‘The Advent has changed’: Andrew Pearson on why he left Advent Cathedral, dealing with the diocese, starting – AL.com

The Rev. Andrew Pearson, former dean of the 3,600-member Cathedral Church of the Advent, was on staff there for 11 years and served as the lead priest for seven, so he knows it like a face in the mirror.

There came a point when he didn’t like where he saw it going.

The Advent had been through three years of negotiations with the Episcopal Diocese of Birmingham, which tried to get the cathedral to move in the same direction as the diocese.

That showdown came to a dramatic conclusion in May and June. For more than a decade, the Advent had allowed members to steer their giving away from the diocese and the national denomination by selecting “Advent Only” on their pledge cards.

Outgoing Bishop Kee Sloan, who retired in January, and Bishop Glenda Curry, who took his place as head of the diocese, had been urging Advent to change that. They also wanted Advent to change its liturgy back to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, instead of Pearson’s reworked “Our Liturgy,” which reached back into Anglican history and pulled from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Pearson resigned in May and preached his last sermon on May 16.

The diocese and Advent issued a joint statement on June 25 saying an agreement for “peaceful relations” has been reached that was the result of three years of discussions.

In an interview with Alabama Media Group, Pearson discussed the background of the agreement, why he didn’t go along with it, and why he’s starting a new church.

Gay marriage

First, Pearson clarified that he didn’t leave the Episcopal Church over gay marriage. He had remained in the denomination after the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, and after the denomination approved gay marriage in 2015.

“That really wasn’t what sent me out of the Episcopal Church,” Pearson said. “I certainly hold a biblical position on marriage. Human sexuality almost never came up. Our disagreement over that was a given. There was no attempt to argue.”

The pressure on Advent to conform was too much, he said.

“After 30 years of straddling through all of these issues, the Advent has made a fairly definitive decision to be an Episcopal Church full-stop,” he said. “Two lawyers from Advent and two from the diocese came up with the idea of a covenant, which I was against.”

A church shouldn’t have to compromise its identity, he said.

“Do you have to have an elaborate document in order to get permission to preach the gospel?” Pearson said. “That shows me there’s something not quite right in the relationship from the get-go. It really was those core issues that were being brought to bear and of course, yes, they manifest themselves in the sexuality issue.”

He was not pressing other churches to change to the Advent’s position, he said.

“In one of our earlier conversations the president of the Standing Committee said to me, ‘Well, Andrew, what would you say if an Episcopal Church in Birmingham hired a transgendered clergy person to be their associate?’” Pearson said. “My answer was, ‘What I’d say is ‘Welcome to the Episcopal Church.’”

It was more about the Advent’s right to keep its tradition, he said.

“The issue really became, for me anyway, I think the individual congregation should have the ability to go in the direction they feel called to go, but I’d ask the same for the Advent,” he said. “I wasn’t really concerned what other Episcopal churches in the diocese were doing, but there seems to be a great concern from other churches as to what the Advent is doing.”

Why he resigned

The covenant was adopted after Pearson, who led the resistance, resigned. “The vestry has voted for it,” he said. “I just wasn’t able to lead the Advent into a closer relationship with the Episcopal Church.”

He says he was asked to leave.

“Senior leadership felt that I should step down and when they asked me to resign, I agreed with them,” Pearson said. “I thought it was best. My stepping down, when I did, avoided a lot of acrimony. It would have caused tremendous damage to a church that I still love very much. I thought it was best to acquiesce and lay it down.”

Pearson had hoped for a better outcome to the negotiations, with Advent keeping its distinct identity.

“Kee Sloan had reached out to me to say would the Advent be open to mediation,” Pearson said. “One of the options was Advent’s departure from the Episcopal Church.”

New Bishop

When Bishop Curry took over as head of the diocese this year, she took a hard line, Pearson said.

“Curry said no mediator, no agreement binding on the diocese, or on bishop successors,” he said.

Pearson said he had no animosity toward Curry.

“Glenda and I knew one another before she became bishop,” Pearson said. “We teamed a Cursillo weekend together. She is a very gifted and able person. I voted for her in the election to be bishop. I met with her, the Advent delegation as well as me individually, we met with her and the other candidates before the election. I told her before the election that we were committed to supporting her in the election and still feel that she was, of all the candidates, the best candidate.”

