Anglican Unscripted 48: Kevin Kallsen & George Conger

http://geoconger.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/anglican-unscripted-episode-48-august-18-2012/

Anglican Unscripted Episode 48

August 18, 2012 August 18, 2012Posted by geoconger in 77th General Convention, AMiA, Anglican Church of North America, Anglican.TV, Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop of York, Canon Law, Church of England, Church of the Province of Uganda, Church of the Province of West Africa, South Carolina.
Tags: Crown Nominations Committee
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Not a week goes by (even in August) when the Unscripted team can’t dig up some interesting news. Kevin and George discuss the “new thang” with AMiA and the turmoil at Pawley’s Island. They also reveal some Crown Commission secrets, Anglican Job Postings and Affinity Dioceses. Peter Ould talks about an Englishman trying to sell more books and Allan gives some interesting history about leaving and staying in TEC at the same time.

Kevin DeYoung: Why No Denomination Will Survive the Homosexuality Crisis

http://www.christianpost.com/news/why-no-denomination-will-survive-the-homosexuality-crisis-78296/

Why No Denomination Will Survive the Homosexuality Crisis

By Kevin DeYoung , CP Guest Contributor

July 16, 2012|10:31 am

There is no way, short of a miraculous and full-scale changing of hearts and minds, for North American denominations to survive the homosexuality crisis. Denominations like the PCUSA, ELCA, RCA, UMC, and Episcopal Church will continue. They won't fold their tents and join the Southern Baptists (though wouldn't that be interesting!). I'm not suggesting most of our old, mainline denominations will disappear. But I do not see how any of these once flourishing denominations will make it through the present crisis intact.

And the sooner denominations admit this sobering reality the better.

Every denomination is different. The percentages on both sides of the issue and the official positions are not identical. But the basic contours of the problem are quite similar.

On one side you have liberals who want to see the church open its doors to the GLBT agenda. They want homosexual behavior welcomed and affirmed. They want to perform gay marriages. They want gays and lesbians to be ordained to church office. Liberals (or "progressives" or whatever-I'm trying to use neutral labels) see this as a justice issue. They believe conservatives are simply on the wrong side of history and that one day we will look at our traditional attitudes toward gays and lesbians like we look at old attitudes toward African Americans or our old attitudes toward women's ordination. We will be embarrassed to see that we could have been so blind and bigoted for so long.

On the other side you have conservatives who want to see the church maintain purity and biblical fidelity. They want homosexuals to be loved and treated with respect. But they believe the behavior cannot be tolerated as Christian behavior. They see this as a gospel issue. They believe liberals are simply on the wrong side of the Bible and one day will be embarrassed to see how much we dishonored God by capitulating to our culture. To cave on this issue is not only to reject the plain teaching of Scripture, affirmed for two millennia of church history, but it says to people "peace, peace" where there is no peace.

In the middle are those who want both sides to get along. Maybe these third way folks are liberals willing to let conservatives keep doing their thing for awhile because they believe today's conservatives will slowly evolve or die off. Maybe they are institutional loyalists who want to preserve the denomination at all costs. Maybe they consider homosexuality a relatively minor issue, one not worth fighting over and dividing the church over. Or maybe, as is often the case, those advocating for a third way are conservatives who don't want to be the meanies who put up a fight.

These are the three main parties in this controversy-left, right, and center-and there is no way to make each of them happy. There is no way for mainline denominations to broker a compromise that everyone can live with.

What If

Let's say denomination XYZ adopts a full blown official open and affirming policy. Conservatives and many middle of the roaders will leave. How can they not? The denomination, as they see it, is calling "good" what God calls "sin."

If the XYZ tightens up a conservative stance, the liberals will be livid. The denomination, as they see it, is telling their friends, their family members, their partners, and some of them, that they are not welcome any longer. The liberals could then leave, or, more likely, continue to fight or simply ignore the denomination.

