Something Dramatic

Is the diocese planning something dramatic to be revealed on Tuesday evening, or has Chancellor Devlin been reading too many spy novels?

That was how I ended my post “Pittsburgh Mystery” Monday. I actually thought that I might have been a bit dramatic myself. What more could the diocese do, after all? It had already gutted the accession clause in its constitution!

I must say that I underestimated the ability of Bishop Robert Duncan and his followers to create a parallel universe in which up is down, black is white, and wrong is right. More about that later.

Although I considered going to the Diocesan Council meeting last night, I did not actually do so; I knew that other loyal Episcopalians who had not been tripping out on hallucinogenic mushrooms would be there as observers. I had, I thought, done my duty by attending the District V meeting. (See “‘... the bishop didn’t say that.’”)

Revelations at the Diocesan Council Meeting

So what happened? A series of constitutional amendments are being proposed. You can read them here. These were accepted for passing along to the annual convention in November for its consideration. This was done with essentially no discussion and only token opposition. (Some members of Diocesan Council are elected by districts, and, by geographic accident, some districts contain enough mainstream parishes to actually elect one of their own to the Council. There were three votes opposed to the resolution to change the constitution.) Council also passed along a resolution that would rescind the unlawful changes already made to the accession clause of the diocesan constitution. (This resolution, obviously, did not come from the diocese.) At least one member of Council had trouble dealing with the cognitive dissonance of presenting two conflicting proposals to the convention, but the bishop explained that this was perfectly in order. (That resolution can be read here. The diocese eventually posted a version of this as well.)

The diocese quickly posted an explanation of what it was planning to do, along with a link to its own proposal and Bishop Duncan’s pre-convention report.

Cockamamie Theories

Bishop Duncan declares in his report that “it appears the time has come to begin the process of realignment within the Anglican Communion.” This, of course, is because The Episcopal Church has not submitted to the demands of those who have no authority to tell it what it should do and who would surely not submit to analogous demands made of them. He complains further that The Episcopal Church has not allowed “sufficient integrity to dioceses like Pittsburgh, concerning traditional Faith and Order.” I had not known that integrity could be granted by The Episcopal Church. I actually thought it was something one either had or did not have. What Duncan means, of course, is that The Episcopal Church is unwilling to allow a bishop to be unconstrained by its own faith and order—a constraint every bishop vows to accept at the time of consecration—rather than doing whatever he chooses because he—invariably he—believes he knows God’s will.

Duncan subscribes to the theory—likely because it is convenient, rather than because it is compelling—that the church is not really a church at all in the sense most people think of churches. It is not an unified whole, but a confederation of completely independent dioceses that unite with one another as long as it is convenient to do so. That this is patently ridiculous should be clear from the fact that the church’s constitution requires, in Article V, “unqualified accession to the Constitution and Canons of this Church” in a diocese’s constitution. (This is hardly the place for a complete argument that the church is not a confederation, just as the United States of America is not a confederation. Interested readers should read Dr. Joan Gundersen’s essay in answer to the confederation theory, “History Revisited: Historical Background of the Proposed Amendment to Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.” I also recommend my own essay, “Unqualified Accession.”) “Constitutional changes proposed for consideration at the 142^nd Annual Convention,“ Duncan writes, ”would begin the process to exercise our right to end the accession of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh to the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church of the United States of America.” There is, of course, no such right.

This brings us to the substance of what the Diocese of Pittsburgh is proposing to do. For openers, the present Article 1 (Acceding to the General Constitution) is to be rewritten as follows:

The Church in the Diocese of Pittsburgh is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces and regional churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.

(Interested readers can find the current Diocese of Pittsburgh constitution and canons here.) This wording, of course, parrots the Preamble of the Episcopal Church constitution. There are two problems, however. First, the text eliminates any reference to the church’s constitution, and certainly to any “accession.” Then, there is the matter of declaring the diocese to be a part of the Anglican Communion. Provinces (i.e., regional churches), not dioceses, belong to the communion, and, although a few extra-provincial dioceses overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury are part of the Anglican Communion, one suspects that Rowan Williams has not blessed the arrangement contemplated by Pittsburgh. Even if the Diocese of Pittsburgh were in a province, be it The Episcopal Church or some other province, it would not strictly be a member of the Anglican Communion any more than it is at present.

A proposed new section of the constitution would, in fact, put the diocese into some unspecified Anglican province to be determined by canon, and, therefore, easily changed at the convenience of the diocese:

The Diocese of Pittsburgh shall have membership in such Province of the Anglican Communion as is by diocesan Canon specified.

A proposed new canon places the diocese, for the moment, at least, in “The (Protestant) Episcopal Church in the United States of America,” but the diocese is hedging its bets and, of course, threatening The Episcopal Church, should its House of Bishops, in the upcoming meeting in New Orleans, not surrender to the international tyrants who are the Anglican Primates.

The diocese has, in fact, nicely parameterized its future constitution so as to not require troublesome constitutional changes whenever it chooses to province-shop. This is how “deputies or delegates” to the General Convention (or whatever synod in whatever province) are described in the proposed constitution:

Section 1. At each Annual Convention, there shall be elected [four] Clergy and an equal number of lay persons to serve as deputies or delegates to any extra-diocesan conventions, synods or meetings that may occur between Annual Conventions and to which the Diocese shall be invited to send deputies. They shall possess the same qualifications as member of Standing Committee and shall be elected by a concurrent majority of both orders.

Section 2. At the same Convention, there shall be chosen in the same manner and with the same qualifications, the same number of Clergy and Laity to serve as alternate deputies.

Section 3. Should a vacancy among the deputies or delegates occur by reason of resignation, removal from the Diocese, death or otherwise between the stated times of
election, it shall be filled by the highest ranking Alternate, as determined by the General Rules of Order.

Section 4. In case of failure or neglect of the Convention to elect deputies or delegates, those already in office shall continue until successors are chosen.

Section 5. It shall be the duty of the persons so elected to signify to the Bishop, in writing, at least one month before the meeting of the extra-diocesan convention or synod, their acceptance of the appointment and their intention to perform its duties. If a person so elected fails to give this notice or fails to attend the convention or synod, the Bishop shall notify a replacement in accordance with Section 3 hereof.

Not content with a piece of southwestern Pennsylvania, Bishop Duncan seeks empire. The amended constitution specifies the limits of the diocese as follows:

The Diocese of Pittsburgh embraces all those counties of the State of Pennsylvania known as Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Cambria, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Somerset, Washington and Westmoreland. Additionally, for reasons found satisfactory to any Convention of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, parishes outside of the boundaries of the aforementioned counties may be considered for admission into union with the Diocese of Pittsburgh, provided that they meet all other requirements set forth in the Constitution and Canons of the Diocese of Pittsburgh for canonical admission.

Contrary to Episcopal Church practice, the Diocese of Pittsburgh has the potential to not even be contiguous! Imperial conquest requires rules for incorporating new territory into the empire, and that is given in the following text:

Any Parish formed and desiring union with the Diocese, and regularly organized according to the Canons, may be admitted into union with the Convention, on motion, by a majority of votes; provided, it shall have laid before the Convention its Charter and By-laws, or its original Articles of Association, or a duly certified copy thereof, wherein it expressly adopts and recognizes the authority of the Constitution and Canons of this Diocese, and commits to upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer. And provided, also, that it shall have complied with the canonical requirements for such admission.

Hypocrisy reaches its apex here. (Well, maybe not. See below.) Whereas the Diocese of Pittsburgh is about to disregard completely the constitution and canons to which it pledged its unqualified accession, it now will demand absolute fealty from its own parishes!

And Cockamamie Consequences

Pittsburgh Episcopalians are used to the bishop’s mantra that he is not leaving The Episcopal Church, but the church is leaving him, walking apart, etc. We have learned to ignore such patent nonsense. However, my own parish became alarmed at this rhetoric recently when it received a letter (dated June 25) from Bishop Duncan suggesting that our newly selected rector might not be approved by him. The church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, in Mt. Lebanon, had made it quite clear, both to the bishop and to potential candidates, that it was committed to staying in The Episcopal Church. Priests who might wish for a different parish future, it was clear, need not apply. Bishop Duncan wrote:

Given the extraordinary moment of decision now before our diocesan family, and what I perceive as a trajectory likely to lead St. Paul’s to separation from the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, I do not believe I would be faithful to my responsibilities as Bishop of all the people to agree to the call without Standing Committee consultation.

Because the parish wanted to stay in The Episcopal Church, it was, in Duncan’s looking-glass world, threatening to separate from the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. Little did St. Paul’s’ Vestry members realize how seriously the Duncan intended his words to be taken. (The parish’s choice of rector was eventually approved, though perhaps because the candidate was so qualified that no reasonable excuse for not doing so was readily available. The bishop had more important matters on his mind.)

