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The Emerging Church in
Northern Michigan
Marquette, Michigan, sits on Lake Superior about 300 miles south and slightly east of Thunder Bay, Canada. While we were there, Christine and I were made honorary “Yoopers,” a name derived from the initials UP for Upper Peninsula. It is a remote part of Michigan since its land mass stretches over both Michigan and the State of Wisconsin. Its population feels cut off from the mainland, not unlike the feelings we have encountered in Alaska and in Alice Springs, Australia. The state government in Lansing tends not to pay much attention to this vast land mass that contains few voters. Marquette is the largest city in the Upper Peninsula and its inhabitants number less than 25,000 people. Northern Michigan University is there, a part of the statewide University of Michigan system, but its 9000 students are a far cry from the numbers attending the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor or Michigan State University in East Lansing. Marquette is the regional health care center for the entire Upper Peninsula, so that is a major economic factor. Once this was a lumber and iron ore mining area, but both have declined dramatically from their heights some 50 years ago. The Upper Peninsula is bounded primarily by Lake Superior, the largest and the cleanest of the Great Lakes. When the winter is severe, as it was last winter, about 98% of this vast inland sea is frozen solid. The average winter brings about 240 inches of snow. We met, however, in this seemingly distant place, some of the warmest, most receptive people we have encountered anywhere in the world. I want to share with you, my readers, something of this remarkable area of our nation and of our church.
The invitation was to launch the first annual Diocesan lecture series on “Being Christian in the 21st Century.” The inviting entity was the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan, which is coterminous with the Upper Peninsula. This diocese has been through turbulent years as they struggled to redefine what church means in an under-populated area where all of the traditional symbols of church life are for them economically impossible. The overhead cost of full time clergy serving congregations in buildings that require full time maintenance simply did not work for them. Distances between congregations also made it almost impossible for one priest to serve several congregations, which is the typical way of cutting costs.
In 1982, this Diocese elected a priest serving a large church in Evanston, Illinois, to be its bishop. His name was Tom Ray and, together with his wife Brenda, they moved to Marquette. He was and is one of the most creative bishops I have ever known. Tom and Brenda began to run the diocese as a kind of “Mom and Pop shop.” For some time they lived in an apartment above the Diocesan offices. It cut down on expenses and, as he says, he could walk to work. His example led the clergy and people there to develop something they called “Mutual Baptismal Ministry.” They began to train and equip lay people to do the ministry in their congregations. Since that included administering the sacraments, that meant that some people had to become ordained. They began to call these specially trained persons “local presbyters” and their job was to see that the bread and wine of the Eucharist was properly “consecrated,” so that the people could receive communion regularly. Other lay people were trained to be preachers. The desire was to keep these two functions separate, so as to encourage another religious hierarchy from developing. Still others they trained to be pastoral caregivers to work with people in “trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity.” They hired professionals to help these people to become grief counselors, marriage counselors and to prepare young people to enter holy matrimony. None of these functions were paid. The small churches in the Upper Peninsula with limited resources were equipping a “ministry team” of local people, who became responsible for the worship life, the Christian education and the pastoral care of that particular congregation. The locally ordained “sacerdotalist” was to serve primarily as a priest for that congregation only. This ministry team in each church was part of the people, not the employees of the people. It began to look like Martin Luther’s “the priesthood of all believers.” The learning process was ongoing since the temptation was to revert to the old patterns in which the clergy did the ministry and the people supported them. Their program began to spread to other parts of the nation such as Nevada, Utah, Alaska and Montana, where distances were vast and resources thin. This diocese was dreaming dreams of what the Christian Church might look like in the next century.
The first crisis occurred in 1998 when Bishop Ray, having reached the time of retirement, announced his plans to do so in 1999. The Diocese now had the chance in their choice of the next bishop to affirm or to reject the direction Bishop Ray had set. The election of their new bishop would be a referendum on this strategy. They chose Bishop Ray’s first deputy, the Rev. Jim Kelsey, who had worked hand in glove with this bishop to develop these new forms of ministry. The election was almost unanimous. The Diocese clearly was on a path they did not want to reverse. For seven years under Bishop Kelsey’s leadership, the work prospered and the diocese thrived. Then tragedy struck. At age 54, Bishop Kelsey was killed in an automobile accident. A referendum was upon them once again in their choice of a new bishop.
Not surprisingly, again the election was almost unanimous. Making decisions by consensus rather than by majority vote, they nominated one candidate and he was quickly elected. His name was Kevin Thew-Forrester, the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, whose wife was also a priest. Both were graduates of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He was a brilliant man, who roamed the edges of Christianity. He was conversant with the other great religious systems of the world and was not afraid to draw wisdom from them. He was also a sensitive liturgist and a thinking theologian. He moved to have the church’s liturgies escape the hierarchical images of God as a king, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere above the sky and intervening miraculously in human history to answer prayers or to accomplish the divine will. He saw God primarily in the life of the people. He was uniquely qualified to lead this diocesan enterprise to its next level, having been deeply a part of its life. Tragedy, however, struck again, but this time in a totally unimaginable way.
