Traditional Anglicanism in America
Greg Griffith
Tea and Questions with the Presiding Bishop


Katharine Schori spent about 45 minutes answering questions in Birmingham on January 12, 2008, following the consecration of Alabama Bishop Suffragan Kee Sloan.



Thanks to Stand Firm operative Tom Cain for the video, who deserves combat pay for doing this.

UPDATE: thanks to reader GW, we now have this transcript. Note that there are some omissions of unimportant questions.

3:20
Question: Could you share your testimony about how Christ came into your life and your faith?

Bishop Katharine: I have always been a member of the church. I started life as a Roman Catholic. MY family brought me into the Episcopal Church before I was nine. I think grew up with the understanding of God as the old white guy in the big chair. (I'm quite serious about that.) ...and was raised with an understanding, just an immense appreciation for creation. My understanding of God's presence in my life continues to grow and evolve. I think that's what it means to be on a faith journey. I understand Jesus as God in the flesh, showing you and me what it is like to be in wholly intimate relationship with God and how this is lived out in relationship to our neighbors. Does that help? I can't point to a specific time in my life of radical conversion. It's been a life-long process for me.

4:50
Question: As a follow up to David, what do you see as Jesus having done on the cross?

Bishop Katharine: What do I see as Jesus having done on the cross? Many, many layers... I understand he was executed by the Romans because he's asking people and encouraging people to understand the relationship with God in a way that influences society. I understand Jesus as dying for the whole world. I understand Jesus as offering his life as servant. We're going to hear that wonderful reading again from Isaiah tomorrow, the suffering servant, who comes to deliver the world from darkness and blindness and prison. That's just a start.

5:49 (Edited)
Question: ...; how can we be salt of the earth dealing with racial divide?

Bishop Katharine: Surely there is no justice if some are treated unjustly. That's one reason why Jesus was such a "problem"--his insistence that the unobserved were welcome at the table.

8:10
Question: I understand that reconciliation has always been an important concept to you, and you've just mentioned it again. And as Christians, we are reconciled to God through Christ's sacrifice on the cross through grace. In light of that, I'm interested in knowing where your philosophy of reconciliation is for the church today...in this divided time. What is your concept of how to bring about a reconciliation in our church?

Bishop Katharine: We talked about this yesterday with the clergy as well. The Anglican tradition has, at its best, honored a diverse center, has affirmed the reality that we are a healthier community when we can include a diversity of opinion. That's the genius of the Elizabethian settlement, if you will,when we are a broad tent, or a comprehensive church. Part of our difficulty, right now in the Episcopal Church, is that there factions of the church who insist that they have the fullness of the truth individually. It's only when we can gather in that comprehensive community called the body of Christ that we can begin to think that we might have a piece of God's truth. The willingness to live in a community with a tentative or a lightness of holding our understanding of truth, a vulnerability to be converted by that conversation with others, and ability to say, yes, this is where we think God is calling us, but God may be calling us beyond where we ever thought imaginable. Willingness to hold our positions a little more lightly, I think, is a piece of where we need to be moving in the Episcopal church.

10:40
Question: Much of what you just said was in a letter to the Bishop of San Joaquin, and I'm wondering if you received a response and if so, are you allowed to share that with us today, and if not, can you tell us what may happen between now and March, dealing with the San Joaquin diocese? (I hate to bring it up.)

Bishop Katharine: I'm not sure which letter you're referring to.

Question: You've offered him the idea that we're a church of the centers and this coming together, left and right, middle of the road, and if you're not at the table for dialogue---where are we as the Episcopal church going to go if you're telling us, "No, we're going to leave, we're going to take our toys and go home." Am I quoting you accurately?