But Curry was determined to pull Advent back in line, he said.

“She takes her job very seriously,” he said. “In the diocesan profile, there were three issues or three challenges confronting the next bishop. One was numerical decline, two was financial decline, and three was the Advent. Because she was elected at 67 (she turned 68 on June 20), she had a certain time to work on those issues. She understandably took those as her marching orders, and those were the three things she has set out to fix. The financial issue and the Advent issue are somewhat intertwined.”

The main issue was Advent had to conform, he said.

“At the end of the day, it was an issue of, and she articulated this and so did Kee, that if the Advent wasn’t going to change, then there was no place for us in the Episcopal Church,” Pearson said. “There needed to be a greater degree of conformity.”

Money matters

How much money the biggest church in the diocese sent next door to the headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama loomed large in the discussions.

“The Advent has never done any teaching on how people should give,” Pearson said. “We left it to people to pray through and decide. That was an agreement we made when Henry Parsley was the bishop. We just left it to individual givers to determine how they would give. Of course, well over half our congregation was giving Advent only. That’s not a result of the Advent’s actions. That’s a result of the Diocese of Alabama becoming more like the Episcopal Church.”

Many people in the congregation did not like the more liberal direction of the denomination, he said.

“I think that our people had a hard time investing in ministries that they saw as undermining gospel work and opposing the Advent even,” Pearson said. “Having Advent only was a real pastoral accommodation that really kept our relationship with the Diocese of Alabama, albeit strained.”

Churches are asked to contribute a portion of their budget to the diocese, which keeps some for its budget and also sends money on to the national church headquarters.

“If somebody designates their giving, you have to honor that,” Pearson said. “I think the Adventers will scratch their heads and wonder, well, has anything really changed in the Diocese of Alabama that would make us feel good about taking ‘Advent Only’ off. Of course, the answer is the Diocese hasn’t changed, but with this covenant, the Advent has changed.”

The “Advent Only” option dramatically reduced the amount of the budget that was forwarded to the diocese.

“It’s not as big as it once was, but when I left, we were still the second-largest giver to the diocese behind St. Luke’s (in Mountain Brook),” Pearson said.

“Their recommendation is that large churches give 15 percent,” he said. “Of course, nobody does that. If we gave 15 percent, we’d be looking at giving the diocese $725,000 a year. The most we ever gave was $400,000. Our giving has been around $275,000 the past couple years.”

The church earmarked much of its giving, he said.

“We tried to work hard with the diocese, that even though we weren’t giving it in our covenant, we tried to true up our giving by designated giving to particular ministries in the diocese,” he said. “We gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Bethany Village expansion, for instance.”

The Bethany Village provides handicapped accessible cabins for the disabled at Camp McDowell, the summer camp for the diocese.

“If you totaled up all of our giving, we were giving more than we had given in the past, except it was not given carte blanche to the diocese,” Pearson said.

“We did pull back on some of our designated giving because it became very difficult for us to be able to support some of the ministries in the diocese,” he said. “Unfortunately, some of our longstanding relationships were ended because of the decisions of those ministries to move in a direction that the Advent wasn’t willing to go in.”

As an example, he said the annual mission camp in Sawyerville, a town in Hale County south of Tuscaloosa, took on a sexual education component that included distributing condoms to youth, he said.

“The diocese allowed itself to get hijacked by the issue of human sexuality,” Pearson said. “It was just being introduced into contexts where I thought it was just unnecessary and even egregious.”

Members at the Advent had some issues with whether teaching newly evolving views on human sexuality should be a focus of the church’s mission to disadvantaged youth, he said.

“At Sawyerville, the camp down in the Black Belt, which for so many years was a wonderful ministry, there was an incident where they were handing out condoms to 11-year-olds; they did training for their counselors concerning gender, meaning don’t use personal pronouns for a camper until they give you permission. Even Camp McDowell buying into that kind of stuff and having special cabins for people who identified a certain way. My contention was, I understand, this is not a shock to us. Maybe down in Sawyerville, instead of doing that kind of stuff around transgenderism, maybe we should do a unit on personal banking, so these children who often will be left as an adult to do their banking through payday lenders, will have other options. Something that was a little bit more practical to their context, rather than, frankly, elitist folks coming down there telling them what they ought to think.”

