Bowen Conference Turns From Issues to a Focus on Humanity
Episcopal News Service. April 13, 2000 [2000-082]
Harry W. Crandall
(ENS) Gathering in the rustic quarters of the Kanuga Conference Center, 190 Episcopalians met March 13-16 for the 12th annual Bowen Conference, a program that typically has grappled with hard issues facing the church, but which this year reflected on the common humanity of the 2.4 million people who are the church.
Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold set the tone of the conference with a talk that began with the analogy of the biblical wilderness as a place that cannot be avoided. "The wilderness is a place of growth and development where we move from encounter to awareness," he said.
"Biblical truth," he added, "is discovered in relationships, which is what the scriptural stories are all about....So many of the struggles of the church are not about issues, they are about people."
He made it clear that in this age when so many seem to "lead with their conclusions," the church must move away from the kind of confrontation that tries to make things "either/or" and learn instead to live in the paradox of "both/and."
The Rev. James C. Fenhagen, former dean of the General Theological Seminary, described the mission of the church as a way to understand its identity. "We have," he noted, "a vision conflict." The church is in conflict over what in its biblical and creedal affirmations should receive primary emphasis, he said.
Noting the disagreements over the degree of acceptance church members give women and homosexual persons, Fenhagen also called attention to the disarray on the matter of authority in the church's common life: "Who speaks for us and who do we listen to?"
"Despite our claim to catholicity," he declared, "when it comes to authority, the Episcopal Church is Protestant to the core!...It has been a long time since members of the Episcopal Church changed their minds in deference to the authority of a bishop with whom they disagreed."
Fenhagen went on to affirm the power of the liturgical and theological declaration, "Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again."
"As a church, we by intent have not lived by carefully worded articles of faith," he said. Rather, "what we believe is embodied in the way we pray: Proclamation, the Biblical Story, Repentance and Forgiveness, the offering of ourselves and God's gift of himself in the Breaking of the Bread -- all are there as statements of what we believe and hope for."
Later, harking back to the General Convention of 1964, he recalled that the major program inaugurated was "Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ," which fostered so many of the relationships that bind the Anglican Communion together to this day. That is the kind of people-to-people involvement in the name of Christ that makes mission a reality, he said.
The gifts of this people-to-people engagement are "awareness and compassion, vision and hospitality," he said. "The command to 'Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house be filled,' is not a matter of us choosing who's in and who's out....God's call to the church in our time, if we are to take the world seriously, is not to tighten our boundaries but to expand them."
After hearing Duke Divinity School Professor Stanley Hauerwas criticize a small herd of sacred cows such as the American Way of Life, American ideas of Justice, the principle of Separation of Church and State and the Constitution's use of the term "inalienable right," conference-goers moved to the last speaker, Professor Denise Mary Ackerman of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
A product of a Dutch Reformed Church background, Ackerman reflected on the horrors of living under apartheid and the healing promoted by the country's Truth and Justice Commission. Her feelings and stories of the working of the Holy Spirit in her troubled homeland and the power of miracles set the stage for group participation in work on conflict resolution.
Throughout the conference, participants also heard remarks from conference chaplain Mary Adelia McLeod, bishop of Vermont, and music chosen for -- and sometimes written for -- the meeting by Horace Clarence Boyer, the general editor for "Lift Every Voice and Sing II."
In some parting thoughts, Griswold said he hoped that in this Jubilee year the church would stress not only the baptismal covenant but the act of baptism as well. "We need to remember that Jesus' baptism and his being driven into the wilderness were one event, not two separate events," he said.
We are called to go likewise into our wildernesses, not merely to "dwell in gated communities of like-mindedness," he added.
Griswold noted that the words conversion and conversation come from the same root word. "Real conversation," he said, "is dangerous and we must not avoid it simply because we fear we might be changed....We ought to enter into conversation not to reach conclusions, but to reveal Christ in each other."