Episcopalians: Successor for Pike

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"Hello, Kim? This is Jim," said California's retiring Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike into a phone at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. "Has anyone told you the news?" No one had. But there was no better way for Michigan's Suffragan Bishop C. (for Chauncie) Kilmer Myers, awakened at 3:30 a.m. at his home in Detroit, to learn that he had just been elected Pike's successor.

When the balloting started, Myers, 50, seemed one of the least likely winners in a field of eight. But as a deadlock developed among liberals, moderates, and a minority of conservatives, Myers took on strength as a compromise choice. He was elected after midnight on the ninth ballot by the required majorities of both the 180 diocesan clergymen and the 500 lay delegates.

"A Catholic Churchman." Myers is more than sufficiently liberal on social and race issues to satisfy the enthusiastic followers of Pike, and sufficiently orthodox on theological matters to soothe those moderates and conservatives who think Pike close to heresy. Pike and Myers have been friends since their teaching days together at Manhattan's General Theological Seminary 20 years ago. Myers' work in slum and Negro areas of Jersey City, New York and Chicago has won him the reputation of being more at home in the asphalt jungle than the pulpit. He and his wife Katie Lea had no children, but they adopted a Negro boy (now grown up and in the Peace Corps) and two Koreans. Myers has been in Michigan since 1965, took part in last year's Selma march.

Unlike Pike, Myers shuns theological controversy, calls himself simply a "catholic churchman." When asked what he thinks of such thorny matters as Pike's denial of the Virgin Birth, the physical Resurrection of Christ and the Trinity, and his restless questioning of the nature of God, Myers is diplomatic. "The theological situation throughout the church today is extremely confused," says he, "and Bishop Pike is simply a part of that."

"A Worker in Purple." Myers inherits a see that includes ten counties around San Francisco and has 103,000 church members. Under Pike's yeasty eight-year stewardship, the number of clergy has almost doubled, the diocesan budget is up from $349,000 to $894,000—and the deficit may reach $80,000 this year, partly because of decreased giving by grumbling parishioners. Pike has delighted some and scandalized others by allowing a policy of open communion in his diocese, and by permitting the use of Grace Cathedral for a modern art exhibit, a jazz mass, and the premiere of Duke Ellington's In the Beginning, God.

Now Pike joins the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. He calls himself a "worker-priest in the purple"—a somewhat oblique reference to the fact that, as a result of a resolution passed by the delegates, he will stay on at Grace Cathedral in the largely honorary job of auxiliary bishop.