At which point, the conservatives, if they are willing and able (and they are probably neither), can engage in case after case of church discipline, until the liberals leave or have been defrocked.
Apart from discipline, however, assuming the liberals continue to push against the stated position, eventually the denomination will just let them be and allow for what they technically say they won't allow.

Or, before that happens the conservatives will say enough is enough and leave a denomination they believe is no longer reformable and no longer demonstrates the third mark of the church.

Third ways don't work either. It may sound like a brilliant compromise to deploy another study committee, but this merely kicks the can down the road. It says "pass" on the crisis, only to push the crisis into someone else's lap a few years later. The denomination must fish or cut bait. It must decide what it really believes. And if it decides to never decide but just keep studying, then many folks will conclude, rightly I believe, that the denomination's de facto position is "let's just agree to disagree." This will be unacceptable to conservatives.

If denomination XYZ goes one step further and allows for a "local option" or puts homosexuality in the category of "conscience" this is a decision of its own. It says that homosexuality is such a minor issue or such an ambiguous issue that we shouldn't take a firm stance. This too will be unacceptable to many conservatives. Over time, it will be unacceptable to liberals too, who would probably view such a "compromise" (though they might not say it out loud) as training wheels meant to help the denomination ride through a difficult time until the progressive position seizes the day.

Admitting the Obvious, Proposing the Unthinkable

I understand that many good Christians love their denominations deeply. I love mine too. I don't want to see the RCA crash and burn, or fall apart. I recognize that many Christians are loathe to consider any option that involves anything less than staying together no matter what. They want to hope against hope that everything will work out and there will be some way for everyone to get along. But it is no virtue of Christian hope to trust God for contradictions. He cannot make circles to simultaneously be squares. We are not losing confidence in our almighty God if we admit that many of our denominations face intractable problems. We can't "unify" our way out of this mess or press people to stop having mutually exclusive convictions for the sake of our institutions, pensions, or pride. The fact is there is no third way, no fourth way, no tenth way out of this controversy that leaves all the pieces in the same places they are now. Groups will split. Bodies will rearrange. Parts will realign.

Maybe not this year. Maybe not on your watch. But soon enough.
So my plea is for these denominations to make a definitive stand. Make it right, left, or center, but make one and make it clearly.

Insist that member churches and pastors hold to this position. And then graciously open a big door for any pastor or church who cannot live in this theological space to exit with their dignity, their time, and their property. Because sometimes the best way to preserve unity is to admit that we don't have it.

This article was originally posted here.

Joel Osteen on Homosexuality

 

Kevin Deyoung is the Senior Pastor at University Reformed Church (RCA) in East Lansing, Michigan, and a Council Member of The Gospel Coalition.

Attorney A.S. Haley: TEC's Next Move with Bishop Lawrence?

Bishop Mark Lawrence

http://www.standfirminfaith.com/?/sf/page/29143

What Could ECUSA Try Next with Bishop Lawrence?

When one reads the strong, clear pastoral letter which Bishop Lawrence sent to all of his South Carolina parishes earlier today, one has to wonder at the past attempts to hinder his ministry, or to block it altogether. First, after the Diocese in September 2006 chose him overwhelmingly to be their Bishop on the very first ballot, the carping and the cutting from the revisionists began almost at once.

Sure enough, the Presiding Bishop later declared that his election had not been properly ratified, and voided it. (Nearly all of the Dioceses whose Standing Committees refused to approve his election had voted through their deputations at GC 2003 to approve the election of V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.) Whereupon the Diocese of South Carolina elected him a second time. After the DSC deployed a masterful new strategy to persuade doubters, the rest of the Church finally confirmed Bishop Lawrence’s election, and in January 2008 he was consecrated as the 14th Bishop of South Carolina in a ceremony in which former Bishop Alden Hathaway gave an unforgettable sermon. The Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, did not take part in the laying on of hands, even though canonically she is the “chief consecrator”; reportedly she had a “scheduling conflict.”

