Bishop John Howe and his diocese (Central Florida) are blackmailing the Episcopal Church. With a strong arm they have said that if the Church does not decide matters their way, they won't pay their dues. This is an attempt to influence judicial process by threat of punishment.

The so-called Briarwood Group of 20, including three bishops, have also used blackmail: we are the one righteous group of Anglicans and we will undertake to organize economic war against any other group in the Episcopal Church that will not be faithful as we alone define faithful. The Briarwood folk too have spoken specifically in the context of ecclesiastical court proceedings currently underway, in a clear effort to try to influence those decisions with economic threats.

Blackmail is conduct unbecoming bishops and should be so named by General Convention. I urge the House of Bishops to begin that process at its next meeting.

A friend wrote recently:

>Louie,
>
>I love you dearly, but I must disagree with you strongly on this issue. I
>do not support organizations that have taken positions against me, such as
>Coors, Domino's Pizza, Target, and other such organizations that support the
>agenda of the Rediculous Reich. It is not blackmail. It is simply a choice
>of what my dollars will support.

I replied then as now:

I support your need to exercise your own conscience regarding stewardship.

I do not personally see myself as the client of the church as I am of the other organizations you mention. I AM the Church, not its client. If I don't behave as the Church, many may never see Jesus.

The Church is not mine to command with my money. Nor is the church ever to be made in the image of any one of its set of constitutents. I am not merely buying pizza or a beer. I am on a pilgrimage with lots and lots of difference among the pilgrims.

Nor has the Episcopal Church "taken positions against me" in the same sense Coors and Dominos have. Even when officials of ECUSA have taken hostile acts specifically opposed to me, I have presumed that they have acted in good faith, trying to be faithful, even when they lacked my particular understanding of faithfulness. I did not stop paying my pledge when I was summoned for discipline by my bishop in 1976, charged with disturbing the peace and good order of the church for saying to the world that God loves me. I did not take stop paying my pledge when that parish asked me to leave, nor when another later discussed my possible excommunication.

Nor did I see myself as funding my oppression. When I give, I am giving to God, and I give cheerfully, with no strings attached, either to God, or to God's servants authorized in that place to determine how to be stewards of everyone's gifts. My contributions are not a vote of a stockholder: they are a gesture, however small, to give back from the enormous bounty which I have received.

We in ECUSA are having this big struggle together as people largely sincere on both sides, as to how to give to God and how to obey God. I try desperately hard to respect the integrity of my opponent's motives even as a growing number of persons who disagree with me have grown to respect the integrity of my motives.

I do not possess the truth all by myself, and I certainly won't cut out my stewardship of money or time or talent merely because people ask me "to seek some other place to worship"--as one vestry once wrote 20 years ago next month. Three years later they repented of that statement and re-issued their welcome. Then God sent me to yet another difficult vineyard. I had never sought some other place to worship: I attended Sunday after Sunday during that painful interval not at their invitation, but at God's. And many, many of them grew to understand that.

Given your own point of view, I would not vote for you to serve on a vestry of your cathedral parish in Orlando, nor, in fairness, do I imagine that you would run for such an official position. In respecting your choice, were I a voting member of that body, I would conclude that you needed to accept some consequences that come along along with your choice. Since you had exercised your vote with your wallet, I would not approve giving you additional votes with the wallets of others in that place.

That is what your bishop has done and what your diocese is doing. While drawing their salaries from tithes and offerings of all people, not just those who agree with them, they are saying that they want the additional privileges of full and unencumbered membership in General Convention, with the power to control how the tithes and offerings of persons elsewhere are spent as well, and yet they are withholding their fair share of responsibility for our common life.

Furthermore, they are are doing so in a move candidly connected to a trial which they hope thereby to influence. That is blackmail.

As Jesus said of others who prayed loudly to show their righteousness, "They have their reward!" All of it right here and now. That's not the bargain of the faithful.

>A diocese has the sole right to determine what to do with its funds

You sound like you are speaking from the Southern Baptist or Congregationalist polity of autonomous congregations: that is not an episcopal understanding.

We are an Episcopal Church, not just independent dioceses. How the Episcopal Church assesses funds from dioceses is an issue under continuing re-evaluation each year; that the Episcopal Church may assess funds is not an issue hitherto much in question.

How to deal with dioceses which don't pay their assessments is also an issue under continuing re-evaluation. What is innovative in the case of Central Florida, Texas, and the Briarwood Group is an effort to intentionally to punish the national church. That's a policy which, if followed by all, would most certainly do away with any program worthy of the name 'national.'

Most dioceses, like my own, see the importance of supporting the church in season and out of season, whether or not the powers that be are running things according to our own vision. That is in large measure a respect for the office and for the organization that transcends our very real concerns about who occupies the office or controls the organization at any one time.

Those who choose otherwise obviously have that right. They cannot have it both ways, however. They cannot in fairness excercise credible leadership in a body from which they have set themselves apart.

Lutibelle/Louie
House of Deputies

• See Message headed "on Voting with your church pledges where I make the same point when the issue gets tough for us ourselves.
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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