Bishop Katharine: I think you have the gist of it. The response that came back was he felt that he was right and it was inappropriate for him to remain with his diocese in the Episcopal church because of the direction of the Episcopal church. Where things stand with San Joaquin? Most of you probably know that I inhibited John David Schofield from acting as a bishop yesterday, because the review committee has certified that he has abandoned the communion of this church and three senior bishops agreed to that inhibition. The canons say that he has two months in which to recant, in which to retract his actions and say that he wishes to remain as a member of this church. If that doesn't happen, the House of Bishops will consider that charge of abandonment at its meeting in March. It's a tragic situation, just tragic. What will happen in the next couple of months? We will offer yet again to be in dialogue and conversation with John David Schofield. Whether or not he takes us up on that offer, I do not know.

Question: Do you have any reason to believe this will be an isolated incident, or will there be others that will follow?

Bishop Katharine: I think that the reality, that the situation in San Joaquin is being played out in public, may encourage others not to take that direction. I think we are all diminished when people leave the table, God's table, and the table of conversation. This church cannot be its comprehensive ideal if some choose to absent themselves. I understand that some people may decide for their own spiritual health, they need to be in a different place, and in that case, my job is to bless their journey and assure them that they will be welcomed if they ever decide to return.

23:15
Question: I wanted to go back to a comment that you made a few moments ago about, and please correct me if I misheard you, about holding tentatively to the idea of truth. Could you restate that, because I don't think I'm getting that exactly right.

Bishop Katharine: My point is that none of us as limited human beings can know the fullness of God's truth, and therefore we have to be careful in assuming or asserting that we do. What we can do is come together in a community, and hopefully a diverse community, and look at not only what the Bible seems to say, but at what our tradition has said through time, and what our reason is teaching us today in how we approach that particular issue that we're troubled about.
Question: I have a friend... (edited) ... who's working in a Muslim country. One of the men who is to be ordained was murdered for his faith in Jesus Christ who saved him. I'm concerned with the word "tentative". As they gave him a Christian burial, and put their own lives at risk for asserting his salvation in Christ and confronting their Muslim community with the Gospel in that way, I would say that their faith is anything but tentative, and I think that as part of the body that we share with them, that we can't be tentative either. We have to hold fast to the faith that was given to us and preach it with boldness, not with any sense of tentativeness.

Bishop Katharine: I would not disagree with you in that particular circumstance. I think it is when we are certain about some issues of morality, that we would impose on other people, that we need to be cautious in how we do that. When Jesus said be careful about the beam in your own eye, when you seek to take out the mote in your brother's eye, I think he was talking about being careful and cautious that one not impose one's understanding on another person, being cautious in judgement.

Question: I would just simply respond to say that that's true as I look to my brother next to me and say, you're doing something wrong. But as a church, as a body, we've been given authority in Holy Scripture to say that these things are abhorent to God. And we've also been given a duty to share that because those that haven't heard the Good News are truly perishing and without the Gospel of Christ they are perishing. And if we, out of fear of offense, fail to give them the Gospel, then we are accomplices in their death. We've been given an enormous responsibility and an enormous trust by our Lord, and I think we shirk it when we deny what's written in Scripture.

Bishop Katharine: My understanding of the essential k_?___ , the central proclamation of Jesus, is that God loves you. Jesus came to show us that. Jesus gave his life to show us that, and we can argue about the details beyond that. I won't disagree with you that proclaiming the Gospel is the centerpiece of what we do. I would continue to have conversation with you, I hope, about how we impose our particular understandings of aspects of that ? . And I think that's been the struggle of the Christian journey from the beginning.

28:00 (Edited)
Question: ...about MDG's...

Bishop Katharine: ... ... ... I think there's increasing desire to focus on how we love our neighbors across the world, Anglicans and not. Among the leaders of the Anglican Communion, I think that yes, there is still some conflict up at that level up there, but the reality is that the vast center of the Anglican Communion leadership seems to be tired of all that conflict up there. And at this point, they're saying there are far more important issues in my province where people are dying because there's no medical care or inadequate food, or children cannot go to school because there are not schools or teachers. I want to pay attention to that on behalf of my province of the Anglican Communion. So I think there is some movement away from the sexy issues of the day, if you will, from the headline issues toward life and death issues.

