The Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska has settled a dispute with a local parish over whether the congregation could remain in its church building.

In an out-of-court settlement, St. Barnabas parish made a cash payment to the diocese. The settlement enables the congregation to permanently remain on the church property at 129 N. 40th St. Both sides are keeping the amount of the payment confidential.

In 2007, members of St. Barnabas voted to leave the Episcopal Church. The parish disagreed with the Episcopal Church over issues of church doctrine.

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Baxter told diocese officials he has continued to deal with migraine headaches, vertigo and fatigue, the website reported, and he felt these ailments would interfere with his ability to execute his duties fully. Baxter has served as bishop for eight years. Most bishops in the Episcopal Church serve an average of 10 years before retirement, the website said.

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Jesse Zink’s “Why Provinces Matter” and the responses from William G. Witt and Colin Podmore [TLC, May 26] illustrate the range of opinions on what South Carolina’s ultimate ecclesial structure should be, from standalone province to joining the Anglican Church in North America. One thing in common to all of the initial essays, however, was the recognition that any decision on ultimate structure might still be some time away.

This recognition has also been the starting point of the Anglican Communion Institute in our work on this issue in the last several months. We believe that South Carolina’s current status does not necessarily present a problem in need of immediate resolution, but rather inheres in the nature of this dispute. Taking our cue both from Bishop Mark Lawrence and the Instruments of Communion, we have proposed that the guiding principle of the next season for South Carolina is “provisionality.” During this period ultimate decisions are deferred precisely because they are premature. Bishop Lawrence has stressed this on many occasions. The rupture with the Episcopal Church is too fresh with many unresolved issues; the ensuing litigation is only beginning, not nearing an end. This is not the time to make such a momentous decision as that regarding the ultimate future of this diocese, which predates the formation of the Episcopal Church.

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When it comes to leading denominational conversations on sexual violence, clergy across traditions express twin reactions: encouragement over the protocols already in place and the efforts of fellow advocates; and frustration with a culture of silence around sexual violence in the church. Despite strikingly different experiences across denominations ”” and church by church ”” the clergy, church staff, and seminarians who spoke with Sojourners are in agreement that addressing this issue in one’s own house is complicated at every level.

First, the good news: Several major Protestant denominations, across progressive and fundamentalist strains, subscribe to a practice of what the United Methodist Church calls “safe sanctuary” ”” a commitment to ensure their church buildings and leadership are free from sexual predators. These policies generally include running background checks on any volunteers working with children and establishing protocols (many developed by Marie Fortune and the Faith Trust Institute) for interpersonal interaction at the church.

These denominational policies are the first line of defense against abuse, particularly of children, in houses of worship. So what else, if anything, beyond this basic groundwork is needed from leadership?

This is where consensus breaks down, and in speaking with clergy and seminarians across denominations and traditions, various barriers and fear patterns were revealed.

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Jim Lewis, Canon to Diocese Bishop Mark Lawrence, said the Diocese is very pleased with the decision since the “issues involved are essentially those of legal identity and are wholly determined by state law, so the most appropriate place to settle is clearly in state court, where we first took the matter.”

Thomas S. Tisdale, Jr., Chancellor of TECinSC said the group is disappointed with the result, but “we are confident in our legal position going forward.”

A separate federal lawsuit, filed by Bishop Charles G. von Rosenberg, who heads TECinSC, is still before Judge Houck. That suit asks the court to find that only Bishop von Rosenberg, as The Episcopal Church’s recognized bishop, should control the name and marks of the diocese.

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Beginning this summer, [William “Chip”] Stokes, who will head a diocese that stretches from Elizabeth to Cape May and encompasses two-thirds of the state, will be living in the city of Trenton.
He will be the first diocesan bishop in 40 years to do so.

“There was some hope in the diocese that the next bishop would live in Trenton, and we’re very comfortable with that,” Stokes said.

“I think I was chosen in part because of my commitment to urban ministries. I grew up in New York City. I’ve been blessed to do a lot of work with diverse communities.

