Listening Process a 'gift' to church
Episcopal News Service. August 31, 2009 [083109-01]
Matthew Davies
Listening to the experiences of gay and lesbian Christians may have been commonplace in some dioceses and congregations for decades, but no official Anglican Communion-wide effort got underway until just over three years ago.
A second phase of the process, called the Continuing Indaba and Mutual Listening Project, now is launching with the help of a $1.5 million grant. It will allow clergy and laity to share their experience of listening to homosexual Christians and offer the opportunity for Episcopalians to hear stories of mission in contexts far removed from their own, says the Rev. Canon Phil Groves, who will facilitate the project. "The vision of the project is to make mutual responsibility a reality, hard though that may be."
The Anglican Communion Listening Process is essential to continuing "to open up conversations that we've really not had," said Bishop John Chane of the Diocese of Washington. "Before you can get into changing hearts and minds, you need to come to the table for conversation. That's the gift it can present to the church."
Requests to listen to gay and lesbian Christians have been made intermittently since the bishops at the 1978 Lambeth Conference recognized "the need for pastoral concern for those who are homosexual" and encouraged "dialogue with them."
But not until 2005 did the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), the communion's main policy-making body, call for "mutual listening" and request that adequate resources be allocated so that "study, discussion and reflection" could commence "within each member church of the communion."
Groves, a team vicar in England and a former missionary in Tanzania, was appointed process facilitator in January 2006. He attended General Convention in July to network with bishops, deputies and international visitors and to help them understand the process and what is involved in its next phase, supported by funding from the Satcher Health Leadership Institute in Atlanta.
The phase will run five "pilot conversations" around the communion, with each expected to involve three different dioceses. The conversations will center on mutual listening and sharing in one another's contexts, says Groves.
"Mission contexts in places such as Niagara and San Francisco, as well as London and Edinburgh, demand that gay unions are part of the reality of life and they have to be addressed by the church there for mission to continue," he said. "In other parts of the world other mission issues come to the fore, such as war, extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS.
"We cannot say to the people of Burundi that listening to gay people is more important than averting potential genocide. So when we come together we will want to respect the vulnerable and engage in conversations where an issue is not forced on to another church, but both share in the responsibility for mission in the other's context."
The first steps, Groves said, will be to compile theological resources and identify dioceses "where there is going to be the strength to speak out of conviction across differences and how we assist one another in mission."
Calling the process a "biblical imperative," Groves said he'd engage with indigenous theologians from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific in compiling resources. "In recent years some people in the communion have come to realize that the Western style of combative democracy might not be the only way in which conflict can be addressed," he said. "Indigenous theologians need to be involved to ensure the Continuing Indaba project reflects their wisdom."
Authenticity debated
While many have expressed enthusiasm and support for the process, some conservative Anglicans and former Episcopalians have questioned the new phase's authenticity, saying that the funding, coming from a progressive source, is likely to influence it. Groves and the funders have refuted that claim.
The funding was provided to the Satcher institute by Miami philanthropist the Rev. Marta Weeks, who said it comes with "absolutely no strings attached.
"I trust the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Communion to use it however they feel will best contribute to dialogue and clarification of important issues," she said in a statement made available by the Anglican Communion Office in London.
Those reassurances are not enough for Philip Ashey, a former Episcopal priest and chief operating officer of the conservative American Anglican Council. He has called for suspending the process until funding is secured from a different source.
During General Convention, Groves said that he had received "nothing but total enthusiasm" for the Listening Process "because we're not determining an outcome, but we're trying to engage people in talking to one another from a common basis for respect for Scripture and the Christian tradition."
Most importantly, Groves said, "we need to make sure there's no manipulation and ensure that there's confidence and a safe ground so that people can come knowing that they will be heard and listened to."
Groves said he wouldn't expect the pilot projects to commence until 2010 and possibly 2011. "We will be working with the bishops on how they train one another in leading but not dominating conversations. Then we will be looking into training facilitators, gaining theological resources and maintaining our commitment to traditional Anglican values of Scripture, tradition and reason in the context of our variety of cultures."
The first phase
Since 2006, Groves has monitored work undertaken on human sexuality throughout the Anglican Communion. The first task, he said, was "to discover models of best practice from around the communion and to explore ways of applying these in a wide variety of contexts."
But responses to and engagement in the Listening Process were inconsistent and often determined by the cultural context. In Nigeria, where homosexuality is illegal, for example, the church and its primate Archbishop Peter Akinola have taken a firm conservative stand. They say that homosexuality is "an acquired aberration," a view many American Episcopalians would consider homophobic and unchristian.
