An Appeal to Justin Welby

27 February 2019

The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby

The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury

Primate of All England

Lambeth Palace, London, SE1 7JU

Your Grace:

Many of us in the Episcopal Church first greeted the news of the upcoming Lambeth Conference with great excitement. When I was in England this past summer and visited Canterbury for the first time, I was deeply moved by the palpable bonds of kinship and affection created by our shared belonging to the Anglican Communion. I felt incredibly proud and connected. It was with great sadness and distress, therefore, that I read the recent statement from Dr. Josiah Idowu-Fearon, Secretary-General of the Anglican Communion, announcing that same-sex spouses of active bishops would not be invited to attend the 2020 Lambeth Conference along with opposite-sex spouses.

I am, of course, keenly aware that not all Anglicans are of the same mind on issues of human sexuality, as well as a wide range of other issues. We are living in an age, however, in which the Church stands largely discredited among the people to whom we are called to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Having often found ourselves on the wrong side of history, the Church has developed a reputation for being prejudiced, retrograde, and oppressive, a reputation that, I fear, is well justified. How are we to look people in the eye and say that our God is a God of love, and the Bible is the divinely inspired container of God’s loving Word, when the leaders of the Anglican Communion countenance and perpetuate the homophobia and discrimination that hurts so many LGBTQ members of our Christian family? How are we to defend the Church against the legitimate claims of outmoded and pharisaical legalism?

I know that you, like I, take seriously St. Paul’s affirmation in his Epistle to the Galatians (Gal. 3:28-29) that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Are LGBTQ people not also heirs of Christ’s promise, Your Grace? I came to the Episcopal Church in 2004 after having wandered for twenty years in a spiritual wilderness following a traumatic departure from the Judaism of my upbringing. I fell in love with the Anglican form of Christianity, because I witnessed in Holy Scripture and experienced in the embodied life of the Church a Jesus who loved and fully included the poor, the marginalized, and the rejected without any qualification and in defiance of the religious and civil authorities of his time. And I fell so in love with Jesus that I have dedicated my life to him as a priest.

The Sunday lectionary recently included the Sermon on the Plain from the Gospel of Luke, in which Our Lord says, “blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets” (Lk 6:22-23). Our Lord did not judge us worthy of being hated, excluded, or reviled. Must we wait for heaven to see our Lord’s promise of inclusion fulfilled? Are we to be bullied, as the prophets were, by people who are ignorant and frightened by the ongoing revelation of God’s truth, as Our Lord said in the Gospel of John:

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16:12-13).

God is speaking to the world; but many do not want to listen. As the spiritual head of the world’s 85 million Anglicans and Episcopalians, Your Grace, please guide me: what am I to tell my flock? When the chips are down, and we have to choose what is just and what is expedient, how am I supposed to defend the Anglican Communion? Must I tell my LGBTQ folks that Cantuar believes them to be expendable, or will I be able to say with pride that you and other Anglican leaders stood up for them? I hold out the deepest hope that you will take a courageous stand and echo the resolute words of the Most Rev’d Edmond Lee Browning, 24^th Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church, who said “I want to be very clear – this church of ours is open to all – there will be no outcasts – the convictions and hopes of all will be honored.”

I have great compassion for the very difficult situation in which your find yourself, Your Grace, in trying to keep the Anglican Communion together, as did your predecessors in office. I will pray for you in love for the formidable vocation which has been entrusted to you, as I hope you will pray and advocate for all those who have been materially harmed by the Church’s exclusionary policies. With this in mind, I implore you to consider adopting the fairer and more equitable policy of inviting no spouses of active bishops to the Lambeth Conference, if you do not feel you can invite the same-sex spouses. This would at least mitigate the sting of our continued exclusion from full membership in the Church at the highest levels. It would remind me and others of why we are still proud to be Anglicans.

I thank you, Your Grace, for your consideration of my comments. I wish you and all of our family in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion a transformative Lent.

Your humble servant in Christ,

The Rev’d Ethan Alexander Jewett, SCP

VIII Rector, St. Helena’s Episcopal Church, Burr Ridge, Illinois

Episcopal Diocese of Chicago

The Episcopal Church

Statement on the Primates' Meeting in Canterbury

My dear brothers and sisters,

The recent news from the Primates' Meeting in Canterbury has generated a lot of controversy, debate, and hurt feelings in the Episcopal Church, particularly among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other queer people, as well as their heterosexual allies. The resolution by the primates to exclude the Episcopal Church from the governing bodies and activities of the Anglican Communion for three years appears to many a punitive, disciplinary measure designed to pressure the Episcopal Church to retreat from its support of marriage equality by extending marriage rites to same-sex couples.

A number of parishioners have expressed their disappointment and distress to me, and have asked me to offer my perspective. Let me begin by assuring you that I share your feelings of sadness, and perhaps even anger, that the primates have taken this approach to resolving differing views around human sexuality. It does not seem to cohere with what St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians, that "the eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.' [...] If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." I believe that every member of the Anglican Communion will suffer and be diminished by the primates' choice of a punitive response to the experience of the Body of Christ's fragmentation.