As so often happens in the church, a lone critic, one who was actually an ordained deacon, feeling threatened and diminished by what this diocese was doing, one who liked the status of vestments and leading worship, rallied others to form an internet opposition campaign against the bishop-elect, calling him a variety of what this deacon thought of as derogatory titles. “Thew-Forrester was a Buddhist,” he said; “a radical;” probably “an atheist.” He urged the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church not to confirm the election. The conservative church press made this deacon a hero. His challenge came at a time when the bishops were weary of controversy. They had been buffeted by the criticism of those who had opposed the ordination of women and especially of allowing women to become bishops. They were exhausted by the battle for the rights of gay and lesbian people to take their place in the church. They had courageously supported the election of Gene Robinson, a partnered gay priest, when he was elected bishop of New Hampshire. They had been criticized by leaders in the worldwide Anglican Communion in general and in particular by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who always put the unity of the church ahead of both truth and justice. So when this attack on Thew-Forrester heated up, the bishops folded visibly. They challenged him on “Atonement Theology,” on his attachment to Buddhist meditative practices and on his unwillingness to jump through the hoops they required in what they believed was an exercise of their ecclesiastical authority. Because Kevin would not affirm the dated theological code words they held before him, they ultimately voted not to confirm his election. The rector of their largest church, the clear choice of the clergy and people of this diocese to carry on their magnificent experiment in ministry, was shot down by the majority of the House of Bishops, most of whom did not know where Northern Michigan was. It was as if the liberals had decided that the time had come to throw a sop to the beleaguered conservatives. What better place to do so than in a small rural diocese in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, whose cries of pain and betrayal would be heard by very few. That decision crushed this diocese at least momentarily. They could not believe they were being treated this way. It was one of the most shameful acts the House of Bishops ever perpetrated upon a member diocese. This same House of Bishops has time after time confirmed people elected by a diocese, who were absolutely dedicated to carrying the church back into the 13th century. This body has even confirmed the election of a bishop, who wanted to leave the church if homosexual people were ever ordained and he did so. In this decision, however, they refused to confirm the election of one who might have had the vision to lead this church into the 21st century. It was an act of moral cowardice and inept leadership.
This courageous diocese regrouped and elected once again one of their own, again almost unanimously. His name is Rayford Ray from Rapid River, Michigan, a gentle, good priest, serving a small congregation in this diocese and thus dedicated to the patterns of ministry that were developing. Kevin Thew-Forrester remains today to serve his church in Marquette and, in a tribute to the largeness of his spirit, he continues to work for the vision he was chosen to lead, but not allowed to do so by the bishops of his church.
Kevin, a born visionary and a deeply loving spirit will make a difference in that diocese, but the National Church will be robbed of the impressive gifts he might have brought to the whole church. “A little child shall lead them,” says the Bible. Perhaps it is also true that a little diocese will lead this church, no matter what its own hierarchy does to it.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Shirley Patterson, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
In the early 70s my husband and I attended a Unity School of Christianity at the Unity Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. They seemed to be saying that the scriptures were to be interpreted metaphysically. Would you agree with that? If so, just what does that mean? I am a former Catholic nun and my husband a former Catholic priest. I find your writings clearly express what I can believe about the Jesus of history. For seven years now I have been an active member of the ELCA Church.
Answer:
Dear Shirley,
There is a wonderful Unity Church in Little Rock and on two occasions I have had the privilege of lecturing there and have always enjoyed that contact. On both occasions they had a female vocalist that I especially enjoyed.
Unity does tend to read the scriptures metaphysically. That is a slippery word, but as they see it, it means first, that they do not read the scriptures literally and second, they see the scriptures pointing beyond its words to a realm of transcendent meaning that is not always apparent to the casual reader. I have always enjoyed the Unity Movement. They wallow neither in the bankrupt tradition of original sin nor in the story of Jesus as God’s divine rescue of this fallen creature that was achieved in the crucifixion, which theology I think of primarily as a guilt-producing violation of Christianity’s deepest meaning. They emphasize human potential and human growth and seek to empower people to become all that they can be. That is quite consistent, I believe, with the Christian message especially as the more mystical gospel of John understands it.
Whether Unity would meet the yearnings of a former nun and priest for a rich liturgical life, I cannot say, but I do find them to be pastorally sensitive and willing to accept everyone as he or she is and to nurture everyone’s faith into new dimensions. I hope you will give them a look.
John Shelby Spong
Announcements
Last week for our Weekly Liturgy we sent a BIG thank you to Bishop Spong!
Read More Here!
