A Response to The Living Church article “Michael Curry’s Ecumenical Moment”

Dear Editors of The Living Church,

I read Dean Robert Price’s piece, “Michael Curry’s Ecumenical Moment” this morning hoping to find a reasoned, researched article on ecumenism in the Episcopal Church. Instead what I found was an article full of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. I will start with what he gets right: The Episcopal Church has not faced the issue of racism systematically and thoroughly. As a church of historic privilege in our society, we have not done nearly enough to address the wrongs our society and church has visited on people of color. It is a sign of hope that our Presiding Bishop has made this a priority, but we have a long way to go.

Having pointed out what Dean Price gets right, let us move onto some of the frustrating issues. They are frustrating because many of the inaccuracies could be corrected by simple Google searches or consultation with any of the people who currently volunteer (and that is the vast supermajority of us) and are appointed or elected to lead ecumenical work in the Episcopal Church.

Perhaps the most egregious error is his characterization of ecumenical work as being between “White Denominations.” In the case of our dialogue with the United Methodist Church (UMC), 40% of the UMC is “Non-White,” and 16 of their 46 bishops in the United States are people of color. It is certainly not a “White Church.” Inexplicably included in the article is a picture of the 1999 signing of the (misnamed in the article) Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation, which he identifies as a “Germans agreeing with Germans” document. This is a blatant inaccuracy — the single largest church in the Lutheran World Federation is that of Ethiopia. You would likewise be hard-pressed to seriously assert that the Roman Catholic church is a “German Church.” In any case, what a picture of the JDDJ ceremony has to do with the racial makeup of dialogues in the Episcopal Church is anyone’s guess.

The second obvious error is the assertion that we are not in dialogue with the historically African American Methodist Episcopal Churches (AAMEC just for shorthand in this article) of the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion and Christian Methodist Episcopal churches. He seems to be unaware of the series of talks that the Episcopal Church held with the AAMEC from 2006–2010. The fact that the AAMECs are not a party to the proposed full-communion agreement A Gift to the World is not due to neglect.

In my local context in Milwaukee, African-American church leaders are certainly willing to work ecumenically, but they are (rightly) laser-focused on race, poverty, prison reform and ending the cycle of violence. Questions of exchangeability of orders or organic union are of the second or maybe third-order. The truth is, most of them ALREADY accept our orders as valid and interchangeable. The issue is on our side with our interpretation of the Historic Episcopate. A high percentage of their clergy and many of their bishops are bi-vocational. To ask them to divert their limited resources from what they consider to be life-and-death issues towards a bi-lateral intended to help us get over what is often seen to be our somewhat-incoherent obsession with a tactile historic succession of bishops is pure privilege (See my post, Methodists and the Episcopal Willy Wonka from 2017). Should A Gift to the World be passed by TEC and the UMC, it could become a foundation for substantive talks with the AAMECs, with the history of racism between our churches remaining the prime issue to discuss.

The article seems somewhat muddied in the distinction between desiring “full communion” and “organic union” (A Term of Art that means a full merger of church structures. Is this what Dean Price means by “Hierarchical union?”). As noted above, organic union is not a high priority for the AAMECs. All of the AAMECs have had full-communion through the Pan-Methodist commission since 2012, but there has not been a significant movement towards organic unity within the denominations that make up the commission itself. (It should also be noted that a representative of the Pan-Methodist Commission, a woman of color, is a member of the A Gift to the World Dialogue.) The suggestion that the AAMEC would desire full organic unity (as opposed to full communion) with TEC in order to get access to the pension fund (As that is the only way the pension fund could do that) makes a lot of assumptions. The basic premise seems to be that an AAMEC would give up their sovereignty to merge into a church where they would be a minority in order to gain access to money. Anyone sensitive to the history of race in America should be able to see the pitfalls in that proposition from a “White Church.”

In general, the AAMECs put their energy into multi-lateral ecumenical organizations instead of bi-lateral talks because those organizations directly address the key issues they care about. Dean Price correctly identifies Churches Uniting in Christ (CUIC), but fails to mention Christian Churches Together (CCT) the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC), all of which we sit at the table, as well as Ecumenical Advocacy Days and the National Workshop on Christian Unity (NWCU) which we participate in. While organic unity is a laudable goal, it is simply not a high priority for the AAMECs, and our place as a “White Church” of historic privilege needs to be to listen to them, instead of telling them what we think their needs are.

Finally, let us address the immediate subject of this article, our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. Dean Price’s presenting issue is that he thinks Bp. Curry is missing an ecumenical moment, but the truth is that he has been extraordinarily active in building relationships with historically African-American churches. Bishop Curry was the preacher at a mutual recognition of orders ceremony at CUIC in Dallas in 2017, and he has met with and spoken widely to groups of AAMEC bishops and at historically African-American Baptist churches. A short Google search will bear this out. It is true that he has not initiated any formal dialogues with these churches but see the arguments above. The process of beginning to form deeper relationships with the AAMECs and other historically African-American denominations is one that has to be done on a personal basis, as there is minimal historical trust between our denominations to base an institutional dialogue on.

While I applaud Dean Price’s suggestion to confront racism in relationship to our sibling Christians in other denominations, I am highly concerned that The Living Church would publish an article with so many obvious inaccuracies and gaps of knowledge. This article inappropriately injects race into a discussion of full-communion that is highly charged and unfairly characterizes our United Methodist siblings who are struggling with their already-significant internal issues.

The Rev. David Simmons. ObJN

President, Episcopal Diocesan Ecumenical and Interreligious Officers

Member, TEC Task Force on Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations

TEC Representative, NCC Faith and Order Table

Note: For more in-depth analysis of inaccuracies in the TLC article, as well as a heady dose of snark, see the Crusty Old Dean’s They Can’t Help Themselves: Oops, TLC Did it Again.