How to Create a Crisis: The Connecticut Six Deliberately Ask For What Cannot Be Given

Having read carefully the actual text of the letter to Bishop Andrew Smith of Connecticut written May 27, 2004 from the clergy, wardens and vestries of Bishop Seabury Church, Groton; Christ Church, Watertown; St. Johns, Bristol; St. Paul’s, Darien; Trinity, Bristol; Christ & The Epiphany, East Haven as posted on http://www.ctdiocese.org/news/may27_04letter.pdf, I can only conclude that that authors themselves precipitated the crisis they find themselves in. Looking at this material as an outsider is instructive because the text reveals some fundamental challenges to our common life that is important for all of us concerned with the mission and ministry of the Episcopal Church to understand.

I tried to put myself in their position by asking myself what if the Church put forward as teaching something that I believed in all my heart was wrong. And what if I was a Rector who was not only appalled by such a turn of events but who chaired a vestry equally appalled? What would be my response? How far would I go and at what cost? What would have to be the response of my Bishop and Diocese if I wrote a letter such as the May27, 2004 document? It is from that perspective that I looked at the demands themselves irrespective of the theological dispute itself.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should say that I support the election of Bishop Robinson and the actions of GC03. To be fair, I will to try to not let my biases show too much. Again, I have attempted to look at these questions separate from the theological dispute.

I bypass the preambles, noting the truth of what they say. If Bishop Smith were to change his mind and recant his support of Bishop Robinson and other gay clergy, then the authors of the letter would be right, there would be no need for DEPO oversight.

The significance of the six churches acting in concert is, to me, nothing less than a pressure tactic: a perfectly good one, actually. Just don’t be surprised if the Bishop does not want to play. Their requests for a big single meeting—all Vestries, Wardens and Clergy in one place at one time, with the Bishop having to submit in advance the names of those going with him—strikes me as a request designed to be unacceptable. Would such a gathering be a meeting, a lynching or a constitutional convention? It’s hard to tell. It should not surprise that the idea was refused.

Turning to their specific demands, I want to look at the implications of what the petitioners are really asking. The exact text of the letter is followed by commentary.

• We seek immediate care and pastoral oversight of a bishop acceptable to us who
• Affirms Holy Scripture, the ancient creeds, and the 39 Articles.
• Upholds the 1998 Lambeth Resolution on human sexuality.
• Neither supported the election, consecration and ministry of V.G. Robinson as bishop, nor supports the ordination of any unchaste homosexuals to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church.

This speaks to the fundamental disagreement with their Bishop and the rest of the Diocese. One would assume that any DEPO Bishop would be sympathetic to the cause of the petitioning congregations.

• We seek suspension without prejudice of the canons and resolutions of the Diocese of Connecticut requiring an assessment of funds in support of diocesan mission and ministry.

In this instance, the leaders of these congregations want to be relived of their obligations to the wider community of the Diocese and the Episcopal Church but retain their right to seat, voice and vote at Diocesan Convention and for the right of their representatives and clergy to take part in the councils of the Church.

• We seek a one-year review of these DEPO Agreements in consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of the Primates of the Anglican Communion or their appointed designee.

The signers interpret DEPO to mean that what is being delegated flows not out of the authority of the Diocesan Bishop nor out of the structures of the Episcopal Church, but flows out of Canterbury and the combined council of the Primates of the whole Anglican Communion. According to this view, the canons of both Diocese of Connecticut and the Episcopal Church do not apply.

The weakness here is that they are asking their Bishop and Standing Committee to suspend their own rules outside of the authority of the Convention of the Diocese, and outside of General Convention. Even if this were desirable, the laws of the State of Connecticut do not disappear, either. The responsibility of the Bishop, Standing Committee, Diocesan Council and Convention is to the whole diocese, not just a few. And it is to live within both the laws of the state and the canons of this church. This does not cease simply because some might wish it so.

Even if outside Bishops, of whatever rank, were to review the agreement it would have to be within the framework of the relevant canons and civil law.