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The conservative Albany Episcopal Diocese is poised to change the way it elects its bishop in a move that is opposed by liberals.

How the bishop is chosen has become a debate about democracy locally in a mainline denomination known for making its decisions democratically.

A proposed rule change would eliminate a special Profile and Search Committee that seeks candidates in the diocese and from the national church and conducts a vetting process. Instead, the diocese’s Standing Committee, which advises the bishop, would administer the process relying on nominations from within the diocese.

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“Reunification might not be the right thing everywhere in the Episcopal Church,” Jennings said. “But I think it’s a hopeful sign that people within the church are willing to try new things. It shows the rest of the church that we can do things different ways and there are new ways of being able to collaborate.”

Others, however, are skeptical that reunification will do much to help a church struggling with internal dissent and decreasing membership.

“I think the right way to see it is as a face-saving attempt of a denomination that’s facing significant internal hemorrhaging,” said the Rev. Canon Kendall Harmon, an Episcopal scholar in the Diocese of South Carolina. Though the geography makes sense, he said, “it does not reflect the kind of radical restructuring that needs to happen.”

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Read the whole letter to Christ Church Episcopal, Greenville here. It is interesting that given a choice the rector of the largest parish in the diocese will not allow such blessings in the parish in which he serves.

New bishops in the Episcopal Church should be vetted for their political orthodoxy, a paper released by the House of Bishops’ Standing Committee on Pastoral Development has proposed. The call for conformity came in a 29 April 2013 letter released under the signature of the Rt. Rev. James Waggoner, Jr., Bishop of Spokane and was sent to the church’s bishops and standing committees.

However some of the questions were “so egregious” and so “thin in its substance as to be silly”. Dr. Ephraim Radner of the Anglican Communion Institute told Anglican Ink.

In his covering letter Bishop Waggoner wrote the committee had noticed “two extremes” in recent years of “intense scrutiny” and “uninformed consent” in the consent process for newly elected bishops. The ten questions offered by the committee were designed “to be an additional resource in your decision-making process.”

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Jesse Zink is therefore quite right: the Diocese of South Carolina cannot properly remain independent indefinitely. To be faithful not just to Anglican but more importantly to catholic ecclesiology, its bishops should belong to a province.

Once litigation in the secular courts is concluded, this could be achieved in several ways. There could be reconciliation with the Episcopal Church’s national leadership ”” we should always pray for reconciliation leading to the visible unity of the Church, however remote human sinfulness may make that prospect seem. Or the diocese could join the Anglican Church in North America or (less ideally) a more distant Anglican province.

Alternatively, it could follow the Sudan model, to which Zink points, and become a province by dividing into four dioceses. Half of one U.S. state, with fewer than 80 congregations and 30,000 baptized members, might be thought rather small to form a separate province. However, in 1998 the geographically and numerically much smaller Diocese of Hong Kong and Macao was divided into three dioceses (with only 38 congregations between them) and a “missionary area.” This enabled it to become a freestanding province of the Anglican Communion instead of joining the Church of the Province of South East Asia, which was formed in 1996 by the more conservative extra-provincial dioceses with which it had previously been associated.

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The Rev. Whayne Hougland, Jr., was elected at a special electing convention May 18 to be the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Michigan.

Hougland, currently rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Salisbury, N.C., was elected on the eighth ballot out of a field of four candidates. To be elected, a candidate must have received a majority of the votes in both the lay order and the clergy order. He received 87 of 139 votes cast in the lay order and 34 of 65 votes cast in the clergy order.

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One of the Ten Commandments is “thou shall not steal,” but an Episcopal priest has been suspended for allegedly lifting more than a dozen Sunday sermons verbatim from a book.

The Rev. John E. McGinn, 65, who has led the 300-plus families at St. John’s Episcopal Church since 1993, was placed on administrative leave amid allegations that he plagiarized sermons dating back to 2006, said the Rev. Mally Lloyd, canon to the ordinary for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, a position equivalent to the bishop’s chief of staff.

