Making Corrections

An occasional embarrassment of publication is the discovery of errors. While these are often purely textual, they occasionally involve the reproduction of local urban legends. This past month I became aware that this had occurred in my first published monograph, The Road to Renewal. I must therefore admit that on page 202, I describe the publicity given by the National Catholic Reporter to Father John Bloms following his employment of girl servers at the Catholic parish in Ada, Oklahoma, as dating from 1964.

The diminutive Benedictine did indeed feature on the front page of the national paper celebrating the Eucharist facing the people and flanked by two young female parishioners, but although he instituted this practice in 1964, it was not until November 24, 1965 that reporters finally caught up with him. Two weeks later, the National Catholic Reporter dutifully reported that Father Bloms had signified his submission to an episcopal injunction to cease and desist.

While my error does not detract from the essential truth of the story, it nevertheless requires correction and this seems the best forum in which to acknowledge it.

The Gathering Shades

I came across this only recently but it seems so pertinent to the season that I place an extract here. I suspect that others are experiencing the same emotions.

Comfort, content, delight

The ages' slow-bought gain

They shrivelled in a night,

Only ourselves remain

To face the naked days

In silent fortitude,

Through perils and dismays

Renewed and re-renewed.

Though all we made depart,

The old commandments stand:

"In patience keep your heart,

In strength lift up your hand."

Rudyard Kipling, "For All We Have and Are" (1917)

Out of This Furnace: The Episcopal Experience in Western Pennsylvania

This is the first of three articles that will appear in TRINITY, the diocesan publication of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. They represent an overview of a manuscript history, which will be published by Wipf and Stock in 2009.

“At the noise of the trumpets he saith, Aha!” declares the Psalmist, “and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” From the 1758 expedition of General Forbes (an observant member of the Church of England) that won western Pennsylvania for the British Empire to the global storm now threatening to close the present chapter of the Anglican experience, western Pennsylvania has been witness to many of the profound changes that have reshaped this continent and the world. Now is the moment to pause and consider what it has meant to be Episcopalian and Anglican in Pittsburgh and its environs across two and a half centuries. In future articles I intend to look more closely at the nature of the shepherds called to guard the flock – our bishops – and at that much debated question of what being Anglican has meant to western Pennsylvanians down the years. As a preliminary, I propose to sketch some of the threads, both well-known and obscure, which constitute the web of the Episcopal experience since the foundation of the American Republic.

Isolation and neglect are recurrent themes of the western Pennsylvania experience, easily understood in an age when the region constituted the edge of frontier settlement, but no less applicable in the early nineteenth century when all roads led to Philadelphia or during the early 1980s when the Rust Belt recession left many Mon Valley communities fighting to survive. Thus could western Pennsylvania’s pioneer missionary, Joseph Doddridge, complain that little thought had been given to the needs of Episcopalians in scattered communities along the frontier in the 1790s and 1800s. Half a century later, in 1865, the region’s congregations were only too keen to cast off their ties to the settled east and form a new diocese stretching from Erie to Waynesburg. For them, east was east and west was better. Another forty-five years and the complaint went up that the northwest had little interest in the work of greater Pittsburgh, leading a committee to quip that a north-south division “would make practically no change in the conduct of affairs of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.” With such a ringing endorsement was the Diocese of Erie (now Northwestern Pennsylvania) birthed. Nevertheless, such isolation could also be challenged. Witness the work of Keith Ackerman (now Bishop of Quincy but then rector of St. Mary’s, Charleroi) when he brokered an agreement in 1984 to keep open a local foundry threatened with closure or the participation of Pittsburgh parishes in the New Vineyards Project of the 1980s, by which churches in areas of economic growth worked with those in depressed areas to relocate workers with appropriate skills. And who can forget that throng from “every tribe, people, language and nation” that gathered in Pittsburgh for Hope and a Future in 2005?

