Reporter Duane Schrag can be reached at 822-1422 or by e-mail at dschrag@saljournal.com.
By DUANE SCHRAG
Salina Journal
So how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?
Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori posed the question/joke Monday to members of Christ Cathedral Episcopal Church.
"Change?" Jefferts Schori continued with perfect comic timing. "My grandmother gave that light bulb." The audience roared, all too aware of the rifts that have threatened the Episcopalian Church as traditional ideas are questioned.
Jefferts Schori knows change. When elected a year ago to head the United States Episcopal Church, she was the first woman to hold such a position within the church. She took over a denomination in turmoil, with conservative congregations threatening to bolt if the church didn't reverse its support for gays.
She was in Salina on Monday as part of a national tour of the church's dioceses.
In the question-and-answer session that followed her luncheon at the Salina church, 138 S. Eighth, one lifelong member recalled growing up in an atmosphere that focused on all the positive things Christians could do.
"When I was a kid, it was all about doing good works," the man said. "I feel like we've totally lost a lot of that. Now it's all about ideology."
Jefferts Schori said the church's mission hasn't changed -- understanding how to serve God through loving one's neighbor -- but many of the details have. She pointed to the candles in the front of church. One hundred- fifty years ago, there was a debate about whether candles were appropriate.
The next generation tackled slavery, an issue that left deep scars.
"We've not gotten beyond all the consequences of that history," she said.
And the early church wondered whether marriage -- between a man and a woman, even -- was to be encouraged. Paul, who authored most of the New Testament, seemed to only grudgingly endorse it, Jefferts Schori noted.
Disagreements and controversy are part of life, she told the audience.
"Build on what you share in common," she advised. "The challenge is to keep the things you disagree about lower on the priority scale."
Above all, talk about differences, she said. Talk not at each other but with each other.
"In order to truly know someone, we have to enter real conversation," she said.
The word "conversation" when it came into use in the Middle Ages didn't so much convey speech as a sense of having dealings with. Thus, "criminal conversation" is a legal term for adultery, she observed.
She warned that the biggest challenge to conversation is judgment.
"Our tendency to escalate the anxiety and conflict comes from our tendency to judge," she said. "When we deal with people in ways that don't lead to judgment, we can have conversation. We live in a culture that is very eager to leap to judgment."
Jefferts Schori, an oceanographer by training, was asked what she makes of Kansas' infamous debate over evolution versus creationism. She accepts both as true, but in different senses.
"I understand evolution as the very best of scientific theory," she said. "If more data comes along that causes us to change the theory, scientists do that."
The Genesis story, on the other hand, is a myth that explains humankind's relationship to God and the world, she said.
"I see no difficulty whatsoever in holding both to be true," she said.
n Reporter Duane Schrag can be reached at 822-1422 or by e-mail at dschrag@saljournal.com.
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