So what of churches like St. Paul’s if Duncan is successful at creating his non-Episcopal Church empire? The question was asked at the Diocesan Council meeting. (There are at least a dozen churches in this situation, and their numbers may increase as the bishop’s behavior becomes more erratic.) The bishop explained that the settlement agreement resulting from Calvary Church’s lawsuit provides a procedure by which parishes wishing to leave the diocese may negotiate their exit. The bishop says that this procedure can be used by parishes who want to remain in The Episcopal Church! This, of course, stands the settlement agreement on its head, as the point of the agreement, as far as Calvary Church was concerned, anyway, was to protect Episcopal Church property. Clearly, Bishop Duncan expects not only to remove his diocese from The Episcopal Church—apparently the Boston Globe got the story right—but to claim all the property as well. This is exactly what the Calvary lawsuit was initiated to prevent. Judge James may have something to say about the matter.

The Way Forward

The Episcopal Church is being challenged by a rogue bishop in a way it has never been challenged before. It is clear how we must proceed. Bishop Robert William Duncan has abandoned the communion of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Bishops, do your duty. Your church is waiting.

“... the bishop didn’t say that.”

I attended a Diocese of Pittsburgh event last night. It was a meeting of church members in District V, one of the regional groupings of parishes in the diocese. It was an “informational meeting” relating to the visions of the diocese’s future discussed at a May retreat of diocesan leaders. (See “Diocese Asks: What Next?”) Members of District V churches were invited to ask questions of two diocesan representatives, the Rt. Rev. Henry Scriven, Assistant Bishop, and the Rev. Canon Mary Haggard Hays, who appears to be Bishop Robert Duncan’s closest associate in the diocese.

Although four options for the diocese were originally proposed, the diocese has largely stopped talking about one of them, namely, that the diocese undo the unlawful steps it has taken to distance itself from The Episcopal Church—weakening the accession clause in its constitution, for example—and fully participate as a regular diocese of the church. It has been clear for years that Bishop Duncan and his allies have wanted to create a separate Anglican Communion province for their particular brand of Anglican Fundamentalism and to do so by removing parishes and entire dioceses from The Episcopal Church. Clear or not, however, Duncan has repeatedly told those in his charge that he is not leaving The Episcopal Church; The Episcopal Church is leaving him.

In light of such statements, it was refreshing when Boston Globe reporter Michael Paulson reported Bishop Duncan as having said that he would attempt to remove his entire diocese from The Episcopal Church. (See “Agreeing to Agree.”) Seemingly, the statement was made while Bishop Duncan was in Nairobi to participate in the consecration of two former Episcopal priests by the Anglican Church of Kenya to oversee breakaway former-Episcopal parishes in the U.S.

I decided to ask the representatives of the diocese if Bishop Duncan had, in fact, decided what should be done and was only trying to determine who would follow him out of The Episcopal Church. Furthermore, since such a move was canonically (and, almost certainly) legally impossible, how did our bishop intend to carry out his plan?

All my questions were not answered, but the response was certainly interesting. Canon Hays enthusiastically addressed my inquiries. She said, “Number one: I was there, and the bishop didn’t say that.” I found such a categorical denial of the Globe story incredible. Unless Canon Hays followed Bishop Duncan everywhere he went in Nairobi—stop, for a moment, and let that thought sink in—how could she possibly know everything he might have told a reporter? She could, on the other hand, know that Bishop Duncan was not supposed to say what Mr. Paulson said that he did. Will Canon Hays demand a retraction? Will the Globe print one?

Canon Hays explained, “He [Bishop Duncan] cannot, singlehandedly, move a diocese anywhere.” That is assuredly true. He needs supporters to help him realize his plans, and it is clear that the diocese’s “informational meetings” are part of a plan to convince lay Episcopalians to sign on with the ordained conspirators. (I do not expect that the opinions of any deacons or priests will be changed at these district sessions.)

I never got an answer as to how Bishop Duncan expects to carry out his program, but Canon Hays assured everyone that the opinions of the Presiding Bishop’s chancellor and that of The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council that Pittsburgh has unlawfully changed the accession clause in its constitution are only opinions. (Presumably, Pittsburgh cannot remove itself from The Episcopal Church if its actions are constrained by the general church’s constitution.) Canon Hays admitted that no diocese has ever removed itself unilaterally from The Episcopal Church and implied that we will all be witnesses to how that plan works when our bishop attempts to execute it.

As is often done at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, my church, in Mt. Lebanon, Pa., the event last night was recorded. Rather than take my word for what happened, you can listen for yourself to the exchange I have described. At one point in this recording, I reiterated my objection that what Bishop Duncan would like to do is illegal. This brief objection cannot be heard because I had left the public microphone to return to the pew where I was sitting. The nature of my objection is clear from the response, however.

IE users may need to click twice on play button.

Pittsburgh Mystery

In a diocese whose bishop brazenly declares his intention to remove it from the Episcopal Church (see “Agreeing to Agree”), it is not surprising that changes to the diocesan constitution and canons might be in the works. Members of the Diocesan Council of the Diocese of Pittsburgh just received a packet of materials for their meeting Tuesday night, September 11. Included for their consideration was a list of 26 proposed changes in the way the diocese is governed. Most changes seem unremarkable, though, taken together, they do seem to represent a power shift away from parishes and to the bishop and to other diocesan leaders, such as those on the Standing Committee. The proposed changes, at most, only hint at the anticipated schism. Diocesan Council, of course, does not enact the changes suggested by the Committee on Constitution and Canons—this is the task of the diocesan convention, which meets in November—but it can influence what is put before the convention.

The most interesting item in the material provided to Council members was the following note on a separate page:

ADVICE TO COUNCIL

In addition to the regular constitutional and canonical proposals contained in this mailing, the Council will be asked to consider texts of constitutional and canonical changes relating to the accession clause in Article 1 of the Constitution. In order that those texts not be in the public domain prior to the meeting, the texts will be available for distribution and consideration at the time of Tuesday’s Diocesan Council meeting.

Robert Devlin
Chancellor

Pittsburgh has already modified the accession clause in its constitution (see “Unqualified Accession”), and has been informed by everyone from Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh to The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council that its having done so is null and void, since a diocese has no right to make such a change. It now appears, however, that the illegal action completed at the 2004 annual convention was not sufficiently illegal for the purposes of Bishop Duncan and his schismatic minions. Additional changes are needed to create fig leaves for supporters and smokescreens for detractors.

I have quite limited capacity to make myself upset over the prospect of yet more illegal canonical changes in Pittsburgh. My interest is certainly piqued by Chancellor Devlin’s cloak-and-dagger approach to discussing changes to the diocese’s statutes, however. Would putting these texts—as the chancellor puts it—“in the public domain” on Saturday have consequences that making them public on Tuesday would not? Perhaps what is being unveiled Tuesday night is so momentous that it needs to be carefully orchestrated for maximum impact on the Anglican world.

Is the diocese planning something dramatic to be revealed on Tuesday evening, or has Chancellor Devlin been reading too many spy novels?

Agreeing to Agree

Ostensibly, the Diocese of Pittsburgh is engaged in a discernment process that will determine its destiny. In practice, the broad outlines of its future are clear, even if the path leading to that future is obscured. Anyone doubting this need only read the story in yesterday’s Boston Globe, which includes the following paragraphs:

Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan, who came to Nairobi for the consecrations, said he expects to see a new Anglican province in North America that will replace the Episcopal Church.

“We are realigning,” said Duncan, who added he would attempt to pull his entire diocese out of the Episcopal Church, a move that would raise an unprecedented set of legal and financial questions about the ownership of parish buildings and diocesan property.

Make no mistake; Pittsburgh is a conservative place, and its Episcopal diocese is one of the least progressive in The Episcopal Church. It is led by the moderator of the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, has petitioned for alternative episcopal oversight, and has unlawfully weakened the accession clause of its constitution. The diocese claims to have removed itself from its Episcopal Church province, sends no money to The Episcopal Church for the maintenance of the general church, and hosts Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, perhaps the institution most responsible for what the Rev. Tom Woodward has called the “undermining of the Episcopal Church.”

Despite Bishop Duncan’s efforts, however, his diocese is not monolithic. It is home to Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh, one of the more liberal of the Via Media USA groups, which has been opposing the depredations of the bishop for the past 4-1/2 years. It contains at least a dozen parishes, including some of the largest in the diocese, that have opted out of Duncan’s Network. Among these is Calvary Church, which, in 2003, sued Bishop Duncan and other diocesan leaders in an effort to protect Episcopal Church property from alienation.

It is therefore certain that Duncan will not “pull his entire diocese out of the Episcopal Church.” The question now is who will go and who will stay. Many Pittsburgh clergy are determined to leave, in many cases, along with their congregations. Fewer clergy seem committed to staying in The Episcopal Church, but many of these are proud to call themselves Episcopalians. This leaves a large group of clergy who despise The Episcopal Church but are not yet convinced that abandoning it is a good career move, particularly if their congregations are divided in their loyalties, as many are.

