John Shelby Spong was born in 1931 in segregated North Carolina. His circles tended not to talk about race or sexuality, topics that would be at the forefront of his ministry, though he recalls being told by his father, at the age of 4, not to use respectful titles of “sir” or “ma’am” for black people and how unfair it seemed to him, even as a child.(1) When he was president of his youth group in 1949, he asked his Bishop to invite young black people to their youth convention. Spong recalls that his bishop’s refusal, which suggested that “the people are not ready for... [the mixing] of Negro boys and white girls,” “was insightful about the depth and content of racial fear in the South,” which was both racist and sexist.(2) From a young age, Spong saw the injustices within his tradition and sought to find a path toward change while remaining committed to his church. While seeking reform, Spong found in Jesus Christ “a basis for meaning, for ethics, for prayer, for worship” that he sought to convey to others.(3) He was a poor student, but he knew that such a path would require education. Despite helping to support his widowed mother and siblings as a teenager, he turned his grades around in late high school to ensure that he could attend college and make his dream of the priesthood a reality.
Jack Spong attended a religious school, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, for undergraduate work, where he majored in Philosophy and minored in Greek.(4) His education would open him to the joys of learning and the deep spiritual satisfaction of truly examining one’s beliefs and applying them to the world. During his undergrad work, he became lay leader in charge of a small church in Roxboro, North Carolina that offered him pastoral experience and taught him the importance of listening to the voices of those he served. He entered seminary at Virginia Theological Seminary promptly after graduation.
Jack Spong’s seminary education opened his eyes in new and exciting ways. Prayer was integral to his life at this time. He had always believed in the power of prayer and prayed vigorously for his father’s health during his illness. While in seminary, he created a 24-prayer circuit to pray for a professor’s wife who had cancer. After her passing, he was forced to reconsider prayer and what its purpose was-- a dilemma that he would ponder for years and eventually write his first book on.(5) His classes on theology, likewise, challenged his ideas of God. “My personal God,” he would write, “...began to shake visibly… I had begun my long theological journey into maturity.”(6) Seeing how little the knowledge provided by seminary leaked into congregational settings, he saw the priesthood’s reversion to “concepts of a manipulative, invasive, this-world-oriented deity” as an injustice to the communities they served and “vowed that [he] would be different when [he] finally became a priest.”(7) Spong increasingly came to value how academia and continual learning could influence and enlighten one’s faith. Even today, in his 80s and retired, he continues his research and writes books to share his quest with others.
During Jack Spong’s clinical work in seminary and the sessions with his supervisor, he began to realize the need for personal care and communities of trust. After his clinical work, he sought to extend the experience with his supervisor and began a covenanted group-therapy session with his supervisor and other young couples at his seminary. This journey helped him address his own needs, better understand his wife and their friends, and helped him to realize the importance of deep, personal, mentoring friendships.(8) Jack would continue to build deep, sustaining relationships with his peers, which would provide advice, counsel, and comfort in his difficult times. As a faith leader whose wife was severely ill (she had acute paranoia and later, cancer, both of which she refused treatment for) and who found himself often at odds with his institution on important issues, the support and confidence of these relationships would sustain him in some of his most challenging times.
When Jack Spong entered the priesthood, he knew that he would make adult education important to his career. “The world I lived in was not the thirteenth century, where only the clergy were educated. My world was a dynamic, intellectually exploding world… I wanted the church to speak to that world.”(9) He felt that the theologies and academic understandings that he explored in seminary were lacking in churches-- most churches continued to spout the “same old” pious theologies that disregarded seminary educations. Spong saw this as an injustice to laity, who were largely ignorant of so much knowledge regarding their tradition, and as a dimension for expansion of spirit that was not offered in churches. At his first assignment as priest at St. Joseph’s Church in Durham, North Carolina, he began offering Sunday night potlucks to discuss current issues of politics and science in relation to faith. The college town responded enthusiastically to the honest approach to religion and the willingness to dialogue. The church began to grow.(10) As Spong began to bring education, so important to his own spirituality, to others, he saw that others’ spiritualities were also heightened by the inclusion of academic and critical understandings, as well as opening up dialogue to modern science and social issues. Such forums allowed all to deepen their religious understandings and bring their faith into very real conversation with the issues that touched their lives. Bringing academia to faith allowed for the seeming dichotomy of “knowledge” and “faith” to dissolve. Educated people who had felt religion to be problematic were able to reconcile their beliefs through exploratory dialogue and the guidance of religious academia.
