Episcopal Bishop of Arkansas Gives OK on Exploring Blessing Ceremonies for Gay Couples

The Episcopal bishop of Arkansas has given the green light to congregations that want to explore offering blessing ceremonies for gay couples and has notified clergymen in the diocese that some congregations are ready to do that.

One of them is St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in west Little Rock, which is to have a blessing ceremony for a couple in September. In addition, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville has invited same-sex couples to consider exploring such a ceremony.

“The Episcopal Church continues to be in the forefront of the effort to assure that gay and lesbian persons are made welcome in our churches and are afforded equal treatment by society at-large,” starts the 428-word letter by Arkansas’ bishop, the Right Rev. Larry Maze. “There is not agreement across the church in how to achieve those ends.... It is my belief that seeking ways of recognizing and blessing faithful, monogamous same-sex relationships falls within the parameters of providing pastoral concern and care for our gay and lesbian members.”

“In the weeks ahead, those congregations that have been addressing the possibility of such blessings will likely move forward,” Maze wrote in a letter dated Wednesday.

The bishop, who will retire later this year, was out of town and unavailable for comment.

Gays in the church have been at the epicenter of rifts between liberal and conservative groups within the 2 million member national denomination since its 2003 triennial convention. Maze was among bishops who approved the election of an openly gay man, the Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire. Convention representatives also passed a resolution in favor of churches exploring the option of blessing same-sex couples.

Conservative leaders condemned the American church’s actions. Leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is part, met in 2004 and produced the Windsor Report, which asked that the American church not consecrate any more gay bishops or perform same-sex unions.

This year’s triennial convention in Ohio was watched by Anglicans around the world, some of whom believe that the U. S. church’s continued standing in the Anglican Communion depended on its response to the Windsor Report.

On the last day of the nine-day convention, deputies and bishops passed a resolution advising dioceses not to elect another gay bishop, but they didn’t explicitly address the issue of blessing gay couples.

Maze, bishop of the state’s 14, 000 Episcopalians, sent his letter to clergymen in the state’s 55 churches notifying them that several churches are close to performing such blessings and acknowledging that beliefs differ widely on whether that is appropriate.

The Rev. Ed Wills of St. Michael’s in Little Rock said a couple has been going through the same counseling process he uses for couples planning marriage. They have a tentative date in September for their blessing service, which would make them the first in Arkansas to have an Episcopal service of blessing.

Wills said he wanted the couple to experience what any couple would experience in preparing for a lifelong commitment and not to become a media spectacle or a novelty. Wills said Maze’s letter does not reflect a change in the bishop’s thinking. “He has said all along that we were moving in this direction,” he said. “Nothing has changed.” St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville passed a resolution last September expressing its support for performing such ceremonies.

Its rector, the Rev. Lowell Grisham, and Wills said their churches had been waiting until the outcome of the national denomination’s triennial convention in June before asking Maze whether they could proceed.

Grisham sent a letter to parishioners July 14 saying St. Paul’s will offer blessing ceremonies, and he invited same-sex couples in committed relationships to explore the possibility.

Wills said it is important for a congregation to be part of the decision-making because the blessing of any couple is always rooted in the community. “God is about community, about belonging, about relationship,” he said. Couples are blessed within that community “not just so that they can be special but that they can be a blessing to other people.”

Grisham’s and Maze’s letters noted that blessings are neither weddings nor same-sex unions and have no legal standing in Arkansas. Grisham explained that they are a local observance in each church, not an approved formal rite. That puts them in the same category as other informal, local blessings, such as the blessing of animals near St. Francis’ feast day, the blessing of the fleet in a coastal parish, or the church’s blessing this Sunday for a young man about to join the Peace Corps.

Grisham said no couples have requested a blessing yet, but he predicted that the church will perform one before the next general convention in 2009. Couples will go through a period of counseling, just as couples do before marriage.

“Our expectation is that anyone who enters into a covenant with our blessing rites would be making a lifelong vow characterized by fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful honest communication, and the holy love that enables those in such relationships to see in each other the image of God,” he said, echoing the words of the 2003 resolution.

“My gay friends are very sensitive about the notion that we’ve been blessing animals for years and find it so difficult to bless their relationships,” he said.

News of the letter also appeared Wednesday on the Web site of The Christian Challenge, a bimonthly publication calling itself “the only worldwide voice of traditional Anglicanism.” Editor Auburn Traycik reported the letter in a commentary that was repeated on other conservative sites.

Traycik called the move “a study in the incrementalist tactics of liberal revisionism, which approaches an overthrow in church teaching in steps designed to be as non-threatening as possible, in this case, congregation by congregation.”

Grisham said the ceremony is inevitable, not only at St. Paul’s but in the denomination. “I think its universality is as inevitable as desegregation,” he said.