What then of class, that bugbear of Episcopal identity? In a Presbyterian town, the natural social ascendancy of Pittsburgh’s Episcopalians was somewhat dissipated, but not dramatically so. The identification of men like John Neville with the locally detested Federalist cause and his acceptance of the office of federal excise inspector, led to the burning of the Neville home during the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. In the 1830s and 1840s several rising entrepreneurs identified as Episcopalians including John Harper, the first president of the Pittsburgh Clearing House, and Abraham Garrison, who launched the chilled roll industry in America. Yet what greater testimony can there be to the universality of the Christian message than the nine working class Confirmation candidates who walked twelve miles to attend the ceremony and then walked the same distance home in order to be at work the following day? Nor did demand among working class English immigrants slacken during the 1870s and 1880s, as the formation of the Layman’s Missionary League in 1889 attests. Most of those native to the Diocese will recall the missionary initiatives of the 1990s: Cursillo, the creation of “equipping ministries” like Robinson Township’s Incarnation Fellowship; the “6 in 96” program; and the implementation of “total ministry” at Aliquippa and Donora. A century earlier, however, the evangelists of the Layman’s Missionary League were out serving the English and Welsh miners who had no opportunity to come to the city for worship. The campaign against pew rents was but another marker on the road to social equality within the Body of Christ.

And what of healing, of care for the last, the lost and the least? Today we celebrate the self-denying work of Seeds of Hope and Shepherd’s Heart, missionaries to those “poor in things but rich in soul,” to invert the words of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s famous hymn. The depression of the 1980s is not so long past that we can forget the food cooperative established by St. Matthew’s, Homestead, a forerunner of many parish hunger ministries in the Diocese, yet these in turn were preceded by congregational initiatives during the 1930s to hire unemployed members to refurbish their facilities. “The Christian citizen’s attitude toward various schemes of relief that are proposed,” Bishop Alexander Mann warned at the time, “must be determined, not by the politician’s concern for votes, nor by the selfish fear of increased taxes, but by the unforgettable words of Jesus Christ – ‘I was hungry and ye gave me meat, I was naked and ye clothed me.’ ” Yet healing has a still more ancient lineage. Take the case of Alfred Arundel, who sought to make wealthy Trinity Church a haven for the residents of nearby tenements. “I went into this downtown district of our parish to fill the empty pews,” Arundel declared in his farewell sermon of 1911, “among underpaid and underfed laborers, in the slums and the tenderloin, I saw the results of extortionate capitalism – the undue enrichment of the few and the underserved poverty of the many.” There was another side to those wealthy capitalists whom Arundel was fond of flaying, however. Trinity’s John Shoenberger left most of his fortune to the erection of a public hospital – St. Mary’s Memorial – which remains part of the fabric of Pittsburgh’s public health system.

What, finally, of Pittsburgh’s Episcopalians in the public sphere? Consider the cases of William Baum and George Whitten Jackson, Evangelical Episcopalians and abolitionists, who helped found the Republican Party in Pittsburgh. Or George Hodges of Calvary who was instrumental in the establishment of Pittsburgh’s first settlement house – Kingsley House – and whose lay protégés, Henry D. W. English and George Guthrie, championed civic reform and sponsored the Pittsburgh Survey, one of the most extensive studies of social problems of the early twentieth century. How can one read Sam Shoemaker’s Pittsburgh Experiment as anything less than a call for Christians to integrate their spiritual and material lives? The earliest stirrings of civil rights activism can be seen in Walter Righter’s decision to admit an African American couple to All Saints Church in segregated Aliquippa and in the 1964 initiative of St. Stephen’s, Sewickley to sponsor a mission to the Hill District. For all those who struggled with such issues, the words of Nancy Chalfant, reflecting on the sorrow and the joy of raising a handicapped daughter, ring true: “I saw that I could be a channel through which that power could work, and I didn’t have to sit by helplessly as [my daughter] grew in years but not in mentality. Jesus became real to me, no longer a shadowy figure living 2,000 years ago but a person to love and be loved now, today, a person who loved [my daughter], too, and who hurt when we hurt.”

