Profile of a Bishop: John Shelby Spong

by Ellen Barrett

Sitting across the dinner table from this tall, distinguished man with the soft voice and courtly manner of his Southern heritage, one would hardly recognize the Jack Spong who gives the right wing of the Episcopal Church such nightmares. He seems downright mellow as he discusses winding up his term as Bishop of Newark; that is, until some challenge brings a glint of fire to his eye. On the subject of controversy, Jack Spong is clear about the high emotional price one pays for standing up for principle, but he says with equal clarity, "I would rather die in a confrontation than die running away from it. When I become convinced of something, I have to hit it head on; I cannot be diplomatic."

Bishop Spong has come a long way from Charlotte, North Carolina where he was born, June 16th, 1931. It is a distance more of spirit than geography, and the mileage is beginning to show on his finely carved face.

Charlotte was a good place to hatch a radical churchman. Lord Cornwallis, after a stopover during the American Revolution, christened the town "a nest of hornets," plaguing those who would retain the established order. Not much in the future bishop's early years except a love of basketball hinted at the future hornet. Nor would one have expected the Anglo- Catholic altar boy to grow up to be a bishop who rarely wears a miter. The South of Spong's youth was a place few people under fifty would recognize. He never shared a classroom, a restroom or a water fountain or lunch counter with a person of color. Even among people of good will and better manners, the color line was something as solid as the Great Wall of China. So too was the idea that women might be well educated and talented: such achievements were strictly ornamental, not practical.

Popular religious culture in the South was conservative, Bible-based and evangelical. At worst it was blindly Fundamentalist. At best it was serious and, within the limitations of the surrounding political milieu, thoughtful. White Southerners thought God was a Protestant gentleman, as was God's only begotten Son. A few hated Jews, most just didn't know any. Homosexuality was an abomination, but nobody connected it with the charming old bachelors who subscribed to the symphony and escorted widows to society parties.

Born into a middle-class family with an alcoholic father who died when his elder son was twelve, the young Jack became the man of the house, a role he still plays in looking after his ninety-year-old mother. He found a mentor in the local parish priest, Robert Crandall, and wanted to be just like this wonderful man, even serving at the 8:00 service on a regular basis when none of the other boys wanted to get up. The boy found not only a substitute father, but also the beginning of a call that would draw him to the priesthood. Crandall probably influenced Spong's brother William's decision to seek Orders as well.

Impatient to get on with his life's goal, he entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, living in the parish house at the Chapel of the Cross just beside the campus. Perennially hardstrapped for cash, Spong was the proverbial church mouse. The first member of his family to go to university, he finished his undergraduate work in three years. By marrying his classmate, Joan Ketner, Spong dodged the rule that would have postponed his marriage until after graduation from Virginia Seminary. Joan was the major breadwinner during this period, stopping work at the C.I.A. only shortly before the birth of their first daughter. He speaks fondly and sadly of his first wife, who died of cancer in 1988. A zoology major, Joan was perhaps the first woman Jack had met who rebelled against the claustrophobic nature of her expected role. The future supporter of women's issues was bewildered that the mother of his growing brood (eventually three daughters) was not content as a housewife and mother.

Joan's discontent, however, eventually deepened into a paranoia that the bishop still finds hard to discuss. Mentally ill for some fifteen years, in the last five years of her life she had all but cut herself off from outside contact. She refused treatment for cancer even in the final stages. During these years Spong grew ever closer to his teenagers, becoming a mother as well as a father to them, though he recalls that Joan was always sweet and loving to their daughters. He also turned more and more to study and writing as a solace and a way to put order into the chaos of his domestic life. He teases that writing has become a habit, one that has produced a book every year or two since 1973.

In that loneliness was also born the beginning of his conviction that God was right, "It is not good for a human being to be alone." Eventually, about the time of Joan's death, this would lead him to affirm the relationships of homosexuals as well as those of heterosexual people living in non-traditional arrangements.

The social radical was not yet born when the young deacon was ordained just after his twenty-fourth birthday, nor when he was ordained priest six months later on Holy Innocents' Day, 1955. Seeds that were to develop into the main themes of his career were growing, however, when he was put in charge of St. Joseph's Church, Durham, North Carolina, just between the East and West Campuses of Duke University.

