South Carolina is thus far the only diocese in the Church to take measures to prevent the changes to the national Canons, which are scheduled to go into effect this July 1, from taking effect within its boundaries. I have explained some of the reasons why those changes are contrary to ECUSA’s Constitution in this earlier post: essentially, they extend unprecedented metropolitical powers to the Presiding Bishop, which that office has never been authorized to exercise, and they radically add to the authority of local bishops over their own diocese’s disciplinary proceedings.

Three other dioceses have protested the scope of the revisions made by General Convention in 2009 to Title IV of the Canons (having to do with disciplinary proceedings against clergy). Some have called for General Convention to revisit the subject, and scale back the powers granted to diocesans and to the Presiding Bishop. But most dioceses (including my own, alas, which I could not deter) have implemented the changes into their own canons, by making revisions in the disciplinary proceedings and in the bodies that carry them out.

Thus ECUSA heads into a Constitutional crisis of its own making, which its leadership seems determined to ride out, confident that the Executive Council and General Convention will back them up. As with the leadership’s current litigation strategy, the course is a very high-risk one for them to take….

Read it all.

[Anglican TV] ATV: What’s the most important issue going on in the Anglican Communion today?

[Greg Venables] GV: The vast majority of Anglican leaders worldwide, together with Anglicans in general, want to get on with preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the fact that there is a message of hope, and love and forgiveness and new life in Jesus Christ.

But we’ve hit a problem. And the problem is that within what we call the Anglican Communion there is a significant group, which unfortunately seems to dominate much of the public life of our church, which is suppressing the truth.

The reason why we feel this urgency is because it is clearer than ever, even within our own Church, that we are under the wrath of God. Now that is not something that people like to talk about very much, and it’s not a very pleasant subject, but it is an important one.

Read it all.

(The Episcopal Church Office of Public Affairs)

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was elected for a three year term to the Anglican Communion Primates’ Standing Committee.

The election was held among the Primates of the Anglican Communion during the group’s recent meeting in Dublin, Ireland.

“I am grateful to my colleagues in the Americas for their confidence, and look forward to working with partners around the Communion as we seek to heal a broken and hurting world,” Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori said. “I have every hope that the primates can be models and leaders of that work, as variously-gifted members of the Body of Christ.”

Elected to the Primates’ Standing Committee were:

Africa
Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul Yak (Sudan) – alternate Archbishop Bernard Ntahoturi (Burundi)

Central, North, South Americas and the Caribbean
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori (The Episcopal Church) – alternate Archbishop John Holder (West Indies)

Europe
Archbishop David Chillingworth (Scotland) – alternate Archbishop Alan Harper (Ireland)

Middle East and West Asia
Bishop Samuel Azariah (Pakistan) – alternate Bishop Paul Sarker (Bangladesh)

South East Asia and Oceania
Archbishop Paul Kwong (Hong Kong) – alternate Archbishop Winston Halapua (Aotearoa, New Zealand & Polynesia)

Conflicting opinions on ordaining homosexuals or blessing same-sex unions hinge largely on one’s view of Scripture, Bishop Jefferts Schori said.

“I don’t think anybody takes everything [in the Bible] completely literally,” she said. “The tension is more around which parts are more important. I think Anglicanism — the Episcopal Church is part of the Anglican tradition — Anglicanism at its best has said that the wisdom of community is important in interpreting Scripture. One’s rational capacity, reason, is important in interpreting Scripture. We can’t just read it and understand what it means. For one thing, most of us don’t read in the original languages. And meanings of words have changed over the centuries,” she said.

As an example, she said, in Shakespeare’s time, the word “nice” meant “stupid,” from the root for “to not know,” unlike today’s definition of “agreeable” or “pleasant.”

Read it all.

President Barack Obama announced Feb. 4 his intention to appoint the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

The advisory council brings together religious and secular leaders, as well as scholars and experts in fields related to the work of faith-based and neighborhood organizations, to make recommendations to the government on how to improve partnerships, according to a White House news release.

Read it all.

Speaking on behalf of the GAFCON Primates of Uganda, Rwanda, West Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and the Southern Cone ”” none of whom went to Dublin ”” Bishop Venables said that the meeting “had ignored the difficult issues that divide us.

“There was a denial of the serious­ness of the crisis facing the Communion which led to the absence of Primates representing two-thirds of the Anglican Com­munion, and there remains a com­plete lack of trust, which every day is getting worse.

“The Dublin meeting has just made things worse, as they did not deal with the reasons why people stayed away, or the causes of the divisions in the Anglican Church.”

Read it all.

Anglican archbishops concluded their six-day summit in Ireland on Sunday (Jan. 30) by issuing statements on a host of international issues, including violence against women in Africa, political chaos in Egypt, and the murder of a gay rights activist in Uganda.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was among the two dozen senior bishops, or primates, gathered in Dublin who also sought to clarify their roles in governing the increasingly fractious Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

There is also a patristic root to this sacramental understanding, particularly in the theologizing of Athanasius and Irenaeus, and the doctrine of theosis or divinization to which it gave rise. Perhaps the best shorthand summary is, “God became human in order that we might become divine.”

All those various threads are significant if we’re going to look at the current state of Anglican and Roman relationships, for the patchwork that is Anglicanism takes all those various threads and at least theoretically encourages them to find life of different colors and textures in the soil of different nations and peoples. It also forms the background on which our two communions can find common cause in joining God’s mission in this day and age and all our varied contexts. It is the ground on which we can share a catholic vocation.

