Some Episcopalians Would Like Their Church to Grow. Some wouldn’t.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports on the coming replacement of Carolyn Tanner Irish as bishop of the Utah Diocese under the headline “Next bishop’s big challenge: Grow a shrinking Episcopal Church in Utah”:

The question put to the Rev. Michael Barlowe is on the minds of many Utahns as they quiz four candidates for bishop:
"Where do you see the Episcopal Church in Utah in three years?"
Barlowe's answer, given recently to a group of Episcopalians in Ogden, is both a joke about the state's culture and a wish — and it is greeted with applause:
"I'm not the prophet," he says. "But I would hope we'd be a much larger church."
Indeed, growing the church is very much on the minds of Utah Episcopalians as they come to the end of an 18-month process of selecting a new bishop to replace the Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish, Utah's 10th Episcopal bishop.
The 11th bishop will be elected May 22 in a special convention at St. Mark's Cathedral in Salt Lake City.
Like many mainline Protestant denominations, the Episcopal Church is losing members.
Utah, which had about 6,000 Episcopalians in 1996, when Tanner Irish was consecrated, now is down to 5,200 — a 13 percent drop during a period in which the state's population swelled by 37 percent.
On any given Sunday, notes the Rev. Scott Hayashi, another of the finalists, only 1,600 are in the pews of Utah's 25 Episcopal congregations.
And yet, for Episcopalians, growth is not so much about having numbers to boast about as sharing what members see as a historical, richly liturgical and welcoming form of Christianity.

This couldn’t help but remind me of the interview Katharine Jefferts Schori, who had been bishop of the neighboring Nevada diocese from 2001 through 2006, gave the New York Times shortly after she was installed as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?
About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.
Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?
No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.

Bear in mind reading those sentences that the interviewer was Deborah Solomon. As Steve Sailer put it, “Deborah Solomon has established a popular weekly feature in the New York Times in which she snarkily interviews somebody much smarter than herself. The secret to her success: being ignorant and surly.” From her interview with Umberto Eco: “Are you saying that Germany got the idea of fascism from Italy?” “Oh, certainly. According to what the historians say, it is so.” “Maybe just the Italian historians.” “If you don’t like it, don’t tell it. I am indifferent.”

The Times’ public editor once had to run a column addressing Miss Solomon’s creative editing of her interviews:

Last year, The Times Magazine published an angry letter from NBC’s Tim Russert, who said that the portrayal of his interview with her was “misleading, callous and hurtful.”
Russert, the author of two books about his father, told me that the interview had been presented as an opportunity to talk about his mom on Mother’s Day. Instead, the interview, headlined, “All About My Father,” featured a seemingly insensitive Russert dodging Solomon’s questions about his mother. “I talked at great length about my mother,” he said, but none of it appeared in the published interview. Russert said that Solomon combined questions and took “an answer and transposed it to another question.”
Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the magazine, said, “We examined his complaint and found it more or less justified.” Russert had talked about his mother, Marzorati said, and Solomon made it appear that he had not. Solomon said, “I made a mistake not putting in what he said about his mother.”