30:00
Question: How is your conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Bishop Katharine: I don't know him terribly well. I've met him only three times. I think there is a desire for greater relationship there, certainly there is on my part. Chuck Robinson, the Canon to the Presiding Bishop, is going to England on Monday to try to increase the level of conversation with the Archbishop's office and with the office of the General Secretary of the Anglican Communion. We're working at it. I think that the biggest difficulty is that the conflict in the Church of England is far greater than it is in this church. And the Archbishop of Canterbury is first and foremost, head of the Church of England. Everything that impacts the rest of the Communion is being played out even on a larger stage in his own church. He's in a very difficult position, very difficult, and I empathize with him, and I pray for him, and I hope that you do too.

31:45 (Edited)
Question: ...(I couldn't hear this question)... something about religious, moral, spiritual truth and how science influences the strictness of relativism... ?

Bishop Katharine: As a scientist, I was trained to see the interconnection of creation. You can't do oceanography without studying biology, chemistry, geology, physics and biology. You can't study a squid in isolation. You have to study a squid in its environment and the way the other species in that environment affect that particular individual or species. To me, that has informed in many ways the kind of languages that are used in the Bible. How do we show our love for God? We show it in loving our neighbors--not just our human neighbors, but creation, is a way of giving glory to God or potentially not giving glory to God. I used the image a littler earlier on how we interact as an image of the body of Christ when one part of creation suffers, all of it suffers.

33:33 (Edited)
Question: ...experiences of being a bishop and being a woman...

Bishop Katharine: ... ... ... I'll give you an example from the last Primates meeting. The last Primates meeting that Frank Griswold went to, there were 14 other archbishops that wouldn't go to Communion with him. When I went to the Primates meeting in Tanzania last year, there were only seven, so we're making progress.

35:08
Question: (Edited) ...how the church should minister to children and young people...

Bishop Katharine: I think congregations that take seriously the ministry of all members of the body retain children more effectively and draw in children and young people a little more effectively. I will give you an example. There's a small congregation on the Colombia River in southern Washington state that has done remarkable ministry over the years. It's a very small congregation, fewer than 20 people on Sunday morning. But they listened to the needs of their community fifteen years ago and started basically a day care center. That day care center has grown into something called the St. James family center, that provides pre-school, child care, after school care, teenage programs, manages the county domestic violence shelter, provides parenting programs, and is now the third largest employer in the county. That congregation is very clear; they say we do not let adults in this congregation do anything of which children are capable. They don't let adults take away ministry from children. There is an expectation that every baptized member of that community participates in the life of the community in the way in which the gifts of that person are appropriate. That's one example. We have to take seriously every member of the community.

38:00
Question: (Edited) ...about open Communion...open in the Methodist Church; limited in TEC...

Bishop Katharine: I don't think your understanding is correct. I think in the Methodist Church the requirement is the same. We are in the beginning stages of Communion conversations. We are in, what we are calling, interim Eucharistic sharing, with the Methodist church. Basically it says that we can celebrate Communion together under particular circumstances and we are encouraged to do that. One of the conversations around the Communion and around this church, that I think is much more interesting, and likely to be more challenging than the current one, is about who is welcome at the table. There are parts of the Episcopal church where the invitation is often said as ... it's not qualified that you have to be baptized in order to come to Communion. Jesus did not apparently baptize his disciples before he shared a meal with them, even though the tradition and the discipline of the church from very, very early has been that we expected people to be baptized before they come to Eucharist. That's the rationale in some places for saying that. It challenges many Episcopalians and Anglicans to even think about giving Communion to people who aren't baptized. Let me remind you of what it was like when I grew up in this church. You had to be confirmed before you could come to Communion. We remembered somewhere along the way that baptism was full initiation into the body of Christ. We remembered that babies could come to Communion if they're received as God's heirs through Christ, then they should be deserving of a full meal, even if they don't understand what's going on. I don't think that I can say that I fully understand what goes on at Communion. And I'm not sure if many of us can. That's an enormously challenging conversation for us right now, about whether we should allow people who are not baptized to come to Communion. I certainly learned in seminary that it's not pastorally appropriate to go down the rail, saying show me your Baptismal Certificate! To receive people at the rail, whoever came, and then if you had a question later on, then go and ask and have a pastoral conversation and encourage the person to prepare for baptism, if you discovered that he or she was not baptized. That's a conversation that's going to drive us crazier than the current one.

