Leaders Meet to Discuss the Future of the Episcopal Church

Representatives of the evangelical, charismatic, and Anglo-Catholic streams find unity in spiritual renewal.

Last month, the Episcopal Church installed a new presiding bishop who will set a course for the 2.8 million-member denomination through the rest of this century. Leading evangelicals, who hope to influence the church’s course, met the week before Edmond L. Browning was installed as presiding bishop. The renewal leaders emerged with a statement of united purpose, inviting the Episcopal Church to adhere to biblical tenets of faith and to acknowledge signs of spiritual renewal in its midst.

The purpose of the Winter Park, Florida, meeting was “to gather the evangelical constituency and give it a voice [because] evangelical witness has been underplayed and silent in our church for a long time,” according to Bishop Alden Hathaway of Pittsburgh, one of the conference organizers.

Episcopalians who desire renewal in the denomination make up a diverse group that is not always in complete agreement. It consists of church members who are charismatic, evangelical, and “Anglo-Catholic,” or high-church traditionalists. As a result of last month’s conference, 90 participants from all three streams agreed to work together for renewal “in whatever variety of worship and devotion the new life finds expression.”

They drafted a lengthy letter to the church, describing renewal in Episcopal parishes nationwide and summarizing position papers drafted at the meeting. They addressed biblical authority, salvation, preaching, apostolic witness, life in the Spirit, evangelism, and social outreach, among other topics. “We recognize that the Spirit is moving in our midst,” the letter states, “and our purpose is to move with Him.”

The conference grew out of a Chicago priest’s desire to meet with like-minded Episcopalians. John R. Throop, now in a Shaker Heights, Ohio, parish, spent two years developing the idea for the meeting. “Like so many people engaged in renewal in the Episcopal Church, I felt like I was an oddball, all on my own, and I could count on one hand the people I knew who were interested in renewal,” he said.

Throop wrote about his concern to John Rodgers. Rodgers is president of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a newly accredited seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, that has a clearly evangelical outlook.

Rodgers and Throop corresponded for several months, then convened a planning meeting with leaders from different aspects of the Episcopal renewal movement: Bishop Michael Marshall, an Anglo-Catholic speaker and writer based in St. Louis; Chuck Irish, of Episcopal Renewal Ministries (ERM); and Bishop Hathaway, among others. They set a date for the renewal conference without knowing it would immediately precede Browning’s installation as presiding bishop.

Of the more than 130 persons invited, 90 participated, including five bishops. Among the participants were some of the church’s best-known evangelicals: theologian J. I. Packer, evangelist John Guest, author Keith Miller, and ERM leader Everett L. (Terry) Fullam. Bishop William Frey of Colorado, one of four candidates for the office of presiding bishop last year, and several ordained women were also present.

Hathaway, who emerged as a leader, termed the meeting a “watershed.… Tremendous things were accomplished in terms of relationships that had been shaky,” he said. “A great spectrum of theological perspectives came together and began an amalgamation toward continuing fellowship and encouragement of one another.”

Said Richard Kew, executive director of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge/USA, a branch of the oldest Anglican mission society: “Catholics [are] bringing a richness to our evangelical emphasis which we needed.” At the same time, he said, “a maturing of charismatics is going on. The ones who have come through a crisis renewal experience are entering into something more edifying.” Many conference participants said they identify with all three streams.

How these newly united evangelicals, charismatics, and traditionalists will be received by church authorities—particularly Presiding Bishop Browning—is still in question. John Howe, rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, said the denomination’s “leadership as a whole has drifted in the direction of relativity and standardlessness. In loyalty and love, we want to say to them, ‘It’s time to come back to the basics.’ ”

Howe has seen renewal infuse the Episcopal Church over the past two decades, boosting the hopes of evangelicals who have remained committed to the denomination. When he attended Yale Divinity School in the 1960s, he said, J. I. Packer’s book Fundamentalism and the Word of God was laughed at. “Now,” he says, “renewed Episcopalians are speaking from the heart of the church.”

Browning has given little indication of what he thinks of renewal movements, but he has said he wants to hear from every wing of the denomination’s diverse membership. His installation sermon underlined compassion as “the root of Christian spirituality and mission” and “the hope of our future.… It was the discovery of Christ’s compassion in my own life that has been the foundation of my own spirituality, which draws me inevitably to my present witness.”

In Browning’s view, Christian compassion calls for practical expression in areas of social and political concern, such as care for the poor, environmental protection, and opposition to the arms build-up. For the past nine years, Browning has served as bishop of Hawaii. He is known as a liberal, but is cited for being open to all points of view. “There will be no outcasts,” he said in his installation sermon. “The hopes and convictions of all will be respected and honored.”

Browning is the Episcopal Church’s twenty-fourth presiding bishop. Some believe he will channel the church’s energies toward the social activism that characterized Presiding Bishop John Hines in the 1960s and early 1970s. Opposed to the Vietnam War and appalled by the havoc of race riots, Hines channeled millions of church dollars into social endeavors, some of which were backed by radical secular groups. Membership and giving dropped precipitously, and when the church chose Hines’s replacement in 1973, it opted for John M. Allin, a low-profile, cautious churchman. His 12-year term saw two major changes occur in the church. In 1977, women were ordained to the priesthood—a development that Allin opposed. In 1979, a new Book of Common Prayer came into use, updating the language and, some believe, the core doctrine of the historic prayer book.

