders who now serves on its bishop's committee, a mission church's governing council, which operates in this case under the authority of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin's Provisional Bishop Jerry Lamb.
What is now the mission congregation of Grace Episcopal Church began when 12 Episcopalians met in Bakersfield's public library and realized that they needed to worship together, explained Dunlap, who was part of the gathering. Most were members of Remain Episcopal, an organization founded by Episcopalians who were concerned about the direction in which the diocese was being led by then-Bishop John-David Schofield.
Schofield claimed to have disputes with the Episcopal Church over theology and the authority of Scripture. He and a majority of the diocesan leadership voted on December 8, 2007 to join the Argentina-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.
Amanda Gaona, one of the 12 who gathered at the Beale Library, suggested that the group gather at her house for evening prayer. The first service in March 2006 attracted about 25 people, according to Dunlap. The worshippers took turns hosting evening prayer in their homes. On All Saints Sunday, November 4, 2007, the group met in the Huber Memorial Chapel for their first Eucharist, according to the Rev. Dr. Tim Vivian, who presided at the service and is now Grace's vicar.
Fifteen months after that gathering, Grace's average Sunday attendance of 60-70 people places it in the mainstream of Episcopal Church congregations. (About 42 percent of the church's nearly 7,100 congregations have an average Sunday attendance of 70 or less.) Grace's members work on Habitat for Humanity projects, volunteer at a local homeless shelter, offer Bible studies at a women's prison, donate food to an organization that helps victims of family violence and collect money for Episcopal Relief and Development.
Stef Donev, another member of the bishop's committee at Grace, said many of Grace's members are "refugees" from other Episcopal parishes divided by Schofield's efforts to lead diocesan members out of the Episcopal Church. All three of Bakersfield's already-established Episcopal parishes voted to realign with Schofield.
"We have formed a community that is a safe place to be, and it's a growing place," Donev said.
Vivian, an assistant professor of religious studies at California State University Bakersfield, works one-third time as Grace's vicar and the Rev. Dr. Vern Hill is Grace's deacon. Lay people founded Grace and continue to share in its leadership.
Vivian told ENS that he was "was very uncertain" of himself when he first began working with the Remain Episcopal group that formed Grace Church because he had had not acted as a priest for nearly 10 years, since he left a parish when the rector endorsed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"I believe that I, like many, many others at Grace, have grown into my role and duties," he said, calling Grace "a joyous, Spirit-filled" congregation and saying that being there "though not without trials and tensions, has been the most fulfilling ministry in my life and the most fulfilled and joyful time in my life in more than 20 years."
House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson visited Grace on February 1 and during her sermon told the congregation that "you have built a community, with God's help, of support and prayer and a sense of call to be in relationship with others outside your community. Like Jesus [you are] always looking for the marginalized, the outcast, the ones who need help, because, like Jesus, you have been there yourselves."
The story of Grace's founding and growth is a microcosm of the progress the Diocese of San Joaquin has made since its official reorganizing convention was held March 29, 2008. "We had nothing," Lamb told ENS in an interview January 31. "Some people say we started over from step one. Actually we started over from pretty deep in a hole, because we had nothing."
Lamb and other diocesan leaders spent nearly four hours January 30 briefing the Episcopal Church's Executive Council in closed sessions about their climb out of that hole. In interviews with ENS outside of the briefings, Lamb and others told a story of a diocese divided against itself and led by bishop who, aided by some but not all of the clergy, punished those who disagreed with them.
"We all have stories," said Joyce Tanner, an icon maker who joined St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Bakersfield in 1952, but came to Grace because she did not agree with the conservative direction the parish took under the leadership of then-rector Mark Lawrence, who is now bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina.
Stephanie Antoniogiovanni's story from St. Paul's is about the cost of exploring the developing community that became Grace. When the St. Paul's leadership learned about her involvement with Remain Episcopal, Antoniogiovanni said, they told her she was no longer a member of the parish and thus not entitled to the $300 monthly discount on the cost of having her three younger children in the parish preschool.
"It got ugly," she said "We were shunned."
"No one has talked to us since," Antoniogiovanni's older daughter, Alyssa, added.
