Browning Trip Renews, Strengthens East Asia Ties
Episcopal News Service. May 28, 1987 [87120]
NEW YORK (DPS, May 28) -- A hoarse and weary Presiding Bishop reflected this week on a journey of "forty days and forty nights" that carried him to two major Anglican events in East Asia this Spring and on a pastoral visit to the Church in Taiwan, part of Province VIII of the Episcopal Church, and a return to the Diocese of Okinawa where he spent 12 years as priest, archdeacon and, finally, bishop.
While the trip was, in a very real sense, a homecoming for the Most Rev. Edmond L. Browning, it was much more than that to the Church he heads. It was an opportunity to strengthen the bonds of friendship between the Episcopal Church and some of the Pacific Churches it had helped to found and between the Episcopal Church and the entire rest of the Anglican Communion. It was a chance to affirm the importance of local culture in developing churches and to assert again the support of the Episcopal Church for churches working toward autonomy. It was a time to stress in new locales some of Browning's priorities: the importance of 'he Church as family; the affirmation of unity within the Anglican Communion's diversity; the top priority of seeking peace with justice; the enrichment to the total church of the ministry of women.
Those were some of the elements from the seventh meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, the centennial of the Anglican Church in Japan and his pastoral visits that Browning held up in his comments to the staff of the Church Center.
Browning is one of the three U.S. delegates to ACC, the Others being the Very Rev. Frederick Borsch of the Chapel at Princeton, and Pamela Chinnis, vice president of the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church. At the Singapore meeting, Chinnis was elected to the ACC Standing Committee.
ACC brings together some 80 delegates -- bishops, clergy and laity -- from the 27 Provinces (or Churches) of the Anglican Communion, along with perhaps an additional 25 consultants, staff, ecumenical observers and communicators. One third of the delegates rotate off at each meeting. For both Browning and Borsch, who were returning delegates, this meeting was a time to renew friendships, catch up on news of families and share concerns with fellow church people from around the world.
"I am always so moved to be in this gathering," Browning commented. "I am deeply appreciative of the fellowship and of the love and caring we have for one another."
It was a sentiment which both the other U.S. delegates had expressed earlier. "All the issues we face in the world and in the Church become personal and human," Chinnis said, adding that they thus become more understandable and more compelling.
The delegates bring different perspectives from their many cultures in which they experience God, Borsch said. "Meeting together is a kind of partial fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that people shall come from the East and West and sit at table in the Kingdom of God."
Most of the work of ACC, Browning noted, was carried on in sections which addressed the same themes that have been chosen for the 1988 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops: Mission and Ministry, Dogmatic and Pastoral matters, Ecumenical Relations and Christianity and the Social order.
To the Mission and Ministry section was brought what had been expected to be the hottest issue before the Council -- the ordination of women and possible consecration of a woman bishop. While his own commitment is to a ministry which embraces the full rights of women, including their calling to the three-fold ordained ministry, Browning always has maintained, as he did at ACC-7, that the Church must listen with understanding to those who cannot accept this view and he broad enough to accept them within its folds.
Browning said the section meetings had been stimulating and revealing. "It was very exciting to me to realize that the African members of our group were so strongly in favor of the ordination of women, and on firm theological grounds." In fact, the group discovered in its first meeting that they were unanimous on this point, and therefore had to request Archbishop Donald Robinson of Sydney, Australia (a well-known opponent), to meet with them in order to be sure the opposing view was properly heard.
To his surprise, there was only one woman in the section, Browning said: Korean delegate Ruth Choi. "She remained very quiet through most of our meetings," he recalled. "Then she asked to read a statement she had prepared about this. She talked about the Korean flag -- a circle divided into two sections, one red, symbolizing man, and the other blue, representing woman. But the two overlap, each invading the other's hemisphere and establishing itself in the other's center. She said that a whole person should possess the virtues and characteristics of both the masculine and the feminine. Certainly, this would be true of God, in whom there could never be any discrimination. Her talk was a high point of the whole meeting for me. Everyone was so deeply moved, including Archbishop Robinson."
