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The Rev. Wendy Smith, rector of St. Thomas' in Sunnyvale, has watched women's roles in the church grow to the point that they're 'not some little phenomenon at the edge anymore.'
Spiritual Split
The Episcopal Church finds that even in a new century, tolerance doesn't play to everyone.
By Oakley Brooks
Photographs by Mark Kocina
In the fundamentalist churches of his youth, Billy Bennett encountered only one unyielding view of God, and he grew weary of it. After his family took him from a Baptist parish in Georgia to a Pentacostal one in the Cambrian section of San Jose, Bennett, 48, eventually struck out on his own some 15 years ago. The first house of worship he walked into was St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Los Gatos. He's still there.
"People are free to dictate their own spiritual journey," Bennett says of his new life at St. Luke's, where he's now sits on the church's advisory board.
But Bennett's pride in the Episcopal denomination was bruised when he came upon a copy of a San Jose Mercury News story in mid-July about a former Episcopal priest from Campbell named Doug Weiss who charged that the Episcopal Church was "dying."
Weiss had recently been consecrated a bishop in the Anglican Mission in America, a movement breaking away from the Anglican-based U.S. Episcopal Church. He said the movement's return to stricter moral principles and a more aggressive pursuit of new converts were the only ways to right the Episcopal ship.
"My hope is that what we're doing...will bring it back to righteousness," Weiss told the Mercury News.
In the wake of Weiss' dark depictions of the church, some local Episcopal leaders such as the Rev. Ernest Cockrell, rector of one of Silicon Valley's largest parishes at St. Andrew's in Saratoga, have less than kind words for Weiss.
"I see it as a fraud," Cockrell says of Weiss' elevation to bishop in the Anglican communion, which includes the U.S. Episcopal Church and other Anglican churches worldwide.
'I'm finally doing what God has called me to do,' says the Rev. Doug Weiss, the charismatic missionary for the Anglican Mission in America.
And so the ideological struggle that had lain dormant since Weiss and his 150 parishioners left the local diocese of the Episcopal Church in frustration in 1994 has once again bubbled to the surface and taken on a new face.
The grappling brings a national, even international, struggle home to roost: Weiss' Anglican Mission movement, solidified just over a year ago and now with 8,000 members nationwide, has drawn the ire of the Anglican spiritual leader in England--the Archbishop of Canterbury. It's also led to a court battle between one diocese in North Carolina and a defiant parish hoping to hold onto its church property. Weiss would even call the moment historic, akin to the Reformation some five centuries ago, when the Anglican Church in England broke from the Catholic Church in Rome.
But more than a holy war, the split between Weiss and his former colleagues may indicate that a church that still prides itself on bridging the common American liberal-conservative gap--"There's a grace that allows us to listen to each other," says Cockrell of Episcopalians--may no longer be able to hold those two camps completely together.
Local Episcopal leaders insist that there was enough space for a conservative priest like Weiss and his followers in the Diocese of El Camino Real, which includes Santa Clara County.
"Everyone was quite shocked," says the Rev. Wendy Smith, rector of St. Thomas' in Sunnyvale, of Weiss' 1994 departure. "If they had chosen to stay, we would have been content to have them."
But Weiss, who came to Campbell from Ohio in 1981, maintains he was later "ostracized" by the Episcopal community and asked to leave several times before he finally separated from the diocese.
"It was very clear that it was time to leave," says Weiss.
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The Rev. Wendy Smith greets parishioner Rusty Helsel after a noontime prayer service. Smith said she still believes there is room for conservatives in the local Episcopal diocese.
His views on specific issues generally aren't reconcilable with those that have been accepted by the Episcopal Church.
Weiss says he believes that gay and lesbian relationships should not be condoned. Sexual intimacy, he says, is reserved for married men and women. Based on his reading of the Bible, Weiss also doesn't support the full ordination of women priests--he sees them only in roles of subordinate deacons.
"Scripture brings principles," said Weiss. "They are not flexible."
Local Episcopal leaders' individual readings of the Bible may vary significantly, and Cockrell says he will even refer parishoners to other churches than his own if they're looking for something other than his fairly progressive message.
But the church as a whole has become tolerant of openly gay and lesbian members. Cockrell says that at the most recent national church convention, a motion to approve a same-sex commitment ceremony failed narrowly. While the church apparently wasn't ready to sanction homosexual marriages, "we'll get there," Cockrell says.