Changing liturgy

Pearson’s views on liturgy rankled the diocesan headquarters. He was particular about the prayers said during communion, such as an epiclesis, a prayer calling on the Holy Spirit to consecrate the bread and wine used in the Eucharist.

“Most of the Anglican Communion does not have this thing called an epiclesis,” Pearson said. “There’s another thing called the Prayer of oblation that comes after receiving communion and that’s what most of the Anglican Communion does. So, we were simply conforming to a tradition that the majority of the Anglican Communion observes.”

More importantly, some churches are given freedom on liturgy, but others are not, he said.

“It also had to do with the principle, as the bishop noted in the covenant, that different liturgies can be used with the permission of the bishop,” Pearson said.

“There are lots of liturgies taking place in the Episcopal church that move in a more revisionist direction, which get approval. But the Advent wanting to move in a more conservative, traditional direction is met with disapproval. And so there really is a double standard, whereby, I think that if we wanted to be more experimental in the other direction, we would have gotten the thumb’s up. So, really, it is at the discretion of the bishop and the issue is her unwillingness to allow the Advent the same freedom that other congregations are given.”

Starting a new church

Pearson preached his last sermon at Advent on May 16 and joined the Anglican Church in North America on May 17, he said. He’s now planning to start a new congregation with that Anglican group that has welcomed many former Episcopalians.

“I am in the process of working with others to plant a new church in Birmingham,” Pearson said.

When he first joined the staff at Advent under former Dean Frank Limehouse, there were discussions of Advent starting a mission church, he said.

“The original plan, I had hoped to plant a church alongside the Advent, that it would be a group of people sent out from the Advent,” he said. “The vestry discerned that was not something they wanted to do. It’ll be up to me to lead that group.”

It won’t be dedicated to the idea of being ex-Episcopalians, he said.

“No one wants to plant a church with a bunch of angry Adventers,” Pearson said. “That would be a terrible idea. The great encouragement that I have is that it’s becoming a very diverse group of people that are yes, from the Advent, but also from other churches in the Birmingham area, and people who don’t have much church experience. They are looking for something that’s less institutional, more relational, that’s a little bit more clear about where it stands and it’s not so culturally conformed. It’s an exciting time for us. We’re taking it one step at a time. We want to do this right.”

He’s not sure how many Advent members will leave and follow him, although he expects some will. No worship services are being held currently, he said.

“We’re still in the process of forming the congregation,” Pearson said. “We’ll be holding informational meetings in August in homes of individuals. Then we’ll begin gathering weekly in September, not necessarily as an organized church but a weekday evening, where will pray together, fellowship together, open our Bibles and dig down into the convictions that will shape this congregation.”

He’s not trying to imitate what Advent was, he said.

“It’s not just going to be an exact replica of the Advent, somewhere else in town,” Pearson said. “People at the Advent will need to say their prayers and if their only reason for coming and joining this new congregation is because they’re against the Episcopal Church, that’s a bad reason to join.”

Pearson alludes to country music for what the church won’t be.

“There’s this terrible Mac Davis country song (from 1980) that says, ‘I thought happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my rearview mirror,’” he said. “For this new church, the Episcopal Church is in the rearview mirror. We’re not going to be talking about the Episcopal Church. We’re not going to be talking about the bishop or the Diocese. If we talk about the Advent, it will only be in a positive light. We’re going to move forward, and this is going to be a missional church plant, not one that’s over and against where we’re coming from.”

When he and Limehouse looked at areas to start a new church, Homewood and Mountain Brook were considered. “We looked at property in Mountain Brook Village at one point in time,” Pearson said. “Even the Cranmer House that we lease over in Homewood was outfitted with a nursery with the possibility of planting a church; so, this idea had been floating around the Advent for awhile.”

With the new Anglican church, Pearson wants a fresh start.

“We’re not looking to take sheep away from already solid congregations,” Pearson said. “I’m fine if we’re a pasture of refuge for sheep that have been on goat farms. We are looking to reach an area that isn’t being reached by the gospel right now, not shuffling sheep but growing the kingdom. This is very early on. You need lots of things to start a new church. To purchase property you need money and people and right now we officially don’t have either.”

