Passions and opinions brought into General Convention often had a way of dissipating under the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, III told members of the House of Bishops on July 10. 

Present at the request of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Bishop Griswold and former Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning paid their first visits to the House since their retirements, with each offering an avuncular view of the issues before the house.

“It’s wonderful to come back” and to share this fellowship with you, Bishop Browning told the morning session on July 10.  The trip to Anaheim was doubly poignant, the 80-year old bishop said, as it was in Anaheim in 1985 he was elected Presiding Bishop.

“Much has happened in my time,” Bishop Browning noted, adding that as he looked through the resolutions awaiting action from the house, “things really haven’t changed too much,” as “some really difficult things are still before us.”

As “one who loves this church very dearly,” Bishop Browning said he prayed often for the bishops in the midst of the difficulties they were facing. Drawing upon the text of his sermon given in Anaheim in 1985 after his election, Bishop Browning urged the bishops to remain united, holding on to a “common love for one another that heals” worries and divisions.

Bishop Griswold rose to thank Bishop Jefferts Schori for her invitation to attend convention, noting that the custom for former presiding bishops was to “just fade away.”  He then lauded the “graceful and articulate way” that she had kept the house “on course in the midst of extraordinary stress.”

However, he reminded the bishops, “we do not live for ourselves” alone as bishops but are part of a wider global whole, offering an oblique word of caution and restraint to the bishops
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Drawing upon memories of his first General Convention in 1976, where he served as a deputy, Bishop Griswold recalled hearing a “nun from a diocese opposed to women clergy” announce that she had switched sides and now supported the innovation.  He further recalled a “Texas priest” who had been commanded by his wife to vote against ratification of the new Book of Common Prayer, yet by the end of convention had become an ardent supporter.

When we “arrive with fixed and passionate points of view” to convention, we sometimes find our “fixity becomes more malleable,” he said, adding that he had “seen that process occur by the work of the Holy Spirit,” and expected the “mystery of intervention will occur once again.”

Deputies, Bishop Griswold noted, were “elected to a specific General Convention,” and often had “no assurance that they will be reelected.” 

“Hence there is an urgency” at times, he observed, about their deliberations.  Bishops, however “take a long view.”

“Sometimes urgency is the order of the day, sometimes it is the long view,” Bishop Griswold said.  But this “interaction can create tensions,” but the church yet remained under the sovereign power of God.

(The Rev.) George Conger  reporting from General Convention.
 
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