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When the people of Christ Church, La Crosse, in the Diocese of Eau Claire, held a parish meeting recently to discuss the possibility of their diocese reuniting with the Dioceses of Fond du Lac and Milwaukee, among the most urgent questions that came up was not about the future, but about the past. “Someone said, ‘Well, didn’t we do this before and the result wasn’t positive? So why are we doing it again?” said Carla Corbin, who has served several terms as the parish’s senior warden. Not everyone present understood the question, and as long-time members attempted to explain the diocese’s recent history to those who had arrived more recently, Corbin noticed that not everyone remembered the same story about the vexatious events of 2011, when the Dioceses of Eau Claire and Fond du Lac had almost, but not quite, decided to unite. (“Junction” is the ecclesiastical word for the merger of two dioceses when one was not originally part of the other.) “Part of the angst and disappointment that still continues today is part of that process,” said the Rev. Kathy Charles, a supply priest in the Diocese of Eau Claire, who is a member of the steering committee of the Wisconsin Trialogue, the name organizers have given to the process of exploring whether the three dioceses should reunite. At the steering committee’s first meeting last spring, she said she told the group, "We need to be very clear with people that this process and that one are not the same things.”
What happened in 2011 can be quickly summarized, but remains the source of rumors, hurt feelings and mistrust. After a lengthy exploratory process, the two numerically small dioceses that cover the northern three-quarters of the state met in separate conventions on Saturday, October 22 to vote on becoming one. Eau Claire voted heavily in favor of junction in both the lay and clergy orders, and it seemed initially that Fond du Lac had done the same, although by much tighter margins. But multiple recounts of the Fond du Lac ballots, performed by different groups in different settings on the following Tuesday, indicated that the initial count was in error, and that the vote had succeeded in the clergy order by two votes, but failed in the lay order by one. This development created a quandary for Bishop Russell Jacobus of Fond du Lac, who had assiduously avoided taking sides as his diocese debated the issue. “I did not want to say the tellers did something wrong,” he said. “I also spent time praying about it. Should we yoke with Eau Claire or not? With such a close vote, it would be a struggle.” Under a churchwide canon that has since been revised, the ecclesiastical authority of each diocese, in this case Jacobus and Bishop Ed Leidel, bishop provisional of Eau Claire, had to give their consent to the juncture. “I just decided I am going to simply say that since it was so close, as the bishop, I am not going to consent,” Jacobus said. His decision was announced to the wider church in a media release on November 3, but word had already reached the Diocese of Eau Claire, whose convention had sung a celebratory hymn on the day the outcome of the vote was originally announced. Lee Donahue, a member of Christ Church, La Crosse, who is the facilitator of the current communications task force of the trialogue, remembers driving between the two dioceses for juncture discussions, and recalls “a great sense of camaraderie and cooperation.” “It left such a devastating impact on Eau Claire,” she said. “It was like, ‘Well, they don’t want to be a part of us and they have decided they are going to navigate their own way.’ So all of those conversations and collaborations that had been taking place for months just evaporated. It was like losing a great new friend.” Narratives not necessarily supported by fact gained currency as people attempted to explain the reversal of the originally announced outcome. “Of course, everybody thought they had changed their minds after the vote,” Corbin, who also serves on the trialogue’s communications task force, said. The proposed explanations included an alleged threat by two churches in Fond du Lac to leave the diocese if the merger took place. But Jacobus said in a recent interview that while a few of the diocese’s most conservative parishes occasionally discussed leaving the Episcopal Church, none did so over the proposed juncture. In a 2011 interview with the Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg of Episcopal News Service, he was frank about the resistance to juncture from some corners of the diocese, noting that some members of the diocese were threatening to withhold financial support, and some had threatened to resign from diocesan committees if the juncture were approved. The controversy surrounding the counting of ballots in Fond du Lac diverted attention from what Matthew Payne, the diocesan canon for administration since 1999, said was a more fundamental problem. Diocesan leaders and those who participated in the numerous meetings the two dioceses held from May to October in 2011 had a solid understanding of what juncture would entail. But, Payne said, “convention delegates weren’t necessarily in on all of those pre-convention meetings.” The debate at the Fond du Lac convention indicated both a desire for more detailed information and anxiety about Eau Claire’s financial position in 2011. “We did not target the audience that was voting,” Payne said. “We did not specifically take the time to sit down with those delegates that were going to be there and say, ‘Throw us your questions.’” Bishops Matt Gunter and Jeff Lee and the trialogue steering committee are well aware of the history Eau Claire and Fond du Lac share. The 2011 effort was the second time the two dioceses had discussed merging, a 2008-09 effort having been postponed as premature. Task forces on finance and parish and regional engagement are at work, as are task forces on communications, constitution and canons, culture and mission, prayer and discernment and structure. With the steering committee, the group comprises 58 members. On April 15, the steering committee will hold a daylong meeting in Stevens Point to assess the reports it has received from the finance, structure and parish and regional engagement task forces and determine whether and how to proceed with reunion discussions. “We’re looking to develop an architectural rendering of what reunion would look like, not a blueprint,” Gunter said. “If God is calling us to reunite, we want to leave plenty of room for the Holy Spirit to shape who we will become.” Regardless of the specifics of the proposal that may come to all three diocesan conventions on October 21, clarity regarding the vote and vote counting will be essential, Lee Donahue said. At a recent parish meeting a member of the Christ Church, La Crosse vestry posed four questions that the steering committee will want to answer ahead of time: How will the votes be counted? Will the counts be announced? Is the threshold for reunion a simple majority in every order, or higher? And how will the dioceses proceed if two of them agree to reunite and one does not? If the steering committee recommends reunion to the three dioceses’ standing committees, trialogue leaders are committed to a series of meetings and listening sessions this summer and early fall. "We’ll need to answer those questions and a whole lot of others,” Tim Donahue, a member of the steering committee from Christ Church, La Crosse, said. “We’re committed to a clean and transparent vote.” David Skidmore of the Diocese of Fond du Lac, a member of the communications task force, contributed to the reporting of this story. Comments are closed.
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