Viewpoints

Presiding Over a Schism

For the past nineteen years I have resisted, without much difficulty, saying anything publicly about a schism at the Church of the Redeemer in Rochester, New Hampshire that took place while I was Rector there, 1986-1991. But as things have evolved, and as the bishops are about to meet next week, I believe the telling of my experience there may be helpful if not instructive.
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Oversight

Jesus didn't leave all his moxey to one person. He left it to a community and he sent Spirit a plenty to keep it embodied, between the curbs, and focused...

Lane Denson serves as Priest Associate at St. Ann's Episcopal Church, Nashville, TN. He is editor of the occasional journal COVENANT: A Commentary on the Church, and author of the (almost) daily email meditation series Out of Nowhere. He has been the rector of several parishes in Texas and Tennessee, as well as Chaplain at Rice University and Texas Medical Center in Houston, TX.
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Would There Still be Anglicanism if the Anglican Communion Suddenly Disappeared?

"In one particularly lively exchange with a group of Episcopal bishops....I posed the question: "Would there still be Anglicanism if the Anglican Communion suddenly disappeared?"

"They answered, "of course." "
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Here Comes the Global South

The Global South primates are coming to the United States, to an unspecified place, to meet with the bishops of dioceses seeking extra-provincial oversight. They are intent on changing the way TEC looks and is viewed by the rest of the world. Our Presiding Bishop, with great graciousness, has invited them to meet with her. We shall see.
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By Their Fruits Shall You Know Them

Over the past ten years, the Episcopal Church has been subjected to increasing attacks for its breadth of theological perspectives and its hospitality to all. Since the consecration of New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, an openly gay man living in a committed monogamous relationship, the attacks have become more strident. A small but vocal faction, comprised of people both inside and outside the Episcopal Church has used significant resources to paint a false picture of our Church.
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All Will Be Well

The Latest from Lambeth Palace

Though I admire him greatly, I will not claim to understand Rowan Williams. But, I suggest the following:

Many liberals/progressives have misunderstood him in that they assumed that he thought like them because he had argued for the possibility of rethinking the tradition in matters sexual and was not politically conservative. They were mistaken in at least three ways:
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What Does 'Disassociate' Mean to You ?

One of the questions our bishop asked us when he came to listen to our vestry and convention delegation and clergy was: "What does the word 'disassociate' mean to you?" My quick response was: "divorce."
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Falsely Accused

One of the most frustrating things about being a moderate in The Episcopal Church is the constant need to respond to various bizarre charges made against you by groups like the Anglican Communion Network (ACN), American Anglican Council (AAC) and allied groups. Those groups have now been joined by leaders in the Nigerian church who are organizing a mission to cleanse our church of its traditional teachings.
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The Hijacking

From a sermon written for 10 Pentacost, 2006.

I know with the revelations this past week about the plot to blow up air planes headed from England to our country, we have things like security and hijackings on our minds.

Will it ever end?

But today I want to talk about a different kind of hijacking. Not of planes, or trains or cars.
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We Don't Need an Anglican Covenant

The proponents of an Anglican Covenant continue to talk in terms of how such a device will strengthen the Anglican Communion and draw out its wondrous capacities. Theological sources are adverted to in order to make this exalted case. A rude question remains unexamined: Just who really has demanded such a covenant and why?
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Don't Call Them Conservative

I was raised by conservatives. In Southern California, where I now live, this is rather like saying you were raised by wolves. But I like to think the people who raised me did a good job: they gave me a strong sense of family and of community obligation; they taught me to respect social institutions. Conservatives, my mother often said, valued what was best in society and tried to preserve it. She abhorred mob tactics, half-truths and secrecy. "If you have to hide it," she'd say, "You shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
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What's Going on in the Anglican Communion?

In a July 10 story on Beliefnet, Robert Bruce Mullin, SPRL Professor of History and World Mission and Professor of Modern Anglican Studies at The General Theological Seminary, New York, writes, "Despite the headlines, the Episcopal Church crisis has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power."
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Without Generosity There is No Future

The following editorial appeared on the website of The Church Times (an independent, weekly Anglican newspaper) on June 30, 2006.

