Is God male? Episcopal Church debates gender wording in prayer book

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.

Gafney says that when she preaches, she sometimes changes the words of the

Book of Common Prayer, even though Episcopal priests aren’t formally allowed to do so. Sometime she switches a word like “king” to a gender-neutral term like “ruler” or “creator.” Sometimes she uses “She” instead of “He.” Sometimes, she sticks with the masculine tradition. “‘Our Father,’ I won’t fiddle with that,” she said, invoking the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to say in the book of Matthew.

Gafney and many other Episcopal priests don’t want to skirt the rules when they make changes like that — they want the prayer book to conform to a theology of God as bigger than gender.

The leaders of the Episcopal Church, the American denomination that descended from the Church of England but has long been separate from its British mother church, will consider two dueling resolutions at their triennial convention, which began Tuesday in Austin. Texas, and runs through next week.

One resolution calls for a major overhaul of the Book of Common Prayer, which was last revised in 1979. A wholesale revision would take years, the church says, meaning a new prayer book wouldn’t be in use until 2030.

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; or updating the calendar of saints to include important figures named as saints since 1979.

The competing resolution says the church should not update the Book of

Common Prayer now, and should 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.

Other mainline Protestant denominations, including the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have 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.

Kelly Brown Douglas, the canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral in the District of Columbia and a member of the committee recommending a change to gender-neutral language, said that a revised Book of Common Prayer wouldn’t just replace all the lord” with “sovereign.”

The Bible, she said, includes more varied descriptors of God than the current

Book of Common Prayer uses. “What about the God who heard? I’m talking about the God who heard the cries of the oppressed . ... The God whose voice comes through the whirlwind. Wow! Who is that God? That frees God from these very limited, finite images of God in which we are creating God in our own image instead of trying to live and reach into the image that is God.”