A few years later, Spong would be called to another small town church in Tarboro, North Carolina, where he would find himself in the middle of further racial tension in a Southern town resisting desegregation. As Jack would socialize and minister to black members of his community, folks within his home church, which was predominantly white, would struggle with his progressive attitude. “If preachers are going to touch life significantly, they must be willing to live deeply with their people.”(11) Jack would get up early to study and thus began combining his spiritual practice of study with community. He began taking his study sessions to a local coffee shop “to drink coffee with the farmers” and other laborers, many of whom were not white.(12) This would break down some divides that were present in his town and allow Jack to be present and in community with folks in a way that can’t be accomplished in a church setting. Listening to people in a variety of settings would inform and open his mind and heart to the concerns of others. “When trust developed deeply enough between [him] and the [black community],” they shared with Jack Spong and he was able to minister to them.(13) These simple acts of treating the people of color in his town with the same dignity as the white people led to many hateful and threatening phone calls, letters, and rises in KKK activity toward him and his family. While many in the Episcopal tradition still supported segregated communities, Jack Spong felt it was imperative to live and speak in ways that were radically honest. Perhaps this was due to his understanding that “life of prayer is… the responsibility to open myself in love to the transcendent in everyone I meet… It is to live with courage and honest involvement with [the] world.”(14) This time, early in his career, was a struggle. Many elements of his community, including the local press, were intent on removing Spong from their church because of his “radical” positions. Spong drew on the strength of his friends and mentors, understanding “sharing deeply” as a form of worship.(15)
When it was time for a diocesan convention, Spong attempted what he had in his youth: racial integration. He and another priest had to battle the racism of their peers, but they prevailed. “When issues are being fought over a changing world, those who risk rejection by embracing the future and moving beyond the barriers of past prejudices are never finally hurt. Those who cling to the insights of a dying world… are the ones who will ultimately lose both credibility and integrity.”(16) Spong learned the importance of speaking prophecy and calling for justice. Voices in his church in Tarboro would start to call for his resignation, but Spong continued to speak his truth. Honesty against odds would mark his career.
When Jack Spong was called to a larger church in Lynchburg, Virginia, he also brought this prophetic honesty to his spiritual education. When called to St. John’s, his adult education class would “duck no issues, compromise no truth, and avoid no frontier to which [his] thought and study led [him].”(17) He believed that churches could be intentionally deceitful in their presentation of the Bible and thus felt it important to challenge those presentations. Likewise, his understanding of prayerfulness as a way of living required him to be open and in dialogue with his world. Academia would continue to be a focal point of Jack Spong’s spirituality that he shared with others, believing that we must journey deeply into the faith to which we are loyal.(18) He believes strongly even today that critical inquiry into our religious traditions only brings us closer to the “deeper well” in which all religious journeys meet-- a level of mysticism beyond individual traditions and touching the reality of God.(19)
When Spong’s ministry moved to St. Paul’s in Richmond, Virginia, a more metropolitan area, he encountered racial tension and a class divide that he saw as unacceptable. He observed that the majority-black city had pockets of poverty and “patterns of deep racial injustice,” such as underfunded and limited access to medical care.(20) He pioneered the “Isaiah 58:12 Program” which would partner with other organizations to work on affordable housing and open a clinic so that folks in underprivileged neighborhoods would not have to go to the emergency room for care.(21) Spong understood that systematic injustice was the responsibility of all members of a community and that the lack of basic care for some members of society was a symptom of institutionalized racism-- one that had to be addressed head on, with honest speech and prayerfulness.
