THE ROAD TO LAMBETH - AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE 

Rt. Revd. Carolyn Tanner Irish - Bishop of Utah

As for blessing partnered relationships among gay and lesbian persons,what an improvement over secrecy, lying, and living in fear! Nothing in any of the biblical passages referring to homosexual behavior could have imagined or foreseen the kind of dedication, care, and hope involved in couples making such a commitment to each other.

 Overall, I believe the single best articulation of The Episcopal Church (TEC)'S perspective on the issue said to be dividing the church, is a document called 'To Set our Hope on Christ" It is a scholarly piece, published by our Office of Communication in New York in 2005, and was written in response to an invitation contained in the  Windsor Report (section 135). Presented at the Nottingham meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (to which our members were uninvited), it appears to have elicited almost no serious response from other leaders, while the Windsor Report itself continues to be regarded as the authoritative road map to unity.

For many of us in TEC, the inclusion of gay and lesbian members of our church at all levels of church governance was one of our finest moments, a sign of standing for justice as other churches in our country have not been willing to do. I recall the Archbishop of Canterbury commenting at the time that if the ground of this decision was prophetic, then we must just be prepared to receive a prophet's reward (which I read as disparagement and worse). But to us, homosexual people are first of all people, children of God and members of Christ's Body. They have suffered contempt, prejudice and abuse far too long. To speak only of forbearing from such attitudes and offering pastoral care in their afflictions is, to my ear, totally condescending.

The Anglican Communion
The present crisis in the Anglican Communion has many more dimensions to it than our having one gay bishop serving the small Diocese of New Hampshire could ever explain. Some of the fallout is positive - for example, ordinary members of TEC now know far more about the Communion (and even our own Province!) than they ever did before. And in many cases we have worked to make the bonds of our Provincial partnerships stronger because of this. Other things have been negative and hurtful to us - being told to absent ourselves from the Anglican   Consultative Council; having other Primates leave the communion table because our former and current Primates (one male and one female) were present; and realizing that others see diversity itself as divisive. For the most part, however, reactions to our decision, which by our constitution and canons was entirely legitimate, seem to have generated stranger results than the decision itself. Of these, the affiliations of congregations and dioceses with provinces thousands of miles away seems bizarre as well as totally outside the norms of our tradition. Only  time will tell how long and how well they hold.                                                         page 34 Search Vol. 31 number 1. Spring 2008

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