You make a wise and excellent point that 40 years is not a long time. Helpful perspective. The civil rights movement is an excellent teaching example. I suggest that this “recent unpleasantness” (curious choice of words for a Yankee Boy) is as old as the church and even older. As The Eagles say, ‘Sooner or later, we’ll find out in the long run’!

However ……

I sincerely appreciate your praying for me. Please continue to do so. I covet that. Pray that God continues to reveal His wisdom and direction to me and shows me how to walk in a manner worthy of His calling. I will pray for you as well.

Perhaps one day we can even meet face to face – talk for the sake of talking, share ideas for the sake of sharing ideas. In the process, I would sincerely hope that genuine brotherly love and a bond between Christian brothers would break out.

Go with God and be at peace as well

Yesterday at Mass, during Communion, we sang the lovely hymn #304, and I prayed for you, as you were at Mass also; prayed that all of us take to heart the truth expressed in the lyrics of that hymn:
As Christ breaks bread and bids us share
Each proud division ends
That love that made us makes us one
And strangers now are friends
And thus with joy we meet our Lord
His presence always near
Is in such friendship better known
We see and praise him here.

Forty years is not a long time in God’s time, nor even a long time in Church time. It was just about forty years ago that clergy and laity who participated in the civil rights movements in Arkansas and Mississippi and California and other locations were excoriated for their actions which they grounded in Holy Scripture study and the prophetic call for justice to roll down like rivers. I believe that action, over the last forty years, has brought Godly fruit forth. I see the children and teens of my town walking with friends of all different colors, whose parents live in the same part of town and work side by side and attend church together. That is something that would never have happened in my youth. That in the Church we have moved our understanding of Suffragan Bishop from being a lower-rank, second-rate episcopacy restricting bishops of color from administration over Anglo clergy and laity to being an associate episcopacy generally in collegiality with the Diocesan, and that we have had and have now a number of Diocesan bishops of color, is one of the fruits of that once-condemned action.

The liturgical reform movement that began in the 1930s at Solemnes and has been at times resisted and deeply criticized in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican Communions led to the restoration of the Holy Eucharist as the primary worship celebration on Sundays and Feast Days for us Anglicans. That reform (and the Cursillo movement coming to us from Spain) opened the way for the Charismatic movement of the 1960s, which in its maturing has influenced even the most anglo-catholic of Anglicans an dbrought a rich new source of hymnody and restored spiritual praxis to Episcopal congregations all over the United States. Those are just two of the major shifts within the Episcopal – and wider catholic – Church of the last forty years. And those are changes I give thanks for!

Thank you for praying for the fire of the Holy Spirit in my life: the Holy Spirit has been at work in me, known and loved and sometimes (as with Paul and Teresa of Avila and others) much resisted) but always irresistible. I believe the Holy Spirit is likewise at work in you, and that you are deeply aware of that work.

Please know that I shall continue to pray for you daily, by name, that you contine to be filled with the Spirit’s cleansing fire and filled as well with Christ’s reconciling love. I believe there shall come a time, in God’s good time, with Christ at the head, that the Spirit’s pricks will shove us into humble bowing together before the only real Authority, who is Christ the Lord.

Go with God, and be at peace.

“Conservative” believers would have left the Episcopal Church a long, long time ago and many did. They would have seen the choice as simple intuition. Others out of love, patience and honor, remained hoping that “dialogue” would change things. They have seen with the last convention how that patience has been rewarded. Others still, like those in our own diocese, are choosing to be even more patient. In my own personal view, the time is for patience is over – in fact long, long past.

Julian, I accept your testimony as it is. Please forgive me for judging you personally or other individual Episcopalians. (Read “condemning” you.) It is not my place to do so. I acknowledge that there are and will continue to be many sincere and genuine believers who will remain in the Episcopal Church. However, at this very late date,if you remain in the Episcopal Church and are not outraged by what has transpired and are not motivated to actively address those issues for change, then I question your theology, judgment and commitment. At this point, one of us is VERY wrong. My goal is not to convince you. You are convinced. Because you are an Episcopal priest of long tenure, the standards for you are much, much higher. People listen to you and pay attention to what you have to say. Your profession and confessions may stir others. They do not stir me. For me, there is a clear gap between your profession and their subsequent actions. My goal is to challenge you and others who have similar beliefs as you. However, future efforts are better directed toward advancing the Kingdom. Further discussions like this do not advance the Kingdom. They distract from it. Therefore, I will redirect my energies.

I believe that one day soon you will have a stirring in your heart like you have never had. It will shake you to your core. It will be the Holy Spirit stirring and convicting you. You will be faced with a new decision about how you will respond. This decision will have nothing to do with church polity.

I am an Episcopal priest, vowed twice to be loyal to the doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as this (Episcopal) Church has received them. I have signed that oath twice in public, and hew to it to this day. I have no difficulty owning obedience to the bishop diocesan who has been elected and consecrated for the diocese in which I serve.