During his tenure in Richmond, Jack Spong began to realize more fully that women were treated unfairly in society and in the church. He allowed a woman to serve communion in his church (despite continual criticism) and supported publicly the ordination of 11 women that bishops in the church had performed despite official church positions against female ordination.(22) When Spong was nominated to serve as Bishop of Newark, he announced that he favored the ordination of women and suggested that the “church should meet the issues of our world head on and that truth was more important… than church unity” when it came to issues of justice.(23) He would write and speak on many occasions about the injustices of the church toward women as a sin and suggest that any position of the church should be available to women.(24)
Jack Spong would soon be elected as Bishop of Newark, a position of more authority that allowed him to bring his views to a larger subset of the church, as well as the ability to advocate for justice on a larger scale within the Episcopalian body. During his tenure, the Church was struggling with the humanity and authority of LGTBQ persons, as was Bishop Spong. Amid the rising tension and controversy, many priests in his diocese came out to him. He “absorbed [their challenges] like a body blow to [his] prejudices” as he faced the reality that his imaginings of what “homosexuality” meant necessarily dissolved.(25) As he was forced to deeply consider his own beliefs, he came to the conclusion that his views had been wrong; Bishop Spong made known his views and became the first bishop to ordain an openly gay and non-celibate man to the priesthood.(26) While earlier in his career he held prejudiced views, Spong would today suggest that “we can either follow Christ or maintain our prejudices. There can be no compromise.”(27) Equal rights, recognition, and welcome must be extended to all. While this issue would continue to plague his Church after his retirement, Bishop Spong continues to speak this truth in his books and lectures, believing strongly that God’s will is done in faithful and consistent truth-telling.(28)
Retired Bishop John Shelby Spong led a career as an outspoken reformer in the Episcopal Church. As a writer, speaker, teacher, preacher, and pastor, he brought his gifts to the people and asked all to honestly engage in prayer, honesty, study, and community to confront issues of injustice in church and in society. While his views have matured over time, he was and is a powerful voice for inclusion and respect of people of color, women, and gay and lesbian persons. Through continual education, prayer, an openness to the voices of the oppressed, support of deep personal relationships, and brave honesty, he moved communities toward justice. As Bishop Spong articulates, the goal of his career “has been to combine scholarship with faith, to bring honesty and the authenticity of citizenship in the modern world to the activity of worship while continuing to walk in the faith tradition established by Jesus of Nazareth whom [he calls] Lord and Christ.”(29) The history of communities he has touched and legacy he leaves behind him is testament to the importance of both deeply spiritual and critical engagement with faith.
(1)John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001), 16.
(2) Spong, Here I Stand, 45.
(3)John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002), 1
(4) Spong, Here I Stand, 48-49.
(5) Spong, Here I Stand, 67.
(6) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(7) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(8) Spong, Here I Stand, 71-73.
(9) Spong, Here I Stand, 265.
(10) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(11) Spong, Here I Stand, 89.
(12) Spong, Here I Stand, 98.
(13) Spong, Here I Stand, 104.
(14) John Shelby Spong, Honest Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 29.
(15) Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, 70.
(16) Spong, Here I Stand, 102.
(17) Spong, Here I Stand, 135.
(18) Spong, The Sins of Scripture, 243.
(19) Spong, Lecture, PSR, July 18, 2014
(20) Spong, Here I Stand, 184.
(21) Spong, Here I Stand, 185.
(22) Spong, Here I Stand, 234-236.
(23) Spong, Here I Stand, 254.
(24) Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, 5-6.
(25) Spong, Here I Stand, 281.
(26) Spong, Here I Stand, 240.
(27) John Shelby Spong, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 126.
(28) Spong, Here I Stand, 211.
(29) John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: a Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Reprint ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992), 11.
Works Consulted
- Spong, John Shelby. A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002.
- Spong, John Shelby. Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001.
- Spong, John Shelby. Honest Prayer. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
- Spong, John Shelby. Jesus for the Non-Religious. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008.
- Spong, John Shelby. Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: a Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture. Reprint ed. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992.
- Spong, John Shelby. The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. Reprint ed. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014.
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