Into the fray

Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori thought the odds she would be elected to lead the Episcopal Church were “ridiculous.”

“I was a woman, fairly young, I hadn’t been a bishop all that long, and I was serving a diocese that’s not part of the Eastern establishment,” she says.

Then came the surprise: She won anyway, in balloting at the Episcopal general convention this June.

Today, Jefferts Schori will be installed as presiding bishop at Washington National Cathedral, becoming the first woman priest to lead a national church in the nearly 500-year-old Anglican Communion.

“The Bible is full of stories of the younger son being called and the outsider being called (by God to serve),” says Jefferts Schori, 52.

“I think courage is a central characteristic of leadership. If you’re not willing to go into dangerous places, you have no business doing this work.”

The perils for anyone leading the Episcopal Church right now are considerable. The 2.3-million-member denomination is at the center of a worldwide Anglican feud over how to interpret what the Bible says about sexuality and other issues.

Jefferts Schori unapologetically supports ordaining gays and allowing blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples. In 2003 she voted to confirm New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.

The uproar over his consecration is threatening to split the Anglican family, of which the Episcopal Church is the American branch.

“I’m clear about this role involving the entire breadth of the Episcopal Church,” Jefferts Schori says. “But at some level, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to disguise what my own theological understanding is.

“I’m someone who believes transparency is incredibly important. It’s part of integrity.”

Yet the bishop also is aware that compromise is necessary to heal the rift with overseas Anglicans – a goal she says is important to her.

She believes Episcopalians should fulfill the request of Anglican leaders that the American church stop consecrating any more gay bishops for now and should refrain from developing an official prayer service to bless same-gender couples.

“There’s a piece of me that is very sad that we need to do that,” she says, “but there’s a piece of me that understands that for the health of the larger body, we might have to do that for a season.”

Having served just five years as a bishop, Jefferts Schori knows her experience in the church may seem all too brief for such an important job.

But she has spent her life tackling outsize challenges.

She is an oceanographer who graduated from Stanford University and earned a doctorate at Oregon State University, working at sea with boat captains more accustomed to all-male research crews.

A pilot with more than 500 hours logged, she flew her plane to visit parishes in the sprawling Nevada Diocese. She also rock climbs with her husband of more than 25 years, Richard Schori, a theoretical mathematician and retired university professor.

Their 25-year-old daughter is a pilot in the Air Force.

Jefferts Schori decided to pursue full-time ministry after federal funding for her scientific research dried up. She earned a master’s degree from Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., and was ordained in 1994.

Her theological outlook has given Episcopalians and Anglicans with traditional views of the Bible plenty to criticize.

She personally believes in a relationship with God through Jesus but does not see it as the only true path.

“If we insist we know the one way to God, we’re putting God in a very small box,” Jefferts Schori says.

Episcopal conservatives, a minority within the church, were aghast when in a sermon at the general convention she said, “Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation – and you and I are his children.”

She used the term, as many woman theologians do, as a metaphor, describing “that sweaty, bloody, tear-stained labor of the cross” as bearing new life.

Seven U.S. conservative dioceses have rejected her authority and asked Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, to assign them another national leader. Three of the dioceses do not support ordaining women.

Overseas, some tradition-minded Anglican leaders, meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, said they would snub her at the next global Anglican meeting in February.

Asked what she wanted to say to those Anglican leaders, she shrugs and replies: “Get over it.”

Jefferts Schori, who met privately last month with Williams in London, adds: “I think the reality is clear that the archbishop of Canterbury isn’t going to assign somebody to be an alternate primate” – the Anglican term for a national church leader.

She hopes to find a way to reconcile with Anglican leaders overseas and conservatives at home. She already has started work at Episcopal headquarters, where her predecessor, Bishop Frank Griswold, has just finished his nine-year term.

“At some level if it becomes clear that the relationship is broken, that there’s no possibility for a new life in that relationship, then the pastoral thing to do is to find a creative way to separate, a gracious way to separate,” Jefferts Schori says.

“I hope we don’t have to go there. My hope is for finding life that is still present in relationships, and if we go the separation route, the door is left open and the lights on.”