While Pittsburgh clergy meet over lunch in small groups to discuss whether to join the exodus or how to deal with its aftermath, Web sites are providing ammunition to the battle for the hearts and minds of Pittsburgh laypeople. It is laypeople, after all, who ultimately will determine whether Duncan leads a great throng out of The Episcopal Church or merely a dispirited band of malcontents. The diocese has created a site called Parish Toolbox to provide “resources” to parishes uncertain of the way forward. In principle, Parish Toolbox exists to offer materials from all points of view. In practice, its insistence on countering “progressive” material with “conserving” material has meant that the site has expanded slowly and, because it was launched with a substantial collection of resources from the diocese, balance, by any objective measure, seems unachievable in our lifetime. (A more proper characterization of the material—no binary classification can be completely adequate, of course—might be “schismatic” and “non-schismatic,” rather than “progressive” and “conserving.” A recent piece by a diocesan priest who is conservative, by any measure, had to be countered by a conservative, schismatic essay.)

Although the Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh Web site contains a wealth of material that might be used by parishes, PEP, which is anathema to many in the diocese, has not made any special effort to compensate for the deficiencies of Parish Toolbox. However, loyal Pittsburgh Episcopalians seeking to appeal to a wider constituency have created a new site called A Pittsburgh Episcopal Voice, which is offering materials that, in an ideal world, might be expected to be made available through Parish Toolbox.

A Compact

On Tuesday, Parish Toolbox published “A Pittsburgh Compact for a Way Forward in this Season,” a declaration by “153 Pittsburgh Leaders.” I began reading this piece thinking it unusually irenic, but, by the time I had finished, I was asking myself what its purpose was. The signers, the compact explains, in light of the likely “fork in the road ahead that may divide our fellowship,” affirm three principles as guides to action:

1. Believing: We will follow the leading and live in the faith of Jesus Christ.
   
2. Belonging: We will work for the health and unity of the Church.
3. Behaving: We will walk in humility and grace.

None of these principles seemed especially controversial. Therefore, they did not seem much in need of affirmation. The details were interesting, however.

Under “Believing,” signers agree to “repeatedly test all things” against “‘God’s Word written,’” quoting Article XX of the Articles of Religion. The view of scripture found in this article—it is a view only implicit in a proposition about the authority of the church—is simply not sustainable in the 21st century. No reputable scholar would hold either that scripture is formally consistent (the Church may not “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another”) or that it is somehow dictated by God in the same literal way Muslims claim for the Qur’an. Signers declare that they live in “‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3),” a faith, no doubt, quite different in Christology and in many other respects when these oft-quoted words were first written. They affirm the creeds and pledge to listen to bishops and primates “whose leadership has remained true to the historic faith of the church.” Presumably, not all bishops and primates are included here—the lack of a comma is significant—and I suspect that “church” was meant to be capitalized.

The “Belonging” section, while offering the usual romantic mix of traditionalist motherhood and apple pie, does, eventually, confront present realities. Before doing so, however, it declares the Anglican Communion “a precious gift of the Gospel”—what does that mean?—and asserts that “‘clarity and charity’ go together”—I assume this refers to the love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin thing. (Of course, Anglicanism has maintained what signers call “health and unity” by studiously avoiding clarity.) After repeating the tired charge that The Episcopal Church is choosing to “‘walk apart’” from the Communion, the signers admit that some feel that God is calling them to leave The Episcopal Church, while others are called to stay behind to fight a rear-guard action against “an increasingly hostile ecclesiastical culture.” (“Traditionalist” clergy, a small minority within The Episcopal Church, seems as much bothered by their failure to be hired into high-paying jobs in big, moderate churches as they are by anything having to do with homosexuality. Laypeople should be unmoved by this complaint.) They agree to “respect, honor, and support one another” and to look forward to the advent of “a biblically-rooted, mission-minded jurisdiction,” presumably one encroaching on or replacing The Episcopal Church.

The “Behaving” section certainly does begin meekly enough, with the signers admitting that “our own hands are not clean” with respect to fostering division. They speak of “the pride that has too often accompanied our witness” and beg God for forgiveness. Then, however, we come to the last paragraph:

We are mindful of God’s weakness displayed in Christ’s Cross, and of the Apostle Paul’s consistent advocacy of the weakness of the Cross as the way of Christian life and ministry. Because of this, we forsake the spirit of condemnation and the opportunity for litigation. We look instead for clarity and charity towards all, and will work towards any prospect for just mediation. We pray to God for the heart to bear any difficulties with joyful grace, peaceful spirits, and confidence in His provision.

I'm not sure I follow the logic from the first sentence to the second, but, in this paragraph, I believe that we, at last, can see what the point of this compact is. First, it is clear that the unity being declared in the statement is not that of the Christian Church or of The Episcopal Church, but that of a group holding to a particular, radically Protestant, and not particularly Anglican take on the Christian message. The compact is not a watershed agreement between people who have major disagreements with one another, not a step forward toward a unified diocese. These people are simply agreeing to agree. Examining the list of signers is instructive here. Not only are all the signers either right-of-center or far-right-of-center, but a little checking around makes it clear that no clergy I would consider to be moderate or (God forbid!) liberal were even asked to sign. The compact is, in reality, a statement of solidarity against The Episcopal Church by those who will try to subvert it from without and those who will try to subvert it from within.

The key sentences in the whole compact, I believe, are these: “Because of this, we forsake the spirit of condemnation and the opportunity for litigation. We look instead for clarity and charity towards all, and will work towards any prospect for just mediation.” In the end, this compact is all about allowing congregations to depart with their property. Those called by God “to dissociate from the Episcopal Church” will, of course, try to do so with “their” parish property. Those behind agree not to engage in litigation to stop the theft. They will, presumably, urge mediation as an alternative to a spirited defense of its rightful property by The Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church and the moderates left behind in the diocese, the signers no doubt hope, will be struck by the loving example of the remaining traditionalists who refuse to demand retribution and will, therefore, allow the schismatics to leave on favorable terms negotiated with the diminished diocese.

Sorry, guys—we’re talking mostly, if not quite exclusively, of guys here—it won’t work. The secret to avoiding litigation is to not give offense. Leave the keys on the desk, and turn out the lights when you leave. To do otherwise is to steal in the name of God.

And/Or

NPR broadcast a typically brief report on an Iraqi bombing this morning. “Most of the victims,” listeners were told, “were women and children.” I doubt that many people gave the report a second thought, both because it was a now-standard “dog-bites-man” story and because the grammatical absurdity of the sentence is subtle. It got my attention, however.

What the correspondent should have said was that most of the victims were women or children, since, in standard American English, being a women and being a child are mutually exclusive. Apropos of how women are treated in Islamic societies, reformers might argue that this dichotomy is not so sharp in Iraq, but I doubt that the NPR reporter was trying to make a sociological point.

Aquafina Scandal

The bottled water industry has come under increasing criticism of late, and not always from predictable sources. Its most obvious vulnerability, one might expect, is price. Lately, however, bottled water has been criticized by environmentalists for the resources used in packaging and transportation, and for the low rate at which plastic bottles are recycled.

Last night, ABC News, which frequently airs consumer-interest stories, telecast one about PepsiCo’s Aquifina. Viewers, apparently, were expected to be upset by the revelation that Aquafina draws its raw material from municipal water systems. PepsiCo has now agreed to acknowledge this on its Aquafina labels. This likely will not satisfy critics who charge that the advertising of the bottled water industry generally, which emphasizes purity and taste, is defaming municipal water systems and undermining consumer confidence in them.

Was this really one of the top news stories of the day? Are people actually staying awake at night worrying whether their tap water is safe to drink because Aquafina promises “Pure Water, Perfect Taste”? Not likely.

I am not a big consumer of bottled water, but bottled water is a product that has its place. It is certainly a healthy alternative to soft drinks, though I do object to paying the same price for a bottle of Aquafina as I would for a bottle of Pepsi Cola, which is surely more expensive to make. (We might be surprised to learn how little more.) I also feel manipulated when an establishment I might reasonably expect to have a water cooler sells bottled water instead.

I grew up in a family that always kept a container of tap water in the refrigerator for drinking. The water, perhaps, did not have Aquafina’s “Perfect Taste,” but it seemed good enough at the time. Whether because of maturation or the pernicious influence of advertising, I have more sensitive taste now, and I do prefer the taste of many bottled waters, but filtered water from a dispensing refrigerator isn’t such a bad alternative.