Today it seems as if we stand at a moment of superlative crisis, yet it was ever thus. “Had we imitated at an early period the example of other societies;” lamented western Pennsylvania’s pioneer missionary, Joseph Doddridge, to Bishop John Hobart in 1816, “employed the same means for collecting our people into societies, and building churches, and with the same zeal, we should have had by this time, four or five Bishops, surrounded by a numerous and respectable body of Clergy, instead of having our very names connected with a fallen Church.” Almost seventy years later, as Bishop Cortlandt Whitehead prepared to take up the reins he was faced with equally gloomy forecasts. “A spirit of Congregationalism pervades the whole diocese,” declared one correspondent. “There is not much going on of any sort; the diocese, the clergy and laity alike, are dead spiritually and this seems to be generally admitted.” The frontier is different – no longer geographical but ontological – yet the challenge and the promise remain the same. That frontier, Bishop Duncan declared in 2000, “is post-modern America: where political candidates no longer explain themselves by identification with a party heritage or tradition, where truth is relative and subjective and experiential, where conflicts are settled by guns and arguments by excommunication (whether of distance or divorce), where plenty and pain abound, and where everyone secretly yearns for some relationship or meaning that might hold beyond tomorrow.”

When My Love To God Grows Weak

When my love to God grows weak
When for deeper faith I seek
Then in thought I go to thee
Garden of Gethsemane.

There I walk amid the shades
While the lingering twilight fades
See that suffering, friendless One
Weeping, praying there alone.

When my love for man grows weak
When for stronger faith I seek
Hill of Calvary I go
To thy scenes of fear and woe.

There behold His agony
Suffered on the bitter tree
See His anguish, see His faith
Love triumphant still in death.

Then to life I turn again
Learning all the worth of pain
Learning all the might that lies
In a full self sacrifice.

John Reynell Wreford (1800-1881)

The Last Chrism Mass

This is a time of “lasts” for the Diocese of Pittsburgh: the last Christmas celebration; the last Lent; the last Holy Week; the last Trinity Sunday. That mixture of sober realism and nostalgia was visibly on display at today’s Chrism Mass, where the Bishop of Pittsburgh took for his text the third verse of Psalm Eleven: “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

In Pittsburgh, we have all had occasion to watch Bob Duncan over the past few years; at Trinity Cathedral we see him more than most. While his offices are next door, from time to time one will encounter a perambulating bishop wandering the corridors of the parish house, lost in thought. It is hard, though, to imagine the full impact of those years of struggle when, as the psalmist declares “the wicked bend their bows; they set their arrows against the strings to shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart.”

The poignancy of that moment in the service when the Bishop joined his clergy in reaffirming the promises that he made at ordination was all the more striking when one considers last week’s decision in the House of Bishops. At such a moment, it seemed peculiarly ironic that a denomination cannot distinguish between termination of the right to function in an ordained capacity within a particular national church (which all parties would seem to acknowledge as legitimate) and the declaration that a priest or bishop no longer holds valid orders for the exercise of ministry within the Anglican tradition (which, at the least, would seem to demand a trial with the same degree of rigor as that accorded Walter Righter thirteen years ago).

For all that, the homily was a much more pastoral offering that we have tended to hear from Bob Duncan in recent years, with but a single personal allusion. All the care poured into this sermon was for the priests and deacons who have borne the heat and strife of the day, those who, in the words of the assigned Epistle (2 Corinthians 4:1-12), do not lose heart since they have their ministry through God’s mercy. And perhaps it is not just “loyal” presbyters who need the assurance that “though hard pressed on every side, they will not be crushed; though perplexed, not in despair; though persecuted, not abandoned; though struck down, not destroyed,” but also the Pittsburgh Twelve and even those who stand apart from that cause to which a majority of Pittsburgh’s Episcopalians have dedicated themselves.

In the final analysis, Bishop Duncan stated, a priest’s calling is that declared by the Apostle Paul: “We have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.” (v.2) By the end of the year these clergy will no longer be able to gather as one and fellowship, perhaps even friendships, will be ended. Yet if secrecy, deception and distortion are eschewed and the truth is plainly set forth, then perhaps there can be victory even in defeat. Since we are all representative of fallen humanity, naturally this may be easier said than done

At several points in his sermon, the Bishop drew attention to the last days of St. Augustine in a Carthage then under siege by the Vandals. Within a short space of Augustine’s death, he remarked, the great North African Church had ceased to exist. Sitting amid the columns of Trinity Cathedral, itself testament to the rise and fall of institutional Anglicanism in North America, one wondered if another final epitaph was being pronounced.

Of Heaven and Hell

"The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, ' We were always in Hell.' And both will speak truly. "

Extract from C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. (New York: Macxmillan, 1946), 68.

