When I was 21, a senior in college, and trying to wade through the ordination process, my diocese was in a right horrible mess. In 2005, Southern Virginia was not a healthy place to be. Our bishop at the time came at the tail end of a long line of unhealthiness, and for various reasons, things were finally coming to a head. Chickens were coming home to roost. A recent report had revealed that things were worse in the church than most of us knew: staff were not being paid in a timely way, insurance premiums had gone unpaid, money was missing (but that was probably just incompetence) and also there was quite a lot of yelling–all of which seemed bad, frankly, and we should probably do something about it.
Here I was, a baby!Megan, sure God was calling her to a life of ordained ministry, and equally sure that what stood before her was a garbage fire. Days before the diocesan council1, I sat with the rest of my parish delegates as our rector calmly explained what had been happening, explained the bishop was Not Pleased with him and his fellow clergy, and explained that we really had no idea what was coming at this here council.
“But look”, I recall him saying, handing us a folder of the diocesan and national canons “These are the rules. Read up on them.
This is how we will get through.”
One of the jokes my current bishop likes to make about me2 is that I love the canons. And I do. I freaking LOVE the canons. Because the canons aren’t just silly rules we invented to irritate each other.
They are a promise we make to ourselves, to each other, and to those who will come after us. They are a statement of faith about the sort of community we want to live in. We say to one another, “Ok. These are the ways in which I will behave so we will all be safe and protected and valued. So we can get things done. So we can have justice. So we can endure.”
This is most poignantly true in the church, where we rely on nothing more than our good faith that the canons will be followed. There is no Supreme Court. There is no church police to come and drag off wrongdoers. There is just you and me and that guy and her over there, and those people there. We, together, agree to follow these rules and abide by them so that we might have the sort of community we want, where we live in love made manifest in righteousness, in justice, and in wholeness for everyone.
And so when the rules we have agreed to are flouted, when the expectations we as a community have for one another are ignored–that is no small thing. That is a fundamental betrayal of the love of neighbor that Christ calls us to. It means the entire church has turned its back on Christ’s call to love one another.
Of course the one who acted badly is at fault, but everyone else? Everyone who let the person who acted badly slide by? It’s a wider problem of failing to love each other when that happens. And beloved, it happens.
For how can we love one another when we have embraced a system that allows the powerful to continue to misbehave? How is it loving to have different standards of accountability for different orders of ministry? How is it loving to protect the institution over the children of God who have been hurt?
Reading President Ayala-Harris’ letter was horrifying, but it was not surprising. I have stories like hers; many of us have stories like hers. Many of us have told those stories at great personal cost over the past few years, as the #MeToo movement caught up with the church, and we thought that we might be getting somewhere, and yet power still protects its own. The structures we inherit, the ones built on the assumptions of shared patriarchal fellowship and norms will do what they were designed to do, and they will protect the strong, from anyone that comes knocking.
We cannot accept this as Christians. We cannot accept this as humans. We cannot accept that we will forever speak platitudes about justice and fairness and then enact something else in practice. We have the tools to do better–we have the means to find a way towards a community that actually does walk and live in love. But we have to want it badly enough to walk away from what we’ve been doing, and for a lot of powerful people to agree to give up some power.
And until we all get there, we all best follow the damn canons.
- Southern Virginia had councils, not conventions, it’s history, dagnabit.
- HI, BISHOP!!!!!!
- It’s here.