A little over a month after his consecration, however, Bishop Jefferts Schori dropped in on his Diocese for a two-day visit, which received very mixed reports. Bishop Lawrence’s introduction to ECUSA’s House of Bishops came shortly afterward, when he witnessed the Presiding Bishop push through the illegal depositions of Bishops Cox and Schofield (who had been Mark Lawrence’s bishop when he was at St. Paul’s in Bakersfield before his election). Despite being the newest Bishop in the House, he had no qualms writing Bishop Jefferts Schori (along with his Standing Committee) shortly afterward to protest the illegality of the votes.

That fall, Bishop Lawrence was present again as the Presiding Bishop led the House of Bishops in illegally deposing Bishop Duncan of Pittsburgh—this time, she overruled his and other Bishops’ objections made from the floor, and he had the temerity to write to his Diocese about the problems with the vote afterward.

It is a measure of the annoyance which Mark Lawrence and other Bishops caused over the illegal depositions of Bishops Cox, Schofield and Duncan that the Presiding Bishop has not brought another resolution to depose a sitting bishop before the House since the vote to depose Bishop Duncan in September 2008. Instead, she resorted to trickery, by claiming that verbal statements made by Bishop Jack L. Iker of Fort Worth, or letters written by other bishops which expressly disavowed any intent to renounce their holy orders, were actually under the Canons their “voluntarily renunciations” of ministry in the Episcopal Church (USA). That maneuver allowed her to certify that they were each deposed without having to trouble the House of Bishops about the matter.

In September 2009, the South Carolina Supreme Court handed down its decision against the Dennis Canon, and invalidated its attempt to create trusts in church property unilaterally. Now Bishop Lawrence drew her ire for not doing anything: he declined to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, expressing his view that the case had wasted enough of the Diocese’s time and resources over the past eight years. At the same time, his largest parish, St. Andrew’s in Mt. Pleasant, withdrew from the Diocese, and he did not take any steps in court to prevent that, either. (They would have been useless, in light of the State Supreme Court’s ruling, but giving in graciously to court decisions did not fit in with the Presiding Bishop’s scorched-earth strategy.)

By 2010, Bishop Lawrence and his Diocese loomed very large on the Presiding Bishop’s radar screen—especially since by then she had managed to rid ECUSA of many of its more senior orthodox bishops. In February of that year, Bishop Lawrence’s chancellor received a letter from a South Carolina law firm which the Presiding Bishop had her Chancellor engage to conduct a fishing expedition to develop evidence with which to present him (under the former provisions of Title IV of ECUSA’s Canons) to the Trial Court for Bishops in proceedings that could lead to his deposition. Bishop Lawrence mustered his supporters, and responded to the Presiding Bishop respectfully, but forcefully: he let her know that she had no business hiring attorneys and poking around in his own Diocese. Once again, after the kerfuffle died down, she backed off.

In 2011, the Presiding Bishop allowed local dissenters in the Diocese of South Carolina to carry the water for her. They had been encouraged to write the Executive Council about their concerns over the Resolutions which the Diocese had enacted at a Special Convention, called to counter the attempts at undermining its authority by the Presiding Bishop. The Council obligingly referred them to a Resolution it had passed in June 2007 declaring that all attempts by dioceses to disavow their allegiance to the national Church were “null and void.” At their direction, Council Secretary the Rev. Canon Straub wrote to inform them that it was the Council’s opinion that their Resolution would encompass any actions taken by the Diocese of South Carolina. When the dissident South Carolinians sent Bishop Lawrence a copy of Canon Straub’s letter, he replied that the Council, in effect, was all wet.

But by now, the new version of the disciplinary Canons (Title IV) had gone into effect. Among other unconstitutional features, they granted to the Presiding Bishop unprecedented supervisory and pastoral powers over all other Episcopal bishops, and in effect transformed her into a metropolitan over the Episcopal Church (USA). One of the Resolutions the Diocese of South Carolina had passed at its Special Convention had declared that the Diocese did not recognize the validity of the new Title IV, and would continue to handle disciplinary matters under the previous version. Once again, Bishop Lawrence and his Diocese had placed themselves in the forefront of standing for the historic polity of the Church, but in doing so, they necessarily stood athwart the Presiding Bishop’s grand agenda. So she swung once more into action—not directly, of course, but letting the dissident South Carolinians again be her tools.