Anglican tensions

The U.S. Episcopal Church is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, affiliated with its founding church, the Church of England. Anglican churches worldwide tend to be more conservative than the Episcopal Church. Advent often hosted visiting Anglican bishops from Africa.

“The Advent has relationships with folks around the Anglican communion, so anytime a sort of Anglican dignitary comes into town, we were the ones who would host them,” Pearson said. “That would bring friction as well because of the Episcopal Church’s place in the life of the communion is stressed to say the least. And what I told Bishop Sloan and what I told Bishop Curry is that rather than being criticized for it, maybe the diocese ought to see it as a gift, that here’s the rest of the Anglican communion, and some of the most conservative provinces like Rwanda, who are willing to deal with the Advent and relate to the Advent, even though they were an Episcopal Church.”

But relations between the Episcopal Church and other Anglicans remain tense.

“I really thought that the Advent could be a reconciling bridge between the Communion and the Episcopal Church, but not only was it clear from actions of our diocese, but even statements from leaders of our diocese, that they really don’t care about relating to the wider Communion,” Pearson said.

Pulpit freedom

Pearson said he felt stifled in the pulpit as the feud with the diocese escalated.

“Especially toward the end, I didn’t feel free in the pulpit anymore,” he said. “I felt that everything I said, and even everything I did, was being filtered through the lens of, ‘Is he talking about the diocese? Is he talking about the Episcopal Church?’ Even well-intentioned people weren’t able to take it at face value. I feel much freer now. I don’t have to worry about that.”

Pay cut

At Advent, Pearson was in a high-profile, well-paid position as dean of the cathedral. He’s not worried about starting from the ground up with no guarantee of a salary like he had before.

“That factor never really entered by mind,” he said. “The Lord’s always looked out for us.”

It was difficult to leave what felt like home, Pearson said.

“The harder decision was leaving a place that I loved so much and that I know loved me,” he said. “But I think the Lord was speaking through circumstance and the fact that I was asked to resign helped me to see that indeed it was time to go.”

Future of denominations

Pearson said that mainline American denominations like the Episcopal Church do not have the loyalty they once did.

“I’ve always held my denominational identity pretty loosely,” he said. “I think that any church that wants to double down on its denominational identity whether it’s conservative or liberal, is making a mistake. I don’t think that’s wise missionally. People aren’t joining institutions. They’re interested in joining movements. Gone are the days when older generations might say things like I’m a Baptist or Episcopalian no matter what, and when we move to a new town we’re going to a Baptist church or Episcopal church regardless of what’s happening. That is a real rarity and is soon to be extinct completely. I’m not really interested in planting a denominational flag in the ground, even if it is solid theologically.”

Theology and Jesus

Pearson said his meetings with diocesan leaders, though mostly cordial, sometimes devolved into theological disputes over the identity of Jesus and the meaning of the crucifixion that he didn’t think were necessary.

“I got really tired about arguing over who Jesus is, and arguing over what the Bible is and what its role is in the life of the church,” he said. “Those things are very important and ought to be discussed. But those conversations were taken to a level that it’s shameful that a denomination would have to have those conversations. You see that in the emphasis laid in the Episcopal Church on Jesus as a way of love, that Christianity is about emulating Jesus, and loving one another in the way that Jesus loves us. That is part of Christianity, but that’s a deficient view of the Christian faith, and a deficient view of who Jesus is and what he came to do. A Jesus who is just the way of love is a Jesus who can’t save. It certainly may help make our life a little bit better and our neighborhoods a little bit stronger, but when it comes to salvation, he came to die, and die for a very specific purpose. I would often engage in conversations with leaders of the diocese and at given points it was clearly said that Jesus’ death on the cross was just a political accident and that his death would have been just as effective as if he had died of pneumonia, that if the cross is anything, it’s just an event, it’s reduced to an example of ‘see how he loves us,’ rather than the cross being the moment where God is reconciling the world to himself because Jesus’ death is an atonement for our sins. He is a substitution on our behalf. I was always very careful in these conversations. The last thing I would ever do is to un-Christian somebody. But after years and years of these conversations, it became clear that many of us were using the same words but operating under completely different definitions. We were having disagreements over what Jesus did for us, what is the nature of sin, core issues that kept us apart.”

