Schism tears at fabric of church

By Mary Garrigan, Journal staff | Saturday, February 24, 2007

Previous Page

Share

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• NewsVine
• Fark

Print

Email

RAPID CITY -- As his beloved Episcopal Church inches toward schism with the global Anglican Communion, the Rev. Ron Hennies watches the debate from a new distance now.

After 47 years as an Episcopal priest, Hennies was ordained by the Orthodox Church in America in November. That conversion allows him to leave behind the conflicts over same-sex unions and gay ordination that threaten to splinter the Episcopal Church in America.

“It’s a church I still love, but I’m interested in being a traditional Christian,” Hennies said by phone last week. He is a longtime area Episcopal priest.

Hennies, 76, moved to Los Alamos, N.M., a year and a half ago and now is a pastor at a tiny Eastern Orthodox congregation, St. Dimitri’s, in the high desert of northern New Mexico. With his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, Hennies leaves a church that is moving in a direction he chooses not to follow.

“I began to feel that the ancient Nicene religion I loved was disappearing by centimeters,” he said. “I made my break, and I’m very happy where I am.”

Last week, Episcopalians in the Black Hills reacted to a stern directive from Anglican leaders that the American wing of the church must stop sanctioning same-sex unions and stop ordaining noncelibate gays as bishops by a Sept. 30 deadline.

Conflict between liberal and orthodox church members in the United States and abroad reached crisis in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated its first openly gay bishop. The tensions with conservatives grew last year when the American church elected a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as presiding bishop.

Bill Kunerth, a member of St. James Episcopal Church in Belle Fourche, has high praise for Jefferts Schori as a leader of peace and inclusivity and little patience for the Anglican ultimatum that was issued at the meeting in Tanzania.

“I thought it was very narrow and perhaps a little unrealistic,” Kunerth said.

On Tuesday, Jefferts Schori released a written statement asking church members for patience and understanding and that they refrain -- or “fast” -- for a season from issues of gender and sexuality.

Jefferts Schori noted that final communique had made requests not only of the U.S. church, but of conservative bishops outside the United States, who have taken dissenting Episcopal parishes and dioceses in America under their auspices. They were asked to refrain from that practice and were challenged to resolve church property issues without resorting to legal action.

“I have a great deal of faith in the new bishop. I think if more people read her statements, they’d realize she’s taking the church in a direction that more churches should go,” Kunerth said.

Like his new bishop, he supports Robinson’s ordination but knows there are many of his fellow Episcopalians who do not.

“I think there’s a split on those issues in every parish, but it shouldn’t destroy those parishes,” he said. “We’re not allowing that difference in opinion to have any effect at all on the mission and activities of our parish, and that’s the way I think it should be not just within parishes, but among parishes and among dioceses, too.”

Chip Johnson, a former Episcopalian from Hot Springs who is now a deacon in a small Anglican-affiliated house church, disagrees. He left the denomination because of its “failure to uphold the faith once delivered.”

He opposes Robinson’s ordination, refuses to sanction same-sex unions and doubts that Jefferts Schori and other American bishops have any intention of complying with the Anglican directive.

“I don’t think they will conform to the communique,” Johnson said. “I expect to see them refuse to comply and refuse to voluntarily leave the communion. It’s going to be an interesting few months.”

Johnson was nearly ordained as an Episcopal priest through its Mutual Ministry program a few years ago. Instead, he plans to be ordained after Easter as an Anglican priest in a small diocese of seven congregations of mostly former Baptists, Methodists and Nazarenes who are “interested in an Anglican walk.” His church is associated with -- but not part of -- the Anglican Mission in the Americas.

Johnson is not surprised by Hennies’ decision to leave the Episcopal Church. “Not a bit. I know many others who are in the process of packing their bags and making their plans.”

Hennies insists that his departure from the Episcopal Church had as much to do with his attraction to Orthodoxy as it did dissatisfaction with his former denomination.

At least half of all Eastern Orthodox priests now serving in America are converts to the faith. In many places, including New Mexico, about eight out of 10 clergy come from other denominations, he said. His own archbishop is a former Baptist, and the abbot of St. Michael’s Skete, an Orthodox monastery near Los Alamos, is a former Episcopalian.

“Every Orthodox priest in northern New Mexico is a convert,” Hennies said.

For him, the theological compromises began in 1979. That year, the Episcopal Church changed its Book of Common Prayer and decided to ordain women. It wasn’t those changes, so much, as the way they were implemented that bothered him.

“I tried every inch of the way to compromise, to be accommodating of changes,” he said, “but every time I made one compromise, at every fork in the road, there was another compromise, and then another. I just had to decide that I was done compromising.”

Change, he said, has not benefited the Episcopal Church. “Its numbers have declined dramatically,” he said.

The need of the Episcopal Church to “be current” in its language and its worship is lost on him, including a prayer he heard the new bishop address to “Mother Jesus.”

“As far as I know, the historical Jesus was male, so why do they feel the need to change that?”

Hennies said his new spiritual home refuses to change the foundational faith of Christ in any way. “I tell people I didn’t go to a perfect church, just one that doesn’t change with time. It is the living Nicene creed.”

Rapid Citians who remember Hennies’ ponytail and Birkenstocks shouldn’t be surprised by his conversion to Orthodoxy, he said.

“I was a relaxed person, because that’s my nature, but I was also a traditional priest who ran a traditional church. I celebrated Holy Eucharist and believed every word of it.”

As his former church continues to dicker over issues of homosexuality, Hennies is glad to be done with it.

“That sexuality business has become such a forefront issue and in my mind, it has clouded the humanity of people,” he said.

The Rev. Kathy Monson Lutes, rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Rapid City, said the disagreement between the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church is “in how we live out the affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord, and whether persons who are homosexual living in committed, monogamous relationship are able to access the blessing of the church on their union, and whether they may be in positions of authority.”

Monson Lutes supports Jefferts Schori as a bishop who can build relationships and bring reconciliation in a church that has vast political and theological views.

Episcopalians make a baptismal promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself, and to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

“I take these promises very seriously,” she said.

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8410 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com