Declaring that it was time to be a “normal diocese,” leaders of the reorganized Diocese of Pittsburgh of the Episcopal Church welcomed a liberal church caucus group to the city for its annual assembly. Meeting February 23-26 in Pittsburgh, the Episcopal Urban Caucus (EUC) adopted the assembly theme “Building Bridges – Healing Connections in a Broken World: May the Beauty We Love Be What We Do.” The need for building bridges amidst brokenness was evident to leaders in a diocese that had lost its former bishop and most of its parishes to the new Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Disputes arising from that split remain unresolved. The two dioceses are locked in litigation following the reorganized Episcopal Diocese’s efforts to assume control of parish properties.
“In the diocese of yesteryear, we were big players in the issues that concern the Episcopal Urban Caucus,” said the Very Rev. George Werner, past president of the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies and Dean Emeritus of Trinity Cathedral, Pittsburgh.
Werner was joined by Pittsburgh Provisional Bishop Kenneth Price and several members of the diocese’s standing committee in welcoming the EUC on the opening night of its annual assembly.
According to Bishop Price, Pittsburgh has not had much to do with the EUC in recent history. Werner encouraged an invitation to the caucus, saying “we’ve got to do this” and “we are a vibrant, normal diocese.”
In some ways the EUC is reflective of the denomination that the Anglican diocese left, centered upon liberal politics. Many of the caucus members subscribe to a revisionist theology at odds with evangelicals and other traditionalists.
During their presentation, representatives of the Pittsburgh diocese led the assembly in singing an Anglican-style chant about the state of the diocese. Written to convey the diocese’s history since the split, the chant includes a stanza about litigation and “non-participating” congregations. To read the chant, click here.
Clergy and standing committee members took turns describing the diocese’s history, including the founding of a chaplaincy program serving hospital staff and Pittsburgh’s hosting of the EUC 25 years ago, which newly-elected Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning attended.
Bishop Price’s address took up the narrative in 2008, when the then-united diocese had 72 parishes.
“In that year, it was reported and checked out that the then-bishop, the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, was planning to leave the Episcopal Church and go to the Province of the Southern Cone, and was proposing to take many clergy and parishioners in the diocese with him,” Price said. “When word of this came to the House of Bishops, we met in a very gut-wrenching meeting and spent well over 24 hours debating how we could respond to this tragic news that was facing us. And [the bishops] ultimately decided, after prayer, to depose Bishop Duncan as a bishop in the Episcopal Church.”
Price then noted that the diocese came together in convention and “in a gut-wrenching move for that diocese as well” a vote was taken to leave the Episcopal Church and join the province of the Southern Cone.
Price noted that a lone member of the standing committee, the Rev. Jim Simons, did not depart with that group and instead appointed two new members of the standing committee. It was the start of rebuilding efforts with the Episcopal Church-aligned diocese.
“Therefore, in effect, the standing committee never ceased to exist,” Price stated. Price then turned the presentation over to two diocesan officials, standing committee member Mary Work and the bishop transition committee chair, the Rev. Nancy Chalfant-Walker.
“Now we come to the soap opera part of our history,” Work said.
“Before 2002, life in the diocese felt like… life in a diocese,” Chalfant-Walker said, explaining how the election of openly partnered homosexual bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire had caused tensions between the old diocese and the Episcopal Church. Chalfant-Walker also detailed litigation between Calvary Church, Pittsburgh, and the old diocese over a diocesan canonical change concerning property ownership. The former standing committee member also explained ongoing litigation between the ACNA and Episcopal Church dioceses over the ownership of parish properties.
“Litigation is still part of our everyday reality here in the diocese,” said Chalfant-Walker.
Saying that “grumpiness” towards the Episcopal Church leadership has always been a part of the diocese, Chalfant-Walker said that beginning in the 2000s, there was a very real and deep division in the diocese in which moderate voices had been “systematically isolated and maligned.”
“One of our commitments as a diocese is to be as charitable as we can be to those who left us for ACNA,” Chalfant-Walker said. “It was within this light in 2010 we worked within the framework of the TEC cannons to release, rather than depose, the clergy who left the diocese. We trust that it is within that same spirit that we have just reached two property settlements with two of the departing congregations.
“I think that what we’ve been learning over the last two years is the crucial importance of bridge building,” Chalfant-Walker said. “You’d think we’d know it, being from Pittsburgh, the city of bridges, but frankly it takes work to keep doing it. We are committed to honoring our differences and to learning from each other and to working together collegially. One of the strengths of the Episcopal Church is its vision of itself as a place in which everyone can find a home. We can respect each other as faithful followers of Jesus even if we don’t quite agree with the way we’re going about it. We don’t always live up to that vision, but it’s an important one and one that we are learning to live out here.”
“We are now well on our way to becoming a ‘normal’ diocese – whatever that is,” Work concluded.
The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh now has 8,644 members in 29 congregations, down from about 19,000 members and 72 congregations before the split. Average Sunday attendance is just under 3,000.
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