COLUMBUS, Ohio – It is an exceedingly foreboding day of thunderclouds in Columbus, Ohio, as I sit here in the press gallery of the Episcopal Church House of Bishops. They’ve just passed an emergency resolution contradicting the decision of the House of Deputies yesterday to reject a moratorium on the ordination of homosexual bishops and the blessings of unions. Had they not intervened, they would likely have been alienated from the international Anglican Communion.
But as one bishop announced to Bishop John David Schofield of the Diocese of San Joaquin across the table before the vote: “That will never hold where I come from. You’d better know better than that, Schofield.”
The House of Deputies concurred with the bishops Wednesday in an act that one deputy approximated near the “height of hypocrisy.” Most of them made clear that they had absolutely no intention of “living into” their resolution to affirm the international Anglican Communion’s Windsor Report by distancing from the decision of the 2003 Episcopal Convention to ordain a homosexual bishop.
They will not “live into” the Windsor Report because they’ve already made up their mind to “live into” the homosexual movement. “Living into” is the sort of codespeak used at the 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church.
Here, they dialogued on dialogue, and on diversity, inclusion, gender neutrality, transgender neutrality. It was at the Eucharist this morning that the first female Anglican primate-elect ever declared, “Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation. And you and I are His children.”
This is what my friend Dr. Peter Toon of the Prayer Book Society of the USA has called the “New Episcopal Religion.” We might just as well call it Baby Boomer Religion.
It is the religion of the “holy spirit” that moves in evolution. Reality changes. Truth changes. As Dr. E. Bevan Stanley of the Diocese of Newark told the House of Deputies on Wednesday, “For some 30 years, the Holy Spirit has been guiding this church into the understanding of a new truth that culminated in the actions in 2003.”
That was when the Episcopal Church first ordained a homosexual bishop, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson of the Diocese of New Hampshire. The “holy spirit” made them do it.
The “holy spirit” is a Babel-god of progressivism. It has evolving purposes and plans that move in the putrid breaths of a few Right Reverends. In “intentional” (another buzzword) flight from the truth, they hold a death-grip on the wind.
The convention is a concourse of upper middle-class baby boomers wandering about in a utopian ambit where clerical garb stands for a world of “justice and peace.” Indeed, it was “justice and peace” that the convention adopted as the church’s first priority. Evangelism was low on the priority list.
The convention is over now, but the salvation of the world will come about in an ongoing process, a dialogue, as they say, that whirls on and on until any sort of purpose or plan is long-forgotten.
Yesterday spoke the doom of the Episcopal Church. By 8 a.m., the Committee on Social and Urban Affairs had already voted unanimously to close down Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, to discharge a resolution that would remove the church from affiliation with a pro-abortion caucus, and to create a 14-hour time minimum for the church’s anti-racism training that is mandated for all clergy and deacons. Earlier in the week, the Convention passed a resolution condemning the Bible as an anti-Jewish document.
But that is all rather mild in comparison to what the Episcopalians did about Jesus Christ on Tuesday.
The House of Deputies refused to even consider a resolution that affirmed Jesus Christ as the “only name by which any person may be saved.” It also declared Jesus as “the way, the truth, and the life,” and renewed commitment to evangelism.
“This type of language was used in 1920s and 1930s to alienate the type of people who were executed. It was called the Holocaust. I understand the intent, but I ask you to allow the discharge to stay,” said the Rev. Canon Eugene C. McDowell, a graduate of Yale Divinity School from the Diocese of North Carolina.
I suppose that says it all. The resolution on Jesus as Lord remains in the rejection pile, because the Episcopal Church is not a Christian church. It is a liberal church. And it is dying with its generation.
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