Barbara Harris

Born 1930
American clergywoman

"A fresh wind is indeed blowing.... To some the changes are refreshing breezes. For others, they are as fearsome as a hurricane."

Introduction

When Barbara Harris was ordained a suffragan (assistant) bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church in 1989, she broke a 2000-year-old tradition stretching back to the time of Christ. She was the first woman to be made a bishop by any of the three major branches of Christianity ó Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

The U.S. Episcopal Church is part of the worldwide Anglican communion that grew out of the Church of England, and it has many traditionalists among its members. While some of them welcomed Harris's appointment, others were outraged. They protested that it was "sacrilegious" and "theologically unsound" for any woman to be a bishop, because bishops were successors of the twelve apostles, all of whom had been men. Others attacked Harris personally as a left-wing radical and as a divorced black woman who lacked the necessary qualifications. They complained that she had no college degree or seminary training, and had not been a full-time priest with her own parish.

Harris agreed that her background was unusual, for she had been a businesswoman for much of her life, but she did not feel that made her unsuitable. "I've had an active ministry all my life," she said, "a lay ministry." This was indeed true, for she had been an active member of the church even as a child.

Community work

Barbara Clementine Harris was taught from an early age "to love the Lord your God with all your heart" and "to love your neighbor as yourself." Along with her sister and brother, she was regularly taken to church by her parents, Walter and Beatrice (Price) Harris. Her mother was choir director and organist of St. Barnabas Church in the Germantown district of Philadelphia where the Harrises lived, and young Barbara played the piano for the church school in her teenage years. As a teenager, Barbara also started a Young Adults Group, which was so popular that it attracted some seventy members and became the largest youth group in the city.

On graduating from Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1948, Harris went to work for Joseph V. Baker & Associates, a black-owned public relations firm in Philadelphia. The work involved representing white companies in black communities, mainly in the South, a role Harris performed so effectively that after ten years she was made president of the firm. She served in this position from 1958 until 1968, when she was hired away by Sun Oil, where she became head of the community relations department. It was during her term as president of Baker & Associates that she had her brief marriage, which ended in divorce. She had no children.

Civil rights activist

Alongside her busy career, Harris was equally busy doing volunteer work connected with her church. She was a member of the St. Dismas Society, which visited the local jails to hold services and befriend the prisoners. She was also a board member of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Despite such community work, Harris felt that her church was not sufficiently involved in the vital issues of the times. Although most of the congregation supported the civil rights movement, their support was quiet and undemonstrative, since they were rather conservative and did not want to get involved in political action. In the 1960s, with her rector's blessing, Harris therefore moved to the more activist Church of the Advocate in north Philadelphia.

Under its energetic rector the Reverend Paul Washington, the Church of the Advocate had become the center of the black protest movement in Philadelphia. It provided buses to take people to civil rights protests in the South, and many of its congregation ó including Barbara Harris ó joined Martin Luther King, Jr., on his Selma March in 1965. Three years later, the church hosted a Black Panther convention which attracted ten thousand Panthers.

Harris was deeply involved in all the church's activities. She served in the vestry, helped the poor in the surrounding community, volunteered in the soup kitchen, and helped get a Philadelphia orphanage desegregated. The Reverend Washington greatly admired what he called her "strong sense of justice and compassion for the poor," and when she told him of her wish to become a minister, he gave her full support.

Deacon and priest

In the early 1970s, although a woman could be ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church, she was not allowed to be ordained a priest. In other words, she could be an assistant but not a full member of the clergy. Harris thought this an outdated rule that made no sense in the twentieth century. Others were of the same view, and in 1974 three retired bishops took matters into their own hands and ordained eleven women deacons as priests ó thereby causing a great furor in the Episcopal church. But their action had the desired effect: two years later, the church policy was changed to admit women priests.

Harris had shown her support for the "Philadelphia 11" by leading a procession of parish women into the ordination service, and within the next two years she became convinced that she, too, should train for the priesthood. Since she had a full-time job, she could not enroll at a theological college, but she worked out a schedule that allowed her to acquire the necessary number of credits by studying in the evenings and on weekends. In 1976, she enrolled at Metropolitan Collegiate Center in Philadelphia, and between 1977 and 1979, she took several course at Villanova University. After a final three months at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, she had completed all the necessary qualifications and was duly ordained deacon in September 1979. One year later, in October 1980, she was ordained priest.

Harris then gave up her job with Sun Oil, though she continued to do some consulting work. Meanwhile, she served for four years as priest at St. Augustine of Hippo Church in Philadelphia and as chaplain at Philadelphia County Prison. Then, in 1984, she was appointed executive director of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company. It was in this role that she came to national attention, as editor of the Witness, a left-wing church journal. Harris had already written a number of articles for the Witness, protesting such matters as racism in the church and raging against President Ronald Reagan's policies. Like her sermons, her articles were powerful and hard-hitting, and they evoked a strong reaction among her readers.

Bishop Harris

When, in 1988, Harris was elected bishop after a heated campaign, many people objected on the grounds that she was too liberal. However, by far the greatest opposition came from those who were vehemently against the idea of women bishops, even though the Anglican church had recently opened the door to women by ruling that national bodies could choose their own bishops. There were also a few people who based their objections on Harris's color, but this was not a major issue, for there were already twenty-eight black bishops within the church.

During the time between Harris's election and her ordination, it looked as if the church might split over the issue. But Harris stood firm, and in February 1989 she was duly consecrated suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Preaching the following week in her home parish, she told the congregation: "A fresh wind is indeed blowing. We have seen in this year alone some things thought to be impossible just a short time ago. To some the changes are refreshing breezes. For others, they are as fearsome as a hurricane." Bishop Harris has since won over many of her opponents. Meanwhile, as church consultant Myrtle Gordon has pointed out, Harris remains what she has always been ó "a strong black woman, small in stature, fiercely strong in her beliefs, loyalties, and concerns for people's welfare in relation to the witness of the church."

Tenth anniversary in 1999

In 1999, there were 750 Episcopal bishops worldwide; 11 of them were women. Ten years into her tenure as bishop, Harris still believes there is room for the church to grow. "I would like to see the church come to some better understanding of what it means to be an inclusive fellowship, how to more fully exhibit the love of Christ in the world."

As bishop, Harris spends the greatest part of her time visiting parishes in her Diocese and does not have as much time for activism in the various causes that intrigue her as she once did. The battle that she fought to become a bishop has never ended for her and she continues to speak out on this score. On July 29, 1999, Harris gave a sermon in commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the Ordination of Women. There she lambasted the church's decennial conference at Lambeth, in which the value of having allowed women into the clery was questioned. She spoke eloquently of the new surge in opposition to women in the clergy and the fight that lies ahead. Harris faces mandatory retirement at the age of 72 in 2003.