Saturday, July 1, 2006 | 8:09 a.m.
The fish-shaped earrings that hang beneath her short, curly brown hair offer a clue about Katharine Jefferts Schori's character, but it may not be what you think.
She's wearing a cream linen suit with a purple shirt and clerical collar, fitting for the new presiding bishop for the U.S. Episcopal Church.
So the earrings are equally fitting as a symbol of Christianity.
But the jewelry, handcrafted from various stones and metals by native Pacific Northwesterners, also reflect her love of the outdoors.
This bishop climbs mountains, pilots a Cessna 172 and is a trained oceanographer.
Those fish earrings make sense on so many levels.
Here is a woman, tall and lanky, with a wide smile and sparkling brown eyes, who emits an inner joy that is inspiring and soothing. She speaks confidently but softly, with the rational intellect of a scientist and a pastor's warmth and understanding. Fellow clergy describe her as a tension diffuser, able to build bridges and push boundaries at the same time.
These skills will prepare her to navigate the rough waters of the Episcopal Church, fellow clergy say, a church fractured from the worldwide Anglican Communion because of its consecration of a practicing gay bishop and same-sex unions.
Jefferts Schori is an outspoken supporter of the full inclusion of gays in church leadership. There are ample examples of same-sex unions in nature, she notes. Her take on the subject makes her something of a lightning rod in the debate that is roiling the worldwide church.
She wishes the church could move beyond this distraction because there are larger issues to address. Poverty. AIDS. Economic development in Third World countries. These are the issues, she says, that would consume Jesus.
Such is the challenge facing this 52-year-old Las Vegas woman who 12 years ago wasn't even an Episcopal minister.
She now finds herself pastor to 2.4 million Episcopalians, shepherding a dwindling membership and searching for how to make the church relevant to their lives.
Growing up first in Seattle and then in New Jersey, how could Jefferts Schori have anticipated where she would be today?
"Little girls didn't inspire to be clergy when I was growing up," Jefferts Schori says.
Faith, however, had always been central to her life. She spent her formative years at Roman Catholic school, where she has distinct memories of nuns playing kickball with the students on feast days.
The image of nuns hitching up their robes to join in the fun was imprinted in her mind. They taught her the importance of the "life of the mind," but also that man was "meant to be at play in the fields of the Lord."
"Joy," Jefferts Schori says, "is a central part of the Christian life."
Her family joined the Episcopal Church in the early 1960s.
In that pre-Vatican II era, she believes, her Roman Catholic mother and Methodist father found a compromise in the Episcopal Church. She fell in love with the intimacy of the church community and its English liturgy, and found that the church did not shy away from questions.
She pursued her love for "God's created order" by studying biology at Stanford and then earning her master's and doctorate in oceanography at Oregon State University. She learned piloting from her father, a Navy pilot, and the mountain-climbing from her husband, Richard Schori, a theoretical mathematician whom she met at a church stewardship meeting while at Oregon State. The pair have a 24-year-old daughter, Katharine, who is a pilot in the Air Force.
By the mid-1980s, funding for her field was drying up. She realized with depression that she would have to spend time writing grants instead of conducting research.
So the restless Jefferts Schori tried her hand as a lay educator in the church and as an adjunct religion professor at Oregon State. When some fellow parishioners suggested she try ministry, she talked to her priest, but decided she was not ready.
Five years later, after she was asked to preach one Sunday, she took the call seriously. She earned her Master's of Divinity from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in 1994, becoming an associate pastor for her congregation in Corvallis, Ore.
On the strength of her spirituality, she leapfrogged the post of rector to become bishop of Nevada in 2001.
The previous bishop had died, and in the midst of the grieving were divisions between north and south, rural and urban, even seminary-trained versus locally trained clergy.
Jefferts Schori addressed the tensions by creating regions within the diocese to facilitate peace talks.
Her focus as bishop was pastoring the individual church leaders and promoting common goals, including feeding the poor and mission work in Kenya.
The motivating theme in her ministry has come from the prophet Isaiah - to feed the hungry, console the brokenhearted, bring sight to the blind and free the captives.
"In Hebrew it's called Shalom - it's what a right society should look like," Jefferts Schori says.
