Chicago Consultation hosts 'Doing Justice, Building Communion' luncheon
Episcopal News Service -- Anaheim, California. July 12, 2009 [071209-05]
Lynette Wilson
Wyoming Bishop Bruce Caldwell stepped up to the microphone during a luncheon July 12 hosted by the Chicago Consultation and set the record straight.
He'd been asked to explain how an "elk hunting, horse riding bishop from Wyoming come to be working on full inclusion for the LGBT community?"
Caldwell explained that it wasn't long after he became bishop that he was asked to preside at the funeral of a young man who had served as an acolyte in his diocese and who was a member of the University of Wyoming Canterbury Club, a Christian university group. That young man was Matthew Shepard, who was tortured and murdered near Laramie in 1998 in a hate crime believed to have been motivated by Shepard's homosexuality.
The consultation hosted a "Doing Justice, Building Communion" luncheon for more than 60 people July 12 at the Hilton Hotel, steps from the Anaheim Convention Center where the Episcopal Church's 76th General Convention is underway and where the House of Deputies was scheduled to discuss B033-related resolutions later in the day. B033, adopted by General Convention 2006, was widely regarded as a moratorium on consecrating gay bishops. House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson and New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, who lives in a long-term relationship with a male partner, attended the luncheon.
The Chicago Consultation, a group of Episcopal and Anglican bishops, clergy, theologians and lay people, supports the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians in the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The consultation was convened at Seabury Western Theological Seminary after General Convention 2006 so that theologians and other Episcopalians and Anglicans could explore new perspectives that support full inclusion of LGBT people.
Caldwell was one of four people who spoke during the luncheon.
Crowds, including many gay and lesbian people, came to Shepard's funeral at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Casper, Wyo., and rather than distribute the Eucharist at the altar, Caldwell chose to distribute in the farthest reach of the parish hall. As the gay and lesbian people came forward with their empty hands stretched out to receive the holy sacrament, "I knew that was an absolutely holy moment, Caldwell said "I wondered why are they here, why would they have hands outstretched after the way they have been treated."
More than a decade later, Caldwell is still haunted by those outstretched hands.
"Is it time to fill those hands? Can we fill those hands together with the absolute love of God?" Caldwell asked.
(The Episcopal Public Policy Network in May encouraged Episcopalians to support the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a federal bill that would reform existing hate crimes law.)
In an encouraging lesson on Episcopal Church polity offered from an historical perspective, Byron Rushing, (Massachusetts) and a Democratic state representative, reminded luncheon attendees that the church's polity allows for "arguments in extreme fashion," while the church stays together.
The Episcopal Church didn't break apart over differing views on abolition and slavery, the church split when southern states formed a confederacy, and when the confederacy ended, the church reunited, he said.
Two hundred years ago, the Episcopal Church was formed without a right wing, rather it had a center and a left; it came to be democratically, and without bishops, he said.
Rushing hinted at what Bishop Barbara Harris, retired suffragan of Massachusetts and the first female bishop ordained in the Anglican Communion, said in her sermon during a Eucharist service hosted by Integrity USA, a support group for gay and lesbian Episcopalians, regarding B033.
Harris described B033 as the House of Bishops attempt to make false peace with others in the Anglican Communion.
Jenny Te Paa, dean of Te Rau Kahikatea (College of St. John the Evangelist) in Auckland, New Zealand, referred to Episcopalians as "indecently obedient."
But as someone who travels throughout the Anglican Communion, Te Paa has witnessed that there is little difference in the way Anglicanism is practiced at the local level.
"And so it is with absolute confidence that I can say there are far more Episcopalians and Anglicans getting on with the pressing business of being God's mission people, God's full inclusion mission people, than there are those fussing and fretting over whether full inclusion is indeed a Gospel imperative," she said.
In the Rev. Dahn Dean Gandell of Episcopalians for Global Mission's experience, mission requires help from everyone.
"We need each other to do mission, we all need each other gay, lesbian, straight … we need each other. We have to be God's hands in the world," she said. "And when we find those points of connection, it is such an incredible and beautiful thing … sexual orientation doesn't matter. When there are people hurting in the world, we are called to help them."
Before giving the blessing to mark the luncheon's conclusion, Robinson spoke of how his diocese grew by 3 percent in 2008, a growth that he attributes to the diocese's policy of inclusion. And he referenced a Pew Research study that concluded that 20- and 30-somethings are turned off by what they see as discrimination in the church, and with that he said: "I would offer to this church that if we really are interested in evangelism, if we really would like 20- and 30-somethings in our congregations, then carefully consider legislation we'll be voting on in the next few days."