IMAGINE the Provincial Synod of the Church of Nigeria. At its meeting, it first reasserts its total opposition to homosexuality. Not only will it keep the bar on priesthood and the episcopate, it will also support state discrimination against homosexual people. But then Archbishop Akinola steps in...
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The Episcopal Church in the Balance

On my last visit to a congregation a member of the choir, with tears in her eyes, said to me: "My vicar retired, my bishop is going to retire, and the Episcopal Church has been kicked out of the Anglican Communion. That is more loss than I can handle." Her genuine lament stays with me.
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A Gospel of Intolerance

It's no secret that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are engaged in a bitter internal struggle over the role of gay and lesbian people within the church. But despite this struggle, the leaders of our global communion of 77 million members have consistently reiterated their pastoral concern for gays and lesbians. Meeting last February, the primates who lead our 38 member provinces issued a unanimous statement that said in part: "The victimization or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us."

We now have reason to doubt those words.

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What Witness Will We Make?

As the Episcopal Church, the most important question before us is not about schism or sexuality. It is about witness. What witness will we make?

Christian witness is the public affirmation of faith. It is how we let the world see that we practice what we preach. Today those of us in the Episcopal Church are being called on to make our witness. We have the opportunity to be what we say we are. The world is watching. What will we do?

The answer is a matter of faith. We witness to what we believe.

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Akinola and the Windsor Report

Aren't some of us being a bit naive ? Look at it this way: Akinola is a power ful man. He wants to rule the World-Wide Anglican Communion, or organize and rul e his own Biblical Anglican Communion. In order to do so, he must survive. He is not interested in being a martyr. In order to survive, he needs some help from his government. He won't get help from his government by insisting on justice fo r gays, nor by preaching Christian non-violence.
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A New Global Model for the Anglican Communion

Over the course of the past few decades Anglicanism has been struggling to balance two Anglican principles; maintaining global communion while honoring the autonomy of the national churches. The Windsor Report suggests one way forward. There are two main flaws in the Windsor Report. First is the absence of participation by the laity in the highest levels of authority. The other flaw is the introduction of democratic principles at the global level while in many national churches there is little to no democratic principle on the local level.
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Graciousness - and the Current Impossibility of Reconciliation

I think some sort of a split has been inevitable since before V.Gene Robinson and Same Sex Blessings. It is (among other things, as I have claimed before) the fruit of the Modernist / Fundamentalist controversy that has two different biblical theologies: one that has emerged (as prominent Methodist theologian John B. Cobb, Jr has said) "from reading the Bible as critical historians," and the other "from reading it only through the eyes of a tradition that has treated it as a sacred text."
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Inside and Outside: A reflection on Moral and Ritual

At my most pessimistic I sometimes feel that the utility of Scripture in helping us better to understand our current situation may have reached its limit. Over the last several years I have grown weary of seeing texts tossed back and forth, twisting in the air as they fly, stretched beyond their capacity, or shrunk to insignificance. When I consider how little the Scripture actually says about the presenting issue, and how much of what it says is in a limited vocabulary of half-a-dozen Hebrew and Greek words - some so rare they are only understood by conjecture, others so capable of a range of figurative and literal application that they can mean almost anything one wants - and then take account of the energy of the debate, I begin to despair of Scripture.s providing us with a settlement to the matter.
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The Ghost of Bishop Pike, Revisited

Last week, the House of Bishops passed overwhelmingly a remarkable "Covenant". It called for a suspension of consecrations to the episcopate, of bishops' participation in same-sex blessings and authorization of rites, and an end of unauthorized interventions into dioceses by bishops. It was the fruit not of some pre-arranged process, but rather the product of an ad hoc group of bishops from across the spectrum of opinion. In the course of the meeting, a conflict erupted between two bishops, which was not swept under a blanket of civility.