Prophetic Words from Forty-Five Years Ago

We can look at the scene with the special gifts of our Anglican Communion - tolerance, if we are sure it is neither idleness nor cowardice; moderation, if we are sure it is not indifference or complacency; eclecticism, if we are sure it is not trying to eat our cake and have it; empiricism, if we are sure it is not lack of principle. We can be sure that the world we used to know is being crumpled together in an almighty hand; that it will be built again into something new. We can be sure too that, by infinite charity and divine courtesy, free will invites us to take part in that rebuilding. Indeed, in a sense, we may choose what is built. But what we choose will endure only if it is built on understanding and reconciliation. And if these two final thoughts of divine purpose and human freedom cannot be reconciled in logic - well - neither can the Athanasian Creed.

Philip Mason, August 16, 1963, quoted in E. R. Fairweather, ed., Anglican Congress: Report of Proceedings. (New York: Seabury Press, 1963), 67

The Heavenly Orchestra

Sermon Preached by Paul Johnston

in Trinity Cathedral, Pittsburgh, January 27, 2008.

Once upon a time, there was a symphony orchestra. You could hardly call it that at first. It was smaller—maybe a chamber orchestra. Really, it was only a small, rag-tag bunch. But there came to them an inspired and inspiring conductor. They called him “maestro.”

With the maestro on the podium, the players played better than they thought possible. They gave the maestro their 110%. Not only did they grow as individual musicians. They came together as a remarkable ensemble, as if of one mind.

They’d come home from rehearsal and tell their families, “This is a concert you won’t want to miss.” They’d invite their friends. Their friends then told their friends, and soon the players had friends’ friends inviting their friends.

Word spread. The audience and critics, hearing the symphony orchestra under the maestro, would hear the music and find reality illuminated and clarified, and yet in the music there would also be promises for the future. There would be answers—even to questions they hadn’t asked yet.

The symphony’s fame grew. The roster grew. They built their own concert hall, so now they no longer had to rent the high school gym. But in no time, they’d outgrown the first hall and had to build a second. Then they built their third—and by all accounts the most beautiful—concert hall, a jewel on prime real estate downtown.

But slowly, you could sense other changes. Players came and went. Some were genuine superstars on their instruments. During coffee breaks at rehearsals, or long after getting off work, they had conversations about fascinating and often significant issues.

A violinist would ask, “Which edition of this music is more reliable?” A violist might reply, “Does it really matter? Can’t we just look to the conductor?” Another would say, “Well, maybe we need to revise our idea of who the conductor is.” One ventured, “Calling him maestro seems oppressive.”

There were endless discussions about the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The tempo indicated in the score is that quarter notes should be at 76 beats per minute. One party of musicians believed they should respect the composer’s intentions, as apparently he wrote them. But some believed that to be too fast. “It’s unmusical if you do exactly what the score says,” they argued. Some of their colleagues speculated that Beethoven’s metronome was malfunctioning at the time he wrote this work.

The symphony orchestra built a conservatory, where the players kept busy teaching and arguing for their interpretations. This left them less time to practice, of course. Rehearsals became more perfunctory.

If you had half an ear, you could detect problems. The players weren’t together on entrances. They didn’t cut off together on downbeats. The third trumpet was always a little flat, compared with the rest of the orchestra, but no one cared enough to correct him except the conductor, who the players no longer heard.

They got the notes, mostly. But something was missing. So, the audience slowly dwindled. A couple of empty seats here, one or two over there. Then a whole row. It was so imperceptible at first, no one saw what was happening until at last they were in serious trouble.

The orchestra tried different marketing strategies. There was Dietrich Buxtehude Bobble-head Night. It was fun, but didn’t change attendance patterns.

They remodeled the concert hall. No improvement in attendance.

They brought in a consultant. He said, “You can remodel all you want. But your content is irrelevant.”

So they added a drum set and electric bass to their renditions of Mozart. They even put out a record called “Hooked on Mozart.” However, when disco went out of style a couple of years later, they found themselves still in trouble.

It got so bad that, while they agreed to agree on essentials and disagree on inessentials, they couldn’t agree on what the essentials were anymore!

There were partisan fans. When Apollos the horn player would have a solo, his loyal followers would cheer, but the followers of Cephas the bassoonist would boo and hiss. When the oboist Bob had the most prominent, most risky, solo of his career, his fans whistled and thumped their chests, but the flutist Kathryn’s fans tried to kick him out of the orchestra.