You, fortunately for you and me alike, are not my judge: I put all my trust, all my hope, all my confidence in the Lord Christ. It is sad that you choose not to worship the Lord of all, whose joy is to forgive, whose actions were and are to include — even to the Syrophoenician woman, the ten lepers, the tax collector, the Roman centurion, and the Pharisee Nicodemus; whose teaching radiates peace among all those who call upon his holy Name. But that is your choice.

I do not have to lump Stephen Wood with the leaders of the Episcopal Church: he has done so himself by standing for and being elected as a Deputy from the Diocese of South Carolina to General Convention. If Stephen Wood does not want to be a leader in the Episcopal Church, then he should resign that position. If he does not believe in the oaths he made according to the Book of Common Prayer, then he should have the courage to abjure those oaths, leave the Church and its company and find a Christian home in which he can lead and in which he can worship and be inspired.

You have not yet named any one quotable item that makes of the vast majority of Episcopalians “evil” in thought or behavior. Can you do that?

I am in no need of repentance for speaking the truth as it is revealed to me, any more than Stephen Wood is in need of repentance for speaking the truth as it is revealed to him; each of us realizing that according to St. Paul, in this life we see dimly, as through a smoky and distorting glass. It is only in the life to come that we shall see totally clearly. That realization should cause all of us, you included, to speak with a rather large dose of humility, noting from the beginning that excellent phrase, “I could be wrong.” Your hubris in attempting to override the Lordship of Jesus, who is the Only One who can make the kind of judgments that you are doing will have its own reward, but it affects me not one whit.

Jesus hears my confession of those things done and those things left undone daily: Jesus’ forgiveness, renewal and Spirit’s regeneration are given me daily. Does Jesus hear your confession? And do you submit your thoughts and desires to the Light of the World? And do you listen to the still, small voice of God? And does that transform your life so that you see others as the children of God — or do you continue in your hubris?

If you believe this dialogue is absurd, then you may end it at any time. That’s up to you. But if you think for one minute that your vitriol is convincing, please know that you are failing.

For you to lump Steve Wood with the current leaders of the Episcopal church is naive and offensive. I challenge you openly to repent for your own good before it is too late.

No, there are not many mansions for the leaders of this group. We are not sisters and brothers with these people. They are evil and their evil behavior will be exposed in time. You are a part of them because you defend their beliefs and behavior and therefore aid and abet it. You are just shocked because someone openly challenges you on it. One day soon these “dialogues” will not be necessary. We will completely invest our total energy in building the Kingdom rather expunging this kind of error.

Julian, the best way for you to eliminate confusion is to declare yourself. Shun false harmony. Come out from these people or declare yourself one of them. If you declare yourself one of them, you will reap the eternal consequences of your association with them.

Your attempt to re-word what I said into “the leadership of the Episcopal Church” also is a red herring. Since Stephen Wood is a Deputy to Convention, and Mark Lawrence is a Bishop of the Church, it would seem that they are included in the “leadership of the Church” – aren’t they?

Just as in an earlier era, Stephen Bayne, John Allison Hines, Clarence Haden, John Walker and John Spong overlapped as Bishops of the Church. They certainly did not agree with one another: yet they could disagree without the diatribe so freely dispensed from blogs such as Stephen Wood’s on which we are commenting. They also could and did continue to meet together as Bishops of the Church and to consecrate the Sacrament and receive it together. Their godly example is one that many Episcopalians and many Christians of other family rooms in the mansions of Christianity could well emulate.

No, Craig: it is your lens that has been deliberately distorted. The wild-eyed accusations of widespread denial of the Christ as Savior and other false aspersions cast against faithful Christians are lies. And they are no longer accidental lies or lies told out of ignorance: they are deliberate disinformation that is used to separate the sisters and brothers of the Faith one from another.

I have been part of the Episcopal Church for over 50 years. I’ve worshipped up and down my home state and in perhaps half the states of the USA. I have never, NEVER heard or seen anyone, clergy or lay, from Washington state to Arkansas to Virginia, denying Christ.

For the last 30 years I have served the Church in three dioceses as deacon, priest, college chaplain, rector: every single public liturgy and every Daily Office is done in submission and to the glory of Jesus who is Lord and Savior; every liturgy holds within it a strong renewal of either the Nicene or the Apostles’ Creed.

I have worked with six bishop diocesans, who were and are representative of the breadth of orthodox theological thinking of the Episcopal Church, and not one of them has ever needed to cross fingers while proclaiming the Resurrrected Christ as Lord of all Creation and Savior of humankind.

It is an out and out lie to say that “the Episcopal Church” denies Christ.

That there are some fringe-y folks who may do so — that can be granted: but those do not represent the Episcopal Church. The Church has always had its kookier theological fringe, and the Church has worked to love them as their Savior loves them, and not cast them out from Christian fellowship.