The story of the childish charges they brought to the Disciplinary Board for Bishops, as its first major case under the new Canons, and the Board’s mishandling of both the charges and the ensuing publicity, need not be retold here. Suffice it to say that the Presiding Bishop and her new Canons lost considerable face with those who could tell a kangaroo court when they saw one. And to rub salt in her wounds, as it were, the dissident Episcopalians in South Carolina let her know that Bishop Lawrence had quietly handed over deeds to every parish in the Diocese—which effectively disclaimed any and all trust interests in their properties on the part of the Diocese or the Church, in light of the invalidity of the Dennis Canon in South Carolina.

And now we are almost one year later. The 77th General Convention finished its business, but once again, not without crossing Bishop Lawrence and his Diocese’s deputation once too often with its steady pushing forward of the gay and lesbian activists’ pan-sexual program. Most of the deputation went home early before the Convention adjourned, as did Bishop Lawrence. And today, we have his pastoral letter.

Where things will go from here is as much up to the leadership of ECUSA as it is to the Diocese of South Carolina. Resolution A049 enacted by General Convention on proposing a rite for individual bishops to use in their own diocese to bless same-sex civil unions contains the following paragraph (my bold emphasis):

Resolved, That this convention honor the theological diversity of this church in regard to matters of human sexuality, and that no bishop, priest, deacon or lay person should be coerced or penalized in any manner, nor suffer any canonical disabilities, as a result of his or her conscientious objection to or support for the 77th General Convention’s action with regard to the Blessing of Same-Sex Relationships;

Bishop Lawrence has made known to the House of Bishops, and is making known today in writing to his entire Diocese, his conscientious objection to the action of GC77 “with regard to the Blessing of Same-Sex Relationships.” If the powers that be at 815 Second Avenue honor the language just quoted above, there should not be any attempts to discipline or sanction Bishop Lawrence for that objection.

Nevertheless, A049 is just a Resolution of General Convention, and so expresses its mind only at the time of passage. As such, it has no canonical force, and instead serves to estop those Bishops (including the Presiding Bishop!) who voted in favor of its passage from now acting contrary to their vote.

In related matters, it should now be noted that all of the ten Bishops currently serving, or just elected to serve, on the Disciplinary Board for Bishops, together with the Presiding Bishop, will be disqualified from participating in connection with either the pending charges against nine other Bishops filed on the eve of General Convention, or any charges that someone not estopped by having voted for A049 might try to file now. The reason is that the entire House of Bishops, including the Presiding Bishop, took part in discussing those charges, as well as engaging in a separate private conversation with Bishop Lawrence on his point of personal privilege, as mentioned in the last paragraph of his pastoral letter.

Canon IV.19.14 requires that any person on any disciplinary panel convened under the new Title IV “shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which his or her impartiality may reasonably be questioned ... [or] when ... the member has personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding ...”. This language should be enough to disqualify any episcopal members of the Disciplinary Board who sat in on the private sessions of the House of Bishops on these matters.

Finally, there is potential for a constitutional crisis of major proportions should anyone in the Church even try to proceed under the new Title IV with respect to anything that the Diocese of South Carolina or any of its clergy may do. The reason for that statement is simple: the Diocese of South Carolina has not adopted, and will not adopt, the new Title IV because it regards those Canons as beyond the powers of General Convention to enact and remain consistent with ECUSA’s Constitution. (Nor will it recognize the validity of the Convention’s amendments to the Canons dealing with access to ordination and to all lay positions for transgendered persons.) As noted many times before on this blog, the Canons of General Convention are without any binding force on any Diocese that refuses, on constitutional grounds, to recognize their validity.