A substantial number of women have also assumed leadership roles in the church. Smith has been rector at St. Thomas' for five years, and she was among the first group of women to be ordained priests in 1977. Several years ago, she participated in the ordination of the first female bishop, Barbara Harris, in Massachusetts.
"It's not some little phenomenon at the edge anymore," says Smith of women in the church.
Ironically, Weiss says that in evolving, the church has lost its ability to captivate potential new members. "It's lost its first love in Jesus Christ," he says. Weiss believes the Episcopal Church is shrinking, and he's taking it upon himself to bring more people into the fold of the kind of Anglican Christianity that he experienced while growing up in the Midwest and which he still holds dear.
Sitting in his office in an old laser factory off Camden Avenue, south of Campbell's downtown, Weiss speaks with all the texture of a charismatic missionary. He delivers his message in parables: The Episcopal Church is a dying tree that needs to be cut down if it shows no growth; the Anglican Mission is a free clinic set up near a decrepit hospital (the church) that no longer serves its patients well; life is a race in which the quality of the run, not the finishing place is important.
Weiss tells proudly of how a recent prayer walk in Oakland with other local pastors netted 600 converts and that during the last 15 years, he and a group of charismatic leaders have planted the seeds for 200 parishes throughout the Bay Area.
"I'm finally doing what I know God has called me to do," says Weiss.
Priests still within the Episcopal Church may be a bit less zealous than Weiss, but they're still doing some missionary work of their own.
The Rt. Rev. Richard Shimpfky, bishop of the Diocese of El Camino Real, says his Northern California membership stands at around 20,000, and it's grown substantially in the last several years due to an influx of Latino and Asian immigrants. Shimpfky adds that one of the largest Latino congregations in the U.S. Episcopal Church is now at San Jose's Trinity Cathedral.
The expansion came after Shimpfky's diocese resolved, after much reflection in yearly diocesan meetings, to "grow with new people," Shimpfky says.
That may indicate that Weiss and his former colleagues apparently aren't as far apart as they appear. Shimpfky says he doesn't agree with Weiss in that he's "protecting an older way of being and understanding." But the two men's individual takes on the recent economic downturn bear similarities. In boom times according to Shimpfky, it's difficult to get parishoners to think about much else other than their own economic success.
"People overlook their basic moorings," he says.
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The Rev. Wendy Smith, rector of St. Thomas' in Sunnyvale, has watched women's roles in the church grow to point that they're 'not some little phenomenon at the edge anymore.'
The economy's slide has hit Weiss's Christ the King parish hard, reducing its monthly income to just over half of its monthly costs. Weiss told his parishoners recently, "We're living in the bitter reward of materialism."
Weiss and Shimpfky, once good friends, still remain cordial; Shimpfky says he wasn't put off by Weiss' elevation to the position of bishop, though it strayed from U.S. Episcopal protocol: "I rejoice in it for Doug," says Shimpfky.
And Weiss insists he still is "squarely in" the Anglican community after archbishops from Rwanda and Malaysia oversaw his consecration in June, despite a letter from the Most Rev. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey that the move bordered on schism. The Anglican churches of Rwanda and Malaysia have adopted the parishes of the Anglican Mission, in an attempt to give them legitimacy.
With Weiss' Christ the King Church one of almost 40 parishes in the Anglican Mission nationwide, the movement is causing academic experts like the Rev. John Kater, a professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, to take a deeper look. He plans to bring the Anglican Mission up as a focus of discussion in a class this fall.
"Sometimes they're not taken as seriously as they need to be," says Kater.
Kater, like his colleagues in Silicon Valley parishes, can clearly delineate the narrowness of Weiss' views as opposed to the Episcopal Church as a whole.
But when it comes to styles of worship, the distinctions become more muddied. Weiss' services are more wide open than traditional Episcopal worship. Weiss allows for dramatic events like "speaking in tongues"--where a member of the congregation might be moved to call out a message from God--and physical healing through the "laying on of hands."
"It looks like an Episcopal service, but at the same time we have a lot of fun," says Weiss.
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The Rev. Ernest Cockrell, rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Saratoga, insists the Episcopal community still has 'a grace that allows us to listen to each other.'
Billy Bennett left that sort of "holy roller" church when he moved from a Pentacostal parish to St. Luke's in Los Gatos. For him, the broader tolerance of the Episcopal Church is still attractive, despite the staid, often predictable worship service within the denomination.
"The Episcopal Church is in a better position to move forward in a new century," says Bennett
But like other facets of life in a new century in which the political and ideological lines are constantly blurred and redrawn, the church will have to withstand a fracture that's neither clean nor complete.
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