In the Episcopal Church, the process of listening to the voices of gay and lesbian people began in the 1960s. A 1976 General Convention resolution said that "homosexual persons are children of God, who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the church."
Bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference committed, through Resolution I.10, "to listen to the experience of homosexual persons" and called for a "means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the communion." In 2005, the ACC called for the process to be set up without further delay.
Asked why it took so long for the process to get off the ground, Chane said, "One of the biggest logjams is really defined by fear -- fear about where this is going to take us from a theological point of view and a cultural point of view.
"There is a fear that the communion is being forced into this by the American church. Culturally that's where we are, and that's not to say our culture drives our theology, but our baptismal covenant calls us to respect the dignity of human beings – that means being in conversation and seeking to understand."
Indaba groups
The Listening Process played an important role at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, particularly through the indaba groups, "which gave us the opportunity to state our concerns in a nonlegislative way," said Chane. Indaba is a Zulu word for the process of decision making by consensus common in many African cultures.
"We should be encouraging people to listen and then go away and do some reflection … and listen to your inner self and what the Spirit is saying to you," said African theologian the Very Rev. Victor Atta-Baffoe, a facilitator on the topic "Listening and Homosexuality" at the 2008 conference.
The first phase of the communion-wide Listening Process culminated in the publication of a book, The Anglican Communion and Homosexuality, to enable listening and dialogue. In it, Groves identifies four practical elements essential to the process: common ground, safe space, the acknowledging of shared vulnerability and good human resources.
It's important to hear from Africans, said Atta-Baffoe, who contributed a chapter. As dean of a Ghana seminary, he has organized seminars and forums about human-sexuality issues. He teaches his students first to deal with their experiences as Ghanaians and Africans and then to ask how the Bible helps them to understand the issues.
Atta-Baffoe, who served on the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission and as a member of the Anglican Covenant Design Group, attended General Convention as a guest of the Chicago Consultation, which for almost two years has engaged in its own listening process through its commitment to educating the church about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) Christians.
During convention, the consultation released a study guide to help congregations deal with difficult questions regarding homosexuality and to assist churches struggling to understand how to interpret Scripture and the Christian tradition, according to the Rev. Ruth Meyers, consultation co-convener, and Hodges Haynes liturgics professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California.
The booklet's five essays, written by Episcopal and Anglican theologians, review human sexuality within the context of Scripture, tradition, ethics and liturgy, followed by eight pages of discussion questions. The guide is a way to "invite people to engage those questions and become theologically literate, and we see this as a way to engage people in the Listening Process," Meyers said.
For the communion-wide process to work, she said, LGBT people need safe places to tell their stories "in a way that they could be received with love and generosity in the grace of God."
But she noted challenges in facilitating that. In countries where homosexuality is a criminal offence, for example, "it's going to be very hard to create that safe space for those folk to speak of their experience," she said.
Meyers said she hoped the kinds of conversations held at General Convention would multiply. "We really need to continue to develop the conversations and the international work on building relationships throughout the communion, not just around these issues, but continuing to get to know each other. They are our true ties of communion," she said.
Louie Crew, an openly gay partnered deputy from the Diocese of Newark, commended the work of the consultation in listening to LGBT Christians and educating the wider church.
Crew, who has been with his partner for more than 35 years, said he enjoyed engaging the hard questions about his sexuality. "Too often the dialogue ends up being a group talking about gays, and gays don't turn up," he said. "The breakthrough is so dramatic and so quick when you have good dialogue. Much of the misinterpretations can be changed in one conversation."
Indigenous people offer unique and important perspectives to these conversations, noted the Rev. Debbie Royals, missioner for Native American ministry development in the Diocese of Los Angeles, who describes herself as being "in a covenanted relationship with her female partner."
"We, as everything of creation, have God's Spirit in it, and Spirit is both male and female – we cannot separate them," she said. "We read the Bible passages that say God created man and woman. It doesn't say, as my elders have pointed out, that God created them male or female, which is what we acknowledge, that each person has a male and a female spirit. What you tend to be drawn to or live out in your life is what God called you to be."
Royals and Professor Joseph Galgalo of St. Paul's Theological College in Limuru, Kenya, were writing partners on a chapter for The Anglican Communion and Homosexuality.
Getting to know Galgalo gave Royals "the opportunity to hear that there are reasons why it should also be my pastoral and heartfelt concern that there are other people out there with other perspectives and that not everybody sees everything in the same way," she said.
Such relationship building, Groves said, is precisely what the Listening Process is about. "Neither of them changed their mind, but just being able to converse and fully understand one another was the beginning to respect, to hearing how one another respects the Bible and the Christian tradition."