There was even disagreement over who the concert hall belonged to.

Occasionally you’d hear a lone voice: “It’ll turn out all right if you follow the conductor.” But someone always replied, “Yeah, but what does that mean?” Or, “Easy for you to say.” Or, “I don’t look for a conductor anymore. I’ve grown past that. But a conductor is a meaningful metaphor for the beat within me.”

To anybody who loved music, however, the orchestra was an orchestra in name only. It didn’t perform with one mind.
___________

Listen to what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians. This is the first verse of this morning’s Epistle (in my dynamic paraphrase from the Greek original): “I passionately urge you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all be on the same page, not torn apart in schism, but mended in your ways, the cracks repaired, being of one mind and one aim.”

Paul had a lot to say to the Corinthians about unity. The Corinthian church was in fact quite a mess. And in a broader context, Jesus had a lot to say about unity, too. From the New Testament, here’s one thing unity isn’t, and one thing it is:

Going by what Jesus and Paul say, unity isn’t simply getting along. It’s not tolerance. The notion of tolerance is indeed quite foreign to the New Testament. If you were to wear one of those “Teach Tolerance” buttons to an interview with St. Paul, he’d probably shake his head and say, “Tolerance? Your standard is too low!” Can you imagine a Church where everyone merely tolerated each other? Can you imagine a world where the best we could do would be to tolerate each other?

Instead, as Paul builds his argument in his first Corinthian letter, by Chapter 13 he proposes that the greatest spiritual gift is love. And Paul consistently defines love in Jesus’ manner as being every bit as concerned for another’s good and salvation as you are for your own. This isn’t easy, and it takes humility and discernment. But it is the ideal of love.

In other words, unity is not neutral. This unified Body—which Christ calls his Church—he once said will triumph over “the gates of hell.” That’s not neutral language. If you read this morning’s Epistle and keep going a few verses, Paul speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven and those who relate to it either wisely or foolishly. That’s not neutral. So, unity isn’t about taking no stand, making no choices, and sometimes it even rules out agreeing to disagree. Unity is not just tolerating each other.

Unity is something radical. Rather than playing it safe, Christian unity is dangerous. Our Epistle speaks of the power of the Cross as an instrument of unity—surpassing Baptism, in fact. Unity as Paul urges it in I Corinthians comes from a Cross-centered love which dares to discipline and has the power to transform lives.

How do we achieve this radical New Testament unity? Our Gospel has the answer: Jesus invites us, “Come, follow me.” If we follow him all the way to the Cross, we’ll be of one mind and purpose.

Does this seem naïve? Isn’t much of the Church’s debate over exactly what following Jesus looks like?

Yes. And yet, Jesus is the one whose overarching invitation to the kingdom was always personal, “Come, follow me”—who said the way to Father is “by me.” Since it’s his idea, he can make it work.

To achieve the radical, real unity Scripture calls for, not fake unity, which often is disunity masquerading under backslapping jollity, we must “come follow” Jesus more and more, and then trust that what needs to fall into place will fall into place.
___________

It was called a symphony orchestra. But it didn’t sound like one anymore.

One day, a new concertmaster came to the orchestra. He was kind of odd. He kept his eye on the conductor. The rest of the orchestra didn’t notice that, since they had other concerns. The principal oboe once asked the concertmaster, “Do you think it’s fair that there we have 32 violins and a minority of three oboes?” The principal flute asked, “Do you think we should take this tempo marking literally?” The concertmaster kept playing, kept looking past them, his focus on a point more distant.

One day, the principal clarinet heard a voice: “Follow me.” She looked up and saw the conductor. “Did you hear that?” she asked the assistant principal clarinet.

“Hear what?”

“I heard the conductor say, ‘Follow me.’ ”

“What!” the assistant replied, “there’s a conductor?” The piccolo player whipped around, “Does he still exist?”

The message spread through the orchestra. Others heard the voice, looked up, and started to follow. The more they did their best to follow, the more together they were. If they kept their eyes on the music and on the baton, good things happened.

Not that they didn’t have questions. Not that they didn’t have their own ideas. But they could check them with the maestro. The tuba player, whose name was Anselm, said, “Now, I do not seek to understand everything before following the conductor, but I follow the conductor in order to understand.”

