50 Years of 'Full and Equal Claim' for LGBTQ+ People Has Produced Schism, Loss and Disharmony

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | July 21, 2026

Episcopalians across the country have been invited to commemorate 50 years of pansexual inclusion in The Episcopal Church. It promises to be a memorable event affirming "that homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church."

The Office of Public Affairs issued an invitation to return to Minneapolis Sept. 3–5 for "Full & Equal: 50 Years in Pursuit of a Promise," a three-day gathering of worship, workshops and storytelling marking the milestone and reflecting on the church’s ongoing journey toward LGBTQ+ inclusion. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe will join a panel discussion and preside at the closing Eucharist at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis. The event has been planned by the church’s Task Force on LGBTQ+ Inclusion, chaired by the Rev. Susan Russell, an openly lesbian priest of the Diocese of Los Angeles.

It was at the 65th General Convention in Minneapolis, in September 1976, that The Episcopal Church adopted Resolution A069, demanding full and equal access to the church’s promise.

By any definition the campaign has been wildly successful, but the price has been high, very high.

From the moment the Anglican Communion passed Lambeth Resolution 1.10 in 1998, declaring that sexual intimacy belongs to a man and a woman in marriage and that homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture, The Episcopal Church set its face against the Communion. The consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003, the approval of same-sex marriage rites in 2015, Resolution B012 in 2018 forcing those rites into every diocese, the steady ordination of gay and lesbian clergy, and the consecration of at least six openly homosexual and lesbian bishops all tell the same story: the Episcopal Church force fed homosexuality down the throats of the laity, even though privately most did not agree but went along out of loyalty to the institution, the Pension Board and the future occupants of the parish’s columbarium.

It has been a remarkable ride. But the cost has been heavy.

Following the consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual Bishop of New Hampshire, the church lost more than 400,000 baptized members in the decade that followed — from some 2.3 million in 2003 to fewer than 1.9 million by 2013 — along with hundreds of priests and roughly 700 congregations; many of the priests losing or watching as their pensions were cut short.

At the time, the late Louie Crew, founder of Integrity, pled with Catholic homosexuals to leave their church and join TEC. Few if any did. (Even though homosexuality is widely reported within the Roman Catholic clerical establishment — the French journalist Frédéric Martel claimed in his book In the Closet of the Vatican that a large majority of the Vatican’s prelates are homosexually inclined — Rome’s official teaching that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered" still stands.)

The real kicker is that the Episcopal Church has failed to fill its pews with homosexuals anxious to worship with them. The doors stayed open; the pews remained empty.

It was virtue signaling of the worst sort. The vast majority of the church’s 6,700 congregations will never see a homosexual in the pews or have one recommended for parish work. It was all about optics for a handful of aggrieved persons who believed they had changed God’s mind for Him. A transitioning culture helped the push by the church, and all the mainline churches followed.

Despite the fact that the church in 2,000 years had never embraced fornication, adultery or homosexuality, Episcopalians, now steeped in modernity and wanting to follow the world rather than Scripture, managed to persuade wealthy middle-class whites (aka Boomers), the church’s chief check writers and supporters, to go along, despite Scripture’s overwhelming disapproval of a behavior with eternal consequences. They believed their bishops knew more than they did. Acquiescence to a bishop became more important than obedience to Scripture.

From that moment forward it has been downhill for The Episcopal Church. Year after year, statistic after statistic, the record shows an aging church in rapid decline.

The numbers are appalling. In 2013 the church counted just over 2 million baptized members; by 2023 that figure had fallen to 1.5 million — a quarter of the church gone in a single decade. For 2024, the church could not produce a churchwide membership figure at all, citing "confusion" in how congregations reported the number. Average Sunday attendance stood at 413,034 in 2024, down 43 percent from a decade earlier. The median Episcopal congregation now draws just 38 souls on a Sunday morning into a sanctuary built to seat 165, and 92 percent of congregations draw fewer than 150. The number of congregations slipped from 6,754 in 2023 to 6,707 in 2024, and closures will only accelerate as aging remnants die off.

Clergy have aged well into their 60s, and the average Episcopalian in the pew is in his or her sixties as well. There is not another generation waiting to fill the pulpits or the pews. The cost of a seminary education is prohibitive, and with a median Sunday attendance of 38, most congregations cannot afford a full-time priest even if one appeared.

By any reckoning TEC will be a shadow of its former self by 2030 and will, to all intents and purposes, cease to have any meaningful existence by 2040.

TEC progressives stole orthodox parishes and turned them. Revisionists then and now are incapable of planting a church or adequately sustaining one they have turned.

Faithful Episcopalians left, many in tears, as they watched General Convention after General Convention affirm and push homosexuality in the name of inclusion.

The formation of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009, with the sustained support of orthodox Global South bishops and archbishops, offered them a lifeline as they sought to move forward into a new day. The contrast today could not be starker: ACNA’s most recent congregational report showed 1,027 congregations and 130,111 members, with attendance up 13.4 percent in a single year — a church at its highest attendance and membership of all time, planting churches while TEC closes them.

The road has not been easy for those who departed. Many needed second jobs just to pay the bills, but God honored their stand and most have clawed their way to successful futures.

So let them gather in Minneapolis this September. Let them sing their songs, tell their stories, and congratulate one another on fifty years of "full and equal claim." But the numbers do not lie, and neither does God. They will celebrate in a church that could not even count its members last year; they will toast a promise kept in pews that stand empty.

God is not mocked. He never is. There will be no Samson moment for The Episcopal Church, no dramatic crash of pillars — only the slow death of the withered vine. The branch that bears no fruit, our Lord promised, is cut off, thrown away, and burned. Fifty years ago, in Minneapolis, The Episcopal Church made its choice. Fifty years from now, there will be no one left to commemorate it.

Nothing will stop the decline now. Nothing.

END