And short of a Constitutional amendment to make General Convention the supreme legislative and judicial authority in the Episcopal Church (USA), there is nothing that anyone in ECUSA can do about the right of Dioceses to judge for themselves the validity of acts of General Convention. It is the same situation we had in the United States when it was under the Articles of Confederation; Congress had no power to impose any of its laws on an individual State against its will—because there was no Supremacy Clause in the Articles.

Indeed, it was by reason of their experiences with the stalemates thus generated between Congress and the several States that the Founders included a Supremacy Clause in the new Constitution drafted in 1787, and finally ratified in 1789. And tellingly, some of those same Founders chose not to include a Supremacy Clause for General Convention when they participated in 1789 in drafting ECUSA’s Constitution, also adopted by the several Dioceses in that same year.

Finally, to clinch this point, historians of Church polity should note that General Convention did propose adding a “Supremacy Clause” to the ECUSA Constitution in 1895, but that proposal was shot down in flames at the General Convention of 1898—after the individual Dioceses had had a chance to review what General Convention proposed to do. (Back then, deputies sent to General Convention still represented their own Dioceses, and voted as the diocesan conventions instructed them to do. A good part of the reason that General Convention and the staff of 815, as well as all of the Church’s multifarious Committees, Commissions, Agencies and Boards, are so disconnected from the pewsters back home is precisely that they no longer feel any responsibility but to vote and to act as they perceive the “Holy Spirit” guides them.)

If a collision is coming, it will have to be one that the national leadership has actively sought by its actions to date, and that it will seek by its actions to come. Will that leadership be wise enough to pull back before it commits itself to still more? We shall have to bide our time, and see.

In the meantime, please pray for the Diocese of South Carolina, and please pray for the leadership of our Church to see and to do the right thing. In this regard, what could be more appropriate than today’s appointed collect?

O LORD, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Sexual, Liturgical, & Doctrinal Anarchy Says SC's Bp. Mark Lawrence

Bishop Mark Lawrence

http://geoconger.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/lawrence-writes-to-south-carolina-anglican-ink-july-15-2012/

Lawrence writes to South Carolina: Anglican Ink, July 15, 2012.

July 15, 2012

The 77^th General Convention has endorsed sexual, liturgical and doctrinal anarchy, the Bishop of South Carolina declared in a letter to the diocese dated 15 July 2012.

The Rt. Rev. Mark Lawrence stated the 77^th General Convention that met from 5-12 July in Indianapolis had been an exercise in “incoherency”, and urged members of the Episcopal Church in his diocese to pray for discernment as to God’s will for the church in the coming days.

Some good had come from the church’s triennial meeting of General Convention, the bishop said, and he had taken “encouragement from the resolutions that were passed regarding needed structural reform, and for the intentional work in the House of Bishops on matters of collegiality and honesty.”

Yet this may have been too little, too late, and was “akin to a long overdue rearranging of the furniture when the house is on fire.”

The bishops cited four actions taken by the convention that he believed stood “in direct conflict with the doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as this church has received them.

While the convention had turned aside the call for an “Open Table” – removing the requirement that those receiving the Eucharist be baptized, it was nonetheless an ill portent and “moves the Church further down the road toward encouraging the communion of the unbaptized which departs from two thousand years of Christian practice. It also puts the undiscerning person in spiritual jeopardy.”

He also voiced objection to the adoption of Resolution A049 which authorized provisional local rites for the blessing of same-sex relationships. “I will not authorize the use of such rites in the Diocese of South Carolina. Such rites are not only contrary to the canons of this diocese and to the judgment of your bishop, but more importantly I believe they are contrary to the teaching of Holy Scripture; to two thousand years of Christian practice; as well as to our created nature,” Bishop Lawrence said.

The Episcopal Church “had no authority” to change the “sacramental understanding of marriage as established by God in creation and blessed through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. It has no authority to do this either by revising the marriage rite to include same-sexpartners or by devising some parallel quasi-marital sacramental service,” he said.

Nor had the General Convention thought through two resolutions, D002 and D019, which “mark an even further step into incoherency.”

