Terry Brown, Bishop in Four Worlds
AN EMAIL FROM ARCHBISHOP LINDA NICHOLLS, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, sent waves of grief around the world quickly on the evening of Easter Sunday this year:
This morning Bishop Susan Bell texted to let me know that Bishop Terry Brown has died. He had not been responding to emails or texts and a wellness check found that he had died in the last few days. +Terry was retired in Niagara Falls [sic] after serving as Bishop of Malaita, Solomon Islands from 1996 to 2008. He was a theologian, teacher and passionate advocate for the Pacific islands amidst environmental and justice concerns. […] +Terry never slowed down in retirement — and will be remembered for his hard work, passion in mission and keen intellect.
Bishop Brown had been hospitalized in early February for emergency abdominal hernia surgery from which he and his caregivers believed he was making a good recovery. The cause of death is not known. He would have turned 80 on August 14 this year, and he recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his diaconal ordination.
Terry Michael Brown was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1944 and attended both Presbyterian and Unitarian churches until becoming a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Kalamazoo as a college student in 1965. He received his B.A. at Kalamazoo College before beginning doctoral studies at Brandeis that were interrupted by U.S. Army service in Japan in the late 1960s. He began a lasting affiliation with the Anglican Church of Canada after his return from the military, and trained for ordination at Trinity College, Toronto. The Canadian connection came about after Brown was initially turned down for ordination by his own American bishop, Richard S. M. Emrich, in the Diocese of Michigan over concerns about his sexuality, political leanings, and Conscientious Objector status.
After his ordination to the priesthood by the Archbishop of Fredericton in 1975 to a curacy at St. George’s, Moncton, New Brunswick, Brown’s main ministries were as lecturer at Bishop Patteson Theological Centre in the Solomon Islands from 1975 to 1981, tutor in church history at Trinity College Toronto from 1981 to 1984, and Asia/Pacific mission coordinator for the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod from 1985 to 1996.
Terry Brown was consecrated Bishop of Malaita in the Church of the Province of Melanesia, at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Fiu on May 26, 1996. His consecration was momentously transnational, bringing together bishops from Korea, Canada, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Fiji, and his three living predecessors. Brown worked closely with his regional Roman Catholic episcopal colleagues, cherishing a friendship with his Brooklyn-born immediate neighbor. He retired officially on August 18, 2008, and was succeeded by the Right Rev. Samuel Sahu as fifth Bishop of Malaita. This province is now called the Anglican Church of Melanesia (ACOM).
The twelve years of Brown’s Melanesian episcopate saw rigorous attention to building up indigenous episcopal candidates, his work during transitions as acting primate, generative connection with neighbors in Papua New Guinea, support for regional centers of theological education, and fundraising for a tenth iteration of the provincial mission vessel Southern Cross. He also worked to support serious biblical, catechetical, and liturgical translation work into local languages, often in connection with Wycliffe Bible Translators, resulting in new work in Sikaiana, Ontong Java, Natgü, Anuta, and Kwara’ae languages. From his home in the Malaita provincial capital Auki and the national capital of Honiara on Guadalcanal, Bishop Brown helped his chosen Solomon Islands — the only place he said he felt at home — to navigate challenges of modernization, social media saturation, Chinese economic predation, the difficult legacies of local Japanese war dead and tourism related to them, and frequent power cuts as well as slow internet speeds. Although not himself a keen linguist, he acquired preaching proficiency in Solomon Islands Pijin and chose that language for the text of his 2023 grant of a coat of arms by the Canadian Heraldic Authority — an honor he did not seek and found somewhat surprising. Bishop Brown maintained the unity of his diocese against small schismatic movements and articulated a careful position against persistent polygamy and misuse of cannabis and kava drinks by clergy and parishioners. He received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Toronto in 1992 and was a Visiting Fellow of Huron College at the time of his death. He was also a very active member of the ASAONet community (Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania) and a careful historian of the history of photography in Australasia and the Pacific.
The first seven years of Bishop Brown’s episcopacy had as their background the eruption of catastrophic ethnic violence involving groups in his diocese and neighboring Guadalcanal, results in part of a failure of internal national integration following Solomon Islands independence from Great Britain in 1978. He was involved intimately in the church response to the April 2003 martyrdom of seven members of the Melanesian Brotherhood, the encouragement of peace agreements, and efforts at near-complete demilitarization that involved local Anglicans voluntarily relinquishing firearms. He was a key figure in the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose work continued through a 2013 digital report that caused considerable controversy in the Solomon Islands government by highlighting systemic failures that culminated in an Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) composed of over 2,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers and police who quelled the violence.
This work focused on peace was in continuity with earlier high-level Anglican Communion- and UN-sponsored efforts in North Korea, Cuba, Myanmar, the former Soviet Union, and work around reconciliation between Christians in Korea and Japan. Many of Bishop Brown’s lifelong commitments were shaped by his study of the Anglo-Catholic Socialist and Marxist tradition through the life of Frederic Hastings Smyth (1888–1960), the subject of his 1987 Th.D. dissertation at the University of Toronto. Brown was Smyth’s literary executor, and he spent considerable effort reinterpreting the work of Charles Gore, Conrad Noel, Percy Dearmer, Vida Dutton Scudder, and the Canadian Anglican Fellowship for Social Action as outgrowths of patristic and liturgical seriousness in response to problems of poverty, class, and industrialization. This was not merely an academic specialization; rather, Bishop Brown was committed in his own life to the redistribution of financial wealth and religious knowledge on a wide scale. He was an honored long-term guest at my homes in Stamford and New Haven, Connecticut on several furloughs that included a special connection to my Caribbean-American parish of St. Andrew’s Church, Stamford.
