Bishop Griswold’s Next Chapter
From The Living Church
(Clip) For the past three years, Bishop Griswold has also spent a month each year teaching and learning about Christianity in Cuba.
While his time as Presiding Bishop helped him appreciate more profoundly how the gospel could be embodied on the local level, he was happy to have the time to spend engaged in deeper dialogue, he said.
“Every [local] church tends to see the Church in its own particular context. Fidelity there looks so different from what fidelity looks like here,” he said.
In deference to his successor, Katharine Jefferts Schori, Bishop Griswold declined comment on current events in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. He did, however, revisit some themes from his tenure as Presiding Bishop.
Contrary to some Americans’ assumptions, he does not believe that Nigerian Anglicans are fundamentalists. “In Northern Nigeria, your Muslim interlocutors are very clear about their theology,” he said, “so you have to be very clear about yours.”
Anglo-Catholicism has nurtured his sense of Christians living in communion.
“I see the Catholic tradition as alive and constantly unfolding rather than as constrained by the past,” he said. “The Eucharist is about [drawing together] this gaggle of unlikely souls, many of whom would find it difficult to put up with each other, if not for sharing one bread and one cup.”
Echoing the words of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, his longtime friend, he said that both communion and baptism “draw us into solidarities not of our own choosing.”
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