Conflict over religious doctrine and interpretation of scripture is often viewed simply as the battleground that divides one religion from another. But the spiritual leader of the 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church said Friday that she values differing approaches to truth not only outside her faith, but within the church, as well.

Yet some Episcopalians who find themselves at odds with the church's current trajectory say she values such differences only conditionally.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, is in Salt Lake City this weekend on the final leg of a multistate tour. She's scheduled to preside at a 9 a.m. worship service today at St. Mark's Cathedral, and to bless the new Episcopal Church Center just west of the cathedral this afternoon.

She met with the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Friday in a meeting that Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish of Utah said "could not have been more gracious and welcoming."

Formerly bishop of Nevada, Bishop Jefferts Schori came to leadership of the church two years ago at a time of turmoil for some of the faithful, who have watched with growing angst the church's ordination of a gay bishop in 2003 and its growing willingness to affirm gay unions. The backlash has come not only from some within the church itself but also from several quarters inside the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part.

Her visit comes three weeks after she spent time in California, working to restructure the Diocese of San Joaquin. The majority of the church's 7,500 members there voted in December to leave the American church and align themselves with an Anglican province that encompasses several nations in South America called the Province of the Southern Cone.

Bishop Jefferts Schori told the Deseret News that less than 1 percent of the 7,600 Episcopal congregations within her jurisdiction — which includes 15 nations in the Western Hemisphere — are publicly opposed to the church's stance. But the disaffected are not hiding their discontent.

Of the upheaval happening within sectors of the church, she said, "I don't call it a convulsion. It's a deepening of understanding. Finding truth requires using reason, conviction within our faith community, incorporating science

and the best of human knowledge. We're not a tradition that looks only to the Bible.

"We're not (a faith) that insists that people not use their brains and the best knowledge of the human community that's current and keep looking. We're also a tradition very comfortable with a diversity of opinion. We don't assume there is only one way to understand things. That makes some uncomfortable, but it makes the body healthier and richer."

San Joaquin Bishop John-David Schofield summarized the feeling of others who are considering leaving the church: "Those who want to remain Episcopalians but reject the biblical standards of morality, the ultimate authority of the Bible, and the biblical revelation of God to us in his Son ... will in the end be left solely with a name and a bureaucratic structure," he recently told the Episcopal News Service.

The 2003 ordination of an openly gay man, Bishop Gene Robinson, by the church's general assembly was simply the "flashpoint" for those "who have had enough" of the church's increasingly "liberal theology," he said.

Bishop Jefferts Schori said the recent tension is likely the culmination of several changes within the church in the past 30 years, including the ordination of women, a change in communion and the admission of babies as members, a new prayer book and hymnal, and different styles of music that have been introduced.

"The pace of change within society gets responded to within the church by people who have difficulty with it. They expect the church should be the one thing in their lives that never changes. The message doesn't change, but the package may."

Leaders of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth said in January they are considering a move like the Diocese of San Joaquin — to align with the South American province — in order to "afford our diocese greater self-determination than we currently have" within the Episcopal Church.

In November, members of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh also voted in favor of leaving the church. The day before the vote, Bishop Jefferts Schori sent Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan a letter warning him of potential discipline and civil lawsuits if he committed what she called "canonical offenses," which would include overseeing approval of the resolution to leave the church.

Bishop Jefferts Schori said it is her duty to defend the canons of the faith, which involve vows made by bishops to "uphold the doctrine and discipline of the church. Actions that violate that vow show signs of difficulty. ... As stewards of the Episcopal Church in the U.S., we're responsible to respond to that."

She also has the responsibility to guard the church's buildings, land and resources, she said, from those who seek to leave the church but retain control of its physical assets. Of civil actions the church has been party to over such matters, most have favored the church to date, she said.

View Comments

The departures sadden her, she said. "The decision that because part of the church disagrees with them, there is no place for them, is a loss of our heritage. It's a forgetting of one of the gifts of our tradition."

She said there are signs that the fierce opposition in some quarters of the wider Anglican Communion to the church's stand on gay bishops and gay unions is "already leveling out. A number of archbishops in some areas are very unhappy, but even within those provinces there is a diversity of opinion."

While they may not agree with the Episcopal Church's actions regarding sexuality, "it's far more important to them that people are dying of starvation and disease. Some are very irritated that so much time and energy is being spent ... on issues that don't really concern them."


E-mail: carrie@desnews.com

Join the Conversation
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.