Thank heaven for church that celebrates diversity

By Patricia Templeton

When my family began going to the Episcopal Church when I was about 10, women and girls were still expected to cover their heads in church with little lace caps that looked like doilies. (I’m sure there is some arcane ecclesiastical word for those things.)

I don’t remember when the doilies disappeared, but by the time I was a teenager they were gone, and females went bare-headed in God’s house. Somehow the church survived.

Now, four decades later, women’s headgear is making ecclesiastical headlines again. Or to be more precise, one woman’s headgear in church — or lack thereof — is making news on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The brou-ha-hat, which has been dubbed “mitregate,” involves Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Archbishop Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England, who have already been involved this year in one theological smackdown (as writer Diana Butler Bass aptly called it).

A mitre is the pointy hat that bishops wear. It is not the most flattering of headgear. But flattering or not, the pointy hat is a symbol of a bishop’s office and authority; they are expected to wear them.

Mitregate began with an invitation to our presiding bishop from the dean of Southwark Cathedral in London to preach and preside at the Eucharist there last month. She accepted.

Then she received a letter from Lambeth Palace, the London home and office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, instructing her not to wear her mitre at the London cathedral.

The archbishop’s office also pressured her to provide proof of her ordinations as deacon, priest and bishop — a sort of ecclesiastical background check on the leader of the Episcopal Church. Or perhaps more correctly, the ecclesiastical equivalent of demanding to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

And so on June 13, Bishop Jefferts Schori went to church carrying, not wearing, the symbol of her office. “It’s silly; it’s bizarre. It’s beyond bizarre,” she later said.

It is, indeed, silly and bizarre, but it is also insulting. Pictures quickly surfaced of former Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswald, and other American bishops, participating in worship services in England in all their mitred glory.

So what’s going on?

Several things. First, the Church of England, which was almost 20 years behind the Episcopal Church in allowing the ordination of women to the priesthood, still does not permit women to be bishops.

Its General Synod is due to consider controversial legislation on that issue soon. Archbishop Williams is already equivocating about what will happen if that legislation passes.

It is hard not to believe that our presiding bishop’s gender had something to do with the rude way in which she was treated.

But mitregate is only the latest manifestation of tenseness between the leader of the Episcopal Church and the chief of the Church of England, who is also the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the association of churches with roots in the English church.

This spring Williams issued a “pastoral letter” to all members of the Anglican Communion in which he said that he was going to remove Episcopalians from several international committees because we had ordained a partnered lesbian, the Rev. Mary Glasspool, as an assistant bishop in the Diocese of Los Angeles, even after he had warned us not to do it.

Williams, who was a quite good theologian before he became the archbishop, seems to think he has the authority to tell the Episcopal Church how to run its affairs.

He doesn’t. As the title of a Facebook page puts it, “The Archbishop of Canterbury hath no jurisdiction in this realm.”

In a response to the archbishop’s letter, Bishop Jefferts Schori put it a bit more tactfully. “Unitary control does not characterize Anglicanism; rather, diversity in fellowship and communion does,” she wrote.

Ah, that devil diversity raises its ugly head again.

In trying to justify banning Episcopalians from international meetings and ecumenical dialogues, the Rev. Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion and one of Williams’ right-hand men, recently had this to say to a group of Episcopal leaders: “The problem of increased and growing diversity in the Anglican Communion has been an issue for many years.”

Keeping Episcopalians out of ecumenical dialogues is necessary because “the viability of our meetings is at stake,” he said.

As we all know, viable meetings are at the heart of the Christian gospel.

Anyone who wonders why so many people find the church irrelevant need only listen to these desperate voices clinging to male-dominated hierarchy, bemoaning diversity as a problem to be punitively dealt with, issuing edicts telling female leaders how to dress, going to meeting after meeting after meeting and thinking they are following Jesus.

How different from the Episcopal Church that I know and love — a church that sees the God-created diversity of peoples, languages, races, sexual orientations and even faiths as a divine gift; a church that proclaims the good news of the Gospel not to meetings of the like-minded, but to a world suffering from environmental disasters, wars and economic meltdowns; a church that strives to respect the past while being open to fresh movements of the spirit.

Thanks be to God that our Episcopal Church still speaks to things that matter.

The Rev. Patricia Templeton is rector of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta.