http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Home-Page-News-and-Views/Why-is-the-Episcopal-church-near-collapse.aspx?p=1
Why is the Episcopal Church near collapse?
Prominent bishops are pulling out.
Convention-goers were told headquarters had spent $18 million suing local
congregations. Members are leaving at a record rate. This is no longer George
Washington’s church – once the largest denomination in the colonies.
The headlines coming out of the Episcopal
Church’s annual U.S. convention are stunning — endorsement of cross-dressing
clergy, blessing same-sex marriage, the sale of their headquarters since they
can’t afford to maintain it.
The
American branch of the Church of England, founded when the Vatican balked at
permitting King Henry VIII to continue executing any wife who failed to bear
him sons, is in trouble.
Somehow
slipping out of the headlines is a harsh reality that the denomination has been
deserted in droves by an angry or ambivalent membership. Six prominent bishops
are ready to take their large dioceses out of the American church and align
with conservative Anglican groups in Africa and South America.
“An interesting moment came at a press
conference on Saturday,” reports convention attendee David Virtue, “when I asked
Bonnie Anderson, president of the House
of Deputies, if she saw the irony in that the House of Deputies would like to
see the Church Center at 815 2nd Avenue in New York sold (it has a $37.5
million mortgage debt and needs $8.5 million to maintain yearly) while at the
same time the national church spent $18 million litigating for properties, many
of which will lie fallow at the end of the day.”.
This is no
longer George Washington’s Episcopal Church – in 1776 the largest denomination
in the rebellious British colonies. Membership has dropped so dramatically that
today there are 20 times more Baptists than Episcopalians.
U.S.
Catholics out-number the Episcopal Church 33-to-1. There are more Jews than
Episcopalians. Twice as many Mormons as Episcopalians. Even the little African
Methodist Episcopal denomination -- which broke away after the Civil War -- has
passed the Episcopalians.
Among the
old mainstream denominations reporting to the National Council of Churches, the
Episcopal Church suffered the worst loss of membership from 1992-2002 —
plunging from 3.4 million members to 2.3 million for a 32 percent loss. In the
NCC’s 2012 yearbook, the Episcopal Church admitted another 2.71 percent annual
membership loss.
Convention
attendees were told that they had spent $18 million this year suing their own
local congregations — those which have protested the denomination’s policies by
trying to secede. The New York hierarchy has consistently won in court –
asserting that the local members signed over their buildings decades ago. As a
result, some of the largest Episcopal congregations in the United States have
been forced to vacate their buildings and meet elsewhere.
So now, convention delegates were told, the
denomination is the proud owner of scores of empty buildings nationwide – and
liable for their upkeep in a depressed real estate market where empty church
buildings are less than prime property.
It’s the classic “dog in a manger.” The denomination has managed to keep the
buildings – for which it has little use. However, they made their point –
refusing to allow the congregations which built the facilities to have any
benefit after generations of sacrifice, donations and volunteerism.
“One former Episcopal priest wrote me, ‘The irony
is that after all their property suits to get control of empty buildings, they
now are losing their main property.’
“But this cost cutting measure may not be enough
to salvage the long term solvency of the Episcopal Church. The church is
hemorrhaging money like crazy and no one seems to know how to turn off the
spigot.”
“The accelerating fragmentation of the
strife-torn Episcopal Church USA,” writes Christian author Charlotte Allen. “…in
which large parishes and entire dioceses are opting out of the church, isn’t
simply about gay bishops, the blessing of same-sex unions or the election of a
woman as presiding bishop. It is about the meltdown of liberal Christianity.
“Liberal Christianity has been hailed by its
boosters for 40 years as the future of the Christian church. Instead, as all
but a few die-hards now admit, the mainline churches that have blurred doctrine
and softened moral precepts are declining and, in the case of the Episcopal
Church, disintegrating.”