It seemed to me that Bishop Pike's ghost was a bit appeased.
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Anglican Communion 101

The latest flurry of news is about three major written reports and statements: The Windsor Report, the Primates Communiqué, and the House of Bishops Coveant. If one were to rely on the secular newspapers concerning any of this trinity, one would get the impression that The Episcopal Church has been "suspended" from the Anglican Communion.

The rest of this article is available starting on page 6 of the Rev. Kaeton's parish newsletter (click below).
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Parallel Universes, Attempted Coups, and Guerrilla Warfare

The author, a lawyer and Episcopalian web logger in Houston, TX, has published an excellent summary of the plans and activities of the AAC/Network from the infamous Chapman memo of 2003 to the present.
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Living Together For Mission

The Bishop's Address to the 109th Convention of the Diocese of Lexington. "We are now at a point in which the controversy around homosexuality has occupied an enormous amount of my time as your bishop, and a great deal of our time as a diocese. I pledge to you that I will do everything in my power to make that less the case. It is time that this issue cease to distract us from mission. We must not succumb to the ungodly forces of polarization. The situation is what it is, and either we can live with that or we can't."
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The Center Still Holds

For months we have been told that the Episcopal Church is in turmoil, that its long-cherished unity has vanished, as radically different theological perspectives - revisionist and orthodox - have pulled the Church apart. Fault for this sorry state of affairs has been laid at the feet of the "revisionists," liberals who have willfully ignored the concerns of conservatives for more than 30 years. [Editor's note: This article has been accepted for publication in the Jan. 30, 2005 issue of The Living Church magazine.]
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Our Common Ground

Some would suggest that in these times of stress, the unity of the Episcopal Church has been fractured. But unity does not mean uniformity of opinion or of Scriptural interpretation. [Editor's note: This article has been accepted for publication in the Jan. 23, 2005 issue of The Living Church magazine.]
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How to Quench the Spirit

In this article from the Church Times, the Rev. Canon Marilyn Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, argues that, "The Windsor report calls for a suppression of honest discernment." The Rt. Rev. Walter Righter, retired bishop of Iowa, has opined that, "It is a seminal piece which the communion needs to heed. The world wide implications of a shut-down in discernment because of legalisms is dangerous indeed. Such a shutdown was tried as we considered ordination of women - "we should not do it until other historic communions have approved it" - meaning wait for Rome and Orthodoxy. Thank God we did not do that. We can ill afford to pay attention this time either."
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Who's in charge: Judging the Scriptures

The question of Scriptural versus Ecclesiastical authority, while full of rich and complex nuances, is most certainly not a question of which came first, chicken or egg. While the Hebrew Scriptures clearly precede the foundation of the Christian church, the Holy Bible as we know it was assembled and authorized by that very church.
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An "Un-Anglican" Statement

The theological statement of the Network of Anglican Communion Diocese and Parishes (NACDP) contains propositions and assumptions that would radically change the nature of the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church, and are destructive of the via media.
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In the Still of the Night

In the still of the night, when all the pronouncements, letters, blog entries, emails, articles, books, opinions, mutterings and other tools of the struggle have been put down, the delight that is the Anglican Communion remains.
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A Christian Moderate

"A Christian moderate is not someone who is moderately Christian or who lacks conviction, but someone who stands at the center of Catholic Faith..."
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12 Reasons Not to Join the Network

Collected from Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburg and other Via Media affiliates.
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Dealing with Conflicts as Anglicans

"Many Churches are torn by difficult conflicts in our time. In this short essay, I want to take seriously the fact that we Episcopalians aren't members of those other churches. We need to deal with our conflicts specifically as Anglicans. What does our classic Anglican tradition tell us about how we should do this?" L. William Countryman is professor of New Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, CA.
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What constitutes a sufficient body to be church?

Lately there has been a good bit of talk about what constitutes the essential 'unit' of the church: parish, diocese, province or communion. First of all, I admit to being troubled by talk of 'units' of the church. I tend to follow the Pauline model of 'organs' or 'members' which, if cut off from the body, no longer function. So my question would be, what constitutes a sufficient 'body' to be 'church?'
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