Column by Rev. David M. Felten
February 21, 2018

The following is taken from an interview with Bishop John Shelby Spong on September 18^th, 2018. Recorded at his home in Richmond, Virginia, it has been edited for length and thematic focus.

David Felten: Despite conflict and resistance, you’ve managed to help “move the needle” on a number of issues over the course of your career. Where do you think you’ve had the biggest impact?

Jack Spong: Well, I think they’re all the same issue, but with different manifestations. The first one was race. We are ethnic people and the first thing we had to do was to get beyond racial identity.

I grew up in the South in a very segregated world. I didn’t know how racist I was, but I was always uncomfortable with it. I remember when I was about three years old, my father hired two men to help him build a brick wall in the side yard. He told me I could help them and I looked forward to that. When the day came, the two men arrived, and they were both Negroes. Black men. One was an older black man, and one was a younger black man, his helper. During the course of that morning, as I was helping, this older black man said something to me. I don’t remember what it was. And I responded the way I’d been taught to respond to my elders: I said, “Yes, sir.” Or, “No, sir.”  I don’t remember which.

My father stopped what he was doing, hauled me physically into the house, sat me down and told me, “You do not say ‘sir’ to a Negro.” That was in the 1930s. I didn’t know what that meant. My father taught me to say “sir” to my elders. This man was my elder. I didn’t understand. There was truly something in that mix that I didn’t understand. And I did what people usually do: I filed it. And I thought to myself, “My father’s wrong.”

That’s not a radical thing. Every child, by the time he’s 13, thinks his father is hopeless and wrong in everything.

David Felten: But at age three, that’s pretty perceptive.

Jack Spong: Something about that was just negative to me.

Then I went to school. I didn’t know I went to segregated schools. It didn’t occur to me there were no black children there. But I had an experience when I was in about the fifth grade where I went over to another school in Charlotte. It was a black school with black teachers and a black principal. I just sat there with my eyes wide open: “Blacks do go to school. They just don’t go to my school.”

I remember that we were in an assembly. We were honored guests of this black school. I think the principal who took us over there was pretty courageous. It was 1942 and the race question wasn’t raised in the South. They sat all of us honored guests on the stage and in the course of that morning, they went through their ritual: they sang the National Anthem, they said the Pledge to the flag, and they said The Lord’s Prayer together.

Well, I knew all those things. But, so did all those black children. They prayed the same prayer I prayed to the same Lord. But we didn’t pray it together. I wondered why that was. It just didn’t make sense to me. And again, I didn’t know what to do with that, because I was about 10 years old.

Later – when I was 15, 17, 18 – I was active in the Young People of the Diocese of North Carolina. I got to be elected President of the Young People and went to a church convention. There I met another person who told me he was the President of the Young People of North Carolina, the Episcopalians of North Carolina. I said, “How could that be? I was elected President.” But he was black – and that’s the first time I knew we had two systems, a black Young People and a white Young People. His name is Perry Leazer. He’s still a friend of mine.

I went to my Bishop and said, “I think we ought to have a meeting, an annual convention (which they had every year of all the white Young People). But why don’t we invite Perry Leazer and the black Young People? (we called them ‘colored’ Young People at that point). And the Bishop looked at me and said, “You know I just don’t believe the people of North Carolina are ready for that.”

Well, I was a person in North Carolina. And I was ready for that. I wondered who he was talking about – I remember wondering about that. The Bishop was a godly man. I had great respect for him. But I suddenly said to myself, “He’s like my father. He’s wrong. He hadn’t thought about that idea.”

Well, those are just experiences of my youth. But that became a huge issue. I was in seminary when Brown v. Board of Education was passed and I knew that was going to dominate my life as I stayed in the South. And it did. I couldn’t do a thing in Lynchburg or in Richmond or in Tarboro (the three churches I served) that didn’t have to take race into consideration.

