The members of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Peoria, Ill., in the schismatic Diocese of Quincy, have spurned their standing committee and Bishop Gregory Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone. By a lopsided margin of 181 to 35, they have elected to remain in the Episcopal Church. Four hundred of the tiny diocese’s 1850 members belong to the cathedral parish.
Can we please stop pretending he’s America’s pastor and the next Billy Graham and all of that nonsense now?
“Why is there any evil at all in God’s creation?” Nadler explains: “It is not that everything will turn out for the best for me or for anyone else in particular. Nor is it necessarily the case that any other possible world would have been worse for me or for anyone else. Rather, Leibniz claims that any other possible world is worse overall than this one, regardless of any single person’s fortunes in it.”
Jeffrey Weiss, the award-winning religion writer at The Dallas Morning News, throws the penalty flag on Bob Duncan, Jack Iker and company for their unauthorized use of the words Anglican, province and Episcopal.
This radical innovation in church polity by Bob Duncan and his followers not only contravenes the ancient Christian councils of Nicea (325), Constantinople (381), and Chalcedon (451), but also goes against Lambeth Conference encyclical letters of 1878 and 1888, as well as Lambeth Conference resolutions 1897:24, 1908:22, 1988:72, 1998:V.13, III.2.
Members of the Diocese of Quincy who want to remain loyal to the Episcopal Church will meet on December 13 to take the first formal steps to reorganize and reconstitute the diocese. Attendees plan to organize a steering committee to guide the process and lay the groundwork for a special synod meeting, likely to be held in January.
Updated with Jeff Sharlet of the Revealer, who writes: Even as these Anglicans create something new — a church actually founded on its rejection of
“There are clear guidelines set out in the Anglican Consultative Council Reports detailing the steps necessary for the amendments of existing provincial constitutions and the creation of new provinces. Once begun, any of these processes will take years to complete. In relation to the recent announcement from the meeting of the Common Cause Partnership in Chicago, the process has not yet begun.
What if all the conservatives accomplish is the creation of a tiny church of some 80,000 people that is recognized by a dozen Anglican primates and is invisible in most of North America? Wouldn’t the Times’ coverage look a little rash in retrospect?
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has joined 39 other U.S. Christian leaders in calling on President-elect Barack Obama to make lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority during his first year in office. Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), of which the Episcopal Church is a member, is circulating the leaders’ December 1 letter.