Lamb told ENS that he believes the situation in San Joaquin prior to the December 2007 split "was a case in which power was misused and power was withheld."
"I think that the vehicles of biblical literalism and the place of gays and lesbians became the focal point," he said. "As I experience where we are now, I've become aware that it was really a question of power; of how power is manipulated and then used to keep others from positions of power."
Lay people were not the only ones who faced punishment when they advocated for a broader view of the Episcopal Church. "The pressure placed on clergy to conform is really a story that I hear continually from our clergy," Lamb said, adding that the pressure was seen to have come if priests "began to counteract, speak against, [or] act in a way that wasn't in accord with the wishes of the diocesan (bishop) and others in places of authority."
One such incident involved the Rev. Fred Risard, who at the time of the 2007 vote was vicar of St. Nicholas Episcopal Church in Atwater. Risard made it clear that he was not in favor of re-alignment, "so he was removed" by the diocesan leadership, according to Lamb. The bishop said he was aware of at least four such cases.
Vivian, Grace's vicar, had his own disagreements with Schofield. In the early 1990s, Vivian wrote an essay, titled "Kissing the Leper" for the Bakersfield newspaper, in which he said that those who use the Bible to justify homophobia are "so obsessed with these issues that they usually ignore questions of social justice, poverty, homelessness, or war and peace."
He noted in the essay that the week before Schofield had refused to allow him and some other Episcopalians to set up a table promoting the work of Integrity USA, an organization that supports the full inclusion of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people in the life of the Episcopal Church, at diocesan convention, which was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Bakersfield. When the group set up their display outside the church, the police were called, Vivian told ENS. The police said that the diocese had no authority over what was done outside the building, according to Vivian.
Vivian said Schofield summoned him to meet with him about the essay and, when Vivian refused, the bishop withdrew his license. Priests such as Vivian who maintain their canonical relationship with one bishop while working in another diocese must be licensed by the bishop of the second diocese. Vivian is canonically resident in the Diocese of Los Angeles.
Vivian said that Lawrence, in his position as St. Paul's rector, helped convince Schofield to re-license him. Vivian worked at St. Paul's as an unpaid priest until Lawrence preached in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and had the congregation sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" on the Sunday after the troops had entered Iraq. Vivian said he never returned after that Sunday.
The Rev. Canon William Gandenberger, Schofield's canon to the ordinary, told ENS that accusations of lay people or priests being punished for disagreeing with the direction of the diocese were "hogwash."
"I have never seen [Schofield] react harshly or act in retribution because someone disagreed with him," Gandenberger said. He said that "the charge of false accusations is totally bogus" because Schofield disciplined clergy "only for cause."
Schofield has a "steady line" of people coming to his office to talk with him about issues and gives those people "willing ears to hear" even if he disagrees with them, Gandenberger said.
The division in the diocese pitted friend against friend. Those friends have chosen different ways to handle their relationships today. Tanner has been invited to paint icons at two congregations that claim Southern Cone affiliation. She said they don't talk about the issues, adding that "eventually you have to put that behind you" and acknowledging that it isn't always easy.
"When they said that if God closes one door, he always opens another, they didn't tell us it was hell in the hallway," Tanner said.
Richard Jennings, one of Remain Episcopal founders and a member of Holy Family Episcopal Church in Fresno told ENS that not everyone who remained is of like mind on all issues. "We want to think of it as one big family," he said. "You may not agree with your brother or sister's politics but they are still part of the family."
At Christ the King Community Episcopal Church in Riverbank, the fact that many conservative members left is "incredibly frustrating when you want to create a table with many voices," rector Glenn Kanestrom said. Yet, his parish is a "much happier and unified place," he added.
Christ the King parishioners have invited those who left to return to the parish for some social events, Kanestrom said, and some members of the two groups meet to work at the parish's food pantry. "We get to see them and minister together once a month," he said, adding that perhaps reconciliation will grow from those opportunities.
Antoniogiovanni said that one friend who remains at St. Paul's explained her choice this way: "I am staying with the building."
The buildings and other property involved in the diocesan split have consumed much of the time and resources of the leadership of the reorganizing diocese. "In our church we have fiduciary responsibilities, canonical responsibilities, [and] moral responsibilities that when people give treasure to this church for the mission of this church, we are [to be] the stewards of that treasure," diocesan chancellor Michael Glass said.
