In his Guest Column, “Careless Communion” [TLC, July 8], the Rev. Ian Montgomery described a commencement he attended at “one of our seminaries” where, from his point of view, everything seemed to go wrong. The eucharistic bread crumbled and fell to the floor, the presider made an open invitation to communion, and the preacher seemed to endorse what the article called the “new Episcopal religion.”

It didn’t take me long to realize that the event Fr. Montgomery described was, in fact, the commencement of the seminary of which I am the dean, Seabury-Western in Evanston, Ill. While Fr. Montgomery ably expresses his reaction to some elements of our liturgy that day, I would like to address a few of his concerns.

Fr. Montgomery writes that “the bread used crumbled badly and was dropping to the floor during the administration of the sacrament.” Nobody who knows Seabury and its liturgical traditions well could seriously think that we are intentionally lax in our treatment of the sacrament. What Fr. Montgomery experienced was the unfortunate consequence of our new policy of using gluten-free bread at all celebrations of the Eucharist. The Seabury community now has several members with Celiac disease (gluten intolerance), and so we have started using only gluten-free bread as an expression of our inclusive hospitality. If you have ever tried to bake gluten-free bread, you know how tricky it can be. I regret that the recipe used at commencement produced friable bread, and we will work to make sure that the experience is not repeated.

While crumbly bread might seem an apt metaphor for Anglicanism, in reality it’s an expression of a community trying to react pastorally to a new situation — which, in a sense, is what so much of the current conflicts over sexuality, open communion, and inclusive language is about in the first place.

Fr. Montgomery also objects to the non-canonical open invitation to communion printed in our service leaflet. As ordinary of the chapel, I have articulated this policy in full awareness that it does not comply with the canonical provision about communion and baptism. One reason seminary chapels are traditionally “ecclesiastical peculiars” is so that they will have the freedom to push the edges of liturgical practice in the direction of the church’s emerging theology. There is a serious theological argument abroad these days about the relationship of baptism and Eucharist. To characterize the open invitation as “liturgical universalism” misconstrues the state of the argument. Those of us who favor open communion do so knowing that the church has historically seen one sacrament as a precondition for the other. We simply question, in the present pastoral situation, the propriety of following that practice.

In the 19th century, seminary chapels used their status as peculiars to allow experimentation with non-rubrical forms of Anglo-Catholic worship. I wonder if Fr. Montgomery would have judged such practice as harshly as he did ours.

Fr. Montgomery objected to the content of the Presiding Bishop’s sermon, available in full at Seabury’s website (www.seabury.edu). How he could understand a call to metanoia as an invitation to consider a new teaching that “contradicts the holy scriptures” as we have received and interpreted them is beyond me and would not characterize the response of most who heard the sermon. The preacher’s point was that Justin Martyr, whose feast we observed, “spent the first part of his adult life...searching diligently for knowledge,” and she elaborated that “Justin discovered that the world’s wisdom is not the fullness of things.” But, she concluded, “the world’s wisdom is not empty.”

Perhaps most objectionable to me is the phrase which one hears a lot these days, “the new Episcopal religion.” It seems to me that those who posit an “old Episcopal religion” as the normative standard are confused about Anglicanism and how it works. We have always been a pragmatic and not an ideological church —one which reflects theologically on the challenge of the present moment and tries to respond faithfully to it in ways that are consistent with our ethos. This is not a “new Episcopal religion”; it is Anglicanism.

Speaking as one who values traditional Anglican comprehensiveness, I see no evidence of a spreading “monoculture [in The Episcopal Church] that brooks no dissent.” What I do see is a dazzling variety of faith communities living into the gospel in multiple contexts. Those who complain of a dominant liberal monoculture seem, at least to me, merely uncomfortable with the theological diversity they claim to value so highly.

Finally, what is at issue here is the relationship of the church to the world it exists to serve. How do we connect with people in this culture in ways that will call them into a life of wholeness and faith? And what do we have to learn, as we do that, from them? That those outside the walls of the church might have something to tell us within them is precisely what Jesus learned in his conversation with the Syrophoenician woman [“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (Mark 7.28) — to whom he responded as one presenting him with a new pastoral reality, and who herself continues to stand for all the “outsiders” who will always be welcome at Jesus’ table, regardless of the consistency of the bread. ❏

The Very Rev. Gary Hall is the dean and president of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary.

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