Gay dean cheered here amid Episcopal dispute

While many Seattle Episcopalians are still cheering because a gay man was appointed dean of St. Mark's Cathedral, a group of conservative Episcopalians is huddling this week in South Carolina to plan ways to block church blessings for same-sex couples and gay or lesbian priests.

The Rev. Robert Taylor, installed Saturday with pomp and pageantry as chief pastor of St. Mark's, the central cathedral for Puget Sound Episcopalians, is the highest-ranking, openly gay priest in the country.

Taylor has encouraged parishioners to talk about his sexuality since he arrived in Seattle in the fall with his longtime partner.

It is something he accepted many years ago, he says, when God spoke to him as he was praying to change. "Robert," he says God told him, "you're doing to yourself what they're trying to do to you. Denying you're made in the image of God."

Few people have protested Taylor's appointment. Only one family has boycotted services since he began preaching at St. Mark's, he says.

But his installation came amid a dispute over biblical teaching on homosexuality that has polarized Episcopalians and other Protestants.

The bitterness bubbled over with this week's meeting in South Carolina of about a dozen traditionalists. They are led by two U.S. bishops who were consecrated in January in a secret ceremony in Singapore by a group of conservative prelates from Southeast Asia and Africa. The bishops returned to the U.S. with a proposal to lead the church "back to orthodoxy" where homosexuality and the ordination of women are concerned.

A major U.S. church commission recently refused to take a stand on the role of gays in the church, saying the church is "not ready, theologically or scientifically, to say a defining word about the life of homosexuals in the church."

Given the commission ruling and a similar position adopted in 1998 by a majority of the world's Anglican bishops at a conference in England, the church has no official policy regarding homosexuality.

Many dioceses have gone their own way in approving same-sex unions and gay priests.

Some Episcopalians fear a schism in the worldwide Anglican communion - a denomination of 70 million people, including 2.4 million U.S. Episcopalians.

Taylor, a native South African and refugee from that country's bloody civil-rights struggle, is not shy about discussing the tumult in his denomination.

Christians "strive to be more like Christ," he says, "and more and more people find sexual orientation to be part of that. But that is only part of what we are. There have always been deans of cathedrals and deacons and priests and bishops who are gay. This is part of who we are, not all that we are."

Taylor has barely settled into his cathedral office, even though he has been in Seattle for months. Cardboard boxes are stacked head-high in one corner; brocade vestments from the installation are strewn across a chair.

The ceremony was attended by Taylor's mentor, South African Archbishop and civil-rights leader Desmond Tutu, and a friend in the trenches, the Rev. Catherine Roskam, a New York bishop.

As dean, Taylor says, his vision for St. Mark's reaches from Seattle, where it is a community gathering place for people of all faiths, into the churches of the diocese and on to partner congregations in Russia, the Mideast and South Africa.

That vision has nothing to do with his sexual orientation, he says.

Seattle has greeted Taylor warmly, but it isn't always that way for gay Episcopal priests. The Rev. Thomas Bigelow of Saint Luke's Episcopal Church in Renton lost about one-third of his congregation when he told it he was gay.

"I couldn't seem to reach them to say I was the same priest I'd always been," Bigelow says. "We tend to think of the church as one entity, but there's a big difference between Renton and Seattle."

Christians have long used Scripture to support cultural mores, Bigelow and Taylor point out.

"But no one believes slavery or keeping women from voting is right anymore," Bigelow says. "I don't see how the case could be built from the Bible for slavery, but it was good church folk who did that. We became aware it was not God's will that we have slavery, and we changed what we taught about it."

But the group meeting in South Carolina, a fledgling organization called First Promise, doesn't want the church's traditional teachings against homosexuality changed.

The group is led by the two new bishops - the Rev. Charles Murphy, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pawleys Island, S.C., and the Rev. John Rodgers, former dean of the evangelical Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa.

The bishops declined to talk yesterday about First Promise. One of their supporters, the Rev. Tim Surratt, a priest at Murphy's church, said members believe "there is a crisis of theology in the church, not of politics, a lack of unity and clarity of issues.

"The question is not Robert Taylor. It is that the church's response to emerging opinions does not necessarily reflect everyone's thought on what the Bible teaches. The question is how to keep an eye on both Scripture and the culture."

The Episcopalians' presiding bishop, Frank Griswold, says he was "appalled" by the consecration of Murphy and Rodgers as bishops. In England, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the Singapore ceremony "illegal under church practice and tradition" and said Anglican bishops will discuss the matter in March.

First Promise doesn't speak for many traditionalists in the church, said the Rev. Dorsey McConnell of St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Edmonds. "I don't know of any priests in this area who would be against ordaining women priests."

Ordaining gays or blessing same-sex unions is another matter, McConnell said. "When you say homosexuality is normative, you're saying that it is as much a part of God's design as heterosexual marriage."

Despite First Promise's efforts and the objections of priests like McConnell, Taylor's position as the only openly gay dean promises to be short-lived.

Cathedrals in other parts of the country are expected to announce the appointments of a gay and a lesbian dean soon. And a gay priest in New Hampshire who has come within a few votes of being named bishop in two dioceses promises to continue trying.

The dissension is unsettling to Taylor, who didn't want to comment on First Promise or its goal to convince the church that the Bible would ban homosexuality.

"I want us to keep talking, to keep the dialogue going," Taylor says. "I want us to continue communion and community as a church. We're all looking for the same ancient and holy truths about God, but we must keep talking about it."

McConnell agrees. "For us to hold the church together is going to require some real inventiveness. You do that by hanging in there together and praying and talking and not building larger stumbling blocks to the world."

Sally Macdonald's phone message number is 206-464-2248. Her e-mail address is smacdonald@seattletimes.com