The Unfundamentalist Church

The Episcopal Church is in the media a lot. We have a gay bishop. We ordain women. The highest ranking Bishop in the United States of America is a woman, and an oceanographer and she runs for exercise and wears dangly earrings.

If you only read the papers, you might think that we were sort of leftist Unitarians with liturgy. The media seems to cover the hot topics while missing the biggest part of the picture.

Episcopalians are not all liberal nor are they all conservative. We are not the church of the gay bishop or the woman bishop or the millennium development goals. We are the church of the thinking devout.

An essential element of the Episcopal Church is missing in all this coverage. We are not a fundamentalist left, we just believe in discourse. We believe that God gave us brains and we are called to use them, in the reading of Scripture, in contemplating ethical issues, even in prayer. We are not supposed to check our minds at the door when we enter a church. We believe in thinking as an essential part of the devotional life.

If you allow people to think for themselves in church, you inevitably end up with a mess. Because people will disagree. And they will pray, and they will agree, and they will pray. And then they will disagree again.

Right now, across the world, the Anglican Communion is praying, discussing and wondering if it is possible to stay in communion with churches when you disagree over ethical and spiritual issues particularly the issue of human sexuality. No one is debating about Jesus. We all believe in Jesus as the Son of God, but it's how we interpret how best to follow Him--that is what is at stake.

I feel blessed to be part of a church that embraces the mind and reason itself. I just wish that we could agree to disagree with out leaving one another out in the cold. After all, isn't disagreement one of the greatest gifts that our church has to offer? Isn't true diversity about living with those who are different from ourselves, who may even think differently? Let us pray for the Anglican Communion to stick it out even in the midst of painful disagreement. Our unity would speak much more eloquently than our schism. If we are to answer God's call to be the unfundamentalist church, then we must be able to disagree and remain in relationship.

- The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead