The terms for God, in the poetic language of the prayers written for centuries, have almost always been male: Father. King. Lord. And in the Episcopal Church, the language of prayer matters. The Book of Common Prayer, the text used in every Episcopal congregation, is cherished as a core element of Episcopal identity.
This week, the church is debating whether to overhaul that prayer book — in large part to make clear that God doesn't have a gender.
"As long as 'men' and 'God' are in the same category, our work toward equity will not just be incomplete. I honestly think it won't matter in some ways," said the Rev. Wil Gafney, a professor of the Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School in Texas who is on the committee recommending a change to the gendered language in the prayer book.
Switching to gender-neutral language is the most commonly mentioned reason to make the change, but many stakeholders in the church want other revisions. There are advocates for adding language about a Christian's duty to conserve the Earth; for adding a liturgical ceremony to celebrate a transgender person's adoption of a new name; for adding same-sex marriage ceremonies to the liturgy, since the church has been performing such weddings for years; for updating the calendar of saints to include important figures named as saints since 1979.
The competing resolution says that the church should not update the Book of Common Prayer now, and should instead spend the next three years intensively studying the existing book, which has its roots in the first Anglican prayer book, published under the same title in 1549.
"I have no doubt there are many, many, many other priests who are clutching pearls and collars in horror and would never change a word," Gafney said. But she argued that not changing the words of the Book of Common Prayer is harmful. That's the only book found in many Episcopal churches, and the book that a believer is likely to have at home for his or her personal spiritual resource. "As long as a masculine God remains at the top of the pyramid, nothing else we do matters. We construct a theological framework in which we talk about gender equality … then we say that which is most holy in the universe is only and exclusively male. That just undoes some of the key theology that says we are equal in God's sight, we are fully created in God's image."
Other mainline Protestant denominations, including the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have similarly debated the use of gendered language for God; the Reform Jewish movement updated its God language to gender-neutral terms when it replaced its 1975 prayer book with a new edition in 2007.
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