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Two Ministers Forge Friendship Across a Church Divide - NYTimes.com
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Two Ministers Forge Friendship Across a Church
Divide
By MICHAEL PAULSON
APRIL 18, 2014
FAIRFAX, Va. — The two ministers were foes before they ever met,
partisans in a war they did not start, but partisans nonetheless.
For four years, they did not speak.
But in the spring of 2011, the Rev. Tory Baucum drove 100 miles south
to Richmond to introduce himself to the Rev. Shannon Johnston. And now
the friendship that resulted, nurtured over Guinness in the bar of
Richmond’s storied Jefferson Hotel, at dinner with their wives and during
many difficult conversations, is being hailed as one of the most unexpected
and intriguing developments in a bitter feud that has split the Episcopal
Church in the decade since the denomination elected an openly gay
bishop.
Mr. Johnston is the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia — the
most populous Episcopal diocese in the United States — and a supporter of
same-sex marriage who has blessed same-sex couples. Mr. Baucum is the
rector of an unusually vibrant parish, Truro Church in Fairfax, which left
the Episcopal Church over the election of the gay bishop, Gene Robinson,
the final straw in a long-running dispute over theological orthodoxy. By
the time the two men arrived in Virginia, in 2007, their flocks were suing
each other over who owned the Truro property, worshipers had been
forced to choose sides, and sharp-fingered bloggers were trading medievalsounding epithets like “heretic” and “schismatic.”
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No one is suggesting that the friendship between bishop and rector
will end the divisions in Anglicanism, which remain so sharp that just over
the last few weeks, a new feud broke out. A conservative Episcopal
seminary in Wisconsin, Nashotah House, invited the presiding bishop of
the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is a liberal, to visit; a
conservative bishop on the school’s board resigned in protest.
But, in its own way, the friendship is paying striking dividends. Even
as the Episcopal Church nationally has waged blowout legal battles
against parishes and dioceses that have broken away, the Episcopal
Diocese of Virginia and Truro Church have settled their litigation and
forged an amicable truce. The diocese was declared the owner of the Truro
property, but is allowing the breakaway congregation to continue to
occupy it, rent-free, in exchange for maintaining it.
Meanwhile, the friendship between the bishop and the priest has
given license to Virginians who had stopped speaking to one another to
begin repairing long estrangements.
“We were on the barricades for a few years, getting sued, raising
money for a legal-defense fund, battling for our lives, and then suddenly
out of nowhere we’ve reached a truce,” said J. Chapman Petersen, a lawyer
known as Chap who is a seventh-generation member of Truro Church and
a Democratic member of the Virginia State Senate. “A lot of people
gravitated to Truro because it wasn’t afraid to be politically incorrect, but
now we’re making peace and building bridges. Where that goes, who
knows?”
Merely the fact of a friendship between two church leaders on
opposite sides of a theological debate, a property dispute and a schism has
been so promising that it has attracted the attention of the archbishop of
Canterbury, who knows both men, and who last month installed Mr.
Baucum as one of the Six Preachers — an honorary guest lectureship
established in the 16th century.
“The close friendship he has forged with Bishop Shannon Johnston,
despite their immensely different views, sets a pattern of reconciliation
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based on integrity and transparency,” the archbishop of Canterbury,
Justin Welby, said in announcing his appointment of Mr. Baucum. “Such
patterns of life are essential to the future of the Communion.”
Truro is a storied and large suburban church, which attracts about
1,200 people to worship each weekend. It traces its roots to the mid-19th
century, and, in one of its current buildings, a Confederate officer
captured a Union official during the Civil War. But its numbers had been
dwindling since the late 1980s, and its current leaders, who supported the
split with the Episcopal Church, believe an ongoing focus on that split
consumed so much energy and time that it made the church unattractive
to newcomers.
“You can’t have an effective church that’s going to be welcoming if it’s
full of people who are angry,” said Bob Tate, the executive director of
Truro. “We were angry, and we hated Episcopalians,” he said.
When Mr. Baucum announced that he was forming a friendship with
Bishop Johnston, a few of his parishioners left, feeling betrayed by the
outreach. But the parish also began to grow more rapidly, in part because
of its intensified focus on an introduction-to-Christianity program called
Alpha, which helped introduce outsiders to the parish. On a recent Friday
night, visitors gathered over shepherd’s pie, salad and cupcakes to discuss
Christian basics; none asked about the schism.
“Peacemaking is not an option for Christians,” Mr. Tate said. “It is an
imperative from Christ.”
The friendship, which began tentatively with a shared prayer and an
exchange about poetry — Mr. Baucum brought Bishop Johnston a
collection by Adam Zagajewski, prompting the bishop to confess a
fondness for W.H. Auden — has not been easy. Mr. Baucum has declared
publicly that Bishop Johnston needs to repent for his support of gay
bishops and same-sex marriage; Bishop Johnston says simply that he
thinks Mr. Baucum, who opposes such steps, is on the wrong side of
history.
“Peacemaking doesn’t necessarily mean agreement,” Mr. Baucum
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said. “But what it does mean is that you stop trying to hurt each other, and
we were in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, spending millions of dollars on
both sides, and we weren’t evangelizing. And I thought, I don’t know that
we can fight and evangelize at the same time.”
Bishop Johnston was receptive to the initial overture from Mr.
Baucum, even as some of his aides fretted about Mr. Baucum’s intentions.
“The reality in the church seems to reflect the divisiveness in our civil
and secular society, so that quite apart from the question of agreeing with
a foe of one sort or another, you’re not even allowed to like them or
converse with them, and that’s very frustrating,” Bishop Johnston said. “I
don’t understand why disagreement means incivility or brokenness.”
The camaraderie between theological antagonists has caused a
firestorm in the blogosphere. On the right, critics see Mr. Baucum as soft
on crime because he has called Bishop Johnston not only a friend but also
a brother in Christ. On the left, some doubters see Mr. Baucum as a
schismatic.
“The extreme on the right and the extreme on the left have much to
lose if they give an inch,” said the Rev. J. Barney Hawkins IV, vice
president of Virginia Theological Seminary. “If you’ve made your position
synonymous with the will of God, it is very difficult to be reasonable.”
The backlash intensified when Bishop Johnston allowed a prominent
author, John Dominic Crossan, who has questioned the literal truth of key
elements of the New Testament, to address his diocesan clergy. In
response, the leader of breakaway Anglicans in Virginia, Bishop John A.
M. Guernsey, asked Mr. Baucum not to appear in public with the
Episcopal bishop. Bishop Guernsey explained in an email interview that
“the Episcopal Church’s embrace of false teachers and false teaching made
it impossible for the relationship to continue.” (The relationship has, in
fact, continued, but more privately and with less frequent get-togethers.)
The leaders of the Episcopal Church and breakaway Anglicans in the
United States seem unsure what to make of the relationship. Presiding
Bishop Jefferts Schori refused to say anything at all, declaring through a
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spokeswoman that she “doesn’t comment about diocesan matters.” The
leader of the Anglican Church in North America, Archbishop Robert W.
Duncan, would answer questions only in writing; he said the interest of the
archbishop of Canterbury means that the relationship has global
implications, but that he understands the misgivings.
“Conversations across divides raise anxieties,” he said. “This is
particularly true when there is much wounding and mistrust, as there
certainly has been in the Anglican Church/Episcopal Church battles.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with
the headline: Two Ministers Forge Friendship Across a Church Divide.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
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