Harris, Barbara Clementine

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Harris, Barbara Clementine

June 12, 1930

Barbara Harris was the first female bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church. She was born in Philadelphia, where her father, Walter Harris, was a steelworker and her mother, Beatrice, was a church organist. A third generation Episcopalian, Harris was very active in the St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. While in high school she played piano for the church school and later started a young adults group.

After graduating from high school, Harris went to work for Joseph V. Baker Associates, a black-owned public relations firm. She also attended and graduated from the Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism in Philadelphia. In 1968 she went to work for Sun Oil Company and became community relations manager in 1973.

During the 1960s Harris participated in several civil rights events. She was part of the 1965 Freedom March from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was also a member of a church-sponsored team of people who went to Mississippi to register black voters. Harris began attending North Philadelphia Church of the Advocate in 1968. That same year, the Union of Black Clergy was established by a group of black Episcopalian ministers. Harris and several other women lobbied for membership. Eventually, they were admitted and the word laity was added to the organization's name. Later it became the Union of Black Episcopalians.

Once the Episcopal Church began to ordain women in 1976, Harris began to study for the ministry. From 1977 to 1979 she took several courses at Villanova University in Philadelphia, and spent three months in informal residency at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was named deacon in 1979, served as a deacon-in-training in 1979–1980, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1980. She left Sun Oil Co. to pursue her new career full-time.

The first four years of Harris's ministry were spent at St. Augustine-of-Hippo in Norristown, Pennsylvania. She also worked as a chaplain in the Philadelphia County Prison System, an area in which she had already spent many years as a volunteer. In 1984 she became the executive director of the Episcopal Church Publishing Co. Her writings were critical of church policies, which she believed to be in contrast to social, political, and economic fairness.

In 1988 the Episcopal Church approved the consecration of women as bishops. Harris was elected to become bishop of the Massachusetts diocese in the fall of 1988. Her election was ratified in January 1989 and she was ordained in a ceremony in Boston on February 11, 1989, with over seven thousand in attendance.

As the first female Episcopal bishop, Harris was surrounded by controversy centered on three issues: her gender, her lack of traditional seminary education and training, and her liberal viewpoints. Policies toward women, black Americans, the poor, and other minorities were always at the forefront of Harris's challenges to the church and its doctrines. Harris overcame the objections and focused her attention on her duties as a bishop. She served the diocese of Massachusetts, where she was extremely active in local communities and prison work. Greatly concerned with the prison ministry, she represented the Episcopal Church on the board of the Prisoners Visitation and Support Committee. She continued to speak out about gender discrimination in the church; in 1999 at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, she spoke on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ordination of the church's first eleven women priests, lambasting male bishops for the lack of support for women priests. In 2003 Harris retired at the age of seventy-two, the mandatory retirement age for bishops in the church.