Profile of a Bishop: Part II -
To Comfort the Afflicted and to Afflict the Comfortable

One doesn’t think of long-serving bishops as being on the cutting edge of the church. A bitter joke says the reason three bishops lay their hands on a new one is not to pass on the Holy Spirit, but to remove the new bishop’s spine. If that were true, the operation was a singular failure in the case of John Shelby Spong.

When he came to the Diocese of Newark as Coadjutor in 1976, we knew we were getting a bishop with a strong record on civil rights who supported the ordination of women. His friend and mentor, the late Presiding Bishop John Hines, led the Episcopal Church through a time of controversy with grace and integrity, the model Bishop Spong has tried to follow. A measure of his success is that while there are many in the church who love him, and many who hate him, almost no active Episcopalian is indifferent to the man or his message. Newark attracted Spong because it was centered in a riot-torn city, a place where there would be ample opportunity to expand his work for social and economic justice. He also came determined to continue his teaching ministry, through the education series that has brought internationally respected scholars to the diocese, and through his column in The VOICE which he crafted into a special teaching forum.

His convention addresses are trenchant analyses of the social context from which the church’s mission is inseparable. Serious issues like available and affordable health care and equal access to high-quality education are raised not just for our prayers, but in a serious, hands-on commitment to Episcopalians working for the good of all God’s people.

It is a tribute to the Bishop’s intellectual integrity that his views on hot-button issues do not remain static even as he articulates them publicly. Almost inexorably he has been led into controversy after controversy, and the issues that have brought him the most notoriety have been those concerned with sexuality.

His involvement started quietly enough. General Convention resolved in 1982 that the church should begin serious study of “changing patterns of family life.” Three or four years later, the Bishop commissioned a diocesan task force to study what he considered to be three key points: The overwhelming increase in young people living together outside of marriage; unmarried older people living together for various economic reasons; and whether people living in homosexual relationships could be called into the church’s desire to consecrate human partnership. The underlying theme was the pastoral recognition that sex inside of marriage is not always holy, but can be abused. Might it then follow that sex not blessed by the sacrament of matrimony might sometimes be holy, or at least tend in that direction?

From this tentative beginning, the Bishop and the diocese went forth into uncharted territory. Spong took his usual route, educating first his head and then assimilating his findings to his heart. A nationwide storm broke in 1987 when the pressreported the committee’s findings as endorsing gay marriage. Out of that publicity came the book, Living in Sin, solicited by Abingdon Press, but cancelled at the last moment because of hostile reaction to pre-publication ads. The book was soon picked up by HarperCollins, and outsold all his previous volumes. A book tour and numerous radio and TV talk shows followed. The outspoken Bishop found himself the target of anger from all sides. Opposition from conservative extremists led to his next book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.

Acting on his growing conviction that gay people should be fully included in the life of the church, Spong ordained Robert Williams in 1989. The wave of hostility Williams’ ordination generated even intruded upon the funeral service for Spong’s wife, Joan. She was buried from their old parish church in Richmond, and as the Bishop and his daughters sat beside the coffin a woman approached him, struck him across the shoulders with her cane, called him a “son of a bitch,” and strode out triumphantly through the pallbearers. But not all reaction was negative. When the Bishop thanked the lay ministers for taking time off from their jobs for the service, it turned out that all were from the Richmond chapter of Integrity and had come to serve as a show of their support. The Bishop who had once dismissed a gay vicar was well on the way to becoming a hero of the gay community as well as a target of conservative wrath.

In the midst of all of this was a very vulnerable man, struggling with life as a widower. If Joan’s long illness had been agonizing for him, the loneliness that followed her death was intolerable. Long before he was ready, he began to be besieged by people who just happened to have an extra ticket to something fun. The attention repelled him, despite his unhappiness at being alone. He began to work even harder, scheduling meetings late into the night so as not to come home alone.

