Anglican Mainstream

By Chris Sugden, Evangelicals Now, September 2010

From Catholic Culture

Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, will ordain an Episcopal cleric from New York State as the Episcopal bishop of Alaska on September 4. The ceremony will take place at a Catholic parish in Anchorage.

Until recently, Lattime was a member of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester’s Committee for Gay and Lesbian Ministry, which “seeks to further the cause of recognition and legitimization of lesbian and gay relationships within the church and in civil society.” Lattime is married and has three children.

“Catholic churches are consecrated or blessed buildings which have an important theological and liturgical significance for the Catholic community,” the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity notes in its 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism. “They are therefore generally reserved for Catholic worship. However, if priests, ministers or communities not in full communion with the Catholic Church do not have a place or the liturgical objects necessary for celebrating worthily their religious ceremonies, the diocesan Bishop may allow them the use of a church or a Catholic building and also lend them what may be necessary for their services.”

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By A S Haley

In February, after Bishop Mark Lawrence published the correspondence between his Chancellor and Mr. Thomas Tisdale, who called himself "South Carolina counsel for the Episcopal Church", I put up a post entitled "What in the World Is Going on in South Carolina?" I asked how it could be that the Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor had hired their own attorney to investigate Bishop Lawrence's actions, unless there were some kind of a move afoot to lay charges of "abandonment of Communion" against the good Bishop. Such a move, if taken before there was any action by the diocesan convention toward leaving the Church, would have eerie parallels to what the Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor had done in the case of then-Bishop Robert Duncan, of the Diocese of Pittsburgh

Let it never be said that Episcopalians are ones to let a good title go to waste. For the Episcopal Forum of South Carolina, a group first organized in 2003 as a counterweight to reaction in the Diocese to the confirmation of the election of the Bishop of New Hampshire, soon announced a series of forums across the State in April and May of this year, entitled "What in the World Is Going on in the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina"?

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From AAC

There is much positive progress to report in the Anglican realignment, with the orthodox Anglicans coming together and becoming stronger. The maturing of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is proceeding apace and showing that it has real staying power. At our recent meeting in Amesbury, Massachusetts, the ACNA gathering took part in the installation of Bishop Bill Murdoch as the diocesan in his new pro-cathedral. The feeling as the service progressed was "this is us"-this is the ACNA growing and expanding, and now the New England area has a cathedral and a settled bishop.

Additionally the ACNA approved and welcomed two applicant dioceses, the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes (ADGL) and the Anglican Diocese of the South (ADOTS). These dioceses have the potential of having some churches fully seated as members, and other churches maintaining ties to another ACNA judicatory for the time being-having dual citizenship if you will. In ADOTS, some of the churches that I have covered as a CANA bishop are maintaining ties to CANA, but are also partner parishes with the new diocese. This allows a transition time that avoids abrupt endings of established relationships.

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By Diogenes, Catholic Culture

• The major television networks led their morning news coverage with the story?
• The New York Times launched a 5-part series of front-page reports on sexual abuse in the Episcopal Church?
• SNAP held a press conference demanding that the Diocese of Pennsylvania turn over files on all clerics accused of abuse?
• Time questioned whether the whole mess would forever mar the legacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury?
•                    or
• Nothing. These are Episcopalians. Sexual abuse by non-Catholics is a non-story.

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Hat Tip: AAC

"Justice is advancing thanks to today's ruling affirming Californians' constitutional right to marriage in faithful, same-gender relationships." – Bishop Jon Bruno, Diocese of Los Angeles (Episcopal Life Online)

Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real in central California said in a statement that she was 'celebrating the overruling of Prop. 8 along with other supporters affirming that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marriage. Our policy of blessings in the diocese for same-sex couples has been in effect for years and will continue.'" (Episcopal Life Online)

Addressing those gathered at a rally at San Francisco's City Hall, Bishop Marc Andrus said:  "So, today Jesus says to you, 'Congratulations, you who have been mourning! You are being comforted! Congratulations all of you who have been hungering and thirsting for righteousness! Aren't you feeling filled and nourished now?' . . . All these congratulations and blessings are so that we can keep on moving, to extend congratulations to LGBT people in places where persecution is still intense, to use our great energies to help children get food and education, to give strength and support to women everywhere, to fight world-class diseases like HIV/AIDS, to heal the wounded planet. We rejoice today, and tomorrow we continue the fight, lending our strength, the blessing of God, to those who need it." (Diocese of California)

By Philip Turner, ACI

By Mark Tooley, American Spectator

Virginia's Supreme Court recently ruled against conservative former Episcopal Church congregations trying to keep their property as members of a new theologically orthodox Anglican denomination. Hundreds of local churches across America are agonizing over whether to remain in the old and increasingly heterodox Episcopal Church or depart, potentially losing venerable church properties.

