For the Soul of the Church

By Ethan Vesely-Flad, ColorLines. Posted February 28, 2005.

When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, we had the Bible in our hand, and they had the land.

—Jomo Kenyatta, Kenyan independence leader and first president

Harold Lewis, an African-American priest who once served as national director of black ministries for the Episcopal Church, finds an irony in the fact that white, conservative Episcopalians collaborate closely with African and Asian bishops, but, “coming as they often do from lily-white environments, they have little by way of relationships with African Americans.”

The Episcopal Church is a small but significant Protestant denomination that has struggled mightily with sexuality, race and authority—and the reverberations have been felt across the world. This battle has played out most visibly in the wake of the election in June 2003 of a white, openly gay man, V. Gene Robinson, as a bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.

Lewis and many other prominent African-American Episcopalians supported Robinson’s election. But many members of their congregations are opposed to gays in the church, reflecting a sharp division on this issue in the black community here and abroad. That dissension, combined with the sense of many people of color that racism in the church is being ignored while gay and lesbian issues are being addressed, has opened a wedge that conservatives have exploited.

Lewis now heads Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, Pa., a liberal parish (congregation) in one of the church’s most conservative dioceses (regional groupings of Episcopal congregations). Robert Duncan, a white bishop who heads the Pittsburgh diocese, was a vociferous critic of Robinson’s ordination. As part of his work with conservatives who oppose gays and lesbians in church leadership, Duncan serves as president of the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, a traditionalist effort to reclaim the church from its “liberal leanings.” The Network, founded in January 2004 by four white, male bishops in response to Robinson’s election and other recent events, has sought to have the Episcopal Church kicked out of its worldwide church body and replaced by the Network. And to do so, in an unusual twist with racial implications, they went to people of color — abroad.

The denomination has seen new alliances built between global church leaders, often with the appearance of fighting racism and discrimination, but for varying agendas. In Pittsburgh in 1999, in partnership with the evangelical international relief organization World Vision, Duncan initiated a diocesan project to support Rwandan refugees. To help make the connection, refrigerator magnets with images of Rwandan children were provided to participating church members. In his travels around the diocese, Duncan frequently pointed to the magnets as evidence of the diocese’s commitment to eradicate racism. “It’s doing nothing of the kind; it may even be perpetuating racism,” stated Lewis, arguing that a churchperson may point to one of their magnets to “prove” their anti-racism commitment, when in fact they may never have had a black person in their home. Emmanuel Kolini, the archbishop of the Rwandan church, visited Pittsburgh to support this project, but as Lewis noted, at the end of the day, “The Kolinis of the world are going home. I’m not; I live here.” In November 2004, the diocese ended its Rwandan project, and launched a new one in Uganda with Henry Orombi, the Anglican archbishop of Uganda, who has been one of the most vocal critics of gays and lesbians in the worldwide church.

Infighting Among Progressives

While some progressive activists have worked tirelessly to build coalitions across lines of injustice, others have seemed to give up on their international church colleagues. Liberal, white U.S. bishops have been accused of intellectual elitism in discussing their overseas partners. Local church members have also been complicit: at a San Francisco meeting in the late 1990s, white participants talked about “those African bishops” as the problem that needed to be solved. And at a May 2002 gathering of queer religious activists in New York City, a white, gay Episcopalian summarized the Anglican world’s problems as that of Africans “monkeying around” in the rest of the church. To the shock of some in the room, he finished his presentation by saying, “All I have to say to these bishops is: Go back to the jungle where you came from.”

On the other side of the coin, many people of color have found themselves needing to condemn the positions of some in their communities. “I have been very disappointed with my black brothers and sisters,” said Jayne Oasin, an African-American Episcopal priest who has principal responsibility for anti-racism programs at the national office. “They don’t connect the dots of oppression to realize that when you scratch a homophobe, or an anti-Semite, the next level down is a racist.”

Ethan Vesely-Flad is executive director of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company and editor of The Witness, a social justice publication founded in 1917 to address issues of faith, conscience and justice. The Witness publishes voices of progressive Christian and other faith-based activists from across the globe online at www.thewitness.org.

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