“On July 8, 2012, Presiding Bishop Katharine
Jefferts Schori preached her brand of post-Christian religion while masquerading
as a Christian bishop,” reported convention attendee Dr. Sarah Frances Ives.
“She mocked most of the crucial doctrines of the
Christian faith, including the God of creation, the Incarnation, and the
Trinity. She accomplishes this through her demeaning use of rhetoric. She
taunts the Lord by the use of the name ‘Big Man’ and then points her finger at
everyone listening and tells them that they have ‘missed the boat.’
“Jefferts Schori then proclaims that she has the
answer for this. We all need the ‘act of crossing boundaries’ to become God
after which our hands become a ‘sacrament of mission.’
“In this sermon, Jefferts Schori continued her
mission of destroying the Christian faith through her rhetorical device of
dismissive ridicule.
“Jefferts Schori leaves a wide wake of
destruction behind with this sermon: the eternal triune God has been torn down,
human beings are to boldly claim our place as God, and the sacraments of the
Eucharist and Baptism have been turned into things our hands make. In other
words, Jefferts Schori accepts that now humanity, animals and God are one
undifferentiated blob. This is essentially a form of solipsism, the belief that
self is all that is known to exist. Anyone can see that this is both pure
heresy and utter nonsense.
“Episcopalians need to loudly affirm that we are
created in the image of God and redeemed by the sacrifice of the Son of God,
but no, we are not God ourselves and we are not erasing the boundary between
God and humanity. That Jefferts Schori is encouraging humans to cross the
frontier into becoming God should be immediately repudiated by all believing
Christians.”
“Yesterday,” reports Angela O’Brien
from the convention, “the House
of Bishops of the Episcopalian Church approved a new provisional blessing for
gay unions, while the full General Convention voted in favor of general
acceptance for transgender clergy.
“Some Episcopalian bishops spoke out against the
resolution on same-sex blessings. Bishop Bauerschmidt, of the Episcopal Diocese
of Tennessee, urged the bishops to defeat the resolution.
“The Reverend David Thurlow advocated rejecting
the resolution. ‘For two thousand years the Church has had clear teaching
regarding Christian marriage and Biblical norms of sexual behavior,’ he said,
pointing out that ‘through previous statements and resolutions the Church has
pledged itself not to make any change to this traditional teaching.’
Likewise, Bishop Edward Little of Northern
Indiana stood against the resolution.
“The Christian world is going to understand us as
having changed the nature of the sacrament of holy matrimony,” Bishop Little
said. “The Christian world will look at that liturgy world and see vows, and
exchange of rings, a pronouncement and a blessing and they will understand that
to mean the Episcopal Church has endorsed same-sex marriage and changed a basic
Christian doctrine. I do not believe that we are free to do that.”
But few observers were surprised by the
transgender and same-sex resolutions.
A few years ago, the annual national Episcopal
convention overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that
Jesus Christ is Lord.
Upon returning home from that meeting, Bishop
Peter H. Beckwith, leader of the Springfield, Illinois, diocese, wrote in a
pastoral letter that the Episcopal church was “in meltdown.”
Beckwith has joined bishops in the dioceses of
Central Florida, Dallas, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, California, and South Carolina
in asking their church’s top official, the Archbishop of Canterbury in England,
for permission to pull out.
Beckwith says the failure of the resolution
introduced by conservatives to declare the church’s “unchanging commitment to
Jesus Christ as the son of God, the only name by which any person may be saved”
was extremely disturbing.
“When a Christian church cannot bring itself to
endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New
Testament, it is not a serious Christian church,” wrote Allen.
At this year’s convention, David Virtue reported:
“In all the talk about same sex this and transgender that, there is absolutely
no talk about sin. A psychologist friend of mine opined that talk of ‘sin’ here
would be considered psychologically damaging and offensive to a lot of people,
especially gays, so it is off the radar screen. ‘No sin, please; we’re
Episcopalians.’
“The national Episcopal AIDS coalition is handing
out free male and female condoms to all passersby. I pocketed a few just in
case some folks don’t believe me.