Membership decline

The Episcopal Church has kept meticulous records of membership since 1880 and Sunday attendance since 1991, but the persistent decline since the 1960s has caused many in the denomination to call for “narrative” reports that emphasize stories about what churches are doing, rather than complete year-to-year statistics on church attendance.

In the last report before changes in statistical reporting, the numbers were bleak. “The Episcopal Church has lost a quarter of its worship attendees over the past decade,” the Rev. Dwight Zscheile, an Episcopal priest and statistician, told Episcopal News Service last year. “At this rate, there will be no one in worship by around 2050 in the entire denomination.”

The U.S. Episcopal Church went from 6,423 parishes to 6,393 from 2018 to 2019, with a 2.2 percent decline in baptized members from 1,676,349 to 1,637,945.

In the Diocese of Alabama, membership dropped from 32,160 in 2018 to 31,529 in 2019. The decline in average Sunday attendance was steeper, going from 8,867 in 2018 to 8,614 in 2019, a 2.9 percent drop.

Pearson attributes those trends partly to the denomination’s embrace of a changing view of morality.

“The Diocese of Alabama, as well as the rest of the Episcopal Church by and large, instead of reversing course is doubling down on what led to this decline in the first place,” Pearson said.

“Any church that was going to leave the Episcopal Church has already left it,” he said. “What we do see is continued decline as people slowly, but very steadily, continue to leave the Episcopal Church either to go nowhere, or to other churches. I think that the Advent tethering itself to the Episcopal Church and the diocese will ultimately lead to the Advent becoming more like the Episcopal Church, which means, ultimately, it will decline.”

It will take more than small tweaks to save the denomination, he said.

“We’re in a place where there needs to be a complete overhaul,” Pearson said. “So many people at the Advent are there in spite of our being an Episcopal church. If we were to embrace the Episcopal Church, I think missionally, it would be to the detriment of the Advent.”

Effects of Covid

The shutdown of in-person worship through most of 2020 due to Covid-19 pandemic restrictions added another blow for churches, he said.

“Before Covid, we were over 1,000, about 1,100,” in attendance at Advent, Pearson said. “We had been streaming our services since January of 2020. We were ahead of the curve and didn’t have to scramble too much when Covid hit. Our viewership was thousands and thousands of people. We had people tuning in regularly on every continent except South American and Antarctica. So, I would joke with staff and ask why we couldn’t break into the South American market.”

The livestream introduced new people to church services this year, he said. “People who came to us after we opened back up had come to know us through our livestream,” Pearson said. “People over and over would say, ‘I never thought that I would come to an Episcopal Church but after listening to you we are interested in coming and being a part of your church.’ We weren’t fully open when I left. I would expect that the Advent would bounce back pretty quickly. That would be a combination of new people coming in, but also a lot of folks not coming back.”

Many church analysts have predicted that churches could expect a 20 percent decrease in attendance from pre-Covid numbers, Pearson said.

“People refer to Covid as the great decline,” he said. “For instance, department stores that we knew were on their way out, this sped that along. I think that over the next couple years, you’re going to see churches that were already in significant decline shutting their doors and that will certainly be true of churches in the Diocese of Alabama, and all over, regardless of theological conviction.”

Because of the Episcopal Church having an older membership, it may have been hit harder by Covid than some others. People were not shifting church membership much during the pandemic, though, he said.

“I would bet that membership would have held steady, because if it declined that would be an indicator mainly through deaths in the diocese,” Pearson said. “Most people weren’t thinking about church membership when they weren’t going to church. They’re not going to call their church and say, ‘Hey, transfer my membership to wherever.’ There was a minimum of shifting around during Covid. But I think the number to really watch is when we are able to report back what average Sunday attendance is to see what that number says. There’s always been a big gap between membership and average Sunday attendance in Episcopal churches. That gap is going to continue to grow, I think.”

See also: Church of the Advent strikes a deal to change liturgy, stop withholding funds from diocese

Advent Cathedral dean steps down due to ‘tension’ in the denomination

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