Today we’ve got an African American presiding Bishop of the Episcopal church. It just makes my heart warm. He was also the Bishop of North Carolina, my diocese, before he was elected. That’s one revolution. And the heroes in that movement are Martin Luther King, and Jesse Jackson, and Desmond Tutu, and just impressive people that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.

So that’s one revolution – and it’s not considered very revolutionary today. It’s been a long time. But that was an enormous revolution in consciousness. Now we’ve had a black President. I was so proud to have a black President.

The second revolution is women. I didn’t know I was a sexist, a patriarchal sexist, but I was. But that’s the way I was raised. My mother used to never let me do anything in the kitchen except take out the garbage. That was man’s work. Everything else was women’s work. And I learned to cook, and I learned I was a good cook. And my mother never could understand that: “That’s not something men do.”

In the church, women were the “auxiliary.” That’s the strangest thing in the world. We called them the “auxiliary” to the church. They weren’t “the church.” The church was male and women were auxiliary to the church.

So, we had a great battle. I was in Richmond when it began. I remember appointing a woman to be a lay reader. That doesn’t seem like a very revolutionary thing today, but then it was just radical. She was an English woman who spoke beautiful English. She stood up and read the lessons and the congregation about fell over. When she administered the chalice at communion, nobody came to her side of the altar!

Girls couldn’t be acolytes. Well, as a father of three daughters, I didn’t know why girls couldn’t be acolytes, so I appointed the first girl to be an acolyte and put her on at the 8:00 service (a service where only the holy few are there). I knew I was in trouble when she fainted dead away in the middle of the service – but I just knew we had to tap the leadership of women.

We had never had a woman on the vestry of our church in Richmond. We tried several times. I’d get them to be nominated but they’d never be elected. So, I went to the richest woman in our church (whose pledge to the church was bigger than most people could think about) and I asked her if she’d be a candidate for the vestry. She agreed. I had her nominated and dared that church to turn down the biggest giver they had. And they didn’t. They elected her. She was, without a doubt, the worst vestry woman I’ve had. She was to the right of Attila the Hun. But she broke the barrier – and I gave thanks for her every day for breaking that barrier. And after that, we had a stream of good women who were of the generations they represented.

And then to nominate women to be priests: I think I was responsible for women being priests – I know I was for England – I ordained the first English woman priest. When we brought African Bishops to my diocese while I was the Bishop, they would see women priests working. They’d go back home and they’d ordain women priests in Uganda and Kenya and in Liberia. I think I was responsible for having women enter the priesthood in those churches, too.

And today, that’s not an issue. We’ve had a presiding Bishop who’s a woman. And even England, as slow as they are, now has significant women Bishops. They haven’t yet become the Archbishop of Canterbury, but they will. And that was the second revolution.

We uncapped black Americans, and we uncapped white women, and black women, too. The new Bishop of our diocese is a black woman. And that’s a very important thing.

David Felten: And the third revolution was the affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQ folks.

Jack Spong: I was in the center of that, too. I don’t know how I happened to be in the center of so many! I don’t think it’s because I started out liberal. I was raised as homophobic as anybody. And I didn’t know what a homosexual was until I was 15, 16 years old. And then when I heard the word, and somebody told me what it meant, I assumed the definition of my church: If you were liberal, these are people we pitied – they were sick. If you were conservative, these are people that should be condemned because they’ve chosen an evil lifestyle.

Well, I became convinced that to be a homosexual meant you simply were responding to a difference in your own internal being. Nobody chooses to be homosexual. You don’t choose to be heterosexual. As soon as that was clear, it was clear to me that we’d done something terrible to the homosexual population. I don’t remember knowing but one homosexual person before I was a bishop, and that was a sickly woman who fulfilled all the stereotypes that I’d grown up with. She was sort of sickly and that’s what I thought homosexuals were.