“To keep funding for youth ministries alive, a
17-year-old girl stood up in the House
of Deputies to say that the Episcopal Church could stay alive if it got into
recycling. Poor kid hasn’t got a clue.”
“It must be galling to the Episcopal liberals
that many of the parishes and dioceses that are pulling out are growing instead
of shrinking,” noted Jay Tower. “Christ Church Episcopal in Plano, Texas, for
example, is one of the largest Episcopal churches in the country. Its 2,200 worshipers on any given Sunday are
about equal to the number of active Episcopalians in many of the liberal
bishops’ entire dioceses, whose churches average attendance is 80.
“One repeated theme is that the conservatives who
are pulling out have no confidence in the denomination’s presiding bishop, the
arch-liberal Katharine Jefferts Schori. She allows same-sex union ceremonies in
her Nevada diocese and recently used the phrase ‘mother Jesus’ in a sermon.”
Why are Episcopalians leaving one of the oldest
denominations in America? Perhaps that can be answered by New Hampshire’s V.
Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopal bishop. When he addressed the
fifth annual Planned Parenthood “prayer breakfast” April 15, 2006 in
Washington, D.C., he declared that “religious people” are the enemy.
“We have allowed the Bible to be taken hostage,
and it is being wielded by folks who would use it to hit us over the head,” he
said. “The sin of Sodom had nothing to do with homosexual sex but was a failure
to care for the poor, the widows and the orphans. Scripture is not as
plainspoken as some would have us believe.”
When the conservative Anglican diocese that
serves the Fresno, California, area voted to leave the U.S. Episcopal
denomination, the national denomination did as it has done in Connecticut,
Virginia, Florida and Texas, it fought the diocese in court – seeking to seize
all property,
which includes millions of dollars worth of sanctuaries, parsonages, parish
halls and college campuses.
Observer Giles Fraser says that the liberal
national leadership doesn’t have a clue. Citing a vote by the diocese of
Pittsburgh, led by Bishop Bob Duncan, Fraser explained: “They are sick to death
of liberals telling them that ‘gay’ is OK.”
“Anglicanism is in deep trouble,” writes Fraser,
“and so, too, is the Church of England. The fact that 46 members of the
church’s general synod, its parliament, have written expressing their support
for secessionism, bodes very ill.
“Thus far the Archbishop of Canterbury has
maintained the traditional Anglican image via media with impeccable
impartiality, trying to hold things together with a generous policy of being
kinder to his enemies than his friends.
“But the truth is, the only people who now
believe that Anglicanism can survive the current crisis in one piece are those
holed up in Lambeth Palace” – the Archbishop’s luxurious headquarters in
England.
“Fissures have moved through the Episcopal
Church, the American arm of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has 77
million members, and through the Communion itself, since the church ordained V.
Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003,” writes Neela Bannerjee in
the New York Times.
Before being named bishop, Robinson deserted his
wife and children to take up with a homosexual lover – something that
conservative Episcopalians see as adulterous infidelity severely compounded by
sexual sin and perversion – certainly enough to disqualify Robinson from any
kind of leadership.
They consider the Episcopal Church’s ordination
of Robinson as the “most galling proof of its rejection of biblical authority,”
writes Bannerjee.
“In the last four years, the Anglican Communion, the
world’s third largest Christian body, has edged closer to fracture over the
issue. In the United States, several dozen individual congregations out of
nearly 7,700 have split with the Episcopal Church.”
The Fresno vote was the first time an entire diocese
chose to secede.
The Reverend Ephraim Radner, a leading Episcopal
conservative and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in
Toronto, predicted a huge legal battle – since the national headquarters has
vowed to hold onto any buildings of congregations leaving the denomination.
“The costs involved will bleed the Diocese of San
Joaquin and the Episcopal Church, and it will lead only to bad press,” said
Radner. “You have to wonder why people are wasting money doing this and yet
claiming to be Christians.”
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