Listening to the bishop, it is clear that he loves being a pastor and a teacher. It was at St. Joseph's, with its mixed congregation including medical students and Duke faculty as well as the mill workers for whom the parish was originally founded, that he served his apprenticeship in both. One of his first discussion groups was a weekly session where his parishioners dissected his sermons--a daunting but extraordinarily fine lesson in the homiletic arts. Delighting in pastoral calling, hospital visits and youth work, he also attracted a large number of talented lay people to work with him. Between forty and sixty parishioners were presented for confirmation each year, mostly Duke students. It became a part of his vocation to minister to young people from fundamentalist backgrounds and teach them there was good news in the Good News of Christ, to show that religion is not incompatible with intellectual inquiry.

St. Joseph's thrived under the young priest's care, and he developed friendships which endure to this day. After a couple of years, however, ambition took him to be rector of Calvary Parish, Tarboro, North Carolina and its host of little missions. These were the years of controversy over school desegregation in the South, and Spong was in the forefront of the battle. The local sheriff was a member of his congregation, and Spong announced that he expected black school children to be protected, and that he was going to be there with them as they entered the previously all-white school. The sheriff was stuck; to protect his rector he had to protect the children. Supporting integration in North Carolina in 1959 was not a way to popularity. But the struggle was exhilarating, and Spong found others to fight alongside him for the equality of black people as children of God. It was his first serious foray into the arena of social controversy.

During this time his journalistic career took off, as he edited the North Carolina Churchman. He also served on the Executive Committee and chaired the Evangelism Committee of the Diocese. His love of teaching led him not only to a place on the Board of Directors at Kanuga, but to regular lectures at the famous conference center. This was the beginning of his growing reputation as an educator.

After eight years, he accepted the call to be rector of St. John's, Lynchburg, Virginia, returning to his beloved milieu of a college town, where he introduced serious textual criticism into his adult Bible study, to the horror of local fundamentalists. He also continued to serve in diocesan administration, being a member and then President of the Standing Committee of Southwest Virginia.

In 1969 Spong was called to be the rector of St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Virginia. The move helped his early promise develop and grow in startling ways. Not only was he elected to the Executive Council of the Diocese of Virginia and a Deputy to General Convention, he began to teach a televised Bible class as well. It was there that he began to explore the seminal relationship between Judaism and Christianity, especially in two books, This Hebrew Lord, and Dialogue: In Search of Jewish-Christian Understanding.

Before accepting the call to St. Paul's, Spong announced his intention to teach a Sunday adult Bible class and his expectation that the class would be well attended. St. Paul's is a downtown church, and the thought of coming an hour early struck his parishioners as silly, at least until the project got rolling. Soon some three hundred people a week were attending. Books grew out of the class, and Seabury Press literally hauled him off the beach to rework his book on the Lord's Prayer as Seabury's Book for Lent.

A local rabbi was so impressed with This Hebrew Lord, despite his disagreement with the premise, that the two of them debated the book three Friday nights at the synagogue and three Sunday mornings at St. Paul's to record-breaking crowds. Local radio picked up the debates, and the pair were offered a twenty-week cable TV contract to continue. The effort to explain Jesus in Jewish terms in this dialogue had many questioning Spong's orthodoxy, but a close look at his teaching reveals not heresy, but an attempt to tell the Christian story in words intelligible to the world at the end of the millennium. The Jewish roots of our faith are still a major teaching theme for Bishop Spong, combining the best of classic, Evangelical fervor with tough biblical scholarship. His first nomination for the episcopate came in the middle of this project, from Delaware, but he withdrew his name, convinced he was not yet called to leave Richmond. Soon after, however, the Diocese of Newark called, and this time he allowed his name to stand. Since he was almost certain that he stood no chance of winning, he went through the pre-election "dog and pony show" speaking his mind in a manner unusual among candidates. The Holy Spirit, who often has plans we cannot forecast, turned this unique candor to his favor, and in 1976 John Shelby Spong was consecrated Bishop Coadjutor of Newark, succeeding as Diocesan in 1978. Neither he nor the Episcopal Church has been the same since.

Ellen Barrett is Associate Missioner of B.E.A.M.