Former Dallas Morning News editor and current syndicated columnist William Murchison remains in the old denomination. He published his book about the Episcopal Church just in time for the denomination's implosively historic 2009 General Convention, which officially sanctioned gay clergy and same-sex unions. Himself a long-time active Episcopalian in the theologically orthodox Diocese of Dallas, and partial to the church's Anglo-Catholic wing, Murchison sagely traces the church's fall from America's most culturally elite church to an increasingly marginal, though still highly entertaining religious sideshow.

The Episcopal Church's current crisis technically began with its 2003 election of openly homosexual Bishop Gene Robinson, igniting growing tensions with the nearly 80 million member Anglican Communion, especially its increasingly dominant and conservative African members. But Murchison traces the church's wrong turn to the 1960s, when Episcopal elites increasingly chose for cultural conformity rather than cultural transformation. Like other Mainline Protestant elites, Episcopalians began to shed "exclusivist" claims about Christianity in favor of pluralism, where every ideology has a voice except for orthodoxy.

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By Lillian Kwon, Christian Post

The existence of conflict in the church is a sign of health and vitality, the head of The Episcopal Church told a live Web audience Wednesday.

"If there's no conflict, it means that we're dead," said Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. "There has always been push and pull in the church. It's a sign that the diversity among us is passionate and that is a gift from God, not something to be squelched."

The Seattle native was addressing Episcopalians and the wider public in the first of a series of webcast conversations, which have been designed to foster better understanding in the church and to address current issues.

Jefferts Schori had just returned from a meeting in London involving a number of Anglican primates – chief bishops of the Anglican Communion's 38 provinces – and others on the Standing Committee. During the July 23-27 meeting, committee members rejected a proposal that The Episcopal Church be separated from the rest of the global body. Cutting the U.S. church would inhibit dialogue on sexuality issues and therefore would be unhelpful, they agreed.

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By David W. Virtue, Virtueonline

Despite a proposal from orthodox Anglican leader Dato Stanley Isaacs from the Province of South East Asia that the American Episcopal Church be separated from the rest of the Anglican Communion over sexuality issues, Committee members of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Consultative Council (aka the Anglican Communion Office) rejected the plea, arguing it "would inhibit dialogue and … would therefore be unhelpful."

While rejecting the proposal, Standing Committee members agreed to defer further discussion on the matter until progress on a listening project had been considered. Currently, Anglicans worldwide are participating in "The Continuing Indaba and Mutual Listening Project," which is intended to open the ears of Anglicans to the experiences of homosexual persons, according to a July 26 bulletin from the Anglican Communion Office.

The committee, which included the Archbishop of Canterbury, met in closed sessions July 23-27 at the Anglican Communion Office in London.

Once more no one is prepared to exercise godly discipline on the Episcopal Church for its blatant defiance of the Windsor Report and a Covenant in the process of being ratified by all the provinces of the Anglican Communion over sexuality issues which has seen TEC defy the communion not once, but twice by electing an avowed homosexual and lesbian to the episcopacy. The open defiance of the communion's requested Moratorium is met with muted outrage as no one is prepared to put their foot down and lay down the law, largely because the communion's Instruments of Unity are stacked with liberals and token orthodox believers who get shot down if they should so much as raise their voices. Witness what happened to Isaacs.

Groaned one English cleric, "Why, oh why, oh why is TEC permitted to retain such influence in a Communion in which it is an insignificant flea on the rump of the orthodox majority?"

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By Matthew Davies, Episcopal Life Online

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori challenged those attending Sung Eucharist at historic St. Paul's Cathedral here July 25 to be "ready, willing and able" to speak out and take action against the world's injustices and indignities.

By David Williamson, WalesOnline

WOMEN should be represented at all levels of the church, the most powerful Anglican in the US has said during a visit to Wales.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has been a personal guest of Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan, whose conviction that church leadership should not be a male-only preserve she shares.

The US church’s support for bishops in homosexual relationships has sparked conflict with traditionalists and the communion, which has adherents in more than 160 countries, is threatened with schism.

Critics see Bishop Schori’s church as responsible for the potential detonation of the international network, but she said she believed the changes ahead would reshape Anglicanism for the better.

She said: “I think the Anglican Communion is in the process of growing up and evolving into a set of relationships that will serve the wider church in the third millennium.”

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By Matt Kennedy, Stand Firm

16. Never express bitterness or resentment toward the judge, the diocese, the bishop or anyone else to the congregation. Resentment spreads like gangrene and the last thing you need when everything is all over, is a bitter, angry congregation. That’s the quickest way to die. Here’s the attitude I wanted my people to have: “God has entrusted us with this time of struggle and sacrifice. We must glorify him by forgiving and loving those who persecute us. This is not a tragedy it is an honor and a privilege to be called to lose everything so that we may walk with Jesus in his way.” I preached that, taught it, and counselled it. Resentment, while present, has not been a major problem.

