The issue of gay marriage in the Episcopal Church is closer to being resolved, but some conservative dissent remains as the 79th General Convention of The Episcopal Church continues in Austin, Texas.
The House of Deputies on Monday, July 9, by a wide margin passed Resolution B012 – an amended resolution that states that all Episcopalians can be married by priests in their local churches, according to the Episcopal News Service. That resolution now goes to the House of Bishops for final approval.
Resolution B012 grants same-sex and opposite-sex couples permission to use two trial-use marriage rites as stated in Resolution A054 that passed in the 2015 General Convention. In voting by orders, 96 clergy voted yes, 10 no, and four were divided. Among lay deputies, 97 voted yes, eight no, and five were divided. A total of 56 votes in each order is needed for passage.
But Resolution B012 does provide some relief for bishops who oppose gay marriage. The resolution stipulates that if a bishop does not theologically support same-sex marriage, he or she can request another bishop to give pastoral support to a couple asking for marriage rites, along with clergy and the respective congregation, according to the Episcopal News Service.
“B012 has made an effort to try to create space for people who are both for and against the question of gay marriage,” said Bishop Greg Brewer in a video feed from Austin, Texas. “What the resolution, it’s been through a number of different changes, has proposed is that gay marriage should be allowed in every diocese. However, we recognize, now this is sort of my summation, we recognize there are bishops who cannot support it. And so, what the bishops are encouraged to do is provide some kind of pastoral oversight for another bishop for a congregation that is interested in having gay marriages in their congregation.
“That has been fought back and forth,” Bishop Brewer said. “We have had a couple days of debate about that. The bishop provision has been removed and it has been added back. The version that passed (Monday) in the House of Deputies allows for bishops to make that kind of generous pastoral oversight to a congregation that would like to perform gay marriages. That resolution … will now be going to the House of Bishops. We’ll see what the House of Bishops does to it.”
Additionally, B012 states that inquires must be made to an outside bishop for remarriage if a person to be married is divorced, and that trial use of marriage rites must continue to be performed until renovation of the Prayer Book is completed.
Also making news on Monday was the resolution concerning Prayer Book revision that came before the House of Bishops. Prayer Book revision, which is expected to take 12 years, passed the House of Deputies by roughly a 65-35 vote a few days earlier.
“What happened in the House of Bishops was a long debate,” said Bishop Brewer, who is one of 11 people from the Diocese of Central Florida participating in the convention. “In fact, it went much longer than anybody ever anticipated with various bishops standing up and giving their perspectives. The gallery was packed with people who had come to see that conversation.
“Among the number of people who came to the microphone, no more than perhaps three percent who came to the microphone, actually supported Prayer Book revision,” Bishop Brewer said. “There were some who charted a middle course and said: ‘I am not for a renovation of the Prayer Book, but I am for liturgical revisions.’ In other words, (they were) trying to create supplement rights.”
Bishop Brewer said the resolution that came to the House of Bishops was a hodgepodge expression of opinion that was crafted on the floor of House of Deputies with “really conflicting amendments (with) no coherent theological issue.”
The discombobulated resolution presented two areas of concern, according to Bishop Brewer:
- “One had to do with price tag. In this particular next three-year period, triennium, what is presently budgeted for the development of a new Prayer Book is almost $2 million dollars. And the projection in today’s money, which means it would be more with inflation, it would cost at least that much over the next three triennials. In other words, we really are looking at a price tag somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million dollars. There was one bishop who said: ‘This feels like classic avoidance behavior where we’ve been given a charge to mission and evangelism (but) where we are going to spend our money instead? We’re going to be spending our money on prayer books. And guess what … Bishop Robert Wright of Atlanta will have shiny new prayer books in buildings that are empty.’ So, there is a lot of concern about price tag and, in essence, the misspending of funds.”
- “There also are other people who articulated a fairly high level of distrust around the fact that you have an aging group of members in the Standing Liturgical Commission who in 10 years will probably have none of those people in the Episcopal Church in leadership. They will have long since retired. So, especially among young adults, there’s the sense of great, you get to make mistakes for us (as) someone said quite pointedly, ‘Just another opportunity for boomers to screw it up for millennials.’ So, there are those things, as well as some continuing concerted effort of saying we’re not interested in doing anything liturgically that would put us in conflict with our classic Anglican formularies, as well as concerns about how the prayer book renovation would eventually be translated in a variety of other languages given the fact that our present translations, both particularly in Spanish and French, are poor. They don’t reflect the vernacular of French- or Spanish-speaking people.”
After extensive debate, the House of Bishops was ready to vote, but that vote was postponed until Tuesday because of time constraints. “Certainly, the number of people who came to the mike across the theological spectrum would indicate that it will be defeated in the House of Bishops,” Bishop Brewer said. “But who knows? Plus, we will be taking up, probably bishops will, in the next day or two, the resolution around allowing access to gay marriages in each diocese.
“So, we’re in the thick of it,” Bishop Brewer said. “We are still very much in process. Continue to keep us in your prayers. It’s a demanding, demanding pace that really does ask the best of us. Your prayers for stamina, for wisdom and discernment, are deeply appreciated. We need them. But God is using us and others in this convention (for) God be the glory.”