I sat down this week with the bishops of New Hampshire and Pittsburgh. The separate interviews challenged three widely held assumptions in our church.

Assumption Number One: Bishops Robinson and Duncan represent the extremes of the gay rights/homosexuality issue, with strident gay activism on one side and stubborn conservative entrenchment on the other.

Both bishops were gracious in responding to my interview requests. Each of them sat with me for nearly a half-hour and thoughtfully answered all my questions. Both of them not only traded cell phone numbers with me, but worked the interview into their hectic meeting and travel schedules.

That’s the first thing to say because one of the greatest sins in this whole sexuality debate is how dehumanized and caricatured these two men have become.

We’ve fallen into a habit of projecting everything we don’t like about conservatives onto Bishop Duncan and everything we don’t like about liberals onto Bishop Robinson. But the reality of the two men – at least as I experienced them in my interviews – is far more nuanced and complicated.

In talking to both men, you get the feeling that they feel trapped and typecast in roles they would just as soon break out -- but cannot. The momentum is too great.

For example, guess which bishop said this to me: “In the very public role I’m playing, it would be easy to fall into my own agenda rather than God’s agenda, and both those who support me and those who oppose me try to put me in that position.”

And which one said: “I ask the Lord Jesus that he would keep me faithful and loving in all I do, no matter the cost”?

Don’t know? I’ll tell you, but first:

Assumption Number Two: It is important to get beyond this issue in order to focus on mission.

I started out my interviews by asking the exact same question: “What do you think it would take to get through this time of intense disagreement to a point where we can focus on mission?”

When you ask Bishop Robinson that question, he challenges the underlying assumption. The issues surround his consecration ARE about mission, he says, because “this is about God’s love for all his children and that is a part of the message we are called to spread.”

When you ask Bishop Duncan that question, he also challenges the assumption and says that the consecration issues ARE about mission, because they present the Episcopal Church with a clear choice between: a) being a church “which is progressive in relationship to a culture in which there is love without truth,” or b) coming back to its senses and “re-entering the boundaries of catholic/evangelical faith.”

In other words, to both bishops, this issue is not a distraction from our mission, it is part and parcel of our mission. To misunderstand that is to sell both sides short.

Assumption number three: Reconciliation is possible if we just keep at it.

There’s an assumption that seems to underlie most of the preaching and legislative process out here: that reconciliation is possible if we just keep trying.

I’m not sure I’m ready to give up on that assumption myself: that if we just keep talking…if we all just keep coming to the altar together…if we all just focus on the bigger picture or focus on what we have in common…then things eventually will work out.

But what begins to emerge as you listen, really listen, to Bishops Duncan and Robinson is that they are not using different language to talk about the same church. They are talking about different churches.

How do you reconcile two points of view when one man’s inclusiveness is another man’s exclusion – when the movement of non-celibate gays into all levels of ministry is seen, by definition, as either a move toward, or away from, its gospel center?

“You do not hear gays and lesbians say, ‘get out of my church,’” Bishop Robinson told me. “I want Peter Akinola in my church; the problem is, Peter Akinola does not want me in his church.”

“Our manner of speech says, ‘include everyone,’” Bishop Duncan told me, “but our manner of action is to force you to do it the majority way. In 1997, it became mandatory in all dioceses to include women clergy. That change had been made just 30 years before. What kind of ‘inclusive’ church is that? It is inclusive of those who hold the new view.”

It is Gene Robinson who prays not to fall into his own agenda rather than God’s agenda, and it is Bishop Duncan who prays that he be kept faithful and loving in all he does.

And so perhaps the last assumption that needs to fall is that God can’t encourage both their efforts, and answer both their prayers, at the same time.