Then I went to Newark and I experienced homosexuals in the priesthood and homosexuals in the lay leadership of my church. And they weren’t even ashamed! I couldn’t believe that that was true. So, I had to do some learning.

I went to Cornell School of Medicine and talked to a doctor friend of mine named Robert Lahita. He invited me to come over and see what research they were doing on sexuality and I did. I worked with him for about six months. I met all the doctors over there and not-a-one-of-them thought homosexuality was evil. They just saw it was different. But red hair is different. Left-handedness is different. You can be different without being evil. They were all convinced it had nothing to do with choice – that people didn’t choose their sexuality.

And when I got that through my head, then I had to act on it – ‘cause you can’t believe something and not act on it. And so I became open to the possibility of ordaining gay people. I ordained the first man – I was told that I had ordained the first homosexual man, but that was laughable – I ordained the first man who was living in a publicly acknowledged homosexual relationship. In the end, he didn’t turn out to be a very good choice, but he still accomplished the purpose.

There was a revolution in the church: they fought – unbelievable. I had death threats and all sorts of things. And that was probably, emotionally, the most difficult of the three. But now that’s so over. Gene Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire and he was confirmed after a mighty revolution in the House of Bishops. This was three years after I retired. He became a great bishop and since then, we’ve had other gay and lesbian bishops. In New York, a lesbian ran second in the biggest diocese in our country, a lesbian ran second to the man who won, who just barely beat her out.

I look at the church and the enormous revolution we’ve gone through: we’ve got gay people serving openly all over the church today – 35 in my diocese when I retired. I don’t know how many there are now. Probably a good many more than that. But they’re everywhere and it’s not even controversial.

I remember when George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury came to the United States and addressed the House of Bishops. He said, “It’s time for the church to turn away from their concerns about sexuality and get around to preaching the Gospel.” And I stood up and said, “That is preaching the Gospel. You can’t separate people out like that.” George Carey eventually retired as probably the most unsuccessful Archbishop of Canterbury we ever had.

But the church has moved passed that. And that gives me great courage. I look back and see heroes in the church who were hiding in their closets and doing great work and serving in places where heterosexual couples wouldn’t like to go. They’d be in the inner cities transforming those cities.

So, we’ve come a long way in those three revolutions and I think the church is more whole, it’s more holy, it’s truer to its nature, in those things. And I really was glad to be a part of all three of those revolutions.

David Felten: And every one of them involved doing the hard work of educating yourself.

Jack Spong: That’s right. And educating the people, too. You couldn’t do that if you weren’t committed to the institution. It was in the institution that I had the people and I educated the people. When I was the Bishop of Newark, we had a lecture series called “New Dimensions”, and three or four times each year I’d bring to that diocese one of the great leaders of our church, it was just a wonderful series. And they would do a day of lectures. There was this constant stream of new ideas coming in and changing the way people think. We raised up a whole new generation of people.

And that’s what has to be. You can’t run the church for the benefit of those who are in it, you run the church for the benefit of those who aren’t in it. And you keep opening the doors and cracking the structures and bringing people in. And sure, they get upset. You can’t be a Christian without being controversial, I’m convinced. But you go ahead and be controversial. It’s important that you love people while you’re doing this. That’s the key. I loved even the people who disagreed with me the most – and I made sure that they knew that they were loved.

But that was a hard thing to do. Other people were thrown out for doing the same thing that I did, but I don’t think I ever came close to being thrown out of the church.

David Felten: And what do you attribute that to?

Jack Spong: Well, because I took my other role seriously. When I went to Richmond, I got a list of all the sick and shut-ins. Our parish was a great big church: about 1,800 members. I got a list of our sick and shut-in people and I made a strong effort to go see every one of them and to drink tea. I have drunk more tea than you can shake a stick at. And I’d listen to these people tell me the history of that church. It was the history of the Confederacy, by-and-large, and I cared about those people and I learned from those people.