The 21 items below represent some of the lessons I've earned over the past two years of legal turmoil; the fruit of failures, idiotic mistakes, and successes. It is written from a pastor's perspective and it is intended to help pastors who face or who are preparing to face similar circumstances. It is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it's a start. I think I probably learned more in the last two years about leadership in the church than I could have learned in ten years of peaceful service.

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By A S Haley

The arrogance and hubris that characterize ECUSA's legal strategy are nowhere on better view right now than in the courts of Texas, where there are two lawsuits pending in which it is involved — one in Hood County, and one in Tarrant County. ECUSA has lost key battles in both of them, but is acting as though those losses never happened.

In the case in the District Court of Hood County, the dispute is over the proceeds from a trust established in 2002 by Cynthia Brants for the benefit of "St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, or its successor, of Fort Worth." In 2008, St. Andrew's was one of the parishes that voted with the majority of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth to withdraw from its affiliation with ECUSA to align with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. After ECUSA's Presiding Bishop pronounced that she had accepted the "voluntary renunciation of his orders" by Bishop Jack L. Iker, she called an illegal "special convention" to install Bishop Gulick as his replacement. Thus installed — in open defiance of all applicable canons and constitutional provisions of both ECUSA and the Diocese — Bishop Gulick proceeded to inhibit all the clergy who, he asserted, had "abandoned the communion of this Church" to realign with the Southern Cone.

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From AAC

By Matthew Davies, ENS

The Anglican Communion Office has announced that two new members will serve on the Standing Committee beginning with the July 23-27 meeting in London: Bishop Paul Sarker, moderator of the Church of Bangladesh and bishop of Dhaka; and the Rev. Canon Janet Trisk, rector of the parish of St. David, Prestbury, in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

By Ephraim Radner, from Covenant Forums

Over the past few weeks, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (TEC), Katharine Jefferts Schori, has responded pointedly to the removal of TEC’s members from Anglican Communion commissions dealing with ecumenical relations and matters of the Communion’s “faith and order.” The removal itself was announced at the end of May in a letter to the Communion by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It was later explicated by the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Canon Kenneth Kearon, during visits to the Canadian church’s General Synod, and TEC’s Executive Council. At issue, of course, is TEC’s decision earlier this year to go forward with the consecration of a partnered lesbian, Mary Glasspool, as a bishop in the Diocese of Los Angeles. And this decision, according to Archbishop Williams and Canon Kearon, is one that goes counter to a consistently articulated position by Communion councils. These councils have, over and over, insisted that church affirmations of same-sex partnerships are, on the basis of Scriptural teaching, contrary to the “mind of the Communion,” and therefore that e.g. the consecration of partnered homosexual bishops and church-administered same-sex blessings should cease among member churches.

Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori’s response has criticized Archbishop Williams’ decision on several grounds. Here, let me address just three of her objections: first, that the Archbishop’s actions represent a move towards “centralization” within the Communion, viewed especially in terms of the application of “sanctions” against member churches; second, that in removing TEC members from the Communion commissions in question, the Archbishop has somehow acted as if the proposed Anglican Covenant now before the Communion’s churches were already in effect when it is not; third, that a proper understanding of the Communion’s life would entail the maintenance of diversity among Anglican churches, rather than the (punitive) pursuit of “uniformity.”

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From ENS

The Episcopal Church Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music June 28 announced the names of task force leaders charged with leading the development of theological resources and liturgies for same-sex blessings, according to a news release.

By Greg Griffith, Stand Firm

It's a source of frustration for me – and no doubt a source of joy for our Worthy Opponents – that no matter how brazen or successful or disruptive they are in advancing their agenda, there seems to be nothing that triggers any sort of pushback from the Beloved Moderates – on whom, like their counterparts in secular political elections, the ultimate outcome of changes such as these rest. But there we are: In about 20 years, the Episcopal Church has gone from a few rogue priests doing gay "marriages" disguised as home blessings, to a task force that in two short years will develop and present for approval by General Convention, liturgies for same-sex blessings.

By A S Haley, Anglican  Curmudgeon

The recent meeting of ECUSA's Executive Council in Maryland has garnered a lot of media attention because of the impromptu visit to it by the Secretary-General of the Anglican Communion, the Rev. Canon Kenneth G. Kearon. Canon Kearon was on vacation at the time he was prevailed upon to attend a question-and-answer session, with all-too-predictable results. The members of the Executive Council asked him questions, but they did not like the answers, and soon stopped listening — as is evident from all the snide and insulting reports they have since blogged about the encounter, to which I shall not link here.

(Was it worth it, Canon Kearon? Welcome to the club.)

For a look at what really went on at the meeting of the Executive Council, we can take the official press accounts only as a point of departure, and then fill in the gaps. When one takes the effort to do this, the picture that emerges is very different indeed from the one ENS tries to sell you.

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