• We seek a written agreement that guarantees that the future succession of clergy in our parishes rests in the hands of our vestries, our search committees and our DEPO Bishop.

The process for the selection of clergy already rests in a shared process between vestry and Bishop. This group is asking that the Bishop of Connecticut delegate the authority of deployment to the DEPO Bishop. In effect, they are asking the Bishop of Connecticut to hand over the ability to license clergy (and by extension the lay offices such as lay reader, Eucharistic minister, preacher and so on) to the DEPO Bishop. Again, the responsibilities delineated in the canon do not cease. Besides, this kind of agreement can go the other way. If a parish chooses to become Unitarian and only wants to have Unitarian clergy but remain in the Episcopal Church there would be nothing to stop it because this kind of rule would remove the check the canons are designed to give.

• We seek a written agreement that all decisions regarding future candidates for ordained ministry from these parishes rest in the hands of our rectors, discernment committees, vestries and our DEPO Bishop.

See above. Again, the fitness of a person for ordination does not solely rest in theology, but in other factors. Would the six parishes carry the burden of being sure the person is psychologically ready for ordination, and solely take on the responsibility of the person should they commit sexual abuse, misuse of parish funds or commits a crime and absolve the diocese and the national church of those liabilities. In our tradition, a person is ordained for the whole church via the Diocese, not for oneself or ones congregation.

• We seek a written assurance that you and the Diocese of Connecticut will not foster a ministerial environment that is hostile to our parish’s mission and ministries.

On the first reading they seem to be asking their Bishop to continue to include them in the councils of the Church without prejudice or barrier. The definition of a hostile environment is in this case a slippery one. Does it mean that the Bishop would have to be responsible for the choices of other clergy in their ordinary dealings with these priests? For example, if other clergy choose not to fellowship with them or not to entrust their neighboring parishes to their care while they are on vacation or if a parishioner lands in a hospital close to them, or if their colleagues do not elect them to positions within the diocese, then this agreement might indicate that this is the Bishops responsibility, and not a natural consequence of their own choices.

I believe that any fair reading of this document supports what Bishop Smith when he that the clergy, wardens and vestries of these six congregations are in fact asking things of their Bishop and Standing Committee things that they cannot grant without a unilateral suspension of the Constitution and Canons of the Diocese and the Episcopal Church, and probably the laws of incorporation of the State of Connecticut. These folks are choosing to try to not so much change the system as to make the system accommodate them.

It may be nice in theory that we add a level of canonical and legal authority to our church that makes us beholden to the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the Primates, but until the Constitution of the Episcopal Church is changed, it just ain’t so. Their role can be nothing more than an invited and consultative one. To invoke an authority that does not exist is akin to saying “I can beat my spouse because God told me to.” God may or may not have said that, but the laws of the state will have something to say about the consequences of choosing to follow that belief.

Here is for me the heart of the matter: the six congregations are asking to take unto themselves the rights of a Diocese—to select clergy and candidates for ordinations, to establish their own common life and ministry—without any of the obligations. They are, in effect, asking the rest of the church to insure their buildings, support their pensions, cover their liabilities, and to support and underwrite all of the other details that go into running on a daily basis the life of this church.

Even in the area of their professional relationships, they want rights without obligations. Respect is demanded but none given.

There are other less direct, but equally important costs that we all share in our common life. Are these six parishes willing and able to indemnify the diocese for the legal liabilities of what happens in these six parishes? Dioceses are held responsible for the actions of their clergy and congregations no matter whether the priest of a parish likes the Bishop or not.

Based on this document alone the clergy, the wardens and the vestries of these congregations have by their own words placed themselves outside and above the common life of their diocese. They want a common life that gives them freedom with no responsibility, while still expecting the remaining parishes to pick up the tab. If I were a member of the standing committee, whose stewardship is for all the churches in the diocese, then I would feel I would have no choice but to act as they did. Given this reading, I am pleased they acted with restraint.