42:15
Question: If I were an outsider, a non-Anglican, and I came in today and I heard a lot about reconciliation and that's the glory of Christ, through reconciliation, when we reconcile with a family member or with an estranged anything, that's the love of Christ doing that. If I were an outsider, and I'm not, how would I ingest what you're saying that that's the glory of Christ, and how would I reconcile that with you actions yesterday with the diocese in California?

Bishop Katharine: Fair question. We are a tradition of ordered freedom. We have boundaries. We have expectations of behavior like being baptized before people coming to Communion. When those boundaries are transgressed, we have a discipline in this tradition. That's what the canons are about. That really is what our baptismal covenant is about, even though violations of the baptismal covenant for lay people usually don't have consequences. We cannot live in a community without some order. You know, we begin with the ten commandments, we begin with love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Even the permissive statements of Augustine's, "Love God and do what you please", or Martin Luther who said, "Sin boldly, and more boldly still, repent." We have to have some edges to our community or we lose our identity. And what happened yesterday was a response to behavior, that it seems to elected members of this church, to be a violation of those boundaries. And there are some clear opportunities for returning, for coming back into the orbit of this community, and that's were we are.

44:50
Question: (Edited) In speaking about boundaries, it seems like in your Time magazine article that you're trying to be reconciled with other faith communities. And like I think Bishop Robinson (in his book that's about to come out), that he believes that other people don't necessarily have to believe that Jesus is the only way to the father, and it seems like to me, in your Time magazine article that that would be putting God in too small a box, to think that Jesus is the only way. If he is not the only way, then he lied to us and that doesn't seem possible. When Jesus said, I must go to Jerusalem to die, it just does not seem like it's possible for other people in other faith communities to be able to get to the Father, except through Christ.

Bishop Katharine: Do we believe that Jesus died for the whole world? I do. I do. Then...

Question (interrupting): But no one comes to the Father except through Jesus.

Bishop Katharine: Yes, and Jesus died for the whole world, the whole world.

Question: That's why we're supposed to be going and telling everyone about Jesus, and not necessarily saying that the way they believe is the best way.

Bishop Katharine: I never said that. I would not say that. My understanding is that Jesus died for the whole world. You and I understand, having been formed and made our baptismal vows, that we are followers of Jesus in that particular way. We believe that we are saved by grace through faith. For us to insist that someone in South Asia who has never heard the Gospel may not enter the fullness of God's presence violates that in some way. We understand that Jesus died to save the whole world. For us to insist that such a person who has never heard the Gospel has to say, "I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior" in order to be saved, in order to be in the presence of God, requires a work of that person that's impossible. I believe that God is more gracious and generous that that --Jesus having already done that work. That person in this life or the next may not consciously enjoy the presence of God in the way that you or I might, but for me to say that that person cannot be in the presence of God is to deny that Jesus died for the whole world.

Question: Then why did Jesus have to die on the cross?

Bishop Katharine: Again, there is a list of layers, proximately the Romans executed him because they thought he was a revolutionary. He was a revolutionary. He turned the world upside down, in saying really to his fellow Jews that there are other ways to be in the presence of God than keeping all these items of the law.

Bishop Parsley: There's a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea. The boundless love of Christ is what we believe and what we know, and we don't put boundaries on that, as Jesus did not put boundaries on that. Our job is to share that love and proclaim it, so that everybody knows it, in the fullness that Christ brought it to us.



Posted January 21, 2008 at 5:57 pm
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