Leading an Embattled Church

"You have to be willing and excited about adventuring, going where no one's gone before," Jefferts Schori said. "There's a piece of that that is enormously enlivening. I think that's a piece of what abundant life is about."

Jefferts Schori decided to pursue full-time ministry after federal funding for her scientific research dried up. She earned a master's from Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., and was ordained in 1994.

Her theological outlook has given Episcopalians and Anglicans with traditional views of the Bible plenty to criticize. Jefferts Schori personally believes in a relationship with God through Jesus but does not see it as the only true path.

"If we insist we know the one way to God, we're putting God in a very small box," Jefferts Schori said.

Episcopal conservatives, a minority within the church, were aghast when in a sermon at the General Convention, she said: "Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation -- and you and I are His children." She used the term, as many female theologians do, as a metaphor, describing "that sweaty, bloody, tear-stained labor of the cross" as bearing new life.

The protests against her world view have made her pioneering role as the first female presiding bishop almost an afterthought.

Seven U.S. conservative dioceses have rejected her authority and asked Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, to assign them another national leader. Three of the dioceses do not support ordaining women.

Overseas, some tradition-minded Anglican leaders, meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, said they would snub her at the next global Anglican meeting in February.

Asked what she wanted to say to those Anglican leaders, she shrugged and said, "Get over it." Jefferts Schori, who met privately last month with Williams in London, said, "I think the reality is clear that the archbishop of Canterbury isn't going to assign somebody to be an alternate primate" -- the Anglican term for a national church leader.

Jefferts Schori hopes to find a way to reconcile with Anglican leaders overseas and conservatives at home. She has started work at Episcopal headquarters, where her predecessor, Bishop Frank Griswold, has just finished his nine-year term.

"At some level, if it becomes clear that the relationship is broken, that there's no possibility for a new life in that relationship, then the pastoral thing to do is to find a creative way to separate, a gracious way to separate," Jefferts Schori said. "I hope we don't have to go there. My hope is for finding life that is still present in relationships, and if we go the separation route, the door is left open and the lights on."