Chose the Pulpit Instead of Teaching : New Episcopal Bishop Ready to Tackle Big Job

“I make up for my lack of abilities by running around a lot,” said Frederick Borsch, the newly elected Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles. He was talking about his tennis game, but Borsch said he knows that he will have to do a lot of running in his new position as well.

As spiritual leader and chief executive officer of a diocese that covers a six-county area of Southern California, he will be responsible for more than 200 clerics who minister to 80,000 baptized members, the fifth-largest Episcopal diocese in the country.

“There’s a lot of excitement, but it also makes me a little bit nervous, because it’s a big job, obviously,” he said. “In a diocese this large I’m going to need a lot of help.”

Borsch, 52, is a New Testament scholar who started his career as a parish priest in suburban Chicago, called by a vocation to “try to find a way of life that would be of help to other people.”

Almost Became a Teacher

He said he thought about politics and almost went into teaching. “I’ve always thought that a fifth-grade teacher is what I’d do if I wasn’t doing this,” he said. “That would be a great way to contribute to society.”

But instead he chose the pulpit, where he could get closely involved with people’s lives, Borsch said.

The son of a Chicago lawyer, Borsch said that he was active in church youth groups while in high school but that he never considered donning the white collar and black shirt of an Episcopal clergyman until a local priest asked if he had given the idea any thought.

“I said no and went back out and played some baseball, but obviously the seed was planted,” Borsch said Thursday, making his first appearance in Los Angeles only six days after his election. For the last seven years, he has been dean of the chapel at Princeton University.

Stayed in Academia

He said he had been asked previously to run for bishop of the Diocese of California, based in San Francisco, and for the top jobs in Chicago, Pennsylvania and Hawaii. “My wife loved that idea,” he said of the Honolulu posting.

But until recently, he believed that he should stay in academia, Borsch said. Prayer and discussion with colleagues and former students persuaded him to try for the Los Angeles job, he said.

Borsch is not expected to take up the bishop’s crook until late in the spring, after all 118 dioceses of the Episcopal Church nationwide vote to endorse his election. Their approval was virtually assured in the wake of his unusually quick election on three ballots earlier this month, church officials said.

Borsch was the favorite candidate of most priests in the diocese, at least 20% of whom studied under him at a seminary in Berkeley. Several clergy members said they believe that his intellectual background will add luster to the church’s deliberations.

“L.A. is becoming a world city and Borsch is a national and international figure in the church and in the ecumenical world,” said the Rev. Charles E. Bennison Jr. of Upland, one of four candidates who vied with Borsch in the Jan. 8 election. “His election represents our identification with the world community.”

Other delegates said they were moved by his comments in a videotaped interview distributed before the election.

Borsch also showed a flash of wit in the video, saying that he and other candidates had been asked so often what they would bring to the job that one of them finally responded, “Well, what I bring is my butterfly collection.”

One of his early challenges will be to find housing for himself and for the church offices, which were recently sold to Unocal for a development project the oil firm is contemplating near its headquarters on Fifth Street, just west of the Harbor Freeway.

‘I Feel Rootless’

“I came here and found that there’s no house, no cathedral and now I find out that Diocesan House (the church office building) has been sold,” Borsch said with a laugh. “I feel rootless.”

Earthquake-damaged St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, once the leading church in the diocese, was sold in 1980.

Although he began his career as a curate at Grace Church in Oak Park, Ill., in 1960, Borsch moved to England in 1963 to earn a master’s degree at Oxford University and a Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham in 1966. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and another from Oxford.

He returned to America to begin his teaching career at the Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., moving to the General Theological Seminary in New York and to the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, where he was dean, president and professor of New Testament.

Although he acknowledged that he comes from an affluent background and that the Episcopal Church is generally seen as an upscale denomination, Borsch recalled that the Bible says that Jesus is to be found among the poor, the naked and among those in prison.

“That means that if the church wants to hear the voice of God, it means listening to these people,” he said. “And therefore, if we’re going to respond to God, it’s not just by helping them, it’s by listening to them.”

Although he said he does not think “there’s any need for a bishop to get media exposure simply for the sake of media exposure,” Borsch said he hopes to make the Episcopal Church more vocal on the issues of AIDS, poverty, homelessness and help for undocumented immigrants.

“Part of me wants to be very active and part wants to think and reflect before action takes place,” Borsch said. “I’m trained to analyze very carefully, and I want to bring that gift to social action.

“We need not just knee-jerk rhetoric and a quick fix, but carefully thought-out reflection followed by the right kind of bold action that will be helpful to others.”

Although the number of Episcopalians is relatively small--there are as many Catholics in Los Angeles (about 2.5 million) as there are Episcopalians nationwide--Borsch said he expects to work with Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony on issues of concern.

“I look forward to meeting Archbishop Mahony,” he said. “We’re a smaller church but we have resources, too, and we can make common cause on a number of issues.”

Known formally as the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, the Episcopal Church is one of 28 regional and national churches that make up the Anglican Communion.

Although they recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as their spiritual leader, Episcopalians share much of the pomp and many of the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. Their priests are allowed to marry, however.

Membership has been static in recent years, but Borsch said he hopes to expand by recruiting believers among people who do not belong to any church, especially new arrivals from Latin America and the Pacific Rim.

“Let’s be honest about it,” he said. “The Episcopal Church has a pretty Anglo image and we’ve never been very good at that. Still, we have a number of wonderful members who are Hispanic or from Asia, and we need to empower them.”

Borsch, who married Barbara Edgeley Sampson in 1960, is the father of three grown sons. He said his wife will find it hard to leave her job on the staff of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey but added, “She’s a great human being and she’s looking forward to it (the move).”

Borsch is the author of 11 books, most recently, “Many Things in Parables,” which is to be published this year.

He lists his interests as history, writing, poetry, tennis, canoeing, jogging and “sports generally.”