These two “open the door to innumerable self-understandings of gender identity and gender expression within the Church; normalizing ‘transgender,’ ‘bi-sexual,’ ‘questioning,’ and still yet to be named – self-understandings of individualized eros.”

The consequences of adopting this resolution for the local church were such that “I fail to see how a rector or parish leader who embraces such a canonical change has any authority to discipline a youth minister, Sunday school teacher, or chalice bearer who chooses to dress as a man one Sunday and as a woman another.”

The convention’s vote to allow the question of gender to be “self-defined, self-chosen” led to “sheer sexual anarchy” and would not be countenanced in South Carolina.

Over the coming month the bishop said he would meet with clergy and church leaders to discuss the questions: “How are we called to live and be and act? In this present context, how do we make Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age?”

“I ask that you keep me and the councils of our diocese in your prayers as you shall be in mine,” Bishop Lawrence said, adding that “we have many God-size challenges and, I trust, many God-given opportunities ahead.”

First printed in Anglican Ink.

Midwest Conservative Journal: Sound-off Against TEC GC's 2012

The TEC thinks they should be central, vocal and visible.  Well, they are.  Institutionally, they are run by "egopapists." Or, blind narcissists, self-evidentely. Or, meglomaniacs without reasons.  Or, "Gasbags" for cause and with merit. This is TEC's theological and cultural legacy.  MCJ offers a reasonable screed here, one of justifiable frustration.  We recommend following MWJ and linking to it.

http://themcj.com/?p=33537

BACK TO THE BIBLE

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

Ross Douthat of the New York Times looks at the precipitous decline of the Episcopal Organization and other manifestations of liberal Christianity and wonders whether liberal Christianity can be saved. Although regular visitors here know that the argument about when the Episcopal Organization began to go south is a perpetual one, Douthat begins with a certain megalomaniacal old gasbag:

In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.

I think you can make a plausible case for the Episcopal death spiral, while perhaps not starting with the megalomaniacal old gasbag, at least becoming inevitable with him. Over the years, a number of Catholic and Orthodox commenters here have quite correctly pointed out that any church that did nothing whatsoever about the megalogmaniacal old gas bag has no business protesting Gene Robinson.

After all, Robbie, as homosexual as he might be, is still a paragon of Christian and evangelical virtue compared to the megalomaniacal old gasbag. The Episcopaltanic may have struck the iceberg long before anyone ever heard of the megalomaniacal old gasbag. But the water didn’t start pouring into the ship until TEO refused to do anything about him other than hope that he went away.

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Another point that I’ve been making for many years. The Episcopal Organization gets the publicity that it does not because of anything it has to offer. The media plays up the Episcopalians because Episcopalians look Roman Catholic, what with their pointy hats and hooked sticks and Latin terms in their prayer book and saints and whatnot.

Those stories about the Episcopal Organization really have nothing to do with the Episcopal Organization. They’re a backhanded way for the leftist American news media to tell Rome, a church that actually still matters, “Do you see how respectfully we’d cover you if you’d back off the abortion talk, ordain women and gays and generally agree with us? And it would benefit you; these days, the Episcopalians are thriving!!”

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Not that conservative Christianity in any form has done much better.

Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.

But the left has done WAY worse.

But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

And it does you absolutely no good to pretend that you’re perfectly fine when all the evidence says that you’re grievously ill.

Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.

Then Douthat makes a point that is far more profound than I think he realizes.

But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

In the 1800′s, anti-slavery was considered a “liberal” cause probably because you could find no end of conservative theologians, particularly in the southern United States, who lamely attempted to provide a biblical basis for chattel slavery.

It’s significant that one of the most savagely anti-slavery voices among the Christian clergy in that century was the great British Baptist Charles Spurgeon, a man who was, as far as I’m concerned, the single greatest preacher of the Gospel in the English language up to and including Billy Graham, the man from whom I learned who Jesus was in 1969.

Did Spurgeon eventually turn into some kind of Christian proto-leftist? Hardly. Here’s a little something on what was called the Down-Grade Controversy. Long story short, Spurgeon cut ties with British Baptists because he felt they were becoming too liberal.

