Bishop Gene Robinson continues to express concern about the possibility that the House of Bishops may be unwilling to work with the House of Deputies:
I fear (and I hope I’m not being overly dramatic here) that we are moving toward a train wreck between the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops. I sense an unwillingness among the bishops to listen to these voices of the laity and clergy. I hope I’m terribly wrong, but it seems that bishops feel they have some special access to God’s will and nothing will persuade them otherwise. I shudder to think of a church where the Bishops are so disconnected from the will of the people they serve. Please God, let me be terribly wrong about this perception, and may the scales fall from my pessimistic eyes and reveal an episcopate who has listened to the Spirit’s movement in the people of this Church. Nothing would make me happier than to be wrong about this. Only time will tell.
The folks at Walking with Integrity remind us that William Stringfellow, whom the Archbishop of Canterbury praised as perhaps the greatest American theologian of the 20th century, was gay.
We are slow off the mark on the manufactured controversy about the Presiding Bishop’s opening sermon in which she said described “the great Western heresy”:
that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of beingy of us can be saved individually.
USA Today is on the case, as is Religion Dispatches.
Episcopal News Service has a number of good stories today, including a couple to which we have paid little attention. This one examines the budget-making process, and this one looks at the future of church communications.