Here I Stand by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Author:Bishop John Shelby Spong [Spong, Bishop John Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

Transition to the Episcopate and Developing a World View

THERE IS an enormous emotional wilderness that occurs between the day one is elected to the episcopate and the moment of consecration. It is a time of wrenching good-byes and the breaking of pastoral relationships. It is accompanied by feelings of bereavement and guilt. But it is also a time of high anticipation, excitement, and dreams, which inevitably get tempered by reality. For me it was also the beginning of that process in which my integrity and my faith were to be challenged by an organized conservative ecclesiastical campaign.

As soon as I became the bishop-elect of Newark, I began to encounter the dreadful reputation the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey possessed in the minds of many. One of the standing jokes was that this election satisfied everybody—those who liked me were glad I was to be a bishop, and those who didn’t were glad I was to be the bishop of Newark. My immediate sense was that the very being of the city of Newark had absorbed enormous negativity and was, therefore, a hurting city, desperately looking for love and affirmation.

A delegation from the diocese, consisting of Hughes Garvin, the president of the standing committee and the rector of St. Peter’s in Morristown, Marge Christie, the president of the Episcopal Church Women, and Phillip Cato, my longtime friend, arrived three days after the election to extend to me in person the official invitation to become the bishop of Newark. During their visit they also began to tell me about the darker sides of the life of the diocese that had not been mentioned in the election process.

There were deep conflicts in the diocese. The runner-up in the election was a priest named Tom Carson, rector of Christ Church in Greenville, South Carolina, who had been nominated by petition as a direct challenge to the nominating process. His supporters, led by the clergy on Bishop Rath’s staff, projected him as one opposed to the major new initiatives being debated in the church at that time, namely, the ordination of women and the revision of the prayer book. I knew Tom Carson fairly well and found him to be a decent, open person with conservative, but not rigid, convictions. I suspect that his supporters were more conservative than he was. My chief anxiety attached to his candidacy was whether or not I would find a welcome among the members of Bishop Rath’s staff who clearly had opposed my election, since, at least for the first two years, they would be my primary working colleagues.

I also learned that the dean of Newark’s cathedral, Dillard Robinson, with whom I had served on the executive council of the national church, had been adamantly opposed to this “Southern white man” becoming bishop and trying to direct ministry in Newark, an overwhelmingly black city. Furthermore, I was informed that the old-line Anglo-Catholic churches were distressed that someone who, to say the least, was uncomfortable with Anglo-Catholic worship forms was now to be their bishop.

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