“Pull on the same oar together”
Reverend Heather Warren thought she would be a “lifer” in the United Methodist Church. Her father was a Methodist minister, and she said she knew from an early age she had the calling. Now an associate professor of religious history at UVA, she studied at Cornell, Emory, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford, the ancient academic home of the founding father of Methodism, John Wesley.
But in the early 2000s, two realizations rattled her confidence in her church, if not her faith. She developed serious reservations about the Methodist theology of the ordination of church clergy, and she realized she was gay.
“There wasn’t a place for me in the Methodist Church any more—for me to be gay and ordained,” she said.
There was joy in finally feeling comfortable in her own skin, she said, but becoming unmoored from the most important institution in her life was painful.
“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, I hope I have at least 20 more good years of ministry left in my life. Where do I belong?’”
For Warren, 21 years a Charlottesville resident, the answer ended up being St. Paul’s Memorial Church.
St. Paul’s came into being 88 years after the founding of Christ Episcopal and 11 years before Trinity opened its doors. In 1908, the Right Reverend Robert Gibson, then Bishop of the Diocese of Virginia, met with an ordained YMCA secretary and six women during a New Year’s Day snowstorm to come up with a plan to build a new Episcopal church to serve the University of Virginia.
The parish’s first service was held nearly three years later in a hastily constructed wooden building; it took 16 more years to build the brick-and-Greek-columns church that stands opposite the Rotunda on University Avenue. From the start, St. Paul’s was a parish for Episcopal students from all over a very Episcopal state. Many of the church’s leading lights have been locals, said retired Reverend Paula Kettlewell, who has written a definitive history of the parish. But its mission to serve a congregation of young people with a range of beliefs and backgrounds gave St. Paul’s a “wider view,” Kettlewell said, a perspective that continues today, as the church welcomes students, faculty, and staff from the world over.
In the spring of 2011, just months after Bishop Johnston greenlighted Virginia parishes to apply to offer same-sex blessings, St. Paul’s clergy launched a parish-wide conversation exploring the issue, diving into the theology in a series of workshops and Sunday presentations. In September of that year, shortly after the Bishop granted St. Paul’s authority to bless same-sex unions, Rector James Richardson offered a lengthy sermon explaining his reasoning for pursuing permission, an explanation that “states what I believe as clearly as I know how,” he said when reached by e-mail during his sabbatical this month.
“I came to believe that it isn’t God, but people and their cultures, who impose limits on who can be in a committed life-long loving relationship,” Richardson said in the sermon. The sacrament of baptism welcomes everyone into the “household of God,” he said, with no exclusions. “That is why I am convinced that it is not ours to put artificial limits on the exchanging of vows with the person we love.”
For Warren, who had been ordained as an Episcopal priest and become a part-time clergywoman at St. Paul’s the year before, it was another landmark in a decade marked by change. And despite the Bishop’s belief that the storm of contention over the issue of gay inclusion is mostly over—a feeling shared by many local clergy —Warren believes more changes are coming. She knows of very few other openly gay priests in Virginia, but she said there are likely many more who will soon feel comfortable enough to stop hiding the fact that they’re gay. Looking the other way and assuming the issue is settled won’t make it so, she said.
“We’re under one umbrella, and we want to be able to hang together, so we tend to be conflict avoidant,” she said. “There’s a sense that for this world to continue, we’ve somehow got to figure out how to pull on the same oar together.”
That tendency has served the Episcopal church well, she said, and in fact, it’s essential—this view that no matter the argument of the day, common prayer still binds those of the faith. “We are a worshiping people,” she said, “and it’s a worship that carries us beyond any sanctuaries, any chapels.”
But just because there’s no dialogue in some local parishes about potentially divisive social issues doesn’t mean there’s harmony.
“Of course it’s not going to be an issue if you don’t raise it,” she said.
Traditionalist and progressive Anglicans meet on one key fact: The Episcopal Church has hitched its wagon to the shifting cultural landscape of the West. As the times change, so changes the church—some say for better, some say for worse.
And the times keep changing. The tide of public opinion on the divisive social issue du jour—gay marriage—is shifting, and if the Supreme Court’s overturning of key provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act is an indicator of what’s to come, legal opinions are, too. If the inclusion and acceptance of gay people isn’t the only theological flash point for people of faith, for Anglicans, it is at least the one that looms largest.
So at what point does compromise in the name of unity become dodging the question? How long can people of a diverging faith agree not to disagree?
Despite the continuing seismic shifts in the worldwide Anglican community, local Episcopal leaders think the answer is indefinitely.
Bishop Johnston last spoke with Presiding Bishop Schori, the Episcopal Church’s chief pastor, at a July 20 ceremony consecrating a new bishop in the Southwestern Diocese of Virginia.
“She said that among the Anglican leadership across the world, there’s more of a recognition that we don’t want to be on this ledge,” Johnston said. “People want to pull back, and regroup, and walk with each other together.”
That striving for co-acceptance is not just a powerful message for Episcopalians and others of the common root faith, he said. It’s a message for everyone.
“What Anglicanism can show the world is that commitment is to one another, not commitment to one another’s opinions,” he said. “We need each other to be fully who we are. The evangelical wing of the church needs the catholic wing of the church, and vice versa. And that’s what I’m proud that Virginia is living out at this time. We need each other to be with and for each other.”