And that’s basically what Douthat hopes happens. That liberal Christians remember that they are, or at least call themselves, Christians.

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God … the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.

Otherwise…what’s the damned point?

Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

In one respect, atheists are right. You don’t need religion in order to do “good.” Or if you want yourself “spiritual,” you certainly don’t need the Christian religion to do good. Jews certainly do much good while one of the pillars of Islam is charity. Indeed, it’s probably impossible to find any religion anywhere that does not have the care of the less fortunate as one of its foundations.
Or if you want to “do good” and “spirituality” doesn’t matter to you, you can always join the Optimists, the Rotary Club, the Freemasons or any other service club that happens to strike your fancy.

So can liberal Christianity reconnect with its religious basis? Rediscover its Christianity, if you like? Theoretically it could, as the example of Charles Spurgeon mentioned above. The question is whether or not it wants to.

At Stand Firm, Tim Fountain put together a list of other resolutions recently passed at the Episcopal Organization’s recent General Convention. Notice anything peculiar about them? The ones that passed all skew to the left, backing this or that secular leftist cause. Many of the ones that didn’t were more centrist or provided possible cost-effective alternatives to actions TEO was already determined to take, particularly in the area of health care.

And do any of you remember this?

Resolved, That the 75th General Convention receive and embrace The Windsor Report’s invitation to engage in a process of healing and reconciliation; and be it further

Resolved, That this Convention therefore call upon Standing Committees and bishops with jurisdiction to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.

That was Resolution B033. Frank Griswold pushed that through at the 2006 General Convention. It’s since been thrown into the garbage can of Episcopal history but what I recall the most about it was the absolute outrage it engendered among the Episcopal left.

If I remember correctly, people like Liz Kaeton burst into tears at its passage. Something like twenty bishops immediately issued a statement saying that B033 was dead-on-arrival in their dioceses and you couldn’t read a leftist Anglican blog that wasn’t either blazing mad or rhetorically sobbing on its fainting couch.

And over what? A resolution that was never going to be observed by liberal bishops anyway? Resolution B033, the bravest example of actual leadership in the Episcopal Organization that I’ve ever seen(whether Frank knew what he was doing or not), represents what the Episcopal Organization and other mainline Protestant churches must do in order for the rest of us to take them spiritually seriously again.

Here’s a thought experiment for you. What if the Episcopal Organization consecrated Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool, “blessed” same-sex relationships but completely reversed itself on abortion, deciding in convention that the Catholics had it right and that abortion was a great(but forgivable) eviI?

Not only did the Episcopalians now consider abortion to be a great(but forgivable) evil, but any Episcopalian who disagreed with this teaching was unworthy of Episcopal ordination on any level and that any already-ordained Episcopalian who publicly disagreed with the church’s stance was liable to be deposed.

Yeah, I know, you write great science fiction, Johnson. But if the Episcopal Organization had had the reputation of being fiercely anti-abortion in 2003 but consecrated Gene Robinson to its episcopate anyway, would you still have left? To be honest with you, if that had been the case, I would probably still be an Episcopalian.

Because I would understand that while I had been baptized into a liberal Christian church, many of whose stances I know longer agreed with, I would also know that my church knows how to do something actual liberal Christianity has forgotten, or no longer cares to know, how to do. Say no to the secular left.

Otherwise, I’m going to come to the conclusion that I came to in 2003. My “church” is nothing more than a purely secular and entirely political body that utilizes Christian terminology and rites in order to slap a thin coat of “spiritual” varnish over whatever purely secular and entirely political cause is current this week.

By the way, Douthat’s column seems to have struck a nerve. Click here. But if you read nothing else today, make SURE that you click here where the prevailing attitude among Jim’s commentariat seems to be, “The megalomaniacal old gasbag? Never heard of him.”

Wall Street Journal: "What Ails the Episcopalians"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303919504577520950409252574.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

What Ails the Episcopalians

Its numbers and coffers shrinking, the church votes for pet funerals but offers little to the traditional faithful.

