The Episcopal Methodist

Canonists, seminarians, as well as Methodist and episcopal laymen across the U.S., were raising eyebrows last week over an ordination as rare as the California condor.

The Episcopal Bishop of the California diocese, with full rubric and laying on of hands, had conferred on a Methodist minister--not Episcopal orders but episcopal orders. As a result, the Rev. George Hedley is still a Methodist, but he wears his Methodism with a difference. Frail-looking but sinewy, George Hedley, 60, is the well-beloved, brilliant father figure and campus character of California's small (700 students) Mills College for women. Born in China to British Methodist missionary parents, educated in England and the University of Southern California, he had served as director of the Pacific Coast Labor School from 1936 to 1941, when he went to Mills as chaplain. Since then, Chaplain Hedley has also become department chairman and professor of economics and sociology, teaches a senior course in labor problems and a junior course in ethnic groups.

The Complicated Canon. Hedley is known at Mills as a courtly, gentle man with a lively interest in a number of things, from electric trains (five in the basement) and cats (there were once 17) to archaeology and tennis. He speaks half a dozen languages and is a prolific writer of books (eleven), sermons and speeches. Says former Mills President Lynn White: "He can turn out 24 clean limericks an hour." Says another colleague: "George Hedley can call more bishops and baseball players by their first names than anyone else I know. He is like St. Paul in meeting people where they are. He is all things to all men without any act at all."

One of Chaplain Hedley's main concerns is disunity in the Christian Church -"the pathetic tearing of the seamless robe of Christ." Hoping to help mend it, and also to ease the minds of Episcopal students who take the sacraments at his hands, Chaplain Hedley, with the consent of his own Methodist bishop, applied to California's Protestant Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike for ordination under Canon 36.

"I doubt that in the whole of our canon law there is a more complicated canon than this," wrote Bishop Pike in an eleven-page letter to the clergy of his diocese. Canon 36 provides for the ordination of a minister whose previous ordination may be doubtfully authentic, or who wishes to be a minister in the Protestant Episcopal Church without losing his membership in another denomination, or (as in Hedley's case) who intends to remain a minister and function as such in his original denomination.

A Significant Step. As with Chaplain Hedley, Bishop Pike's main motive in performing the ordination was to witness to church unity. There have been protests. The high-church Protestant Episcopal weekly, the Living Church, criticized the ordination as super-Protestantism. Old Testament Professor (and Methodist) John Otwell of the Pacific School of Religion sounded off in a long letter in the Christian Century: "Putting it quite simply, it would seem that Dr. Hedley is now neither fish nor fowl. He has impugned his ordination as a Methodist, yet he remains merely a Methodist."

But Chaplain Hedley was heartened by a freshet of appreciative letters. "A significant movement in the ecumenical history of American Protestantism," wrote a Congregational theologian. A Methodist chaplain on his way to Japan telephoned

Hedley to discuss the ordination as a possible precedent for an integrated Protestant chaplaincy, and Protestant Episcopal chaplains at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral discussed the same possibility. Said Dr. Hedley to his congregation: "God grant that such judgments as to the wider influence [of this ordination] may prove to be sound ones. At least we may trust that we have taken a significant step toward Christian unity here."

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