I do hope that no one was being “fooled” by Aquafina, with its label sporting a sunset beyond the mountains (or is it a water spot on a seismograph chart?). The packaging makes it perfectly clear that the water is not “mineral water” (from a spring, say) and has nothing added to it, as does Dasani, for example, which contains added salt. If the product is, as the label says, “purified drinking water,” it really makes no difference whether the raw product comes from a spring, a river, a municipal water plant, a wastewater plant, or is made directly from oxygen and hydrogen. The filtration, reverse osmosis, and other steps in Aquafina’s HydRO-7™ process frankly produces an excellent tasting water—perhaps I mean tasteless water—and I couldn’t care less where the water comes from. Anyone who insists that drinking water should come from a pure mountain stream or spring should buy a microscope and get outdoors.

Doing Consents Right Redux

The odd story of how consents are actually obtained for consecrations in The Episcopal Church that I wrote about yesterday saw further developments today. The Living Church posted a story by reporter Steve Waring, “Canonically Defective Testimonial Alleged in Virginia Coadjutor Request,” on its Web site today.

Based on remarks by the Rev. Jan Nunley, it appeared that “canonically defective” wording of consent testimonials has been in regular use for quite some time. Clearly, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori could not be responsible for this situation, as she has been in office less than a year. According to Waring, the canon to the Presiding Bishop, the Rev. Canon Carl Gerdau, sees no problem in using the “short form” recently used by the Diocese of Virginia for consents, rather than the one prescribed in Canon III.11.4(b). Presumably, Canon Gerdau has been regularly and intimately involved with the consent process. He is about to retire, but he served in his current position under former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold since 1998.

In my previous post, I quoted only as much of Canon III.11.4(b) as was quoted in the San Joaquin standing committee’s letter. Here is Canon III.11.4(b) in its entirety:

Evidence of the consent of each Standing Committee shall be a testimonial in the following words, signed by a majority of all the members of the Committee:

We, being a majority of all the members of the Standing Committee of ______________, and having been duly convened at ______________, fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God, testify that we know of no impediment on account of which the Reverend A.B. ought not to be ordained to that Holy Order. In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands this _____ day of _________in the year of our Lord _________.
(Signed) _______________

Contrast this with the version sent out by the Diocese of Virginia to standing committees, as reported by the Rev. Dan Martins:

Having been duly elected on January 26, 2007, at the Annual Council of the Diocese of Virginia.

We, being a majority of all the ____ members of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of ____, having been duly convened at ____, give our consent to the ordination and consecration of the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnston as Bishop Coadjutor for the Diocese of Virginia.

In witness whereof, we have here unto set our hands this ___ day of ___, 2007.

(I rendered the above in boldface for easy comparison.) Although this “short form” lacks an explicit signature line, it, like the canonical version, is intended to be followed by signatures of a majority of standing committee members.

A clarification should be made at this point. The electing diocese sends requests for consent to the standing committees of all the dioceses of the church. Apparently, these requests invariably contain wording for what the canons call a “testimonial,” which the standing committees use to communicate their consent to the proposed consecration. (The canons are vague about what a standing is supposed to do if it does not consent. Some send a letter to the electing diocese, but others simply do not reply.) If an electing diocese sends a “defective” version of the testimonial, standing committees are, of course, free to use the canonical form. Their members can read the canons as well as anyone else.

Some observations:

1. The first “sentence” of the “short form” makes no sense. There is no verb.
2. The “short form,” unlike the canonical form, requires the recording of the number of members on the standing committee. Although this information is, in a sense, inessential, it does help prevent the misunderstanding that any majority vote of a standing committee with a quorum present is sufficient to render consent. It would not be surprising to learn that the origin of the “short form” is somehow related to this feature.
   
3. The “short form” omits boilerplate presumably intended to impress on standing committee members that they should take their role seriously: “fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God… .” This isn’t exactly 21st-century language, but the meaning is clear and, as they say, it can’t hurt. The words “without partiality” emphasize that the decision should be an objective one, which, in these times, may need to be said.
   
4. The real difference, of course, is that the canonical form has standing committee members declaring that they “know of no impediment” to the proposed consecration, whereas, in the “short form,” members merely “consent” to the consecration, irrespective of what they may know or not know.

Are these differences significant? I think so. To begin with, there can be a real difference between assenting to a consecration and testifying that you know of no reason why it should not take place. In the case of South Carolina’s quest to consecrate the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence, one has to doubt that any standing committee member did not know of impediments to his consecration. Clearly, however, some people voted for him anyway. The “short form” would have made that even easier to do.

Steve Waring’s story, however, makes it clear that South Carolina, contrary to Nunley’s assertion, did use the proper form, although it was only at the urging of the Rt. Rev. F. Clayton Matthews, Bishop for the Office of Pastoral Development, that its standing committee did so. (Nunley has updated her post and corrected her original statement, which seems to have been based on a David Beers letter. It is unclear as to where Beers got his information. Perhaps it was from Canon Gerdau.)

Following the constitution and canons also matters because we have agreed that we will do so, and we seek (I presume) to be people of integrity. Moreover, if everyone retains a right to follow the rules only when, to him or her, it seems important, then no one can ever call anyone else to account; in essence, there will be no rules.

What is so hard to understand in this case is why anyone would feel the need to substitute a “short form” for the canonical testimonial. In actual practice, one almost never expects an episcopal election to be invalidated by a failure to achieve the necessary consents, so that subtle differences in wording are unlikely to change the outcome of the consent process. Have dioceses been using the “short form” because it involves typing fewer keystrokes?

The difference in attitude between Gerdau and Matthews, both of whom work directly under the Presiding Bishop is striking. Whereas Waring reports that Matthews “cautioned the diocese about the language in its consent request,” Gerdau is quoted as saying, of the “short form,” that it has been “used for a long time and no one has ever objected to it before.” Gerdau’s statement sounds like something a policeman accused of having conducted an illegal search might say: “No one objected to the lack of a search warrant before.”

Clearly, the Presiding Bishop needs to communicate to everyone working at or for the Episcopal Church Center that adherence to the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church is not optional, just as it is not optional for bishops, clergy, and laypeople outside of New York City. That the consent process is cumbersome and opaque to most of the people in the church is unfortunate. A more open process would, among other things, expose quickly deviations from canonical procedures. Had Virginia posted its requests for consents on its Web site, for example, I doubt that 24 hours would have passed before bloggers noted its inconsistency with Canon III.11.4(b). The church should develop carefully written procedures to guide standing committees through requesting consents, and those procedures should be posted on the Web, along with—as I suggested in my previous post—a PDF version of a proper consent testimonial. A church with millions of members and a multi-million-dollar budget should not act like a bunch of kids who decided to put on a musical in someone’s back yard.

Doing Consents Right

Not every church has the formal legal structure of The Episcopal Church. Its ultimate governing authority, a triennial gathering of bishops, priests, deacons, and laypeople, is called the General Convention. The church overall has a constitution and canons (church laws), and its constituent dioceses are similarly governed by conventions, constitutions, and canons. The nominal leader of the church is the Presiding Bishop, who might properly be described as an extremely weak executive. Dioceses, on the other hand, are led by bishops, who are quite powerful.

If I were inventing The Episcopal Church today, I would change some of the details of its organization, but I certainly would preserve its democratic ethos and, particularly, its rule by law, which acts as a bulwark against the goofiness and cultism to which Christianity seems especially susceptible.

Unfortunately, legal systems, whether secular or ecclesiastical, necessarily create tensions and require constant attention. How literally should laws be interpreted? What should be done when the spirit of the law and the letter of the law appear to be in conflict? What is the proper threshold for invoking disciplinary action? The United States has always had to deal with such issues, and it even has an institution, the Supreme Court, that might be viewed as a body whose major concern is dealing with them. By comparison, The Episcopal Church has been less contentious, legally speaking, and it has fewer structures and precedents to guide it when the inevitably messy issues of law present themselves.

When the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence failed to achieve sufficient consents from standing committees to be consecrated the next bishop of South Carolina, two canonical issues made the outcome of the consent process controversial. First, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori allowed, apparently in clear violation of the canons, 123 days, rather than 120 days, for consents to be received. By no one’s reckoning were sufficient consents received within 120 days. Three days later, however, a sufficient numbers of reputed testimonies that standing committees had consented to the consecration had been received. The Presiding Bishop declared that Lawrence’s bid to become a bishop had failed, however, because some of the consents were improperly executed, lacking, for example, signatures of standing committee members. (See the ENS story here.)

The Rev. Dan Martins, a Stockton, California, priest from the same diocese as Mark Lawrence (San Joaquin) and a former member of his diocese’s standing committee has raised a troubling issue on his blog. It seems that, when the Diocese of Virginia requested consents for the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnston to be consecrated bishop coadjutor, the wording of the testimonials requested by the Diocese of Virginia differed from that prescribed by canon. Martins reports that the San Joaquin standing committee has raised this issue with the Presiding Bishop and her chancellor in three separate letters and has received no answer. The letter suggests that the Presiding Bishop is applying the canons of the church selectively, and, perhaps, prejudicially. In what follows, I will assume that what the standing committee asserts was done by Virginia is true; its members are in a position to know, whereas I am not, and I believe that Martins is an honorable priest.

