General Convention 2018

The Rev. Kelly Steele:

My husband, The Reverend Guillermo Arboleda, and I got confirmed together in the Episcopal Church because of the Anglican via media. Since then we’ve done everything at the same time: graduation from seminary with the same honors, nomination for ordination, internships, ordinations to the diaconate and priesthood in the same Diocese.

My bishop and canon have been, thankfully, very helpful in keeping our experiences and compensation equitable, as we are the same age with the exact same credentials. But already two years into our priesthood, my husband and I worry about our remaining decades in ministry. He’s been warned that his career “would suffer because he’s yoked with a woman-priest,” and I’ve been warned that the church “will chew me up and spit me out.”  

I worry about what awaits me and the women around and after me, and the data backs this up.

I don’t want a “crusade” that pushes older, white men or conservatives off of our Episcopal island. I want to have my own biases challenged in favor of a win-win situation. I want all of our biases addressed as we keep and grow the Anglican Big Tent, the via media. I want all peoples participating in courageous dialogue and constructive proposals. We need a generous, consensus-building approach that invites oppressors and the oppressed to dismantle injustice together. Truth-telling and reconciliation takes concerted effort and we need a group dedicated to making reconciliation possible to everyone on the local level.

One Task Force can’t do everything but it can start the process. Thank you.

The Rev. Canon Frank Logue:
I am Frank Logue from the Diocese of Georgia, rising in support of D016. I was grateful to read this January the Letter to the Episcopal Church from President Jennings and Presiding Bishop Curry saying “our church must examine its history and come to a fuller understanding of how it has handled or mishandled cases of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse through the years.”

As our Baptismal Covenant states, we are to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ by both word and example. The Church universal as well as our Episcopal Church have sinned in our treatment of women and girls in our church. This resolution seeks to get our actions, our example, in line with our words. We gathered last week to lament and to pray in a beautiful liturgy carefully crafted and lovingly offered by our bishops which contained painful stories which are but the tip of the iceberg. But we all knew that liturgy, powerful as it was, would only be a good start if we are to begin to repent and change in deed as well as with our words. We must match those words with a powerful example of truth-telling, confession, and reconciliation.