And when I’d do something that some considered crazy, people would go up to them and ask, “What do you think, you reckon?” And they’d say “Well, he’s a little ahead of himself, but he comes by and he drinks tea with me.” And that was all that mattered.

They wanted a relationship and I gave them that. And I loved doing it because they gave me a great deal. I’ve got wonderful stories of people 80 and 90 years old. I was all of 38 when I went to Richmond.

There was this one little maiden lady who died when she was about 90. She left instructions in her will that she was not to be embalmed. Well, that was an interesting thing. She said the reason was that no man had ever seen her naked and she didn’t want any man looking at her when she was dead. I just loved that, it was hilarious. I don’t how the undertaker managed that, but he did (at least I hope he did!)

Remember, the Richmond church was very much a Confederate church. And during World War II, some sailors from Norfolk got into a battle in downtown Richmond with some local characters from Richmond. They started throwing rocks and some sailor threw a rock through the Robert E. Lee window. The federal government came to our church and said they were sorry, that this was a conscript of the United States Navy, and they’d be glad to pay the repair bill. This woman rose up in our church and said “No federal money ever went into the Lee window and no federal money will go into the Lee window now.” And she paid it herself. Those are great stories.

Today I’m looking at that church from the vantage point of a person sitting in the pew. It has a significant black population, has a black senior warden, and the President of the University of Richmond, who’s a black man, is a member of St. Paul’s. I’m so proud of it.

In Tarboro, I served two Episcopal churches, one block apart. One was white, one was black. Bringing them together was hard, but today they are very much together. In the summertime, they close one church and all the people worship at the other for four weeks in July and then they go to the other church for four weeks in August. And friendships are formed and this just gives me so much pleasure, to see the changes that are taking place.

David Felten: What would you say is the next revolution? What’s the fourth revolution?

Jack Spong: For years I thought it was climate, but I’m afraid we’re not going to ever address climate. We have to. Climate is one of those things where you can’t do it alone. You’ve got to do it together. And it means some people are going to have to sacrifice for the thing to become real. Individualism is not going to solve climate change.

But at one and the same time, I think the Christian church has got to see itself in a different way. I think Jesus was a boundary breaker and I think every time there’s a boundary that sets one person off against another, I think the Christian faith has to break that boundary down. That’s the salvation of the church. If we can do that, we can keep relevant.

David Felten: So the next boundary to be broken may be a theological boundary – a breaking of the theistic focus?

Jack Spong: Yeah, I think we ought to break every boundary. You’ve got to break the boundary around the creed, the literalism of the creed. You’ve got to break the boundary around theology. You’ve got to break the boundary around practice: who’s in, who’s out class warfare. Christianity can’t live in a world that’s got boundaries that sets one person off against another person. So we’re always going to be controversial, we’ve got to be controversial. By our very nature we’re controversial. And if we ever cease to be controversial, we’ll cease to be Christian – and that’s not easy for people to embrace. But that’s where we are.

David Felten: But that’s not the message that most people hear growing up in American churches – in fact, it’s just the opposite.

Jack Spong:  You’re exactly right, it is the opposite. Now to counter that, you’ve got to be examining the story and look at what Jesus did: he was always bringing the outsiders inside. Whether they’re Pharisees on one side or prostitutes on the other. He was always bringing them inside. And that’s what the Christian church has got to do.

~ Rev. David M. Felten

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About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.

A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David and his wife Laura, have three children.

Q: By Judy
I just finished "Unbelievable" and found many things in the book that I was unaware that I believed. I am curious to know how you feel about/reconcile people who are truly evil or unrepentantly evil like child abusers/pornographers. I can deal with people whose belief systems are different than mine but not with people who purposefully hurt other people, especially children. Some even believe it is their right to do so.
How can we love these people wastefully?


