Presiding Bishop's Opening Remarks, House of Bishops Meeting
Episcopal News Service. October 4, 1989 [89180]
In a few moments we will embark as a community upon a matter of the highest seriousness and consequence. Dr. Mary Tanner and the bishop of Bethlehem will review for us the report of the Archbishop's Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate (the Eames Commission) along with the response of the Primates to that report. (You should each have a copy of the Eames report before you.) After lunch, following a brief period for questions of clarification, the bishop of Eau Claire will report on the recently formed Episcopal Synod of America, which, as you know, grew out of the June meeting in Fort Worth called by the Evangelical and Catholic Mission. Following Bishop Wantland's report, we will break into small groups to identify pastoral and other areas of concern in these two presentations that you think we as a House need to consider in depth. I refer to those issues of community, of principle, and of practice that threaten to divide and polarize us and yet also contain promise of uniting us in deep communion. Your work in the small groups this afternoon will be crucial to the process that will occupy us for the next several days.
On Monday afternoon, then, after a day of prayerful reflection on Sunday, we will come back into our small groups to consider the issues you have identified as being of consequence. I hope you will have two questions foremost in your minds as you wrestle with these issues. First, I hope you will be asking yourselves: How do we as bishops live together in ways that promote the mission and unity of the entire church? Then, as you consider those issues that divide us, I hope you will ask yourselves: In our differences, how do we rediscover and reclaim our deepest points of communion?
Finally, after you have finished your small group work and the results have been collected and collated, the Pastoral Letter Committee of the House will draft a document for our consideration on Wednesday. That document will, I trust, express the mind of the House on the issues that both divide and unite us. It will, I hope, point the way forward for our church as it seeks to live out, in all its wonderful but sometimes troubling diversity, its sacred calling as the Body of Christ.
This is a long and deliberate process that I have described. It has been carefully planned by members of my Council of Advice, in cooperation with the bishops of the House who identify themselves with the Episcopal Synod of America. I believe that it is a sound procedure, one that will allow for unhurried reflection and deliberation, for questioning and for sharing of our deepest fears and hopes. Above all, I believe it will allow us to listen carefully to each other, to hear first-hand, without the distorting effects of distance and misinformation. Even so, it will not be an academic exercise, in which cool objectivity and detachment are the norm. No process that involves our life together can be merely academic; we are all emotionally involved in the questions before us, as well we should be, but emotion alone will not serve us sufficiently.
I ask you, then, to come together in trust and goodwill and let this process run its course.
Let me say two other things before I turn the proceedings over to Dr. Tanner and Bishop Dyer. While I need not remind you that the questions before us are of great importance to us collegial members of this House, perhaps I should remind you that what we do here -- and how we do it -- can be of great importance to other churches in the Anglican Communion. I have spoken before about what I call the laboratory-like quality of the Episcopal Church in the eyes of the rest of the Communion. The churches of Ireland, Australia, Southern Africa, and England, to name a few, are at various stages in active consideration of women's ordination. What happens here among us, how we manage to deal with continuing dissent from our 1976 decision on women's ordination, will be central to the debate and decisions in these and other provinces of the Anglican Communion. I dare say also that our actions may be relevant to debates of the same issue in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. So, what we are doing we do neither in isolation nor for ourselves alone. Mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ is not simply a slogan but a reality.
Finally, let me say that I am very hopeful about our time together and about the outcome. I can be hopeful because of my firm belief that God is calling us to be something greater than we presently are. God is calling us to go beyond old definitions and formulas and to test the depths of community, of koinonia. The model for all this is not yet clear (and part of our task here is to struggle to make it clearer), but I will not yield in my belief that this is what God is calling us to do: to be more loving, more open, more willing to risk boundaries and accustomed ways of relating to each other. Can we be receptive to the Spirit's movement among us? If we can, then the model of a stronger, truly more inclusive community will become clearer in the days ahead.