Breaking Up Is Hard
The Indecisive Debate about Homosexuality in the Episcopal Church
by Doug LeBlanc
Every three years the Episcopal Church convenes a General Convention, which—with more than 800 deputies and up to 300 bishops—it claims is the world’s largest legislative body.
A General Convention consists of 10 hectic days of debating and voting on reams of legislation. This year’s convention is scheduled for July 16–25 in Philadelphia.
The conventions lock some Episcopalians into perennial three-year cycles of roller-coaster morale. Many who think of leaving the Episcopal Church for Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy adopt a “wait and see” stance, expecting that the next General Convention will act decisively enough to send them to the exits.
The convention must act decisively on at least two questions this year. It must elect a new presiding bishop, and it must decide whether to approve a Concordat of Agreement with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
A committee has proposed four candidates for presiding bishop, including two moderates and two liberals. None of the four candidates offers much hope that the Episcopal Church will return to a clearly orthodox stance on sexual morality.
The convention probably will approve the Concordat, because it has so little to lose by entering into “full communion” with a denomination roughly twice as large as the Episcopal Church. Whether the ELCA’s churchwide Assembly also will approve the Concordat when it convenes two weeks later, is a more open question.
The convention has not acted decisively on much since the hurly-burly of the 1970s, when it approved ordaining women to the priesthood in 1976 and accepted a heavily revised Book of Common Prayer in 1979.
Also in 1979, the convention deputies and bishops passed a resolution stating that “it is not appropriate for this Church to ordain a practicing homosexual, or any person who is engaged in heterosexual relations outside marriage.”
Episcopalians have debated that resolution ever since. Bishops such as John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., dismiss it as merely “recommendatory,” and say that without the force of canon law, it is on a par with calling for boycotts against multinational corporations.
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more on sex from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
Getting Sex Wrong Is a Foundational Error by James M. Kushiner
23.5—September/October 2010
The Loss of a Christian Understanding of Virginity Is Pure Tragedy by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
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Errands into the Moral Wilderness
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