It is, I think, incumbent upon the Presiding Bishop to provide an explanation for her decisions. She should do so promptly. I would expect her to say that she extended the consent period for the Lawrence consents out of Christian charity, and that the defective consents raised questions as to whether certain standing committees had, in fact, validly consented as required by canon. This explanation necessarily raises the question as to why, having already bent the canons to allow more standing committees time to respond, she did not take the extra time to query the standing committees that submitted defective testimonies and give them the opportunity to correct any “technical” errors they may have made.

As to the Virginia consents, I would expect Jefferts Schori to explain that we all know what consents are all about, and sufficient testimonials with valid signatures were received to allow Johnston’s consecration. Perhaps, with the help of David Booth Beers, her chancellor, she will offer a better explanation. She needs one. The wording required by canon includes the following:

[We,] fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God, testify that we know of no impediment on account of which the Reverend A.B. ought not to be ordained to that Holy Order. In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands… .

The wording of the Virginia declaration was much shorter and to the point:

[We] give our consent to the ordination and consecration of the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnston as Bishop Coadjutor for the Diocese of Virginia.

What should we make of this difference? One can certainly argue that the flowery language about standing committee members being persuaded as to what their duty is is really just so much fluff. It is difficult to overlook the difference of substance here, however. Whereas standing committee members are supposed to certify that they “know of no impediment on account of which [the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnson] ought not to be ordained” a bishop, Virginia only asked for “consent to the ordination and consecration” of Johnston. In principle, one could know of an “impediment” to Johnson’s consecration that would impel a vote against consecration if one had to sign a document containing the wording in the canons. Virginia’s wording would allow a signature, however, in spite of such an impediment.

I have the greatest respect and affection for Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, but I do think that she has gotten herself into a muddle of her own making. I do not suspect that she acted out of any but the best of motives, but, like many new executives, I believe that she stumbled on her way up the learning curve. Here is what she should do:

1. Admit that allowing 123 days for consents to be received was a mistake, for which she begs forgiveness. The canons are clear that the proper number is 120, and the wording makes it clear that the General Convention intended the starting date to be unambiguous. The time period is arbitrary, but its length and beginning point is intended to be fixed. The Presiding Bishop should declare that, in the future, only 120 days will be allowed and, within 7 days of the start of the consent period, the day on which the clock started with be announced publicly, so that everyone knows when the deadline is.
2. Explain again that sufficient valid consents for Lawrence’s consecration were not received within 120 days. Whether or not sufficient consents were received in 123 days is moot. (This declaration will likely be criticized, and a public relations expert might question my advice. I cannot see a viable alternative, however.)
3. Admit that the Virginia consent form was defective, but that the consent process cannot really be undone. Beg for forgiveness again. Declare that, in the future, the Office of the Presiding Bishop will work more closely with standing committees to assure them that the steps in the consent process for which they are responsible are carried out properly. Promise that, within 30 days, The Episcopal Church will have a downloadable, fillable PDF form on its Web site for standing committees to use in the future. All consents should be required to be executed using this form. (Actual signatures, of course, will still be needed.) Additional clarifications as to how consents may be submitted might need to be made. By canon, consents from standing committees are sent to the Presiding Bishop only after a sufficient number has been received. The Presiding Bishop should offer to pre-certify consents for a standing committee as they are received, however.
4. Apologize in writing to the San Joaquin standing committee for failure to reply to its correspondence, and thank its members for their contribution to improving important church procedures.
   
5. Beg for forgiveness again and promise to do better in the future.

Addendum

A few hours after I posted the foregoing, the Rev. Jan Nunley reported on EpiScope that both South Carolina and Virginia used the same form. Moreover, she says that this short form, whose wording differs from that specified in Canon III.11.4(b), has been in general use for 10 years or more. If indeed this is the case—I presume that she has checked, something I would have difficulty doing—then the Office of the Presiding Bishop is almost assuredly the source of the wrongly worded consent form. In this case, the current Presiding Bishop (and perhaps even the previous Presiding Bishop) may not be responsible for the church’s having run off the rails here. It does seem incumbent upon Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to fix the problem, however, and to fix it quickly. My advice as to what she should do still stands, but at least part of her apology must be for past church administration, rather than for her own mistakes.

If you want to read the canons for yourself, you can find the latest version of the church’s constitution and canons here.

Note: More developments in this story led me to write another essay on the subject the next day. You can read “Doing Consents Right Redux” here.

“Why Others Stand as Well”

Because my Web site and blog were always intended as outlets for my own work, I am not in the habit of calling attention to what others have written, except insofar as I want to offer my own criticism of it. In this post, I want to make an exception.

As many readers know, the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh is contemplating its future. (See the stories on the diocesan leadership meetings of May 20–21 and June 29.) Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan seems determined to lead a significant portion of his flock out of The Episcopal Church, which has been the very conspicuous object of his contempt since the 2003 General Convention.

The diocesan leadership has correctly concluded that most Episcopalians in the diocese are not well informed about what has been taking place within and beyond the Pittsburgh diocese. Many people, irrespective of their theological views, simply have not wanted to get involved. At many churches led by allies of the bishop, however, people have been deliberately kept in the dark or have been exposed only to diatribes against The Episcopal Church. As a split in the diocese becomes increasingly inevitable, everyone seems to agree that it is time to choose up sides, time to appeal to the hearts and minds of everyone occupying a pew within the diocese.

While the diocesan leadership has talked of the need for “education,” it has promoted an “interview” with the Rev. Dr. Leslie Fairfield called “Why We Stand.” Fairfield is professor emeritus at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, the Evangelically-oriented Episcopal seminary whose raison d’être has always been the winning over of The Episcopal Church to its narrow, reactionary theology or, failing that, the creation of an Evangelical replacement for it. “Why We Stand” misrepresents church history and paints a picture of The Episcopal Church, which, if true, would make me want to leave it.

When the Fairfield essay appeared on the diocesan Web site in early June, I saw it as yet another biased, self-serving contribution to church strife. Its distortions made me mad, but I tried to put it out of my mind. I had lost all respect for Fairfield’s “scholarship” after viewing the DVD “Choose This Day,” in which he says, among other things, “The choice facing the laity in the Episcopal Church is to choose between authentic Christianity and this alien religion which has permeated the leadership of the Episcopal Church in the last generation.” He also describes that “alien religion” as “foreign and alien and pagan” in his appearances on the DVD.

“Why We Stand” was hard to ignore, something I became aware of when I telephoned a young priest I have known since he first attended elementary school with my son. He told me that Professor Fairfield exactly captured his understanding of the present church conflict. I then discovered that other traditionalist priests are distributing the Fairfield interview to their parishioners to explain the conflict. The interview next showed up in Trinity, the diocesan newsletter, and I understand that it will be part of a packet of materials to be made available for Pittsburgh Episcopalians. Clearly, many nominal Episcopalians would be unmoved by being exposed to another point of view, but it was beginning to seem urgent that a rebuttal to Fairfield’s assertions be made available to those who might still be willing to listen to reason.

I did not feel qualified to write such a rebuttal. I am not a priest, a theologian, or a church historian, but I did know that The Episcopal Church as I experience it bears little resemblance to the one Fairfield describes in either “Choose This Day” or “Why We Stand.” In my search for a qualified author for an essay that would provide an alternative view, I discovered that Tobias Haller, Vicar of St. James, Fordham, in Brooklyn and author of the blog “In a Godward Direction,” had already written a brief piece about “Why We Stand” called “Stuff and Nonsense.” This was not the essay I thought was needed in Pittsburgh, but Tobias is a good writer and clearly viewed the Fairfield essay in the same light as I. After suggesting someone else who might write a good essay, Tobias agreed to try writing something himself. I soon had an essay from him in my inbox titled “Where Others Stand as Well.” It was not what I had been looking for—it was too short and not scholarly enough—but, upon reflection, I realized it was perfect for the task at hand.

But I said that I was calling attention to someone else’s work, not evaluating it. In spite of my extended introduction, I intend to stick to that pledge. You can find “Where Others Stand as Well” here or, as a PDF, here.

Missing Episcopal Words

Episcopalians have a reputation for—and perhaps even pride themselves on—having names for everything. Every architectural detail of a church and every liturgical object seems to have a special name, as do our rules, our meetings, our officers, and our very movements during worship. When writing about the church, however, I sometimes discover that we have failed to create a word where one is needed.

I got to thinking about this when I tried to write about church members resident within a particular diocese. Members of a parish, of course, are parishioners, but what are they vis-à-vis their diocese? If a bishop wants to send a letter to all laypeople under his or her care, what do we call the people being addressed?

