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So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

—2 Corinthians 5:18, 19

Louie crew is the worst nightmare for many of my fellow conservatives in the Episcopal Church: he is an openly homosexual man, 65 years old, who often signs his Internet postings as "Quean Lutibelle of the Alabama Belles" and presses for changing the church's policy on ordination and marriage. Crew and I could not be much further apart in what we think about sex and who we consider our theological kindred spirits.

Yet in the week before Thanksgiving last, as a nationwide battle for the White House disclosed anew some of the deepest cultural divisions in America—state by state and often county by county—Louie Crew and I sat working side by side in a basement meeting room of an Episcopal cathedral in South Bend, Indiana. For the first time since I met Crew nine years earlier, we worked toward a common goal as friends. In earlier years, we had developed a cautious respect for each other; we offered one another friendly words, both privately and publicly, but we had never really sat together, one on one, with our defenses down.

We were both participants in a meeting of the New Commandment Task Force (NCTF), a joint project of Crew and the theologically conservative Brian Cox, an Episcopal priest who has devoted much of his pastoral ministry to reconciling unlikely parties, whether in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or the Midwest of the United States. Eighteen people—conservatives, liberals, and three moderates—had gathered at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James in downtown South Bend for five days of sharply honest discussion about what divides us and what (if anything) might unite us. By the penultimate afternoon, I joined Crew to combine various people's notes into a one-page public statement. We removed this piece of jargon and tweaked that sentence to describe what common ground we had discovered. We laughed together and complimented each other's editorial choices.

This experience may not sound at all extraordinary, but it was. In retrospect, I also realize it was a milestone in my long, often subconscious search for the elusive quality of reconciliation.

I first met Crew in 1992 at an Episcopal church in Houston. I had traveled to Houston to report on the annual convention of Integrity, a national organization whose members urge the Episcopal Church to pronounce blessings on gay couples and to ordain gay clergy. Crew is the founder of Integrity, and though he has never served as its president, he is its spiritual patriarch. I attended the meeting as anything but the mythical objective reporter, for I was just beginning to write for Episcopalians United (EU), a national organization that opposed Integrity's goals. My writing for EU eventually became a full-time job, and for eight years it immersed me in the most exhilarating advocacy journalism I've ever practiced. I wrote firsthand reports from some of the most radical and bizarre Episcopal gatherings of the 1990s, such as Matthew Fox's first "rave Mass" (since rechristined a "techno cosmic Mass") in San Francisco and a national gathering at which gay activists wondered aloud whether they wanted to press for their own version of marriage or if marriage was just too hierarchical and oppressive. I formed surprisingly warm friendships with some theological liberals and ticked off more than a few Episcopal bishops during those years. I doubt that I could stand so much fun and heartache again this side of eternity.

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July 8 2001, Vol. 45, No. 9