One might chalk the intent of this document up to runaway congregationalism, which is as alive in Connecticut as anyplace else. But I think there is more at work here. The progressive nature of the demands means that one can’t give on one item without giving into them all. The inflexibility of their demands makes flexible application of the canon impossible. They have drawn very clear lines which gives little room to negotiate. The only real flexibility is the timetable within which the canons may be applied.

This dispute only made the news a few weeks ago, but the letter itself is almost a year old. The demands are undoubtedly older than that. Putting this out in the media first was a choice of the petitioners, and the published material is spun to leave out pertinent details.

The content of their demands fit into the previously publicized strategy of legal activism designed to distract and wear down diocesan leadership until they get their way, to create new layers of authority which by-passes existing processes, and to create parallel jurisdictions that can make the appeal to those outside the Episcopal Church that they represent the actual Anglican Communion.

The nature of their requests shows that the petitioners want nothing less that complete freedom from any accountability that is not of their own design. This is not really accountability at all.

By their own words, they have created the crisis they face. It is inappropriate for these congregations to expect obligations shared by every other congregation to be suspended because they decide the rules do not apply to them. The alternative for these congregational leaders is to stand with their consciences and expect consequences in faith. If they want to make salt against the wishes of the Empire, then go to the sea and make salt. The unjustness of the law should become apparent in its enforcement. The point of Gandhi’s protest was to eventually end British Rule in India. The assumption was that they not only wanted independence but that they were up to it. If these folks want the draw unto themselves the rights of being a Diocese, then they need to accept the obligations. If, as they claim, they truly want to remain part of the Church through the Diocese they are in, then that will require submission to a common life that will sometimes be uncomfortable and challenging.

Our Growing Impasse- 030805

This was a post I made on the listserv "HoBD" for the deputies and alternates of General Convention and members of the House of Bishops. It was first posted on March 8, 2005.

The story upstream of the encounter of an angry person with a delegate to a diocesan convention (aka council) on an elevator seems to speak to the question of adequate representation, but I think it actually points elsewhere. Some of the subsequent discussion about how we elect people to GC I think takes us down a blind alley. Even the question of posting limits take us down another blind alley. We are all frustrated and disturbed at our impasse that may boil over any day now into some kind of schism. I do not believe that the fundemental problem is how we elect our deputies to a particular convention--diocesan or General--or who talks how often, but rather the core problem before us is the unique response of an activist group who have found their interests lose in both the "ballot" box and the legislative arenas in our church and have found a new way to move the system their way.

I believe this is at the root of our current troubles and describes our impasse. If we do not understand how the power is distributed, then we cannot understand how to move through the impasse. As much as we want to deny or decry that politics plays a part in our common life as Christians, the fact is that when two or three gather together there shall be influence and power. Jesus promised to be in that mix and that is both a challenge and a comfort. Our relational, Trinitarian, understanding of God suggests that power and influence are incarnational realities for our common life. In the life of the church, things the Rule of St. Benedict have attempted to describe and bring order to that dynamic. It is in that tradition that I want to invite us to look through gem with a differnt light.

For a moment, I want to look at our current impasse from a political science perspective.

Any deliberative, elected body has to figure out how to allow the majority to decide while protecting the minority from the whims of the majority. The framers of the constiution were always trying to balance the will of the people against the fear of mob rule. The framers could roughly be divided between those who trusted the people to govern versus those who feared the power of the people to turn into an unruly, violent mob. Our nation's constitution, and I would suggest our own constitution and canons, reflect both views.

The second question is how in a deliberative process do issues get discussed and decided in such a way as the losers can both live with the result and live "to fight another day."

Bear with me here a minute...but I have been noticing some troubling parellels between our civic discourse and our discourse as a church. And it does get back to the angry person on the elevator. So I want to start with the second question first:

Throughout our nation's civic history, there have been attempts to circumvent both popular vote and constitutional processes when one can't win in the ballot box and/or the legislature. Looked at this way, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, Tammany Hall, the civil rights movement, and so on can all be seen as non-elective responses to popular or legislative will. Some of this we discover later to be either evolutionary or reactive. In our politics today, the proposal to eliminate the filibuster from the Senate is one obvious example, but more sublty--and sometimes more dangerously--the trend has shown up other ways. Liberals have tended to use the courts to drive around legislative processes to get things they believe in. Conservatives have attempted to re-write legislative rules so that activist minorities trump majority interests. (I am sure I have gotten a bunch of people on both sides of the civic-political-spectrum mad at me by now, but please refrain from throwing hymnals at me for a moment.)