Church Structure and Episcopalians. These questions are trickier than one might imagine, and it helps to begin by talking about church structures, which can provide a framework for understanding what some of the words are that Episcopalians have and, perhaps, need.

The Episcopal Church is often spoken of as a hierarchical church. We can, in fact, identify three distinct structural levels of the church. The most visible level is the one on which everyday worship and mission take place, the level of what we normally refer to as churches. Episcopalians certainly use this word—I attend St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Lebanon, for example—but they also use the more precise words parish, congregation, and mission. The most general of these terms is congregation, which simply denotes a worshiping community. A parish, on the other hand, is a financially independent congregation, and a mission is a congregation financially aided by the diocese. Congregation is used in two other ways. It may refer to the people of a worshiping community, as opposed to the local institution of which they are a part. There are also parishes (and perhaps even missions) that have more than one worship site, each of which has a separate congregation, though under common leadership.

At this local-church level, we speak of a parish’s parishioners. We might speak of congregants of any worshiping community, though, in practice, Episcopalians usually don’t. As far as I can determine, there is no special word for members of a mission. Missioners would seem to be a candidate, but I have never seen the word used this way. A canon missioner is often a person on a diocesan staff responsible for such matters as congregational development, however, which, I think, makes missioner a poor choice for designating a worshiper at a mission.

The geographical area served by The Episcopal Church is partitioned into dioceses, each led by a bishop. This is the next level in the church hierarchy, and considering it brings us back to our original question of what to call the laypeople of a diocese. They are not parishioners because not all of them belong to a parish. Although one could call them congregants, this would not distinguish them specifically as residents of a diocese. The Episcopal Church does talk about members (of a parish, say), but, technically, laypeople are not members of their diocese. Clergy, who are not considered members of the parishes they serve, are considered members of a diocese, though not always the one in which they live. Parishes and missions are not members of a diocese, by the way, but are described as being in union with the diocese, a quaint Episcopalian formulation.

The size of a diocese is often given as the number of communicants within diocesan congregations. There is a technical definition of communicant given in Canon I.17 which has to do with members who actually take communion in their local church, but this word, too, is not specifically tied to the diocese; one can speak of the number of communicants in a parish or in the entire church. Our missing word is still missing.

We can speak of Episcopalians in the diocese or Episcopalians of the diocese, but it would be handy to be able to use a single word instead. Dictionary.com suggests that diocesan can be used of clergy or laypersons of a diocese, but I have never encountered this usage within The Episcopal Church, and it invites confusion with usage of the same word to mean diocesan bishop. (Speaking of diocesans would be confusing indeed, as only one bishop in a diocese can be the diocesan bishop.)

I should mention that dioceses in The Episcopal Church are organized into provinces, not to be confused with the regional-church members of the Anglican Communion sometime referred to by the same term. The nine provinces of the church represent something of a degenerate level—in the mathematical, not the moral sense—of the church hierarchy. Dioceses usually interact directly with the top level of the church hierarchy, although some interactions are mediated by provinces. Nobody speaks of Episcopal provincials—the members, say, of Province III—or seems to have any pressing need to do so.

At the top level of our Episcopal hierarchy are what we might call the trans-diocesan elements of the church, those people and institutions concerned with the church as a whole: the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, the Presiding Bishop, the General Convention, and so forth. We refer to all the structures and people of the church as The Episcopal Church, but we often need to speak specifically of the top level of the hierarchy. Episcopalians used to speak of the National Church, but this term has fallen into disfavor, as The Episcopal Church has dioceses in areas outside of the United States. One could hardly refer to the International Church, as this would invite confusion with the Anglican Communion, which is “more” international, even though it isn’t a church at all. There is, I think, a pressing need to find a replacement for National Church, though I don’t know that many people are working actively on the problem. The recent appellate court decision in California refers to the general church. I’m not sure this phrase has a chance of catching on, but it (or, perhaps, General Church) is not an unreasonable substitute for the politically incorrect National Church. at least until someone comes up with something better.

A different Problem. as long as I’m talking about names for church structures, the matter of the name of the church itself is, I suppose, unavoidable. In this instance, rather than having a dearth of names, we have a surfeit. One need only read a handful of newspaper articles on The Episcopal Church to know that there is confusion about what to call it. At the time that people were referring to the National Church, the church was commonly called ECUSA, the Episcopal Church (USA), or the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. In actuality, none of these was quite appropriate. The official name of the church is the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. This is the name in the constitution of 1789 and all of its successors. In times past, therefore, the church was sometimes referred to as PECUSA, although the acronym is seldom used today.

In fact, Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America seems to have been a good name choice for what had been part of the Church of England but suddenly found itself in a new, independent Republic. It reflects both the Protestant and Catholic (in the word Episcopal, of course) heritage of Anglicanism. Over the years, Episcopal became less of a description, however, and more of a brand name, which gradually made Protestant seem like a denial of any Catholic heritage, hence ECUSA. Anglicanism has always seen itself as neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant, but as some synthesis of the two.

In fact, the Preamble to the church’s constitution, which was added in 1967, and which has been used by traditionalists to claim that acting contrary to the wishes of the Anglican Communion—however one might determine that to be the case—is a violation of the constitution, actually had virtually nothing to do with the Anglican Communion and everything to do with what to call the church. For years, Anglo-Catholics wanted to remove Protestant from the church’s name, and Evangelicals passionately opposed the change. Various other alternatives were proposed and rejected over the years. By the time the church seemed able to change its name without inviting schism, questions were raised as to whether a name change would have any untoward legal consequences. The “solution” was to keep the original name and to make official the common name of the church: “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church)….” The business about the Anglican Communion in the preamble was thrown in as lagniappe without any substantial discussion by the General Convention.

A new sensitivity to the constitution’s Preamble has led to the church’s being officially called The Episcopal Church or TEC, as opposed to all the forms discussed above, and as opposed to the Episcopal Church, which, all things being equal, seems more natural. (It used to be common to include The in front of institutional names—think of The Borden Company, for example—but, in 21st-century America, the church is bucking the trend.) The change seems to have been the brainchild of the director of Episcopal News Service—perhaps this organ now should be called The Episcopal News Service—and one could argue that it has only led to confusion and occasional derision. In any case, the capitalized article in the Preamble, although a product of the mid-20th century, probably reflects 18th-century orthography more than it does the intention of the General Convention always to put The before the name of the church.

As if the foregoing was not confusing enough, one sometimes encounters the name Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. (One can reach the church’s Web site using either the URL http://episcopalchurch.org or http://dfms.org. I tend to use the latter, which is shorter.) The Episcopal Church, governed by the General Convention, has never been incorporated. The DFMS was created in the early nineteenth century by the General Convention and incorporated in the state of New York. For all practical purposes, the DFMS is The Episcopal Church, although the distinction matters in certain legal contexts.

A Side Issue: In enumerating the circumstances of people overseen by a diocesan bishop, all of whom may be called Episcopalians, the general name for members of the church, I began to wonder if there might be Episcopalians in a diocese who are not members of a specific worshiping community. I think the answer is no, but the matter isn’t clear-cut. According to church canon, a church member moving from one parish, say, to another, should execute a formal transfer. This does not always happen, so that, technically, the person remains a member of his or her old parish. The canons do not address the possibility of leaving one congregation and going nowhere in particular, but people do ask to be removed from parish registers without joining another church elsewhere, be it Episcopal or otherwise. A person doing this may have a self-image as an Episcopalian, but the church has no way of counting that person among its members.

Update, 8/22/2014. Since I wrote the above post, http://dfms.org/ has ceased to take the visitor to the Episcopal Church site. Instead, a page is displayed whose title is “Home” and which displays “DFMS” and “Welcome” in large letters. The page directs the visitor to “www.episcopalchurch.org.” Unhelpfully, the (incomplete) URL is not actually a link, so getting to the real church site is not as easy as one might like. There are also icons at the left edge of the page for Facebook, Twitter, etc., the purpose of which is something of a mystery. See my post “Home at the DFMS.”

“Troops”

If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps language is the second. I am thinking about “troop,” a veteran English word that is daily misused by the media. As I write this, for example, the USA Today Web site carries a headline “Military: Eight American troops killed in Iraq.” The story begins: “Iraq's prime minister and two top American officials flew to the blistering western desert … hours before the military reported the deaths of eight U.S. troops.”

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the noun “troop” indicates either a great many or a group of people, animals, or things. More specifically, it may designate a group of soldiers, a fighting unit (such as a cavalry troop), or a unit of the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts under an adult leader. In the plural, it refers to soldiers or military units. In strict usage, if eight American troops were killed, then a very substantial massacre occurred, perhaps involving 100 or more individuals.

Whatever a “troop” is, it is not an individual. One would certainly not say that a cavalry troop consisted of twenty troops or that Boy Scout Troop 16 has 25 troops. We do not see wives on television fretting over their husbands deployed to Iraq and saying, “I pray that my troop comes home safely.” And I have never heard a soldier refer to “my fellow troops.”