The Rev. Robert E. Friedrich Jr., interim rector at Grace in the Desert Episcopal Church, and other clergy say Jefferts Schori became a welcome confidant during difficult times, often by just making herself present.
It helped that as a licensed pilot she could fly around the state, improving communication between the churches and the diocesan office.
"She has been extremely good at bringing very emotionally divided people together," agreed the Rev. Gene Holly, a priest at Grace in the Desert.
Local Episcopalians are hopeful she can do the same for the national church.
For all the attention given to her insistence that gays and women be fully included as active leaders in the U.S. church, Jefferts Schori says her mission is driven by the more basic, Christ-like goals of advocating for social and economic justice.
She's hoping such an emphasis can hold her fractured church together both in the United States and with the worldwide Anglican Communion, that the liberals and conservatives within the church can rally around shared common ground.
At the heart of her efforts to fully include gays and lesbians in the church is her belief that Jesus sought people on the margins, and that everyone deserves a seat at God's table. Coming of age in the 1960s and '70s, she like many in her church have been moved by the civil rights movement to push for full inclusion for people of all races, backgrounds, genders and sexual orientation.
She is troubled that the Anglican Church can support civil rights for gays outside the church and yet deny those same people full inclusion in the body of Christ.
"People want a clear understanding of who is OK and who is not," Jefferts Schori said. "But over and over again in the Bible you have Jesus eating with people he shouldn't or talking with women he shouldn't."
God's table welcomes everyone, regardless of what rules they follow, Jefferts Schori said. From her background as a biologist, she believes same-sex relationships are part of God's created order, and that the emphasis of the church should be in supporting monogamous, lifelong partnerships.
"For us to say in this day and age that homosexuality is sinful is to ignore evidence science has brought us," Jefferts Schori says.
Jefferts Schori says she takes seriously the concerns of conservatives, who believe that the Bible teaches same-sex relations are wrong, but believes the deep internal rift is distracting the church from what is really important. Jesus, Jefferts Schori notes, talked far more about economic sin than sexual sin, and said word none about homosexuality.
At the 2006 General Convention in June, for instance, the church passed resolutions to support the United Nations Millennial Development goals to fight poverty, AIDS and promote economic development in Third World countries, took a stance on immigration and laid out their own plan for Middle East peace. Yet what made the news and is fracturing the church are issues over homosexuality.
"There are so many cases of injustice," Jefferts Schori says. "For us to be focused on this one thing might be seen as the work of the devil."
The church has been threatening to split since 2003, when Jefferts Schori and the majority of the Episcopal Church voted to consecrate practicing gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Jefferts Schori also led Nevada to become one of the first Episcopal dioceses to bless same-sex unions.
Conservative forces within the United States and throughout the worldwide communion condemned the actions based on biblical teaching. Anglican bishops were also angry that the U.S. church had acted unilaterally, without regard to the teachings of the worldwide church.
Conservative critics believe the election of Jefferts Schori, an outspoken proponent of gay rights in the church and a woman to boot, was another American insensitivity to the concerns of their brethren in Africa and Latin America.
But what deepened the schism in the minds of conservatives was the U.S. bishops' failure to take seriously the worldwide Anglican Church's requests to place a moratorium on the consecration of gay bishops and same-sex marriages and to apologize for their actions at the 2003 General Convention. Conservatives wanted to see a complete about-face; liberals agreed only to slow the ship long enough to try to persuade their church brethren to jump aboard.
It may be that both sides need some space, said Jefferts Schori and Kendall Harmon, chief theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, one of four U.S. diocesans who have made requests to the archbishop of Canterbury to be placed under different leadership.
Harmon agrees that the internal divide is distracting the church from more important matters, but he says it is impossible to perform joint mission work in a family that is in disagreement over fundamental teachings. At issue in the debate over consecrating practicing gay bishops and same-sex marriages is scriptural authority and interpretation, the doctrine of marriage, the church's authority, even the shape of the Gospel itself, Harmon says.
"It's a collision in the community between a civil rights-based, inclusion-based gospel and a sin-salvational-based gospel," Harmon says.
Still, if anyone can bring together the two opposing sides, it might just be Jefferts Schori, who carries over her sense of inclusiveness even to conservatives, Harmon says. She also brings a fresh perspective to the situation and a willingness to think out of the box.
The question is whether she can keep everyone at the same table.
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