Copyright Christian Century Foundation Feb 17, 1999Bishop John Shelby Spong, the controversial head of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, may be retiring, but he is refusing to end his fight for the ordination of gays and lesbians and for church approval of same-sex marriages. On January 31, in his valedictory address to the 125th convention of his diocese, Spong, who has spent decades seeking to push the Episcopal Church, and all Christianity, to change many of its traditional beliefs and practices, lashed out at the conservative element within his denomination.
"It is sometimes amazing how hostile and how divisive religious extremism can become," Spong told an enthusiastic crowd of 800. "That was the mentality which emerged in and dominated the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference during 1998."
Spong was a leader in the bitter fight against tradition-minded, mostly Third World bishops at the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade gathering of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion, as they sought to declare homosexuality a sin and prohibit gays from holding leadership positions within the church. In the end, the traditionalists prevailed. More than 700 bishops from around the world attended the conference, and by a vote of 526-70 (with 45 abstentions) they passed a resolution condemning homosexuality as contrary to scripture and vehemently opposing the ordination of gay priests.
"This attitude was expressed in unbelievable rhetoric and in a bitter, negative resolution that was typically camouflaged in the sweet words of piety and with quotations from Holy Scripture," Spong said. "I pronounce the Lambeth resolution unchristian, uninformed, prejudiced and evil."
Africans, Asians and some South Americans, whose Anglican churches are growing dramatically, have voiced serious concerns about the progress of gay rights in the West. But Spong has never relented. In his speech he dismissed those views as a blatantly hostile stance of rejection directed against gay and lesbian people. "Those who supported this negative action revealed that in large parts of the world there is an almost total ignorance of 20th-century scientific facts about the origins and nature of sexual orientation," the bishop said. He called any attempts by the church to change a person's sexual orientation "nothing less than pastoral violence."
Spong described the London meeting as "the most disillusioning experience I have had in my entire ordained life. I never expected to see the Anglican Communion, which prides itself on the place of reason in faith, descend to this level of irrational Pentecostal hysteria." Spong has headed the Newark diocese of 120 churches-and about 40,000 members-in northern New Jersey for 23 years. There are roughly 60 million members of the Anglican Communion worldwide, including 2.4 million in the U.S. -RNS