Episcopal Church elects first black presiding bishop
SALT LAKE CITY — The Episcopal Church elected its first AfricanAmerican presiding bishop, choosing Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina during the denomination’s national assembly Saturday.
Curry was elected by a landslide in a vote at the Episcopal General Convention, the top legislative body of the church. Curry earned 121 of 174 votes from bishops on the first ballot. The other three candidates had 21 votes each or less. The decision was affirmed on an 800-12 vote by the House of Deputies, the voting body of clergy and lay participants at the meeting.
Curry’s election is the second consecutive historic choice for the New Yorkbased church of nearly 1.9 million members. He will succeed Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was the first female presiding bishop and the first woman to lead an Anglican national church. The Episcopal Church is the U.S. body of the Anglican Communion, an 80 million member worldwide fellowship of churches with roots in the Church of England.
At a news conference, Curry said his selection as the first black leader of the denomination was “a sign of our church growing more deeply in the spirit of God and in the movement of God’s spirit in our world.” He will be installed Nov. 1 in a service at the Washington National Cathedral, the day Jefferts Schori completes her nineyear term.
“We’ve got a society where there are challenges before us. We know that. And there are crises all around us. And the church has challenges before us,” Curry told the assembly, when he was introduced as presiding bishop-elect. “We are part of the Jesus movement, and nothing can stop the movement of God’s love in this world.”
The Episcopal Church, the faith home of many Founding Fathers and U.S. presidents, has been trying to confront its own history of racism. The church has asked dioceses to research their own links to slavery because many Episcopalians were slaveholders cathedrals and schools. In 2008, Jefferts Schori held a service of repentance to apologize for the church’s complicity with slavery.