I have no doubt that many people on the opposite side of the issue from me are acting out a sense of real integrity, regarding biblical and historical understandings of marriage. However, we as a Church have to exercise great caution that we do not coerce or bully those who would disagree with us into compliance. It was regrettable that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, chose to apologize to gay and lesbian Christians for hurt caused by the Church only moments after the primates had stigmatized them by disciplining the Episcopal Church for its longstanding commitment to the inclusion of queer people in the full sacramental life of the Church. The primates' failure, moreover, to discipline those Anglican provinces that have failed to observe the Anglican Communion's policy against homophobia and oppression by supporting legislation to persecute or even execute queer people in their countries likewise bespeaks a poor and inconsistent respect for theological difference.

The great gift of the Anglican Communion is that it is not a confessional church and that each province enjoys the autonomy to live out its Anglican identity in its distinctive context. Recent moves from primates, especially those from the Global South, to reframe Anglican polity along a more authoritarian model is deeply distressing. Anglicanism has never had a centralized international structure, such as a curia or magisterium, to enforce doctrinal compliance. The Anglican Communion is not a political and administrative bureaucracy, but rather a family or network of national and regional churches with common spiritual roots. Our longstanding relationships through shared worship, service, and fellowship have made us what we are, not legislated compliance on litmus-test issues. Although the primates' gesture of exclusion is deeply painful to many, it will in no way make the Episcopal Church any less legitimately Anglican. Tomorrow, we will gather to worship God in the Anglican heritage, as we have always done. And we will continue to be the face of the Anglican Communion in the South Loop of Chicago.

Epiphany peace and blessings,
Fr. Ethan+

#TractSwarm Four: The Heart of Anglican Catholicity

Justin Welby, 105th Abp of Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury announced a proposal last week to deal with the schism within Anglicanism by dismantling the Anglican Communion and replacing it with a looser network of provinces connected to the See of Canterbury. The big change would be that, while these provinces would remain in communion with Canterbury, they would not necessarily remain in communion with each other. I considered this distressing news in light of the most recent Society of Catholic Priests TractSwarm on the heart of catholicity for the 21st century Anglican. To what extent can Anglicanism claim catholicity when it proposes to pursue schism for short-term relief, rather than to hold out for long-term unity?

It is probably clear from the way I framed this question that I do not think this is a wise approach to our current difficulties. But it's not because I disagree with the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury about the impossibility of bringing progressives and conservatives to consensus on human sexuality, the consecration of women bishops, or other controversial issues. It's not because I have a solution he and his predecessors haven't yet thought of. And it's not because I don't think folks just haven't tried hard enough. There is a deeper reason. It is because the decision we make now has repercussions for generations that come after us. We cannot simply make decisions for ourselves, but must take the long view of the implications of walking away from each other. Diplomacy and patience over time--perhaps even several lifetimes--is the only answer.

Michael Cerularius

Imagine if the rigid and hotheaded Papal Legate, Humbert of Silva Candida, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, hadn't succumbed to anger and namecalling and anathematized each other in 1054. Might the Great Schism have happened anyway? Perhaps. But perhaps if everyone had known how irreversible and devastating this exchange of tempers would be for all of Christendom, they would have taken one more deep breath, gone away to cool off, or just agreed to disagree for the time being. Or maybe the Pope would have sent a more irenic and levelheaded representative than Humbert to Constantinople to speak on his behalf. Once the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church was shattered, like Humpty Dumpty, there was no putting the pieces back together again.

Later in the week, after the Welby proposal had aired, I was re-reading a passage in William Sydnor's  The Prayer Book Through the Ages, about the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1789, where there were serious divisions over the draft of the first American Book of Common Prayer and the consecration of Samuel Seabury. Sydnor observes, 

In that company the tensions were great. In addition, those in positions of power were difficult to deal with, and some of them could not get along with certain others. The possibility that this band of apparent irreconcilables might reach any consensus looked dim. But the seemingly impossible was brought about by the patience and statesmanship of those in key positions, principally William White and William Smith. Moreover, it was accomplished without breaking off communion with the Church of England (Sydnor, 61, emphasis mine).

Bishop William White

There are consequences of both giving in to impatience and frustration and of practicing patience and diplomacy. It is heartening to remember how the efforts of the Episcopal Church's first Presiding Bishop, William White--not to mention many others--enabled the American Church to be born and to remain in communion with the See of Canterbury. The heart of Anglican Catholicism for me, then, is the recognition that we need each other when we don't agree with each other, or even when we dislike each other. But instead of slapping a bull of excommunication on the high altar of Hagia Sophia like Humbert, we should accept the fact that unity is out of reach for the present, and yet not walk away. We should realize that unity is not an entitlement, something that should come easily, but something that is hard-won after generations of labor and faithfulness.

In the early Church, schism was one of the worst sins a Christian could commit, and it's not hard to see why, the effects are devastating to the Body of Christ. In the polemics and politics of the Anglican Communion, we should set aside our expectations of immediate gratification and take the long view, the one that Jesus offered us in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." Our time is not God's time. We cannot predict when the unity of the Church will become apparent and we will be able to enjoy the fruits of that unity.

Abundant Blessings,
Fr. Ethan+