By JAY AKASIE

Indianapolis

Episcopalians from around the country gathered here this week for their church's 77th triennial General Convention, which ended Thursday. Although other Protestant denominations have national governing councils, the Episcopal Church's triennial gathering stands apart. For starters, it's one of the world's largest such legislative entities, with more than 1,000 members.

General Convention is also notable for its sheer ostentation and carnival atmosphere. For seven straight nights, lavish cocktail parties spilled into pricey steakhouses, where bishops could use their diocesan funds to order bottles of the finest wines.

During the day, legislators in the lower chamber, the House of Deputies, and the upper chamber, the House of Bishops, discussed such weighty topics as whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats, and whether to ratify resolutions condemning genetically modified foods. Both were approved by a vote, along with a resolution to "dismantle the effects of the doctrine of discovery," in effect an apology to Native Americans for exposing them to Christianity.

But the party may be over for the Episcopal Church, and so, probably, its experiment with democratic governance. Among the pieces of legislation that came before their convention was a resolution calling for a task force to study transforming the event into a unicameral—that is, a one-house—body. On Wednesday, a resolution to "re-imagine" the church's governing body passed unanimously.

Formally changing the structure of General Convention will most likely formalize the reality that many Episcopalians already know: a church in the grip of executive committees under the direct supervision of the church's secretive and authoritarian presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. They now set the agenda and decide well in advance what kind of legislation comes before the two houses.

Bishop Schori is known for brazenly carrying a metropolitan cross during church processions. With its double horizontal bars, the metropolitan cross is a liturgical accouterment that's typically reserved for Old World bishops. And her reign as presiding bishop has been characterized by actions more akin to a potentate than a clergywoman watching over a flock.

In recent years she's sued breakaway, traditionalist dioceses which find the mother church increasingly radical. Church legislators have asked publicly how much the legal crusades have cost, to no avail. In the week before this summer's convention, Bishop Schori sent shock waves through the church by putting forth her own national budget without consulting the convention's budget committee—consisting partly of laymen—which until now has traditionally drafted the document.

Whatever its cost, the litigation against breakaway dioceses—generally, demanding that they return church buildings and other assets—has added to the national church's financial problems. Many dioceses are no longer willing or able to cough up money to support the national organization, and its bank accounts are running dry. On Monday, for example, the church announced that its headquarters at 815 2nd Avenue in midtown Manhattan—which includes a presiding bishop's full-floor penthouse with wraparound terrace—is up for sale.

In the past, General Convention, for all its excesses, at least gave ordinary laymen a sense that they had a democratic voice in governing the church. But many Episcopal leaders have chosen to focus more on secular politics than on religion over the years. Donald Hook, author of "The Plight of the Church Traditionalist: A Last Apology," estimates that church membership has declined to fewer than one million today from three million in 1970. This is another reason, along with financial woes, to save money with a slimmed-down legislature.

And yet there are important issues at stake if laymen are further squeezed out of what was once a transparent legislative process. A long-standing quest by laymen to celebrate the Eucharist—even taking on functions of ordained ministers to consecrate bread and wine for Holy Communion, which is a favorite cause of the church's left wing—would likely be snuffed out in a unicameral convention in which senior clergy held sway.

Also in jeopardy would be the ability of ordinary laymen to stop the rewriting, in blunt modern language and with politically correct intent, of the church's historic Book of Common Prayer. The revisionist bishops who would hold sway over a unicameral convention in the future haven't hid their desire to do away with all connections to Thomas Cranmer, who was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by Henry VIII. He was a classic figure in the English Reformation. But today the man and his prayer book are deemed too traditional by some church bishops.

For some, the writing on the wall is already clear. On Wednesday, the entire delegation from the diocese of South Carolina—among the very last of the traditionalist holdouts—stormed out of the convention.

Mr. Akasie, a journalist and Episcopalian, lives in New York City.

A version of this article appeared July 13, 2012, on page A9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What Ails the Episcopalians.