Executive Council agreed January 31 to lend the diocese up to $500,000 for use "in their protection of diocesan properties," and Glass said that money will "help us bring the conclusion to the litigation sooner rather than later."
The diocese and the Episcopal Church have asked a Fresno County Superior Court judge to confirm that Lamb is the incumbent of the corporation sole, a legal entity that held title to most of the real property of the diocese, except seven incorporated parishes. Action on that request in the form of a motion is expected later this month, Glass said. He added that if the diocese receives a favorable ruling on the motion, he believes that the rest of the litigation will be "substantially closer to resolution" because of the recent landmark California Supreme Court ruling that held that the buildings and property of dissident congregations in the Diocese of Los Angeles belong to the diocese and the Episcopal Church.
Lamb and Glass both said that re-gaining control of the property will be another way for the diocese to promise stability to Episcopalians who are still worried about the effects of the split. Both men referred to being able to invite people to "come home" to their church buildings where reconciliation can continue.
Still, Glass said, he regretted that he had to come to Executive Council and ask for as much as $500,000 for litigation "instead of asking for $500,000 to figure out a way to feed people in this diocese." The diocese is one of the fastest-growing parts of the state with just over four million people, nearly 23 percent of whom are Hispanic, according to a briefing paper given to Executive Council. Stockton, Merced and Modesto (all cities in the diocese) held the top three foreclosure rates in the U.S. last fall, according to the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, the diocese continues to re-invent itself with what it has. Of the 56 congregations in the diocese, 19 identify themselves as remaining Episcopal, seven are divided, and 37 identify themselves as belonging to the breakaway diocese, which retains the name Diocese of San Joaquin and calls itself "an Anglican diocese of the Province of the Southern Cone." According to the briefing paper, the 19 Episcopal congregations account for about 1,100 people out of the diocese's reported average 2007 Sunday attendance of just under 4,000. There is opportunity as well as challenge in those statistics, Lamb and others said.
"We have an opportunity to try to build a structure in this area that serves God's people instead of having God's people serve the structure," Lamb said. "It will be a structure that serves outreach, evangelism [and] engagement in a transparent fashion."
Transparency is a word San Joaquin Episcopalians use a lot these days. They say it is the opposite of the way the diocese used to run. There was a deliberate withholding of information, they say, that "really deprived the laity of knowledge of the wider church and enabled some people to portray the Episcopal Church in a way is not reflective of what the Episcopal Church really is and how we really function," Lamb said.
"There seems to have been a concerted effort to keep the laity in the dark about their ministry and their mission" as well, he said.
The critical role of lay people in the founding and growing of Grace Episcopal Church is a scenario that diocesan leaders see as a goal for the renewed diocese. "I think what happened in this diocese is the result of keeping the laity in the dark and not allowing the laity to take their rightful places in the councils of the church," Lamb told ENS. "In my view, the place of the laity was secondary to the authority of the clergy in this diocese. I understand priestly and diaconal ministry. I also am a believer in the shared ministry of all God's people, and that the laity have as significant a ministry as a priest or a deacon or even a bishop. It is different but it is as core, if not more core, to the life of the church as ordained ministry."
Gandenberger, Schofield's canon to the ordinary, told ENS that while local priests may not have been clear with lay people about their authority, the diocesan leadership included elected lay people. He also rejected the charges that information was withheld from people.
"The bishop was most open" about the role of the laity, Gandenberger said. He added that any bishop decides what information "would be particularly appropriate for the members of his diocese."
The emphasis the ministry of the laity and of all Episcopalians is not just about rebuilding the infrastructure of a diocese, Lamb said. He hopes to see lay people come to rely on their baptismal vows "as being the core in which all ministry functions" and to understand the point where they know that "what they do in the world is ministry and mission, and that by their lives and in their actions, they bring others to know God through Christ Jesus."
For Jennings of Holy Family, the long list of things that need to be done does not seem like work. "It's almost like re-inventing the church the way you think it should be," he said. "Loving, inclusive, concerned with outreach."