Hi Judy. Thank you for writing. Your question is one I have had to deal with many times over the years. It is one of the hardest things to practice in the entire Christian tradition, but I still find it mystifying that so many Christians in our world today do not take this issue seriously. In fact, it seems sometimes they believe being a Christian gives them the right to hate or at least dislike anyone who disagrees with them. Certainly that is not the way Jesus expected his followers to behave, nor is it the way Bishop Spong expects us to behave if we actually want to learn and experience what it means to walk the Christian path. We know that and most of us do pretty well with “most people.” However, if we take “loving everyone wastefully” there are some things we must address to make it work with others, or as you put it, people who are truly evil, or unrepentant child abusers/pornographers.
 
First, you must not think of this “love” in the same way that you love your children, a spouse, or a best friend. Marcus Borg probably explained this as well as anyone I know or have ever read. In his book, Meeting Jesus for the First Time, Again, 1995, Borg, addresses this difficult issue. He explains the word “compassion” in Hebrew (as well as in Aramaic), is usually translated in the plural form of the noun. In its singular form, however, the word means “womb.” In the Hebrew Bible, compassion is both a feeling and a way of being that flows out of one’s sense of compassion. It is frequently linked to its association with womb: a woman feels compassion for the child of her own womb; a man feels compassion for his brother, who comes from the same womb. For Borg, compassion is a spiritual shift and is a result of some pretty hard work for most of us.
 
According to Borg, there are four different types of compassion. Reflective (thinking), emotional (feeling), active (doing), and contemplative (experiencing). While our goal, according to Borg, is to integrate all four of these at some point, he admits that this is a challenge. He explains we are called as followers of Jesus to show compassion (love-as a mother loves her unborn child). I think this means you may not know your child, who she is or he is going to be, but you still “love” or feel compassion for her/him. My suggestion is that you at least can love or have compassion for the kinds of people you describe but it might be limited to a thinking type if that is the best you can do. This does not mean you must run up to one of those of these incorrigible people and tell them how much you “love” them. But you could take the time to wonder what kind of childhood they had and what kind of an early life they had to endure.
 
You might wonder what kind of early influences made them so sick. Most serious studies indicate that the significant number of these very sick people were abused, sexually and in other ways, as children. I know this is, in Borg’s words, reflective or thinking compassion but it can bring you to another place that might feel better for you. It might even help you feel some compassion for this person.
 
 
Let me close with a personal story. My wife recently retired from her job as a nurse and director in the county health department. For the first five years of her job, she was required once a month to go a prison on an island in our area that held unrepentant child molesters that have been deemed by Washington State judges as incorrigible. They will never be healed nor will they ever be let out of prison. When she first went there she was disgusted and nervous working around them. But she was in awe of how kind and “loving” most of the nurses who worked there regularly were toward these men. My wife never felt comfortable asking these nurses how they did it but she watched closely. My guess is that most of them saw something in these men through the eyes of “god” rather than the judge who put them there. This would be, I believe, something of Borg’s idea of reflective or thinking compassion. My wife learned many lessons from these nurses, as have I.
 
I hope this helps.


~ Fred Plumer

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About the Author
In 1986 Rev. Plumer was called to the Irvine United Congregational Church in Irvine, CA to lead a UCC new start church, where he remained until he retired in 2004. The church became known throughout the denomination as one of the more exciting and progressive mid-size congregations in the nation. He served on the Board of Directors of the Southern California Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC) for five years, and chaired the Commission for Church Development and Evangelism for three of those years.

In 2006 Fred was elected President of ProgressiveChristianity.org (originally called The Center for Progressive Christianity - TCPC) when it’s founder Jim Adams retired. As a member of the Executive Council for TCPC he wrote The Study Guide for The 8 Points by which we define: Progressive Christianity. He has had several articles published on church development, building faith communities and redefining the purpose of the enlightened Christian Church. His book Drink from the Well is an anthology from speeches, articles in eBulletins, and numerous publications that define the progressive Christianity movement as it evolves to meet new challenges in a rapidly changing world.