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COLORADO SPRINGS: Orthodox Think Tank Takes Aim at ECUSA

ORTHODOX THINK TANK TAKES AIM AT ECUSA

Commentary

By David W. Virtue

COLORADO SPRINGS—That the Episcopal Church is in spiritual free fall, theologically compromised, in moral disarray, perhaps beyond redemption, is not new news.

But what to do about it is another matter altogether. It is exercising the best minds across the Episcopal Church and around the Anglican Communion.

The CAPA Primates and bishops met in Nairobi recently and issued a sharp warning to the Episcopal Church and Frank Griswold to repent, and put on notice to the whole communion that they would lower the boom, perhaps before the EAMES commission has even finished its work.

Every day the American Anglican Council grows stronger and the will of its president David Anderson grows more determined that he will no longer accept the leadership of Frank Griswold and the House of Bishops, and the decisions they make about ECUSA’s future.

Canon Anderson has drawn the last line in the sand and he will tolerate no further innovations. He has, along with other orthodox leaders, been openly and highly critical of the recent House of Bishops statement on Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight.

The recently formed Network (NACDP) is ratcheting up the pain on ECUSA’s liberal apparatik as well. They too, have made it clear, through their spokesman Bishop Robert Duncan (Pittsburgh) that a realignment of the ECUSA is under way and it will no longer be business as usual.

On the other side of the bank V. Gene Robinson, the new bishop of New Hampshire has said that perhaps it is time for the orthodox to go if they can’t remain in the theologically and morally evolving ECUSA.

And Frank Griswold, ECUSA’s Presiding Bishop expresses surprise that the consecration of an openly homoerotic bishop is causing so much consternation among the faithful, arguing that the church survived women’s ordination, a new Prayer Book and will certainly survive this. He has also said that conservative groups have been around ECUSA for as long as he can remember but that won’t change the course upon which the ECUSA is set.

He just doesn’t get it.

Money is drying up in nearly all the dioceses; dozens of orthodox priests are weighing their options for the future, and faithful Episcopalians are leaving the Episcopal Church in droves, concerned that the acceptance of pansexual behavior will compromise their children - the ECUSA being no longer a safe place.

Many are fleeing to the Anglican Mission in America (AMIA) while a few parishes are now asking
for primatial covering either from Africa or more recently from Southern Cone bishops.

Almost weekly there are new twists and turns as orthodox parishes take different stances on how they will deal with ECUSA’s apostasy. A parish in St Louis is prepared to go to the wall and will fight in the courts for their property as are three parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania.

Some six parishes in Eastern Michigan are weighing their options and their futures, with two rectors having already resigned. If they should all go, it would wipe out some 12 percent of that diocese. At least one congregation has lost 50 percent of its membership.

In the Diocese of Central Florida Bishop John W. Howe has taken a more irenic approach to one departing parish, showing a different model of how a parish and its bishop could amicably split without too much pain.

Revisionist bishops, on the other hand, are showing their colors by coming down hard on fleeing orthodox priests invoking one canon or another, inhibiting and deposing fleeing rectors, in their efforts to maintain control of their dioceses.

But one group, the Anglican Communion Institute - ECUSA’s unofficial orthodox think tank, met
recently in Colorado Springs and came up with what could be the ultimate solution. Meeting under the banner, Anglicanism, History and Hope: The Future of Anglicanism in North America, they declared that the only honest thing to do is for Frank Griswold and some 62 revisionist bishops who have departed from the faith, order and discipline of the church to separate themselves from ECUSA and form their own autonomous, independent national church.

The idea has been germinating for some time by this group of brilliant orthodox theologians and
churchmen, and came to a head with the blessing of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey.

Their argument is simply this. By insisting on going through with the Robinson consecration, the majority of ECUSA’s bishops showed their lack of respect for the Communion’s integrity and common mind, therefore they should do the honorable thing, and with the courage of their convictions willingly disengage themselves from the Communion and from the structures of ecclesial life tied to the Communion that the Episcopal Church has enshrined in its Constitution.

The framers acknowledge that while no one has heeded this call, they maintain it is the only honest course of action, and that further talk of “conversation” and “dialogue” – the much beloved theobabble of revisionists end, and a parting of the ways takes place.

All talk of engaging one another in holy conversation with such words as honesty, charity, clarity and harmony within the American church and within the larger Communion, be recognized for what it is; a total fiction. It has yielded nothing.

Said the leaders of ACI, “The leadership of ECUSA has resolutely pursued a course of response to evangelical outrage over Robinson’s consecration (and other related matters) that has furthered obscurantist denial, malicious accusation, ecclesial confusion, and discord – something we might have been spared had disengagement from the Communion by these leaders been pursued vigorously and openly from the start.”

They rightly observe that the House of Bishops plan for dealing with “disagreement” in the Episcopal Church, avoids any mention of the Communion’s real concerns, and demeans and reduces disagreement by the minority to the category of “dissent” as being divisive.

So faithful, orthodox Episcopalians are now being called “ideologically motivated” by Griswold who accuses small “groups within ECUSA of single-handedly perverting the consciousness of bishops around the world” by fabricating their opposition to his own unilaterally-promoted agenda, and thereby derailing the “spreading of the Gospel and the living of the Good News of Jesus Christ”.

According to Frank Griswold certain unnamed INTERNET journalists are also guilty of spreading malicious gossip and fomenting dissent, compounding ECUSA’s problems even more. They and he get mad when they are exposed.

Dr. George Sumner, the Canadian theological principal observed in his lecture, that "we are one of the few places you can move to the right just be standing still".

“This is how I feel: standing still, and watching the church tumble to the side irretrievably,” said the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, theologian and an Episcopal rector in the Diocese of Colorado.

“The silence from Griswold and the ECUSA establishment is absolutely deafening in the face of each new theological talk or Communion-related statement or provincial decision from abroad regarding the plummeting demise of ECUSA's place in world Christianity and the Anglican Communion,” he said.

“ACI conferences are but one element studiously avoided by ECUSA's strange Doukhobor desires. Are they not listening? If they are not, they are woefully derelict in their responsibilities. If they are, and simply refuse to take what is said seriously, they are deluded. If they take it seriously, but refuse to do anything constructive in response, they are willful destroyers of the church. I fear that it is the last; even more distressing, it may be that a mixture of all these reasons, are at work here.”

As things now stand, it is the blind leading the blind in The Episcopal Church. And if in this kingdom the one-eyed man is King, Frank Tracy Griswold is fast losing what little sight he has left as the darkness descends over the ECUSA with each passing day.

END

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