The liberal church in meltdown
The rift within the
Episcopal Church is a sign of the failure of liberal Christianity.
Posted:
12/ 21/ 06 11:05 am
The writer here seems to be a conservative Anglican – and this
article is highly instructive as to what is occurring in this hour in liberal
mainstream churches -- it the article they
name the Anglicans Methodists
Presbyterians and Lutherans as all having these same trends. We will add to
this list Liberal evangelical churches and liberal fundamentalist churches
which as suffering from the infiltration of hundreds of homosexual, feminist,
humanist and even atheist pastors that have silently crept into their midst. As
has been plainly stated in other news articles on this website.
This past Sunday several churches in Northern Virginia announced that
their congregations had voted overwhelmingly to leave the Episcopal Church and
affiliate themselves with Anglican dioceses in Nigeria and Uganda.
Their reasons were the same ones that have prompted Episcopal
congregations and even entire dioceses across the country to sever their national
ties in recent months: decades of liberalizing trends in the Episcopal Church
that have led to, among other things, the confirmation in 2003 of the openly
gay V Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire and the election in July 2006 of
a presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Diocese of Nevada, who is
not only a woman (a contentious issue among conservative Episcopalians) but
supports both Robinson's confirmation and church blessings for gay unions.
Jefferts Schori pooh-poohed the mass departure of the
Virginians, declaring that they were a splinter collection of malcontents
looking for a "quick fix" and that they had failed to embrace
"diversity" and "tension," which she defined as the essence
of Anglicanism.
She has her head in the sand. The Episcopal Church is in serious
trouble only compounded by the current schism. It is a church in demographic
free-fall, its numbers now standing at 2.2 million (by Jefferts Schori's own
estimate), down from 3.4 million at its heyday in 1965. At the 2,700 Episcopalian parishes nationwide, the median
Sunday worship attendance is 80
people, and the churches they attend would be crumbling
ruins were it not for their substantial endowments left over from the 19th
century, when most of them were founded.
Like other mainline Protestant groups in America - Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and the like - the Episcopal Church decided
some 40 years ago that the future of Christianity lay in accommodating its
theology and moral teachings to whatever was fashionable or politically correct
in the secular culture. Militant feminism and blessings for gay sex were only part of
the doctrinal upheaval. Avant-garde clerics and theologians throughout North
America and Western Europe scoffed at the traditional Christian teachings that
Jesus Christ had been born of a virgin, worked miracles, died for human sin,
rose from the dead, and founded a church that was supposed to be the means of
salvation.
All those liberal strands of Christianity are paying the price for their
devil's bargain with secularism in vastly diminished numbers, as members figure
out that when a religion lets them do whatever they want, one of the things
they don't want to do is go to church on Sunday. The
mainline denominations, which once represented 40% of US Protestants, now
represent only 12%: 17 million out of 135 million.
To put it bluntly, liberal Christianity is in meltdown. The election of
Jefferts Schori, a theological liberal who prayed to a female Jesus at last
summer's bishops' convention, together with the bishops' vote not to endorse
the bedrock Christian proposition that Jesus is Lord, proved to be the last
straw for many Episcopalians who believe that the essence of their Anglican
faith isn't "tension" but fidelity to the Bible and the Christian
creeds.
In fact, those conservative Northern Virginia churches that split off on
Sunday may be few in number, but they represent an island of vibrancy in an
otherwise moribund denomination. They are large, prosperous, highly educated
congregations in large, prosperous, highly-educated Washington, DC, suburbs:
Fairfax, Falls Church, Sterling, Woodbridge.
They join four other Northern Virginia churches that have similarly
severed their ties with the Episcopal Church, and two more churches are likely
to schedule similar votes in January. These 14 churches, together with a
15th that had been expected to announce a vote on Sunday but did not,
constitute only 7% of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia's 197 parishes, but
represent 11% of its baptized membership of about 90,000 and 18% of its average
Sunday attendance of 32,000. Live people instead of dead people pay for their
upkeep.
What happened in Virginia is a sign of growing awareness among
conservative Christians that they are not - contrary to the way they have been
painted by the liberal denominations and their sympathetic friends in the
liberal media - a theologically backward, inevitably diminishing minority of
dissenters from the enlightened Christian mainstream.
The recent petition by evangelical Anglican clerics in England to be freed
from the supervision of liberal bishops is another sign of changing times - for
their congregations represent a full 34% of the 900,000 English Anglicans who
bother to go to church on Sunday. It has finally dawned on orthodox believers
in the west that they may have the numbers on their side after all. The
worldwide Anglican Communion has 77 million members, and in the Third World,
where the Anglican Church is growing rapidly, conservative Anglicanism prevails.
For years the wealth, historic prestige, and trendy theology of the
Episcopal Church have secured it outsize press attention that has obscured its
marginal status in worldwide Anglicanism and American Protestantism. The
election of Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop and the pomp surrounding her
installation at the National Cathedral in Washington seemed designed as
displays of liberal triumphalism.
Lately, however, the cracks in the façade have been
showing. There is talk among liberal Episcopalians of "remnant"
churches, and Jefforts Schori's assertion in a New York Times
interview that Episcopalians are "better-educated and tend to reproduce
at lower rates than some other denominations" amounted to a candid
admission of numerical decline.
Jefferts Schori has also indicated that she will use the resources of the
national church to fight to the teeth in court any efforts by churches in
Virginia and elsewhere to keep their property after they secede. Perhaps she
will succeed, and tiny groups of liberals will replace burgeoning conservative
congregations. When and if that happens, however, it is likely
that she and her church will be competing with a thriving branch of American
Anglicanism that takes the traditional teachings of its faith very seriously.
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