Earlier this week the Presiding Officers of the Episcopal Church — Gay Clark Jennings (President of the House of Deputies) and Michael Curry (Presiding Bishop) — issued a powerful challenge to the whole church to repent of its complicity in the culture of sexual exploitation and to commit to creating a more just future.

The joint letter — dated January 22, 2018 — read in part:

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. When facts dictate, we must confess and repent of those times when the church, its ministers or its members have been antagonistic or unresponsive to people—women, children and men—who have been sexually exploited or abused. And we must acknowledge that in our church and in our culture, the sexual exploitation of women is part of the same unjust system that also causes gender gaps in pay, promotion, health and empowerment.

We believe that each of us has a role to play in our collective repentance. And so, today, we invite you to join us in an Ash Wednesday Day of Prayer on February 14 devoted to meditating on the ways in which we in the church have failed to stand with women and other victims of abuse and harassment and to consider, as part of our Lenten disciplines, how we can redouble our work to be communities of safety that stand against the spiritual and physical violence of sexual exploitation and abuse.

You’ll want to read the whole letter here.
If you would like to be part of an online conversation about this important issue, visit President Jennings’ Facebook page, where she has invited feedback on how our upcoming (July 2018) General Convention could act as an agent of change.
Consider revisiting Mike Kinman’s Advent One sermon — “When Lament Is Liberation” — for background on just how deeply rooted misogyny and sexual exploitation is in our historic faith traditions. (You can also hear an excerpt from the sermon in Episode Three of our podcast “Studio ASC.“)
And give thanks for the prophetic leadership of those in our Episcopal Church calling us to partner in repenting of the past and reimagining the future. Together may God give us grace to become the change we want to see.