Why, then, is “troop” regularly, if erroneously, used in news reports to refer to individuals? Certainly, in times past, we would hear of our “soldiers,” “men,” or “boys” being casualties of war. In Iraq, however, the casualties may not all be male, and they may come from different services. An infantryman and a marine cannot really be described as “soldiers.” If speaking of similar individuals, one can imagine reporters using “soldiers,” “sailors,” “marines,” “airmen,” or even “men.” “Boys” is more problematic these days, and, if African-Americans are being referred to, is completely unacceptable. “Girls” would offend women, and it must be said that reporting the death of “two of our women” carries some emotional baggage not entailed by “two of our men.”

The obvious general words that could be used all starkly emphasize what our troops—I use the word properly here—are really about: “warriors,” “fighters,” or “combatants.” Other possibilities abandon objectivity or indulge in irony: “aggressors,” “occupiers,” “referees,“ “peacekeepers,” “nation-builders,” or “hapless victims of President Bush’s obsession.”

One can see why reporters continue to misuse “troops.”

Reflecting on Responding to the Study Guide

I’ve spent a good deal of time the last couple of days answering the questions asked by The Episcopal Church in “A Short Study Guide to Aid The Episcopal Church in Responding to the Draft Anglican Covenant as Prepared by the Covenant Design Group.” This was not an easy task. Even after having invested much energy in the project, I have not produced definitive essays on the proposed covenant, though I trust that others’ work will complement my own efforts.

Answering the 14 questions posed by the Executive Council was something of a double obligation for me. As an active combatant in the ongoing church wars—I know that some people don’t like such metaphors—I would have seemed derelict had I not addressed the questions about the covenant. Along with other members of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh (PEP)—and, in particular, President Joan Gundersen—I had produced both a worksheet for people to use to record their answers, as well as a collection of materials to provide context for the task. How could I not see how these resources worked in practice?

You can read my answers and find links to relevant material by going to “Responding to the Study Guide” on my Web site. What I want to do here is to offer some observations about my experience.

The Study Guide. I quickly learned that the Study Guide is pretty lean in the easy question department. Its questions are quite specific and are not always the ones you most want to answer. No doubt, this is intended to elicit feedback on particular issues and to discourage shallow, rambling, or irrational responses. It is difficult to see any overt bias in the questions, and those on both the left and right may find them maddeningly “objective.” The questions are certainly comprehensive, however, and, since essay answers are expected, no one should feel that his or her thought on the covenant cannot fully be expressed. The Study Guide questions proceed from the specific to the general, which may not be to everyone’s taste. I will have more to say about this below.

If the details of the questions do not discourage you from sharing your opinions with The Episcopal Church, seeing someone else’s answers might. I have been encouraging several fellow parishioners to answer the Study Guide questions, but, when I showed them my answers, their reaction was that they were insufficiently prepared for the task. That may be true, or I may simply be obsessive.

Preparation. Having been following Anglican conflicts for many years now, I was reasonably well prepared to address the questions at hand. I must admit, though, that I felt more like I was taking a final exam than like I was responding to a questionnaire. The term “Study Guide”—it is actually called “A Short Study Guide”— is not so much an aid to study as a prod to study. If you expect to answer its 14 questions, plan to read the obviously relevant documents several times over, and expect to need reference material close at hand as you work. It is difficult to evaluate the covenant without already having a good understanding of the events that brought the Anglican Communion to its present state. That background is difficult to obtain in a hurry, so anyone who looks at the Study Guide or the report from the Covenant Design Group (CDG) and says, “What is this?” should probably just forget the whole thing.

Tools. PEP’s “Evaluating the Draft Covenant,” which collects many pertinent documents into a single PDF file with search capabilities and a digital table of contents, proved invaluable. I kept the document open all the time I was working on my answers. Although I did not consult Joan Gundersen’s annotations of the CDG report on a question-by-question basis, I did read all her notes and fond them quite helpful in framing an overall view of the proposed covenant. I did go back to Joan’s annotations to clarify particular points.

I also used the PEP Microsoft Word worksheet to record my answers. This was very helpful for organizing and presenting my thoughts, though I discovered that Word text form fields, which are used in the worksheet, have some peculiar properties that I cannot find documented anywhere. Text was easy to enter, but it was sometimes difficult to edit. (Hint: If you are having trouble positioning the cursor within your text, try using the arrow keys.) Were I to do everything over again, I think I would keep the PEP worksheet open in one Word window, but type and edit my text in another. When I was satisfied with an answer, I would copy and paste it into the PEP document. (PEP may try making a PDF form with Acrobat next time it perceives a need for such a mechanism.)

Getting It Down. I would recommend developing a good overall view of what you want to say before you start answering specific questions or even studying the questions in detail. This will help assure that you get to say all the things you believe are important. You might even jot down indications of the points you want to make. There will still likely be issues you have not considered that will be raised by the Study Guide, but this approach will minimize the problem of what to say and focus your attention on where to say it. That the PEP worksheet extracts the questions from the full Study Guide text is helpful at this point, and it might be useful to assign your points to make to specific questions. I did find myself making similar statements in more than one place, but this is probably inevitable and possibly even desirable (see below).

One’s psychological makeup or intellectual preferences may have a bearing on how comfortably you are using the Study Guide. I found myself wanting first to write a summary of my reaction to the draft covenant, whose conclusions I could then support with specifics, but the Study Guide focuses on the particular before it treats the general. Episcopalians with my inclinations may want to answer the last few questions before returning to the first ones. I was concerned about procrastinating, so I forced myself to begin at the beginning and skip no questions. No one will know if you do otherwise, however.

Aggregating the Answers. Some people have suggested that the difficulty of the questions asked in the Study Guide and the short time allowed for responses (less than two months) will mean that few responses from Episcopalians will be forthcoming, and most of those will be from institutional respondents. (I see that the General Convention deputation from the Diocese of New York has posted its answers to the questions on the Web.) Some cynics have suggested that the Executive Council actually wanted to discourage responses and wasn’t planning to pay much attention to those it did receive. I’m not that cynical, but I do wonder if the Study Guide authors considered carefully how data was to be handled. Whereas multiple-choice and true-false questions can be reduced to easily assimilated statistics, complex essays cannot be. Moreover, answers will likely be long. Although I cannot know if the length of mine will prove typical, the answers from the New York deputation certainly cannot be described as terse.

Will those responsible for presenting the responses of Episcopalians to the Executive Council analyze data by question or by whole response? Will they try to reduce answers to statistical summaries, or will they try to identify responses from particular people or groups that are somehow representative of distinct positions? Who know? That there is only a week between the deadline for responses and the beginning of the June Executive Council meeting makes me thankful that I personally don’t have to figure out what to do.

The data-analysis problem actually has consequences for respondents. One should not worry about making a point more than once, particularly if it is especially pertinent to more than one question. The redundancy makes it more likely that your voice will be heard. Since all one’s answers may not be kept together, it is a good idea to avoid cross-referencing your answers; repeat a point if it needs to be made in more than one place. On the other hand, it would be wise to be sure that you actually do answer every question directly and in the form it is asked. This will help assure that the points you make are noticed and not misunderstood.

Good Luck. If you’re planning to submit your responses to the Study Guide, be aware that you have less than two weeks in which to do so. (Answers are due by June 4.) Time to get to work if you have not already begun. Good luck!

Helping Episcopalians Put in Their Two Cents’ Worth

A bit less than a month ago, the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church issued “A Short Study Guide to Aid The Episcopal Church in Responding to the Draft Anglican Covenant As Prepared by the Covenant Design Group.” This six-page document with the catchy title asks 14 detailed, non-leading questions about the Anglican covenant as proposed by the Covenant Design Group (CDG) in January. Episcopalians have been asked to answer the questions and to send their answers to the secretary of the General Convention to help the church formulate its response to the covenant draft.

Whatever one thinks of the covenant, it is clear that it has the potential to change The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion in profound ways. (I doubt that anyone, liberal, conservative, or otherwise, believes the claim of the CDG that there is nothing new in the draft.) The Study Guide provides a mechanism for all Episcopalians to have some influence on how our church deals with the covenant proposal. Answering the questions is not a simple matter, however, as they call for a close analysis of the draft. Nonetheless, Episcopalians of every stripe should welcome this opportunity to influence what our church does at this critical time in its history. Episcopalians will have only themselves to blame if they fail to offer their opinions and the church’s response turns out not to be to their liking.

I don’t know that the church has a good plan for how it will handle the answers it receives. It could be dealing with over 2 million responses, handwritten, faxed, printed, and e-mailed. Realistically, of course, that number will be much smaller, perhaps very small indeed. Making sense of them will still be a problem, however, as the Study Guide did not offer a uniform submission mechanism.

