The Big Chill

I've been looking for a metaphor that fits the current ecclesial malaise in Tennessee, the coup d'eglise that began ten years ago, and that's finally coming into its own. I found kindergarten. Starting there, I remembered recess. Then along came bullies and dares and my dad can whip your dad.

The big chill over it all then was fear. But that was then, and this is now. That was juvenile early adolescence. This is juvenile late adolescence. It's outrageous and insulting and downright silly, but still, there's the fear. It's not just the homophobia arising out of insecurity, but the angst about the church itself... holy order verging on wholly chaos.

To help it along, we've got here in Tennessee what is best called "leadership by threat." ("I'm not threatening to leave, I'm threatening to stay" has become the mantra of the resident AAC-bishop.) It should come as no surprise. It polarizes the clergy, confuses the laity, and has brought the diocese into its current disarray and uncertainty. On top of that, it is pretentious.

This is further enabled largely by certain clergy, all deployed here under this current episcopate. Their vogue is to use a narrow, ill-informed, and alien confessional-church reading of biblical morality as a charade to avoid accountability and then arrogantly to demand the repentance of those who do not agree, all the while labeling them as a cult. In their quaint, solipsistic two-step, they've also renounced the church whose judgment once allowed them the very orders they now repudiate.

The Bishop and these enabling presbyters each at their ordination solemnly engaged among other things "to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church" (BCP pp 513,526,538). None have at this date been admonished, let alone inhibited into a time certain in which they could recant or face a presentment. Maybe we should consider a canon prohibiting spiritual nepotism.

On the other hand, there can be a positive side to all this.

Failing the Standing Committee's taking such action, the forthcoming January Diocesan Convention should call on the Bishop to dissociate himself publicly from his AAC affiliation or else resign his office. Further, it should ask for the resignation of the Canon to the Ordinary and those diocesan missioners who also receive their support from us and who with him are "incorporators" of the AAC's new Tennessee chapter. It should, as well, disenfranchise those congregations that have renounced their Episcopal identity and those that have withheld their support from the church's mission and program unless they publicly repudiate these actions.

Does our great Anglican tradition, grounded in Scripture, hammered out in faithful reason, and honed in this Diocese through nearly two centuries of sacrificial stewardship mean nothing? Can't bishops, already enjoying their terminal privilege of tenure, and congregations, long reaping the beneficence of thousands before them, give us more mature (and Christian) leadership than mere threat and withdrawal?

Well, yes. They have in the past, and they will again. We will soon elect a coadjutor. God give us sound judgment in that process to choose someone we can trust, maybe a Captain Kangaroo or a Mr or Ms Rogers. Then we'll at least know for a while that somebody cares and that the neighborhood is safe. Failing that, maybe we call a recess, but with crossing-guards at every corner of the playground, lest some lose sight of the fact that we are disciples of Jesus. -- JLD

[COVENANT, Number 16, December 2003]