The final paper issued by the section was such a reasoned presentation of arguments both for and against the ordination of women -- although leading to the definite conclusion that the full Church will eventually include women in all three orders -- that it elicited almost no debate when it was presented to the plenary session of the Council. Focus of the paper was the importance of maintaining the unity of the Communion, despite its diversity -- an idea roundly endorsed by the full Council throughout the two-week meeting.
From Singapore, Browning flew to Taiwan, where he met with local clergy and made some brief visitations, assuring this remote section of the Episcopal Church of the concern and love of their fellow church members in the United States.
Returning to Okinawa was a special part of the Asian trip for both Browning and his wife Patti, who accompanied him on the entire Asian odyssey. It was their first visit to that land since Browning resigned as its bishop in 1971 in order to allow the diocese, then being re-unified with the Japanese church, to elect its own indigenous bishop. He had been a missionary bishop from the U.S.
Patti Browning once stated in an interview that Okinawa would always be a special place for the Browning family because "we really grew up there." The Presiding Bishop made a similar reference in an address to that diocese during Evensong the night of their arrival.
"You taught us the meaning of family," Browning said. "You taught us that the family of God -- the family of the Church -- transcends national barriers, class barriers, racial barriers. You taught us that God indeed calls us to be one.
"You taught us that the family of the Church is called to be a loving community. You taught us about love -- you taught us how to love -- you gave us your love."
What his family had discovered in their midst, Browning said, was that "it is in community that the love that nurtures and strengthens is found...You taught us that, even though we might be few in numbers, God calls us to be concerned for His creation, to be concerned for the needs of others, for the issues of peace and Justice."
Browning met with the diocesan clergy and Standing Committee during his stay, breakfasted with the vestry and clergy of All Souls Church (his former parish) and was welcomed at a gala reception.
It was another homecoming for the Brownings to return to Japan for the Nippon Sei Ko Kai centennial. They and their family had spent two years in Kobe in 1963-65 attending Japanese language school. He served as assistant to the Bishop of Kobe during that time. During the entire three days of centennial festivities, the Brownings were warmly greeted by friends from their earlier stay. Remembering their own days as missionaries, one afternoon the Brownings entertained at tea all American missionaries presently working in Japan.
Addressing the opening Evensong of the N.S.K.K. celebration, Browning affirmed the close links that church has always had to the U.S. Church.
"The horrors of the most destructive war in human history could not separate us," he said. "Neither, we can be sure, will the uncertainties of today or of the future; for we are bound together in Christ, in whom all things hold together."
Browning urged the Japanese church to hold fast to that which is uniquely theirs to offer to the New Jerusalem: "A vision of the Kingdom of God seen through the eyes of Japanese culture."
Symbolizing their partnership in the mission of the Church, Browning presented to Japanese Primate Ichirou Kikiwada, a special gift: the establishment of the Harry Sherbourne Kennedy Memorial Fund, honoring the late Bishop of Hawaii (1944-69) whose ministry, he said, had been a key to making firm the Anglican presence in Asia. The Fund was inaugurated with a gift from The Episcopal Church, to which the presiding Bishop said he hoped would be added gifts from other friends of Kennedy. The purpose of the Fund, Browning explained, was to help Nippon Sei Ko Kai help other churches in Asia.
The Presiding Bishop arrived in Osaka a day prior to the centennial in order to lead a group of some 50 persons from eight countries on a pilgrimage to the Memorial Peace Park and Museum at Hiroshima. In a steady rain which persisted throughout the day, the pilgrims huddled under umbrellas while Browning led a prayer service, with Okinawa's Bishop Paul S. Nakanrra reading portions of the specially prepared liturgy in Japanese.
A previous trip to Hiroshima in 1981, Browning told the group, had been for him a conversion experience, leading him to a total commitnent to the cause of world peace. "I became convinced that nuclear arms, chemical warfare, any plan to destroy creation and bring to naught that which God has intended, was simply incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
Pursuing the cause of peace with Justice has been a hallmark of Browning's ministry since that time.
Besides Patti Browning, the Presiding Bishop was accompanied on the Asian tour by his deputy for Anglican affairs, the Rev. Charles Cesaretti; Ruth Nicastro of the Diocese of Los Angeles; and, for the Japanese portion of the trip, by the Rev. Patrick Mauney, Asia/Pacific officer of the Episcopal Church Center, and his wife, Mardi.