“The fundamental things”
Less than a mile from Christ Church, Pastor Cass Bailey is settled on a sofa in his study-like office at Trinity Episcopal Church, a modest, homelike ’70s building on Preston Avenue near Washington Park. Books about church and Virginia history line the walls and cover a coffee table. Bailey’s robes hang on a stand in the corner, a Darth Vader helmet lolls on the floor underneath them.
“Sermon prop,” Bailey chuckles.
Trinity is its neighbor’s foil in many ways. Where Christ Church is big, Trinity is comparatively tiny—75 people come through its doors on an average Sunday. There is just one clergyman at Trinity, one sermon a week, and while other local congregations are largely white, the church’s membership is racially diverse.
Its history explains a lot of the contrast, Bailey explained. The church was founded in 1919 as an African-American mission, a parish created and financially supported by the Diocese, with a Bishop-appointed vicar as head priest instead of a vestry-elected rector. Trinity’s small congregation of black Episcopalians moved several times, pushed out of one home by urban development and another by its own expanding size, but the parish center was never far from the heart of the predominantly black 10th and Page neighborhood.
A string of socially and politically active vicars, including the Reverend Henry Mitchell, a vocal pro-integration priest and the first black leader of the Charlottesville School Board, put Trinity at the center of the city’s civil rights struggle in the 1950s and ’60s. And in the ’70s, as the Episcopal church shuddered and splintered over social and theological battles, Trinity itself began to integrate in reverse. Bailey—a student and teacher of local Episcopal history, but a relative newcomer—said he didn’t know what prompted the first white folks to cross the threshold and join the little church.
“Maybe they saw Mitchell doing what he did in the community and thought, ‘Well, we can’t very well be exclusive ourselves,’” Bailey said.
The ’90s saw milestones—first came Trinity’s first white vicar, the Reverend Scott Benhase, now the Bishop of the Diocese of Georgia; then its first female leader, Reverend Melana Nelson-Amaker. Those years solidified Trinity’s identity as an intentionally racially diverse church.
It’s not an easy niche to occupy. Part of why Trinity remains a Diocese-supported parish, Bailey said, is because it’s hard to be self-sustaining while staying small and sticking to a multicultural mission. And that’s why he came.
While no local parish has voted itself out of the Episcopal Church in recent decades, that doesn’t mean the theological turmoil has left the community intact.
Since the 1970s, disaffected Episcopalians have left area congregations to start new churches in what they believe is the true Anglican tradition, holding to the old prayer book and liturgies. Further splits have led some of those congregations, including All Saints Anglican on Ivy Road and Saint David’s on Colthurst Drive, to step out of the Anglican Communion altogether—to uncouple from Canterbury—and affiliate with various churches in what’s known as the Continuing Anglican movement.
Father Warren Shaw was an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Pennsylvania for 40 years before he felt compelled to leave. He moved to the Charlottesville area 15 years ago, but was recruited out of retirement to join the clergy at St. David’s, founded in 1985 and now a member of the Anglican Catholic Church, which has 12 dioceses in the Americas, the U.S., and the U.K.
“What those of us back in the ’70s said was, ‘Look, what they’ve voted on is things that are not subject to a vote,’” he said. “Church is not a democracy. We don’t decide truth that way. And if they can vote on these things, they can vote on anything. And they will.”
When “anything” became acceptance of homosexual clergy and then partnerships, Shaw said his and other traditional congregations saw the stream of former Episcopalians joining their ranks increase. And while there’s a sense now that “everybody who was going to get out is out,” he said, it’s clear that deep rifts developed in the area.
The fight isn’t over, said Shaw. “What we’re up against is the influence of modern American culture as it’s proclaimed on television, in the movies, the media, all over the place. It’s difficult to stand up against that.” And despite the refrain of unity despite differences, the local divides are part of a much greater shaking of the foundation of an ancient and global religious tradition.
“The Anglican Communion is coming apart,” he said.
Cass Bailey doesn’t share that view.
After earning degrees from Berkeley Divinity School and Yale Divinity School, Bailey joined a congregation in Kailua, Hawaii. St. Christopher’s was a cardinal church in the diocese there, big and active. But after 12 years, Bailey said he wanted a different challenge. Trinity, teetering on the cusp of a tiny family church and a bigger pastoral community, became that challenge.
“I wanted an opportunity not to just keep things going, but be involved at the ground floor with some new ministries,” he said.
Trinity has forged its own identity within the Episcopal landscape in Charlottesville. The congregation gathers in upholstered chairs in a skylight space, and after the sermon, they talk as a community, as a family, about the message of the week. “I kind of emcee that,” he said. The conversation often turns to national issues of faith and justice. Two weeks ago, a reading on the Good Samaritan gave rise to a discussion of the Trayvon Martin verdict. “Everybody was asking questions together, and hopefully, the conversation put us on the same page.”
And that’s the philosophy that guides Bailey. He’s a host, keeping the faith discussions rolling, turning people to the scripture—but never pushing. Like Walker, he’s quick to point out that his is a faith that avoids proscriptions.
“We don’t feel the need to necessarily mandate what people believe,” he said. “If you have some feelings that are personally different than ours, and if you’re not imposing them on the rest of us, then that’s O.K.”
Like his counterpart at Christ Church, Paul Walker, Bailey doesn’t preach or talk publicly about his own beliefs on gay unions and clergy. “The fundamental things that drive me are not the fundamental things that divide us,” he said.
But he did say he has opinions, and that he’s shared them on occasion. And unlike Walker, Bailey said he gets pushback on occasion.
“Sometimes, people really want to be told that something is right,” he said. “Part of the frustration is that we don’t do that here. Some people like that, and some people don’t.”
Bailey doesn’t downplay the impact of the divide over the question of gay unions and gay clergy. He said he thinks it’s tested the idea of the big Episcopal tent like nothing else has. “The other upheavals and churches leaving—they were not as significant as this,” he said.
But he also thinks that like his congregation, with its emphasis on maintaining diversity even when it means differences of faith and opinion, the church as a whole has learned the value of holding fast and holding together. The challenges will keep coming, he said, but there will always be those who value unity.
“I can guarantee you, in 20 years, there’s going to be something else,” he said. “This will have worked itself out, and there’s going to be another issue that’s going to threaten the church. The real question is, as a priest and a pastor, ‘Have I taught my flock how to understand their faith and confront whatever issues are before them?’”