So, if you can't win the ballot box or in the legislature, you can do at least two things: go to court or change the rules. But that is not all, there are other ways. One is, to paraphrase the hot dog commercial, is go to (or create) a higher authority.

I believe that this has been the strategy of Anglican Communion Network and American Anglican Council, and their related groups. Change the process to create a new level of authority to at least minimize if not outright cancel the existing constitutional processes.

The activists running the show in opposition to the election of Bishop Robinson knew from the beginning that they would probably lose in the legislative sessions on the issues important to them. Instead they set about changing the question so that they could win in another venue. The intellectual underpinnngs of this in fact began to form well before Robinson was even nominated. I suspect we'd be suffering the same difficulties after GC'03 even if Robinson were never even nominated. The wedge issue was still going to be gays--but blessings not bishops.

The idea was to transform we now call the Instruments of Unity into something they were never designed to be. The Anglican Communion Networks writings over the past few years, have been crafted to sublty, and carefully change concepts of "communion" and "orthodoxy" and "discipline" (and more) so that when the Convention would at the right time go a way that was contrary to their interests, they would have a basis for challenging the General Convention internationally.

The last writing posted by Fr. Sietz of West Virginia (on their behalf) is to me a fine example. This last post was essentially saying "we told you so, so now shape up or ship out." Amazingly, this is a group who, having the changed the subject, and gotten people to follow their line of argument, are now saying "I told you so" to a church for whom the categories did not even exist a few years ago! They are not doing anything they did not already tell us, so we can't accuse them of being sneaky. Just politically proficient.

Now for all the talk about the church leaving orthodoxy and being revisionist, the fact is that these groups have been losing at both the level of the ballot box and on the level of legislation for years. The angry person at the elevator saying "You don't represent me!" and the question of how to make General Convention more representative points to serious frustraton of the inability of these groups to influence large enough numbers of elected deputies to get their way.

Seriously, let's look at who elects whom. Who exactly elects diocesan convention delegates? Every parish I've ever been in for over two decades generally tap fairly active but ordinary Episcopalians to go to those local conventions. I've been in enough churches to know that just finding these folks can be a challenge and so often the same people take turns.

And who do these people select as General Convention deputies? People pretty much like them. Maybe higher profile sure, and certainly people who volunteer, but on the whole slightly more active versions of themselves.

Now since we don't have political parties, we spend some energy reading tea leaves as to aligns with whom, but the net effect is that average people going to average diocesan conventions and elect deputies and diocesan bishops and these people, for better or worse, represent us to make decisions that affect our common life.

This may seem like Ecclesial Civics 101 but I say this because in response to the oft repeated mantra is that some "Elite" has taken over the church. This theory may be comforting if you are a person whose interests or beliefs have not won and if you're seeing results you disagree with. But the theory does not explain the facts. Either the average convention delegate has been brainwashed into voting for people they hate, or, the people that they elect do a pretty good job of representing the large proportion of people who elected them. I'm not saying it's perfect! I am saying that maybe our processes really do represent the mind of our church, addled though it may seem.

If we really believe that Jesus is present in that "two or three" and if we really believe that Councils are a vehicle for the Holy Spirit to speak, and that our catholicity is represented by our totality, then perhaps that the church is well represented. If we are well, if imprefectly, represented then maybe God is up to something. I believe God is much more than up to something--and what a ride it has been!

On the other hand, if you believe in your heart that the "mob" and/or the "elites" were taking the church down the primrose path to perdition, then the time had come to change the rules. From this stance, a way of "legally" challenging our constitutional processes that would have to be found. This is the basic tenet of groups like the IRD and their civic counterparts-- by seeking to return the three mainline Protestant Churches they've targetted to their notion of Biblical faith (read their websites) they, and their constituent and allied groups, want to save the mob from themselves for their own good by changing the rules.

Since winning at the ballot box has not worked, something different has to be tried.

To accomplish this, a layer of governance would have to be created that was out of reach of the average diocesan convention delegate electing the average General Convention Deputy and electing the average Bishop. Since this cannot be done in our own church without changing the constiution, a process that would surely fail, a process has begun that will turn the Anglican Consultative Council and the other "instruments of unity" into something they were never designed to: a deposit of faith with some magisterial authority over the previously autonomous members of the Communion.

The document produced by the Primates meeting seems to express some wariness over a central authority, but unless we can return to a workable notion of unity and communion as being something other than total agreement on every issue, the genie may already be out of the bottle.

We in the Episcopal Church are being told that we are being now beholden to and disciplined by an organization (The Anglican Consultative Council) of which we were a voluntary member and to which we are not in any way constitutionally accountable. The ACC did not ask for the role of disciplinarian but has had that job thrust on it by a meeting--not even a constituted body!--of people (the Primates) that arose out of the ACC in the first place!

So now the Episcopal Church is in an untenable position: If we say to the "Instruments of Unity", "you have no authority to discipline us" then we will seem impudent and rude, andit will be diplomatically difficult, and could prolong the agony. If we say "I accept your authority" then we have accomplished the goals of those who want to limit our own constitutional system by having us volunteer to become subservient to a "higher authority" with it's own kind of agony.

Now as for the angry person in the elevator: what was her real beef? Was it really that "no one represents me?" Or was it really that "I lost?" I will bet that she wanted both--being heard for many people is to get ones way. There is no legislative body on earth that can possibly represent and give proportional power to every minority view. The ones that try, say parliamentary systems, often work by building coalitions of pragmatists that drive around the idealogues. The fringe parties in these systems are great for helping one get power, they are just rotten for making real decisions. (Look at how Ariel Sharon manages his own party and the small ideological parties that got him elected now that he needs to do something they hate!)

The fact is that in our system, like many others, change is never as fast as the most progessive of us wish and always too quick for the most conservative of us. But change does happen in it's own glacial way--long period of slowness intersperced with jarring moments of movement.

I am aware that I have said very little about Jesus or gay bishops, or how to read the Bible in this post. (Don't say I didn't warn you!) I think the recent Primates meeting, the unashamed presence of certain interest groups, and the all the posturing has shown that this is not really about Gospel ministry. It is certainly not about relationships that show the tranforming power of Jesus.

Our impasse is about authority, it is about power and who excercises it, and it is about how deeply committed people excercise power to protect and promote their interests. We are people, and when people in group make decisions it's called politics.

The task ahead for the House of Bishops is a delicate one. The lego blocks for a creating a "higher authority" are out of the box and some are assembling them. Some people have bought into the idea that our independent, constiutionally-based, church needs to "take into account" (a vague and slippery term) the "perspective" of "other Anglican bodies"--of which some are more equal than others. Some will attempt to have it both ways, and certainly there is still lots of room for comprimise.

At the end of the day, we will have to decide if we really believe that God is at work in both our processes and even in the reactions our actions bring. If we as Deputies, Alternates or Bishops believe God reallyis at work in the system we have chosen to be obedient to, and we really believe that what we decided is faithful to the Gospel of Christ, then our choices are pretty clear.

If there are those who believe that the processes we've used speak of the "mob" or the "elites" and not of Christ, then their choices are clear.

We may need to let go of other people's choices as they may have to let go of ours. As ++Rowan has said, there is no pain-free solution. If our Communion really is a gift from God and rests in Christ, not our opinions and interest groups, then we will find a way through it. If others of us decide that Communion rests in agreement, and certain of us want to excercise power in a certain way, then another, more devisive way will be found.

Interesting as this all is, in God's time it will all be a footnote. There is a creation to be transformed. No one ever said that'd be easy.