Both of these developments drew some members away from the Episcopal Church and toward affiliation either with Roman Catholicism or conservative Protestantism. Within the church, scattered opposition to women priests and the new prayer book continues. In circles where renewal is occurring, however, these are not central issues. Fleming Rutledge, a woman priest who attended the Winter Park renewal conference, delivered a stirring sermon at the closing Communion service. Another priest, Carol Anderson, told conference participants about her congregation’s work among street people in New York City.

The basics of renewal, spelled out in the letter produced at the Florida conference, include an affirmation of Scripture as “completely trustworthy and sufficient.” Salvation, the conferees agreed, is a gift from God that is appropriated by “repentance, faith, and conversion of life” made possible by the Holy Spirit. The letter states that the Lord’s “actual resurrection from the dead attested his divinity, vindicated his claims, and broke the power of sin and death once for all.”

The letter says “the scriptural promises of supernatural resources to the believer are true,” and “the personal experience of the Holy Spirit quickens worship in the church.” It defines evangelism as a call to “personal commitment through repentance and faith.” Outreach and service are essential, according to the document, because “renewal will die unless [individuals and congregations] continue to move beyond themselves.”

A paragraph penned by theologian J. I. Packer concludes the document, stating, “Where Jesus Christ is known, trusted, loved, and adored; where the sinner is loved but all forms of sin are hated and renounced; where Christ’s living presence is sought and found in fellowship; and where righteousness is done—there the church is in renewal, in whatever variety of worship and devotion the new life finds expression.”

BETH SPRINGin Winter Park

Bishop Alden Hathaway of Pittsburgh

A Renewal Leader from Pittsburgh

According to theologian J. I. Packer, Bishop Alden Hathaway of Pittsburgh is being anointed as a leader in Episcopal renewal—a movement the bishop at one time thought was irrelevant.

In the 1960s, Hathaway served on the staff of a large suburban Detroit church, specializing in human-relations training and proabortion activism. Inner-city riots—the same events that galvanized liberal social action on the part of then Presiding Bishop John Hines—dashed Hathaway’s hopes for his ministry. “A lot of that liberal commitment evaporated over a period of months and years, as the suburbs retreated into themselves and the inner city became polarized. I saw there was something missing from that social-action movement. We were trying to do God’s work using man’s tools, and we concluded that the sin was in the institution, not in our own hearts.”

Hathaway left Detroit and took a job at a parish in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. The church was split over the Vietnam War, and Hathaway’s best efforts to patch the congregation together had little effect. “I was absolutely burned out, tired of failing, tired of expending my energy and having nothing to show for it,” he said. Then a friend, Jim Hampson, got involved in what Hathaway called “this evangelical business.”

“We’d exchange sermons,” Hathaway said. “He’d write ‘heresy’ all over mine, and I’d write ‘irrelevant’ all over his. We argued and fought.” Hampson challenged Hathaway to submit his ministry and his life to Jesus Christ, but Hathaway resisted the notion. “I knew I had to do that, but it was not a happy thought at all. It was a bitter thought. With my heart I knew I had to get on my knees and confess Jesus, but with my pride I said no.”

At his church, Hathaway had a seminary intern who “preached the Bible, not Watergate.” He knew people were listening more attentively to the intern’s sermons, so he cynically decided, “Okay, you’ll get Bible stories.” He changed his preaching to conform with what he heard from the divinity student, and noticed something happening.

“I found a power and authority that was not my own. I found myself saying things that I didn’t believe or that weren’t credible, but it was touching people in a way I’d never touched them before. And it was touching me, too. It was convincing me of the power of the Word.”

Several months later, Hathaway attended a charismatic conference where he heard the preaching of Everett L. (Terry) Fullam, rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Darien, Connecticut. “I heard Scripture being used in a different way. It all pointed to Jesus. In the confidence of that, I laid down my life and received the Holy Spirit. Nothing particularly happened, except I realized I was on the right track, that Jesus was with me. It’s been slow growth ever since then.”

In 1980, Hathaway was elected bishop of Pittsburgh, placing him in the role of overseeing a great variety of priests and parishioners. “I have a diocese with all kinds of sheep in it,” he said. “It’s not my job to sort them; it’s my job to feed them. The only thing I will not tolerate is skepticism on the [divine-human nature] of Christ. We are not a unitarian church, and I don’t buy for a minute that that is a legitimate Anglican position.”

Hathaway is unfazed by the prospect of a major leadership role in the spiritual renewal of the Episcopal Church. He took charge of sending the renewal conference’s letter to Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning, and offered to coordinate a meeting of conference organizers to discuss ways to cooperate in the future. “I know I’m where God wants me,” he said, “and I wouldn’t be any place else in the whole world.”

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