The Culture Beat

Here is this week’s “Face to Faith” column for the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, a local take on the Episcopal Church drama. My main goal for this column was to emphasize that real human beings are dealing with real struggles over the issue of sexuality and the church, a truism that sometimes gets lip service but often gets forgotten, especially in some corners of the world. And as Forrest Gump might say, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

The Rev. Maggie Zeller loves meetings and conventions, bless her, for how they stimulate her thinking and revive her spirit.

But the interim rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Johnson City returned from last month’s General Convention of the Episcopal Church feeling distressed. The triennial gathering of the 2.2-million-member denomination had come through another angst-ridden round in its long struggle over sexuality, biblical authority and church relations. More than ever, the American denomination and the worldwide Anglican Communion of which it is part teeter on the edge of divorce.

“I hope we can stay together, but I have no idea whatsoever what will happen with the Anglican Communion,” Zeller said this week.

This convention met in the wake of the so-called “Windsor Report,” the official response issued by Anglican leaders in 2004 after the American church consecrated an openly gay man as a bishop and the Anglican Church in Canada started blessing same-sex unions. The report called for the American and Canadian churches to put a moratorium on ordaining sexually active gay clergy as bishops and on same-sex blessings, and for bishops who opposed the North American actions not to cross jurisdictions to offer oversight to dissenting congregations.

After passionate debate at last month’s convention, Episcopalians passed a resolution to “receive and embrace The Windsor Report’s invitation to engage in a process of healing and reconciliation” and “to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church.”

It was neither a full-throated “Amen” nor a snub.

The election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as the denomination’s new presiding bishop, however, instantly became another wedge. Not only is she the first woman to lead an Anglican province – itself controversial – but she strongly advocates full inclusion of gays and lesbians in church life.

The convention hadn’t adjourned before several American dioceses and parishes announced they would leave the Episcopal Church. That was just the beginning of action and reaction.

Before the week ended, the Anglican Communion’s leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, raised the possibility of a new “covenant” that would likely lead to some kind of separation.

“No one came out of this with a clear win,” Zeller said this week. “I don’t know that we’re supposed to win, but at least smiling or holding each other by the hand. I don’t think we did that. We are not treating each other gently.”

A self-described liberal, Zeller criticizes what she sees as second-class treatment of gays and lesbians in the church. She affirms the authority of Bible, historic creeds and traditions of the church, but she thinks many Christians unfairly single out homosexuality as a defining issue in determining who is or is not truly welcome in the church.

“I’m almost sure that none of the (biblical) texts about homosexuals ever appears without lambasting other sins,” she said. “There’s not one of us who’s not a sinner. No sin is greater than another, except blasphemy. We have got to stop seeing people only as their sexuality.”

Even so, Zeller said she has been shaped by her four years in this “conservative” Johnson City parish.

“When I sit down to write my sermon, I feel called to a more traditional stance,” she said. “I trust the Scripture to tell me what it is I’m supposed to say. I have to try to stop hearing it with my more liberal ears and move toward the center. But no movement works unless the other side is moving as well. You have to give the Scripture honest consideration.”

But discerning precise messages isn’t always easy, and it shouldn’t be.

“We have to get messy when we explore Scripture,” she said. “If we step into Scripture and then step out with being changed, then we haven’t really been in it. That requires vulnerability.”

Zeller feels troubled as she ministers among people who agonize over their deeply intimate and spiritual concerns and as she wonders if she is witnessing the break-up of her cherished church family.

“I have seen the pain in some parishioners,” she said. “I’m going to die struggling about this.”

(Originally published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 1 July 2006.)