I am an evangelical and traditional Christian, a church warden in the diocese of northern California. My church, Christ the King, was the first in the diocese to join the AAC. My wife and I have been happily married 40 years. Margaret is to me the most precious sign of God's love for me. I was one of more than a dozen persons who nominated Canon Beisner to be a candidate for bishop and I voted for him at the election convention. I was not alone, the conservative and traditional clergy and laity as a bloc voted for him. We wanted Barry; moreover the opposing candidates were seen by us as poised to lead the diocese towards the left in faith and practice. In our diocese no notoriety exists over his election. The only persons I heard voice disappointment at the election were those who wished to see the rapid introduction of gay clergy and same-sex church rites in the diocese. This will not happen under his leadership. He has publicly voiced his support of the provisions of the Windsor Report.

Canon Beisner is not another Gene Robinson. It can be argued that his election can be reconciled with a principle of mercy in Scripture and the Windsor Report, which at this time may be understood to be the document that best represents the mind of the Anglican Communion on the prospects for unity. Having known Canon Beisner as a personal friend since he was in high school, I am also in a position to comment on his life, marriages and ministry. First let us consider the contrast between he and Robinson.

Robinson's confirmation at General Convention in 2003 served as a wedge issue in his diocese, the whole Episcopal Church and further divided left leaning ECUSA from the most of the Anglican Communion. Two months after the ECUSA General Convention in October of 2003, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury intervened with what was called an extraordinary meeting of the Primates, in an attempt to ward off the breaking of communion by a many of the autonomous Anglican National Churches with ECUSA. In his words what was at issue was the "the grammar of faith and practice" for the whole Anglican Communion. This meeting led to the so-called Eames Commission and its subsequent Windsor Report one year later. This report reaffirmed the position of the Anglican Primates on Scripture and Human Sexuality issued at Lambeth [1.10] in 1998 and called on ECUSA to place a Moratorium on the election of a person in a same gender relationship to the episcopate and to refrain from public blessings of same-sex unions.

Now some say that Canon Beisner's election will add fuel to this national [liberals vs. traditionalists in ECUSA] and international denominational rift. The president and CEO of the AAC was recently quoted in the Sacramento Bee as saying:

The fact that Canon Barry Beisner, who has been divorced twice and is now married for the third time, has been elected as bishop ... is deeply disturbing to orthodox Anglicans both in the United States and globally," the Rev. Canon David C. Anderson, president and CEO of the American Anglican Council, said in a statement to The Bee. "In many dioceses ... Beisner would not be approved for ordination or received as a priest in his present marital status, let alone be chosen bishop.

I wish that Canon Anderson would have contacted AAC or conservative clergy in our diocese before he spoke. I cannot criticize his last statement: it is true. In many dioceses of ECUSA he could not function as a priest or be chosen Bishop. And of the 31 national Anglican churches, only the US, Canada and Wales permit divorced Bishops. More than a dozen are bishops in ECUSA. But his initial comments are hasty and may come to seem ill-advised.

Barry is loved by the orthodox of our diocese; he is orthodox in faith and practice. His theological position is moderate but unequivocal: he believes in the authority of the Bible and the creeds are not outdated mumbo jumbo to him: they are articles of faith. He is a classical Anglican scholar, who hopes the Episcopal Church will remain the "Middle Way," while upholding freedom of conscience. He even spent a sabbatical in England a few years back studying Richard Hooker and his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

What revisionist churchman would do that? Moreover his career in ministry has been model. He accepted Christ when he was 15 in 1966. Since then he has been continuously in some form of ministry. He was sharing his faith with fellow students when I met him at 17. He led a Christian commune at UC Irvine as a freshman. His education was on hold for 7 months the next year while he served as a missionary in Guam. At UC Berkeley he was involved in campus ministry. After Seminary, he served as a Chaplain at Cal Poly and Vicar in Cambria. From there he served as Associate Rector in Columbus Ohio, before returning to California, where he served devotedly the needs of two very different parishes in San Francisco and Davis. The last four years he has been Canon to the Ordinary, a "bishop in training." But a bishop must find sanction in the Scripture as well as the church.

The Scriptures speak of marriage and divorce. The Old Testament permits divorce and the New Testament prohibits it. But it also recognizes that it will happen, thus the higher standard given to bishops in I Timothy, that they be "the husband of one wife:" prohibiting polygamy and promiscuity. Most Christians today believe that unbroken marriage is an ideal as well as a mandate; one that is tragically broken by human sinfulness. Yet we have as a church since the 1960s tried to deal pastorally with Christians who divorce and wish to remarry. One marriage is still the ideal for Barry: he does not justify divorce, but he has more empathy when it occurs.

Barry knows that divorce is a sin and says so, he knows that he failed. This is where he and Gene Robinson differ. Moreover his first divorce was biblical. His wife of three years abandoned him and Matthew, his two year old child. I know, because as Matthew's god-parents my wife and I took him for several weeks that summer so that Barry could continue working and going to school. Barry was awarded sole custody of his child and raised him as a single father the next three and a half years until his remarriage. Reasonable people should not hold him accountable for that divorce. His second marriage lasted 16 years. We were very close friends during all that time. It was a wonderful marriage and yielded two wonderful sons. But in the end it failed. I have never heard Barry speak an ill word of his ex-wife, who also remains our close friend. She is also remarried and very happy.

Scripturally the way I look at this matter uses the scale of intentionality, case by case. Jesus said "go and sin no more." If divorce occurs, do those believers who remarry commit to never again divorce. Everyone in our diocese from the bishop to the clergy to the people in the pews knows that Barry is not promiscuous. He waited 6 years to remarry. He and Ann have been married for eight years. They had shared custody with a blended family of 4 teenage children from their previous marriages. The children are all doing well. Barry and Ann will never divorce.

Canon Anderson might also wish to pull his copy of the Windsor Report off the shelf and read #125 in the section called On elections to the episcopate, it says

There are some areas in which the issue of acceptability is unclear. For example, practice varies across the communion in relation to divorce and remarriage: there are provinces where it would be unthinkable to appoint a bishop who had been divorced and remarried; there are others where this would be regarded as a secondary issue. The fact of divorce and remarriage would therefore not seem per se to be a crucial criterion.

It would appear that the Primates of the Communion will accept Canon Beisner, if confirmed, as a bishop in the worldwide Church of God. So should we all.

---Joseph J. Muñoz is Parish warden of Christ the King, in Quincy, Northern California