As many as 15 sermons have been identified as direct copies, Lloyd said.

They were allegedly taken from a book called “Dynamic Preaching,” which can be accessed only with an online subscription.

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Judge then, young Gentlemen, into what depths of degradation the race of young ministers to which you are to belong must sink, if you not only remain deaf to the voice of conscience, to the admonitions of history, and to the strivings of GOD’S Spirit, but also to the voice of your age and of your country, which is calling you to high and noble things in your ministry. To go forth from this most highly-honored seat of sacred learning in our Church, with low attainment and without studious habits””to enter upon your ministry in this energetic and driving age, without zeal and perseverance””and to place yourselves upon the great missionary field which our Church presents from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, without being animated by the missionary spirit””how certain the fall, how deep the dishonor, how terrible the curse, to which you must inevitably be reduced!

The fathers, the clergy, the friends of the Church, look with increased anxiety and greater hope to each successive class graduating from our theological seminaries. They have a right to expect better scholarship, as the ability of teachers, the number of books, and the aids to study are daily increasing. And surely, as the wants of the Church are better known, and the extent of the missionary field, both at home and abroad, is better understood, they have a right to anticipate a great increase of missionary zeal. A young clergyman, some twenty years ago, might have made many a reasonable excuse for his lack of that holy, self-sacrificing zeal, a want of which would now be utterly inexcusable. What! shall young men just commissioned to the holy office, be deaf to the calls of their country, of the Church, and of her Divine Head, to make full proof of their ministry, and sink down into criminal listlessness, or addict themselves to unworthy worldly pursuits? What! when the cry of souls ready to perish is borne on every wind, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, shall they take counsel of their love of ease, their taste for human literature, or of their worldly-minded friends, and refuse to go to any part of the missionary field to which GOD shall call them?

Remember, young Gentlemen, that the great Head of the Church has placed you under influences more favorable for the formation of a high ministerial character, than with others has been the case perhaps for ages. You may, if you will, unite in yourselves more learning, more pious active zeal, more of a spirit of humility and prayer, than any of your predecessors, it may be, since the Apostles’ own times. What you may become, the Church, the world, the Saviour of man-kind, [14/15] all expect that you will become. And yet this kind goeth not forth but by prayer and fasting. You cannot even succeed well in your studies without prayer. Much less can you grow in humility, and in a spirit of benevolence and self-sacrifice without much and fervent prayer.

Read it all from the Bishop of Kentucky, Benjamin Bosworth Smith.

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The court order, which comes at what could be the end of a series of court battles over three church properties on 32nd Street, was reaffirmed Monday by Judge Kim G. Dunning.

“I give thanks for the culmination of this marathon litigation, and I pray this action will settle the fact that people can disagree but cannot take property that has been entrusted to the Episcopal Church for ministry,” Right Rev. J. Jon Bruno, bishop of the six-county diocese, said in a statement. “I give thanks to God that, after these cases spanning more than eight years, we now can proceed with the continuing ministry of the Episcopal Church in Newport Beach.”

St. James leaders said they were “obviously disappointed by this ruling.”

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The Rev. William Stokes, who has been an advocate in Florida for immigrants and the poor, was elected yesterday to be the bishop of New Jersey, the sixth largest diocese in the Episcopal church.

He will replace Bishop George Councell, who announced earlier this year, that he would pass on his mantle after nearly 10 years.

“I am humbled beyond expression and deeply honored to have been elected as the Twelfth Bishop of New Jersey. I am grateful to the people of the diocese for their confidence, support and prayers,” Stokes said in a church press release.

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Guidelines have been established for same-gender blessing ceremonies to be performed in Oklahoma Episcopal churches, a state leader with the denomination said.

The Rt. Rev. Ed Konieczny, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma, said three parishes already have expressed interest in starting the process so they can conduct such ceremonies, although he does not believe “there are large numbers of people out there waiting for this.” He declined to name the interested parishes, as they have yet to request formal approval.