Into this breach comes Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh with a Microsoft Word form to help people organize and record their thoughts. The form is a Word document containing fields to enter one’s personal information (name, parish, etc.—the Study Guide did not explicitly ask for this), followed by the 14 questions, interspersed with fields for one’s answers. The form is both convenient to use and, I hope, helpful to the hapless folks who have to tabulate all the answers received by the church. The worksheet and its instructions can be downloaded from PEP’s Web site here. The Lead (a blog of the new Episcopal Café) already has a story on the Worksheet.

I hope that people will not be intimidated by the worksheet, which looks more complicated than it is. It is accompanied by a set of instructions to put the task at hand into context—links are provided to the Study Guide and to the CDG report—and to explain how to use a Microsoft Word form, a process that is fairly intuitive, but which can can also be frustrating until one gets the hang of it. The instruction sheet is as long as it is in order to be as helpful as possible to all Word users, including those with the latest version of the software (Word 2007), and to accommodate both PC and Mac users.

Just for the record, the idea for the form came from Joan Gundersen, PEP’s president. I developed the form and its instructions. Several people acted as testers for the project, and they deserve special thanks—Jane Little, Jack Harmon, Mary Jane Amick, and Ben Mudd. Any mistakes, however, are my responsibility, and I hope people will report them to me, so that I can correct them.

Responses to the Study Guide are due by June 4. Download the worksheet and get to work.

Reading the Signs

I drove to a client’s house this morning and encountered an unusual number of curious signs.

A major intersection is just over a mile from my house. Invariably, I encounter a line of cars there awaiting a change of the traffic signal. (Protected left turns from four directions lengthen the signal cycle time.) Today, I saw a new sign as I approached the inevitable stopped vehicles. The large, diamond-shaped orange sign said, simply, “BUMP.” A question immediately came to mind: Was the legend on the sign a noun or a verb? As it happens, the road I was about to cross is being resurfaced and recently had been milled, making it lower than the road I was driving on.

A bit farther along, I came to another intersection, just before which I saw signage that said “END SPEED LIMIT 35.” As the car passed that signpost, I noticed similar signage on the other side of the intersection announcing “BEGIN SPEED LIMIT 35.” What, I wondered, was the speed limit on the 500 or so feet of roadway between the two signs.

The next odd sign I encountered was one I have been seeing with increasing frequency. It is a tall, narrow sign placed in the center of the roadway at pedestrian crosswalks. “Reading” from top to bottom, the sign says “STATE LAW,” followed by a triangular yield sign, the word “TO,” a stylized figure of a pedestrian, and the words “WITHIN CROSSWALK.” By now, I know what the sign means, but, on encountering it for the first time, it seems more like a puzzle to be solved quickly as one is driving past, a kind of traffic rebus dreamed up by a Chinese engineer who does not have a full grasp of idiomatic English. Crosswalks seem to inspire this sort of thing, or am I the only person who finds the sequence of street markings "“PED,” “X,” “ING” just before crosswalks annoying?

Finally, I want to mention a sign I did not actually see on my car trip today, but which I did see while taking a walk this afternoon. In the window of a barber shop near my house—yes, it really is an old-fashioned barber shop, as indicated by the big “BARBER SHOP” sign overhead—there is a sign indicating when the establishment is open. The sign reads as follows:

Shop Hours
Wed., Fri., Sat.
9:00 AM ’til Closing
Thurs.
4:00 PM ’til Closing

If a customer arrives at 4 o’clock on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, what is the probability of being able to get a haircut? I have no idea what the answer is.

Following the Rules

The April 8 issue of The Living Church carried a story about Mark Lawrence’s failure to receive adequate consents to be consecrated as South Carolina’s next bishop. The same issue contained an editorial calling the failure “a tragedy for the entire church.” The May 6 issue offers two letters in response to the magazine’s coverage of the Lawrence affair.

In the first letter, the Rev. John Rawlinson of St. James Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, takes the magazine to task over its editorial, focusing on the assertion that “Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori decided to follow canon law to the letter in ruling the process invalid” [emphasis added]. Rawlinson pointed out that Jefferts Schori was obliged to follow canon law. (She was also obliged to allow only 120, not 123 days for consents to be submitted, but that point is moot, I suppose, at least as far as Lawrence is concerned.)

The second letter is mine, which is reproduced below as it appears in The Living Church:

The article, “Presiding Bishop Invalidates South Carolina Election,” and the editorial, “Failure to Consent Leaves Everyone a Loser,” misinterpret events.

Any balloting procedure must ensure the validity of votes cast. Because South Carolina’s choice of bishop was controversial, particular care was needed to ensure that the legitimacy of the consent process, whatever its result, would be unquestioned. That process did not generate sufficient consents by the date required, and it did not generate enough valid consents, even after the extra three days allowed by the Presiding Bishop. Assuming that the standing committee read the canons and examined the consents it received, its members must have known that some consents were invalid.

Bishop-elect Mark Lawrence received insufficient consents not because of his theology, but because of what he said he would do to the church. He has not been denied consecration because of “things he was reported or reputed to have said or written,” but because of statements he unquestionably made—some of them in TLC—that suggested his unwillingness to be bound by the canons of The Episcopal Church.

The church’s consent process for episcopal elections is not a mere formality, but an important, substantive check on dioceses that may have made questionable choices. The message in this sorry affair is not that “there is no longer room in The Episcopal Church for bishops who uphold traditional Anglican teaching.” It is that the church is growing impatient with bishops who cannot respect its polity and will not abide its law.

Lionel Deimel
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Both letters, then, emphasize the obligation of those in ordained orders to abide by Episcopal Church canons. It is annoying that Episcopalians have to point out this obligation over and over, and yet the church’s militant traditionalists cannot seem to bring themselves to acknowledge it, calling those who raise the issue “canonical fundamentalists.” To this, I propose a question: Why should we defer to the opinions of these people on matters of scriptural interpretation—firm opinions based on ambiguous, if not contradictory texts that cannot be verified as definitive—when they seem incapable of finding the “plain meaning” in straightforward instructions written in the modern era?

Here We Go Again

To hardly anyone’s surprise, the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina has announced that it will attempt again to make the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence its next bishop. In particular, the following announcement has been posted on the South Carolina Web site:

Statement of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina for immediate release

On September 16, 2006, the people of the Diocese of South Carolina overwhelmingly elected the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as our next bishop on the first ballot. We are fully persuaded that the Holy Spirit spoke in that election and we were reassured that a majority of both bishops and standing committee’s [sic] intended to consent to this election. We are determined to carry forward our diocesan mission within the context of the canons which give order to our common life.

Accordingly, at our meeting today, we unanimously passed a resolution reconvening the 216th annual meeting of the Diocese of South Carolina, which was recessed. At that re-convened meeting, we will request that the convention take the necessary steps to allow the calling of a special convention later in the summer for the purpose of again electing the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence. Formal notification will follow shortly.

Charleston, SC
April 17, 2007

Immediately after Lawrence failed to achieve the requisite consents for his consecration, many people speculated that South Carolina would indeed elect Lawrence again to be its next bishop. They further speculated that, the next time around, consents would easily be obtained. The theory seemed to be that denying consents is a rare occurrence that The Episcopal Church would not have the will to pull off twice in a row. The determination of South Carolina, combined with the closely divided first-round result, seemed as though it might work in Lawrence’s favor.

Or maybe not. The speculation about South Carolina’s future was articulated before the spring House of Bishops meeting, which may have been a turning point in Episcopal Church history. Our bishops now seem to have an increased awareness of the need to protect the constitution of The Episcopal Church against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In particular, there seems now to be a widespread understanding—at long last, one must say—that certain members of the House of Bishops do not simply dissent from majority viewpoints, but are actively working to overthrow The Episcopal Church and to replace it with a fundamentalist caricature of an American Anglican church. From this perspective, Mark Lawrence does not so much look like a wronged priest deserving of a second chance at obtaining justice, as he does a fox knocking at the hen house door. The bishops with jurisdiction, who voted to consent to his consecration last time around, may well reject his cause this time, irrespective of what standing committees do. To everyone’s astonishment, The Episcopal Church has shown that it is not a rubber stamp for anyone a diocese might elect bishop, and the House of Bishops has shown that it is not a rubber stamp for the tyrannical edicts of the Primates’ Meeting.

The South Carolina Standing Committee is convinced that “the Holy Spirit spoke” in its episcopal election. Perhaps its members should consider that it is equally likely that the Holy Spirit spoke in the rejection of Mark Lawrence by diocesan standing committees. Rather than showing how stubborn South Carolinians can be, the Standing Committee might well consider starting an episcopal search process from the beginning, with a new consultant, with greater respect for the moderate Episcopalians in the diocese, and without determining the outcome in advance.

I do not, of course, expect this suggestion to be taken seriously by the South Carolina Standing Committee.