The orchestra was enthusiastic about what was happening between them and the maestro. They told their families. Then they were inviting their friends. Their friends then told their friends, and soon the players had friends’ friends inviting their friends.

The audience grew. You no longer had partisan fans. When you’d hear an oboe or flute solo, you heard it as part of a coherent story. Maybe it was Romeo & Juliet, or perhaps Scheherazade. Even with the 1812 Overture, it wasn’t just a loud piece with lots of cannons. You sensed a cosmic struggle of good and evil.

The listeners felt deeply, saw visions. You’d hear the churning C-minor opening in the Symphony No. 1 of Brahms and shudder, “Woe is me!” Then that trombone chorale would enter in the finale, parting the clouds, and you knew you weren’t alone—you’d gone from darkness into light, from death into life.

All eyes were on the conductor. Everyone in the orchestra and everyone in the audience watched the master. And if your eye should wander to a player, you’d be amazed at how closely the player’s intentions reflected those of the conductor.

In the end, there were now standing ovations. There was no rush for the exits. No one wanted to leave the building. There were shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” And of “Alleluia!”

And Jesus said to them, “Follow me…” And they left everything—liberal and conservative labels, certainty over their interpretation of canon law, uncertainty over whether the Cathedral was the property of the national church or the diocese, the way things used to be—everything, and followed him.

Published with the author's permission

In Time of Tribulation

In time of tribulation, hear, Lord, my feeble cries;
With humble supplication to Thee my spirit flies;
My heart with grief is breaking, scarce can my voice complain;
Mine eyes with tears kept waking, still watch and weep in vain.

The days of old, in vision, bring banished bliss to view;
The years of lost fruition, their joys in pangs renew;
Remembered songs of gladness, through nights lone silence brought,
Strike notes of deeper sadness, and stir desponding thought.

Hath God cast off forever? Can time His truth impair?
His tender mercy never shall I presume to share?
Hath He His loving kindness shut up in endless wrath?
No; this is mine own blindness, that cannot see His path.

I call to recollection the years of His right hand;
And, strong in His protection, again through faith I stand;
Thy deeds, O Lord, are wondrous; holy are all Thy ways;
The secret place of thunder shall utter forth Thy praise.

Thee, with the tribes assembled, O God, the billows saw;
They saw Thee, and they trembled, turned, and stood still with awe;
The clouds shot hail and lightning; the earth reeled to and fro;
Thy fiery pillar brightened the gulf of gloom below.

Thy way is in great waters, Thy footsteps are not known;
Let Adam’s sons and daughters confide in Thee alone:
Through the wild sea Thou leadest Thy chosen flock of yore;
Still on the waves Thou treadest, and Thy redeemed pass o’er.

James Montgomery (1771-1854)

Accountability Globalism: The Wave of the Future?

Review: Miranda K. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies are Reshaping Anglicanism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Miranda Hassett has set herself a challenging task, yet the result is worthy of wide scrutiny, by liberal and conservative alike. Indeed, the title of this book combined with the author’s forthright disclosure that she is both a liberal Episcopalian and an anthropologist, makes her balanced treatment of the subject matter all the more commendable.

Central to Hassett’s approach is her understanding of globalization not as an impersonal and irresistible force but as a process shaped by human agency. Conservatives – religious and otherwise – have traditionally been understood as hostile to globalization; yet Episcopal conservatives have recently learned to cultivate transnational networks with Third World provinces that have resulted in a process of shared identity. At one point, Hassett contrasts what she calls diversity globalism (as espoused by liberal scholars like Ian Douglas) with the new accountability globalism: “Accountability globalism is a true globalism . . . This is no veiled anti-globalism or reactionary vision, in which the older authority structures of white male Euro-American dominance are reestablished to maintain order in an increasingly complex worldwide organization. Instead, this conservative vision embraces the diversity and complexity of the contemporary world.” (127)

Hassett is also concerned with the construction of relationships, a very necessary part of the call to discipleship. To study the phenomenon, she elected to spend four months in an Anglican Mission in America (AMIA) parish, pseudonymously dubbed St. Timothy’s, and six months in central Uganda observing how the patterns of global relationship and self-understanding had been transformed by the evolving crisis within the Anglican Communion. In accordance with anthropological practice, except for statements in published sources, all the testimony in the narrative is anonymous. While this may seem strange at first glance, it comports with the tradition of rural American sociology popularized in the 1920s by scholars like Edmund Brunner, and has the added advantage of freeing her subjects to express exactly what they are feeling.

