c. 2003 Religion News Service

NEWARK, N.J. _ John Shelby Spong’s press clippings these days turn up from Australia to Japan, but rarely in New Jersey where the former Episcopal bishop of Newark gained international fame _ as well as infamy _ for his maverick Christian views.

As bishop from 1976 to 2000, Spong challenged core Christian beliefs such as Jesus’ resurrection and virgin birth. Along the way, his prolific writing and preaching supported gay rights, women’s ordination and racial integration within the church.

But Spong says his travel schedule will keep him away from the climax of a controversy his career helped create _ the historic vote at the Episcopalian general convention in Minneapolis next week on whether the church will consent to the election of the Rev. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire to be the first openly gay Episcopal bishop in the United States.

By design, Spong’s 31/2-year retirement has not been relaxing. In high demand for public speaking engagements, he fills his calendar with lectures across the country and around the world to promote his controversial views and his books. He writes weekly columns available online for a $34.95 annual fee.

Also by design, he has kept quiet on church affairs in New Jersey, letting his friend and successor as bishop, John P. Croneberger, chart his own course for the Newark Diocese.

“I don’t see him very often anymore,” said Louie Crew, a staunch Spong supporter who is active in the diocese’s leadership. “That’s largely because (Spong) made an important commitment to the new bishop that he would not in any way be an interference.”

“I travel about 80 percent of my life now,” said Spong, who grew up in North Carolina. “It’s a great life. I love it.”

Spong and his wife, Christine, who organizes and accompanies him on all his trips, take December off each year from the lecture circuit. Between now and then, though, Spong will lecture in Canada, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, often before media, and sometimes hecklers.

He has 500,000 frequent-flier miles saved.

“I must say, I’m surprised at the demand,” he said. “But it tells me there’s a hunger across the world for what I’m trying to talk about.”

The couple plan to lighten their travel load in February 2005, five years after Spong’s retirement.

“It seems like he should reduce things every five years,” Christine Spong said. “We have grandchildren to be visited and family to spend time with. It would be nice to spend more time (home).”

Spong’s newest book, “A New Christianity for a New World,” published in 2001, is a follow-up to his 1999 book, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die,” his literary effort to prod Christians to modernize beliefs he calls outdated. That book still draws strong reactions on Amazon.com and has garnered more than 215 reader reviews.

His old theological foes in Newark are pleased Spong has stayed out of the local limelight but worry about the effects of his lectures elsewhere.

“He is certainly representative of a trend that seeks to oversimplify the Bible and then to categorize it as being largely irrelevant,” said the Rev. Canon John Donnelly, rector at St. Michael’s Church in Wayne, N.J., and a longtime critic of Spong. “That is dangerous, I think, because in so doing, we really discard the heart of Christianity.”

Donnelly has long criticized Spong for rejecting all who see truth in the Bible as fundamentalists.

“Fundamentalists take every single word of the Bible literally, and there are those of us who take the Bible seriously without being literalists,” Donnelly said. “To be painted with the same brush distorts the different ways that people can look at Scripture.”

Spong plans to monitor the Minneapolis vote on Bishop-elect Robinson from afar. He supports Robinson’s election both as a longtime backer of gay rights and as a longtime friend of Robinson, who began his career at Christ Church in Ridgewood, N.J., in 1973.

Church conservatives oppose ordaining a gay bishop, but Spong said the fact that the vote in Minneapolis will focus on a specific person, rather than on the issue itself in an abstract manner, can help Robinson win.

“I think to debate that openly with a concrete person in mind makes it an easier debate,” he said, noting that Robinson was popular enough in New Hampshire to win that diocese’s election for bishop.

DEA END DIAMANT