Brown was a liturgical modernist who welcomed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and their related changes in Anglicanism, as well as the ordination of women to all orders of ministry, though his episcopate was spent in a province that does not have this practice. He adopted some forms of eccentricity intentionally, amassing airline memorabilia such as airsickness bags in a collection that eventually numbered 800 examples and was auctioned on eBay to aid a seminary student. He was a philatelist and a founder of a social media group dedicated to Anglicanism and postal history. He cherished personal friendships with an extraordinary array of leaders in worldwide Anglicanism, including Rowan Williams, the late Canadian Archbishops Michael Peers and Fred Hiltz, Scottish-Burmese European suffragan David Hamid, and retired Dean of Niagara Peter Wall. His inclination was always to champion an underdog, always to assume good intention in a conversation partner, and always to try a solution that would honor diversity of perspective while maintaining the highest level of relation.
Bishop Brown followed one of his own heroes and friends, Charles Elliot Fox (1878–1977), in a commitment to being one of the final non-native, foreign leaders of Christianity in the Pacific. He refused to ordain outside aspirants to holy orders out of his conviction that Melanesian Christianity had its own internal, self-replicating power, and he died firm in his belief that he would be the last non-indigenous office-holder in the Anglican Church of Melanesia.
Beginning in 2001, Brown was a primary volunteer and supporter with New York diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton of Project Canterbury as an online digital archive of all aspects of Anglican history. He contributed thousands of transcriptions and scans to the site, collecting sometimes unique copies of liturgical and historical material from church collections in his hope that theological education in a Pacific context could be transformed by digital scholarship. Brown noted that because of conditions including humidity, vermin, low archival control standards, war, and cyclones, regional libraries often lacked material relevant to their own history and languages. He saw Project Canterbury as a way of addressing this problem, and also working around the quality concerns that come from Two Thirds World seminaries often receiving second-hand theological books from the Anglophone North that leave local scholars at some generations of disadvantage in their own reading and learning.
In the 16 years after his retirement, Bishop Brown served as assisting bishop in the Diocese of Niagara, as priest in charge of the Church of the Ascension in Hamilton, Ontario (ending in 2020), and as an adjunct professor of missiology and church history on the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College of the University of Toronto. He kept a close association in Canada with the Community of the Sisters of the Church, whose members he counted as valued friends. He visited friends and family in the United States frequently and had recently returned from a post-COVID trip to the Solomons for the consecration of a successor and to help oversee the creation of a new Diocese of Southern Malaita and Sikaiana. He died just weeks before a planned Canadian Church Historical Society conference on the sixtieth anniversary of the Toronto Anglican Congress and its promulgation of a landmark stance of Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence (MRI) for global churches descended from the Church of England. At the time of his death, Terry was an honorary assistant at Christ’s Church Cathedral, Hamilton, in the Diocese of Niagara. His most recent substantive social media posts expressed his joy at the launch this month of the mission ship Southern Cross 10, a 45-meter iron boat with a 300 gross tonnage and crew of 13.
Brown viewed the post-2003 Anglican Communion and fissiparous realigning responses to human sexuality with dismay and surprise, as his own 1996 consecration predated that of V. Gene Robinson for the Diocese of New Hampshire by seven years and caused no controversy:
I was consecrated a bishop in the Church of the Province of Melanesia, a Global South diocese, where all the Millennium Development Goals score about 3 out of 10, even though we are great dancers.
And to make matters worse, my own sexuality is “dodgy.”
I live in and am a part of all four worlds — the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of Melanesia and the pained world of gay and lesbian laity, deacons, priests and bishops.
Yet I am a bishop of a diocese that is full of life and has had much growth. In my last 12 years as bishop, I have confirmed 10,000 candidates. The diocese is deeply involved in evangelism, education, medical work, liturgy and peace and reconciliation.
My life as a bishop in all four worlds is possible only because of my faith in Jesus Christ. I had a conversion experience in which I felt deeply loved by God. That, the Eucharist, the life of Christian friendship and community, and Scripture, have sustained me through thick and thin.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you.” There are many other competing kingdoms, do not bow to them.
As much as is in you, try to maintain communion and friendship with all, whether inside or outside the church, however deep the disagreement.
Reject the Puritan option. We are Anglicans, not Puritans.
Exercise restraint and urge others to do so, whether locally or globally. Not everything has to be said or written about.
Be very careful in using typologies to classify people, theologies and churches. We are all the children of God, redeemed, with all of creation, by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If you have not done so, accept all the gay and lesbian people in your midst, in all their complexity, pain and celebration.
Finally, let the conversations (even debate) continue. Television has finally come to the Solomon Islands, so we now have the privilege of seeing BBC interview both Gene Robinson and Greg Venables. In our case, I do not think the church will thereby collapse. But in other situations, that may not be the case, and the endless talking to the media of both may be destructive. That is my final suggestion — remember that whatever you say publicly in this wired age, will go to every corner of the world. Honesty and prudence are both Christian virtues. We need to learn to balance them.
Bishop Terry was predeceased by his long-lived father Charles Raymond Brown (1918–2017) and his mother Louise Martha Walters (1918–2004), both late parishioners of St. Raphael’s, Fort Myers, Florida who had become Episcopalians at his encouragement. He is survived by a sister, Judy Martz of Michigan, nieces, nephews, and a very wide network of confirmands, ordinands, and friends whose faith was strengthened by his kindness. He is mourned especially by close friends Dr. Jonathan Lofft, the Rev. Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, Wayne Kempton, Professor Michael Scott, Canon Dr. Clare Amos, the Rev. Michael Blain, Dorothy Peers, Professor Jane Samson, retired Niagara Bishop Ralph Spence, Bishop Sir David Vunagi, Brother Christopher John of the Society of St. Francis, and by me.