“I don’t expect that this is going to be a floodgate of things. We will make it available and people will take advantage of it according to who they are,” he said.

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Oklahoma Episcopal Bishop Edward J. Konieczny, who once strongly opposed stricter gun control laws, is changing his views.

Konieczny will participate Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church in an adult forum on gun control titled “The Thin Line Between God and Guns.”

A former police officer, Konieczny discussed his changing views on gun control in a recent CNN Belief Blog that drew national attention.

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The bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts, which includes Worcester and surrounding communities, said today that he is against the proposal to locate at $200 million slots parlor on the former Wyman-Gordon Co. parcel in Green Island.

“For those who have little, the illusory chance that they can gain much, even in a game stacked against them, is tempting and ultimately destructive,” said Bishop Douglas J. Fisher. “Our churches stand with the economically poor of our society, and that always means taking a stand against gambling establishments in our cities.”

Bishop Fisher is the latest prominent church leader to take a stand against the proposal.

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While a number of lawsuits between dioceses and parishes have gone to state supreme courts, with the diocese prevailing in many of them, in South Carolina the state supreme court ruled the other way and held the church’s national property rules, called the Dennis Canon, were of no legal effect in South Carolina. In other words, if a parish has clear title to its property in South Carolina, it can take it with it if it leaves its diocese or denomination. Omitting this crucial legal precedent in the story was most unfortunate.

It should also be added that the appellate courts have not adjudicated the issue of whether a diocese may withdraw from the national church. Attorneys for the national church have argued the legal precedents from outside South Carolina governing the relationship of the parish to the diocese should govern the relationship of the diocese to the national church. The diocese’s lawyers in South Carolina have argued this relationship is not comparable.

One might also add, contrary to the assertion in the article about declining membership, that until these lawsuits erupted the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina was one of the few Episcopal diocese to see a growth in membership over the past decade.

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In 2006, [Henry] Parsley was nominated for presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, coming in second in the General Convention balloting to the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was elected. He retired as bishop in 2012.

“The last 10 years have not been the easiest for the Anglican Communion or the Episcopal Church in America,” he said, with bitter debates over human sexuality and other issues. Nevertheless, he added, “I think we’ve turned a corner. We’re learning to live more comfortably with differences. The hallmark of Anglicanism is the way of comprehensiveness, to bring in as many people as possible.”

He hailed the installation of Justin Welby as the new archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, calling him “a reconciler.”

“For me,” he said, “the heart of the Gospel is reconciliation.”

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

You can read the names of nine nominees here and there. Also, for those interested, there are videos available there. Finally, you can get the whole election booklet in English there (a 28 page pdf). The walkabouts start next week and the election is May 4th.

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A prayer service with Holy Eucharist is being planned for Tuesday, April 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (138 Tremont Street) in Boston, with Bishop Gayle E. Harris presiding (assuming downtown conditions and transit have regularized). All are welcome.

Downtown church personnel reached so far report chaos in the Back Bay area and limited mobility.

Trinity Church in Copley Square was closed today for the Marathon; Marathon runners on Trinity Church’s charity team are reported safe….

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Episcopalians along the South Carolina coast are battling in court to determine which of two factions owns an estimated $500 million in church buildings, grounds and cemeteries, following an acrimonious split last year over social issues.

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The Litigation Lottery for the parishes of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin continues in the courts of California. I mentioned in an earlier post that as a result of a poorly reasoned decision by a trial court judge in Bakersfield, which granted summary judgment to Bishop Talton’s rump diocese, two parishes in Kern County had decided to move out of their church buildings rather than carry the fight on to the appellate level — even though the decision was so obviously wrong.

Now comes another trial court decision — based on exactly the same underlying facts — which denies summary judgment to Bishop Talton and his diocese. The Superior Court of Tulare County ruled on Tuesday of this week that there were disputed issues of fact remaining with regard to the ability of St. John’s in Porterville to disaffiliate from ECUSA.

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