More Episcopagans
The Battle Creek Enquirer interviews Wayne Haney, an Episcopal priest who left the ministry in 1997 and ended up a Wiccan priest.
“I left the Episcopal priesthood in 1997. My sense is that the strain of leading a Christian flock while not fully being able to believe the message I was preaching finally dropped me into what might be called a very early mid-life crisis. I went through a couple of years of therapy and soul-searching – one of those times when a person really asks what she/he is about, what she/he believes, what life holds. I had always been interested in spiritualities of most any kind…Online, I became acquainted with people from a Wiccan group in Flint. Eventually my wife and I went there and immediately felt we had finally found our spiritual home.”
Haney is now a priest and ritual leader of the Sacred Birch Society, a group that seems very healthy and centered in its practice. It looks like Haney has managed to bring the best aspects of his formal priestly training into a Wiccan frame of reference.
The last Episcopal priest to make the news for leaving the fold and becoming a Pagan was W. William Melnyk (aka OakWyse). A flurry of public twists and turns circulated causing doubt as to whether he was returning to the Christian fold or leaving and becoming a Druid. But it looks like he has now made his decision and is now grove guardian for LlynHydd Grove, and is in the process of co-writing a fantasy novel with Emma Restall Orr head of the The Druid Network.
As the ECUSA heads towards a possible schism over issues of full inclusion and participation for LBGT members and attempts by conservative splitters to wrest churches from the “liberal” leadership, one wonders if this isn’t just the trickle before the flood-gates open. Will modern Paganism start to have an influx of seminary-trained clergy dissatisfied with the constant hairsplitting and culture wars within mainline Christianity? If this happens how will that affect our communities in the longer run?
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