Griswold Finds a Church 'Focused on Mission'
Episcopal News Service. June 14, 2004 [061404-1]
Jan Nunley, Matthew Davies
In his opening comments to the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, meeting June 11-14 in Burlington, Vermont, Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold reviewed his extensive travel around the church and the Anglican Communion in recent days, reporting that "everywhere I've been I have found health, vigor, commitment to mission in a variety of ways."
At the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council, which met in Canterbury March 1-5, Griswold found that the participants were "not focused on that which divides, but focused on what is the overall mission we share around the world as members of the Anglican Communion."
The bishops of the Episcopal Church, meeting March 19-25 in Camp Allen, Texas, also pledged to work together "with generosity of spirit in order that the church might live the fullness of the gospel for the sake of the world."
Griswold described the Texas meeting as "a deep and thoughtful gathering," adding that "there were several members who were very much on the edge of the meeting, but overwhelmingly people were there fully participating, representing a variety of views, representing what I like to call the 'diverse center' of our church."
At the bishops' meeting, the Primate of Melanesia, Sir Ellison Pogo, prominent spokesperson for the South Pacific in many international forums (notably the World Council of Churches), remarked to Griswold that the Episcopal Church is very good at giving but not as good at receiving from others.
"I think part of the tension in our Anglican world," Griswold said, "is that we are perceived as givers--usually in the form of finance--but we always seem to leave with the assumption that our patterns and our understandings are the normative ones, and that what we encounter in other places would be so much better if they would simply come around to our way of doing things.
"A genuine appreciation of the other in the fullness of their otherness," he added, "is something that many perceive we're not very good at."
What the church should be
Griswold had high praise for a group of Anglican women who took part in the New York meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) in March.
"If we let the women do it I think we'd be in a much better place," Griswold remarked to applause from council members, adding that women "see things less in pontifical terms and more in life terms."
"All the male posturing, all the ego inflations that so dominate other conversations across the Communion seem not to exist when you bring people together from some of the places that seem most problematic in terms of our own relationships," he added. "That's a very important counterbalance to some of the ecclesial goings-on that we are caught up in right now."
The Plant My Church Consultation, held in May, brought people in touch with 20/20 energies and highlighted how mission is broadly understood in the Episcopal Church. "Part of the question of what constitutes a new church," Griswold said, "is being in touch with the wider world." The 20/20 movement--centered on doubling average Sunday attendance by the year 2020--is a goal that General Convention adopted in July 2000 to contribute to the growth and vitality of the church and its congregations.
Griswold also mentioned visits to three seminaries of the Episcopal Church, expressing optimism in discovering graduates who are "articulate, confident and grounded in a true sense of what the church should be."
Deep bonds
During a recent visit to the Anglican Centre in Rome, which promotes mutual understanding between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, Griswold said he found that, although "we hear some of the negative criticism from the ecumenical community about events in the life of the Episcopal Church, there are people who say, unofficially, 'God bless you and thank you-this is a step forward in the life of the Church that you have taken on our behalf.' So if you hear that other ecumenical communities are furious at us--they may be at an official level, but there are all sorts of other levels that come into play as well."
Speaking about his invitation to preach at the June installation ceremony of the new Canadian Primate, Andrew Hutchison, Griswold reminded Executive Council of the "deep bond we share with our Canadian brothers and sisters," adding that it is "a relationship we can all be grateful for."
At a consultation with theologians at Emery House, near Newburyport, Massachusetts, Griswold said he engaged in conversations that incorporated many different perspectives. He described the experience as "renewing and helpful," centering around questions such as "how is Christ formed in us; how are we called to give face to the spirit in the deep and defended places of our lives; what is our legacy of colonialism in our relationships with other parts of the Anglican world?"
"Ours, by nature, is a generous ecclesiology and a highly incarnational ecclesiology," he said. "We live our life through embodied argument--not simply abstractions but a person or persons--and so issues become matters of discerning incarnate reality rather than some kind of abstraction 'out there.'"
Growing in truth
Moving into what he called his "ruminations," Griswold took for his text a portion of Jesus' farewell discourse in the sixteenth chapter of John's gospel: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth" (John 16:12-13a).
"That says to me that the truth in Jesus is never fully accessible to us," Griswold explained. "We are always growing in the truth and there is always more for us to learn." Speaking about evolving human understanding of such topics as cosmology and the origins of disease, Griswold noted that "all of these are parts of a truth that wasn't accessible to us earlier. Maybe we needed to explore and make mistakes for us to come to a full understanding."
But if there has been progress and development in these areas, he asked, why can't there be progress in the understanding of human sexuality? "Other areas of human growth we happily accept as progressive and growing. Why, suddenly, when we come to questions of sexuality, does everything have to be fully given in final form by the Bible, when other areas of human growth and discovery we happily accept as progressive and unfolding?"
Living Communion more deeply
Griswold concluded by addressing the tensions in the Anglican Communion, particularly statements that provinces or dioceses are in various states of communion with the Episcopal Church over its recent decisions. The notion that communion is something for human beings to withhold or bestow is "bizarre," Griswold said. "Communion is God's own life shared with humankind, and that's what the communion of the Holy Spirit is all about: our being yanked into the reality of God's own life, Trinitarian life."
"With the various strains and struggles and fears and rumors and misrepresentations that are so much part of Anglican reality at the moment, isn't there, in all of this, an invitation to discover what it means to be in communion in a new way?" he asked. "If you move beyond the realm of politeness and passive endurance--which is sometimes what passes for genuine relationship--I think there's an invitation. It's difficult; it's painful; it will involve repentance. How do we repent of arrogance? How do we repent of the lingering legacy of colonialism? These are questions we need to ask ourselves, with the end point being living the mystery of communion more deeply."