Northern Michigan Bishop Nominee Has Background in Buddhism: TLC 1.26.09

First published in the Living Church magazine.

The Diocese of Northern Michigan is set to elect as its bishop a priest who once received “lay ordination” in Buddhism. On Jan. 23, a diocesan search committee announced that a single candidate had been put forward to stand for election as bishop at the diocese’s special electing convention Feb. 21 at St. Stephen’s Church, Escanaba.

The Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester, rector of St. Paul’s, Marquette, and St. John’s, Negaunee, was put forward by the diocesan search team to stand for election as bishop/ministry developer under the “mutual ministry model” used by the small, rural diocese on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A priest of the diocese since 2001, Fr. Forrester also serves as ministry development coordinator and newspaper editor for Northern Michigan.

In recent years, he also was a practicing Buddhist, according to the former Bishop of Northern Michigan, the late Rt. Rev. James Kelsey. In his Oct 15, 2004 address to the diocese’s annual convention, Bishop Kelsey took note of some of the milestones among the lives of members of the diocese. After recognizing recent university graduations, the bishop said Fr. Forrester “received Buddhist ‘lay ordination’,” and was “walking the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism together.”

Fr. Forrester did not respond to requests for clarification or comments on how as presumptive bishop he would model the two faiths in his episcopacy.

The director of the Office of Pastoral Development, the Rt. Rev. F. Clayton Matthews told The Living Church that background checks for the nominee were “still in progress,” and “at this point” the question of Buddhist lay ordination had not been addressed. However, a “background check does not cover that sort of thing,” he observed.

The Diocese of Northern Michigan has a “particular theological process” that it has been using to call its bishop based upon the mutual ministry model, Bishop Matthews said. He had been “monitoring” the process, but said he had only “just heard” of the nomination. He added that he could not verify if what Bishop Kelsey said in 2004 was an accurate statement of the nominee’s current beliefs.

If Fr. Thew Forrester was an Episcopalian-Zen Buddhist, and if he was elected by the special convention as bishop, objections to his being seated in the House of Bishops would be raised, according to one senior diocesan bishop. That bishop said he hoped the House of Bishops was “still sufficiently faithful to recognize the total self-contradiction this would involve and deny consent.”