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Guy Spiro: Ian, I usually like to start by asking people to tell their story. How did you get to be who you are?
Ian Lawton: I started out in the Anglican Church in Australia, which is the Episcopalian Church in America. I was ordained in Sydney and moved to Auckland, New Zealand. My background is in mainstream religion, but now I run a very progressive, independent church in Michigan.
GS: Your Anglican background is where your connection with Bishop Spong comes from?
IL: I met Bishop Spong back in the late ’80s when I was a twenty year old in the Seminary. He took me under his wing, seeing that I was in a very conservative context,
but wasn’t really comfortable in it. He tried to lure me to various parts of America over the years and was really onto it for me to come to Michigan. He knew this community and he was the matchmaker that put us in touch with each other. He said, you people should meet, and that’s how it happened.
GS: My wife Jeanne has read Bishop Spong’s books and subscribes to his newsletter, and we’ve been very interested in hearing him speak. We’d heard good things about your church and took the opportunity to see him and your church when he came there, and we were very impressed with both. You had well over one hundred people formally join the church on the day that we were there. That’s amazing.
IL: Yes, it’s a very exciting time in our community and it is truly a phenomenon that is kind of hard to explain. We’re in west Michigan, very conservative part of Michigan. This church has a long history as a reform church, a conservative reform church. My predecessor went on a liberal journey and began questioning literal bible scholarship, becoming more open in relation to homosexuality. When he retired, they said we’re not going to get a reform church replacement, we need to get somebody who takes us the next step. So I arrived six years ago and the mandate was basically, take us the next step on this journey. Once we’ve already found our freedom in becoming inclusive, where do we go from there? We started then, moving from being inclusive or tolerant to celebrating