The case of St. Timothy’s is itself fascinating in that it traces a distinct paradigm shift in how the transnational perspectives of affluent middle class Americans have been transformed by the development of ties to Africa that are not based solely on First World largesse. Hassett describes how St. Timothy’s followed the not untypical renewal pattern of the 1980s, developing a charismatic style and attracting evangelicals who had not been raised within the Episcopal Church. For many, Rwanda had not been on their radar, even during the 1994 genocide, and when they joined AMIA in 2000, their principal concern had been to escape from the Episcopal Church. Yet in the years that followed, there has grown up an identification with the Anglicans of Rwanda that is much deeper and is predicated on a better understanding of the essence of the Rwandan Church. Hassett describes how a group who undertook a mission to Rwanda expected to be besieged with requests for material assistance, only to learn that what their hosts most desired was simply to begin to build a relationship. (162-65)

In examining the origins of the conservative movement in the Episcopal Church, Hassett challenges some widespread opinions held by members of the liberal community. The oft-repeated charge that the support of Global South bishops for American conservatives at the 1998 Lambeth Conference and subsequently was “bought,” she dismisses as reflecting an inadequate grasp of where most of the Southern bishops stood. That there are problems with the disparities of wealth between North and South and how wealth is shared between the two cannot, she believes, explain why the crisis has developed as it has done. More controversial, especially in America, will be the conclusion she draws from her experience of worshipping and talking with members of St. Timothy’s, regarding the genuineness of the professions of concern for moral teaching that come from groups like AMIA. “Although homosexuality is often singled out for particularly vehement opposition,” she writes, “my time at St. Timothy’s showed me that evangelical Episcopalians’ responses to homosexuals are framed in the same language of sin and the need for transformation through a relationship with Jesus Christ that they apply to their own lives.” (42)

Conservatives, however, should not become complacent. Hassett has her own view of the myth that has grown up around Philip Jenkins's The Next Christendom, which has led some to see the shift in the locus of power to the Global South as the inevitable triumph of Christian orthodoxy. (249-52) Her Ugandan experiences demonstrate that the sense of a monolithic Southern Church that one can sometimes derive from the statements of certain primates is far from accurate. She notes, for example, the greater degree of tolerance for homosexuality (though not a denial of its sinful nature) displayed by the Bakolole fellowships that emerged from the East African Revival; the understanding of homosexuality as an imported “colonial” practice that has made it a matter of nationalist well as religious significance; and the continued reservations expressed by Ugandan bishops and priests about the wisdom of constituting AMIA.

Perhaps most interesting of all, in her discussion of conservative idealization of Africa, is Hassett’s exploration of the five key themes of youth; zeal; numbers; suffering; and poverty. (177-97) Her objective here is not to claim that the points raised are wholly invalid but that they are often projections of what conservative Northerners expect to see rather than what those who are enduring them actually experience. Ugandans continue to worry about “nominal” Christians and the superficiality of belief, dislike the notion that their continent should so often be portrayed in terms of chaos and destruction, and fear that endemic poverty, far from producing a stronger faith may actually weaken it. “Conceiving of African Christians as people of pure and simple faith,” concludes Hassett, “invokes concepts ultimately derived from older and negative views of Africans as childlike, primitive and uncivilized. To be sure, these negative images have now been turned on their heads to become idealizations, but the fundamental idea of African otherness carries on unimpeded into the new romanticized images.’ (205)

This book points a way forward in terms of understanding the implications of globalism for the ever-expanding Anglican family and the patterns of relationship that are being developed to transcend physical barriers. Comparable studies of parishes affiliated with CANA, as well as of conservative parishes still within the Episcopal Church, would be a valuable addition to the literature, as would parish-level studies of diversity globalism and how liberal Anglicans understand it. “My account of current debates in the Anglican tradition will no doubt be contested;” notes Miranda Hassett, “my hope is that people on all sides of the current debates will find an equal measure in these texts with which to take issue.” (22) As far as this moderately conservative Anglican is concerned, she has more than achieved her goal.