Unbeknownst to him, the woman who was to become his life’s partner was already a growing part of his world. Many of us cannot imagine Bishop Spong without Christine by his side, but it took Jack himself a while to realize how much she meant to him. Christine had been a family friend for years, one of the few whom Joan had continued to enjoy seeing. Finding herself in need of a job, Christine was hired to fill the position of diocesan administrator and Secretary of Convention (now held by Michael Francaviglia). Bishop Spong smiles recalling that he was not part of the hiring committee and says that Christine and his secretary, Wanda Hollenbeck, between them proceeded to turn the diocese upside down.

The two women positioned the diocesan staff to be more approachable, and in an effort to improve morale began to plan social events for groups of clergy and their spouses, co-hosted by the Bishop and a member of his staff. Christine began to call on clergy, drawing them out about their ministry and their concerns, convincing them that the diocese was their partner in ministry, not their adversary. She became an invaluable co-worker, and though the Bishop was still afraid of dating and blind to being a supremely eligible catch, Christine was someone he felt comfortable escorting to events.

In the summer of 1989 Christine shared with Jack a frightening concern with her own health that mercifully turned out to be a false alarm. The scare, however, convinced him how much he cared for her. By September they were talking marriage, and the Bishop characteristically revealed his plan to the diocese in his VOICE column.

The wedding was the calm before a storm, the last light moment for some time to come. Though the couple celebrated their wedding on January 1, 1990 with great joy, the hurricane over the Williams’ ordination whirled around them for the first six months of their marriage. Today the Bishop freely admits he couldn’t have survived without Christine’s unwavering support. Only one of his fellow bishops voiced approval, and the Presiding Bishop caved in under pressure, condemning the ordination. The House of Bishops voted to dissociate themselves from the Bishop and the Diocese of Newark on the gay issue, but within a year they were split almost evenly. Bishop Spong addressed the House in a moving statement that changed a number of minds and inspired two married bishops to “come out of the closet” to him in the process. There is sadness in his eyes as he recounts his experience, but also a twinkle as he sums it all up with, “Life’s been very exciting.”

Part of that excitement has been the exploration of what it means to have a spouse who is truly an equal partner. The couple obviously adore each other. This experience of mutual respect and support in his marriage has deepened the Bishop’s conviction that those not especially called by God to a life of celibacy deserve the chance to sanctify their relationships with the church’s blessing. He remains determined to affirm the biblical teaching that it is not good for human beings to be alone.

He looks forward to retirement with mixed emotions. It is in many ways the end of one life for him, but he hopes that it will give him a chance to be a full-time teacher in some academic institution. He is growing more mellow and less combative, and tries not to make any commitments that his successor will have to carry out. He is concerned that the Church grow to meet the challenges of the coming century, and has called a commission to study new forms of ministry.

It is more than a little ironic that so many people still see Bishop Spong as a theological rebel and iconoclast. While repelled by the assertion that any style of churchmanship is the only right one, Spong is undeniably an old-fashioned Bible- centered, scholarly, low-church Evangelical with a social conscience somewhat in the mold of the equally controversial English theologian, J.A.T. Robinson. Spong's hope for the church is that it can learn to tell its old, old story in new ways the modern world can hear.

We must, he says, embrace the knowledge revolution that has reshaped our view of the cosmos and humankind’s place in it. We must also embrace the social evolution that is recasting the roles of women and men in relation to each other. And we must replace the tribalism that has infected our religious life with keen awareness of our interdependence. The defeat of the Concordat with the Lutheran Church is obviously a great disappointment to a man who looks forward to the day when religious dialogue will take place among the great faiths of the world, not among the various denominations of Christianity. Old forms of Christianity, he asserts, are dying because they have not been flexible enough to carry the great and complacency-shattering message of God’s promiscuous goodness and love.

It is impossible to sum up so complex a career in a word. But honesty might come near. Jack Spong has certainly challenged us to live up to the mandate of the Gospel and to cast aside even the dearest of old ways in order to be honest to ourselves, honest to each other, and honest to God. Whatever anyone might think of Jack Spong, he has lived up to the old definition of Christian ministry: “To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”

Ellen Barrett is priest associate, Bergen Episcopal Ministry. This concludes the series on Bishop Spong. The Bishop's Voice will resume when he returns from sabbatical later this fall.

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