Once we recognize the common ground, perhaps we may be able to move behind singular answers to highly particular challenges, at least in certain spheres. We share a common belief in the reign of God, in the sacramental presence of God in the earthly realm, and in the necessity of human participation in God’s mission.

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From the blurb:

Raymond Dague, attorney and legal counsel for St. George’s Anglican Church in Helmetta, New Jersey, tells about how his client and The Episcopal Church amicably settled their disputes. Mr. Dague says this outcome gives hope that future and current lawsuits can be avoided or ended.

(TEC Office of Public Affairs)

I look forward to greeting many old friends at the Primates Meeting in Dublin, and I look forward to meeting those who have been elected in the past two years. I am deeply grateful that we may begin to focus on issues that are highly significant in local contexts as well as across the breadth of the Anglican Communion. Certainly issues of serving our brothers and sisters, offering good news for body, mind, and spirit, are the central ones in our province. The Episcopal Church is urgently focused on rebuilding in Haiti, seeking increased ways to bring good news to the poor in indigenous communities, inner cities, and expanding and depopulating rural areas in all the nations in our province. Across the globe, in partnership with Anglicans and others, we seek to serve the least of these, bringing light in the midst of darkness, peace in the midst of war and violence, and hope in the face of devastating natural disasters and the growing reality of climate change. We own our domestic responsibility to change our habits and ways of life that contribute to environmental damage and destruction. In all we do, we seek to recognize the face of God wherever we turn, realizing that the body of God’s creation will only be healed when all members of the body of Christ are working together.

–(The Most Rev.) Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate The Episcopal Church

Q: You’re here, in part, to bless a home in Galveston that the church helped to repair after Hurricane Ike. What role does social outreach and activism play in the Episcopal Church?
A: We understand caring for our neighbor to be fundamentally who we are as Christians. Loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. Taking care of people in distress is a significant part of that.

Q: You were an oceanographer before becoming an Episcopal priest. Does your background as a scientist influence how you approach your role as bishop?
A: I think I’m trained and formed in such a way that I look at the world carefully. I come with a hypothesis, but I’m certainly willing to change it. I just came back from visiting the church in Mexico. I go to something like that ready to learn, to see what they’re doing, what the challenges are, and then to ask, where’s the intersection with our context, not just in the United States, but in the 15 countries we are in? How does this connect with the experience of Latino Christians here in the United States, which is a growing part of our context.

Read it all.

[Katharine] Jefferts Schori, president bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached to a packed house of clergy and lay delegates of the 168th annual convention of the Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida. The convention began with the 4 p.m. Eucharist service and continues today at the cathedral and at the Marriott Hotel.

The homily compared the diocese, the denomination, the nation, the world, other cultures and religions to the human body. The body is healthy when its different parts work in harmony, but breaks down when they don’t, Jefferts Schori said.

The miracle of the human body is that its different limbs and organs, together with digestive bacteria and other micro-organisms can work together to create a healthy life. But sometimes the body turns on itself, creating anti-bodies against needed organisms it perceives as outsiders and threats.

Read it all.

In fact, this story [raises questions about]…the oft-heard assertion that bishops are bound by… [Presiding Bishop Jefferts] Schori, Mr. Beers, 815 and “fiduciary duty” to eschew any negotiated settlements. As you will see,…[Presiding Bishop Jefferts] Schori and Mr. Beers were fully informed along the way as this negotiation proceeded.

Is this a precedent for negotiated settlements and a forbearance of arms? Is it an isolated case, or does it herald a new day? Raymond Dague himself draws the best conclusion:

“[This case] goes to prove that when the parties both desire to find an amicable way to sell a formerly Episcopal Church to an Anglican Church which has disaffiliated from TEC, that a way can be found. There is no legal bar to such a sale, nor is such a sale, even at a fraction of the assessed value of the property, in violation of the fiduciary duty of the diocese or TEC. Where there is the will to be gracious and settle without lawsuits, there is a way that it can be done, because it was done here. Perhaps the Helmetta experience might be repeated. It need not be an isolated incident if both parties in other cases have the good will to try it.”

Read it all and make sure to take the time to read the whole Raymond Dague memorandum also.

A new year has brought new twists and turns to the Episcopal Church’s legal wars. The national church beat back the secession of a West Texas congregation from the Diocese of the Rio Grande, saw reasons for optimism and gloom from Presbyterian property cases in Georgia, Indiana and Missouri, found its lawyer in the Fort Worth cases accused of professional misconduct, and witnessed the amicable settlement of a church property split in New Jersey.

Read it all.

What I wish to call your attention to in this post is something that had completely escaped me in previous visits to the multifarious litigation occurring in Fort Worth. One of the attorneys for Bishop Ohl and the Local Episcopal Parties, Jonathan Nelson (he argued at the initial hearings in front of Judge Chupp), who is now on his own, was earlier in a law partnership in Fort Worth called Broude, Nelson & Harrington, P.C. As a member of that law firm, he represented the Corporation of the Diocese of Fort Worth in a 1993 lawsuit against the Rev. M. L. McCauley, of the Church of the Holy Apostles, who had voted with his vestry to leave the Diocese and join the Antiochean Orthodox Church.

Bishop Iker was then the Co-Adjutor of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, scheduled in 1994 to succeed the Rt. Rev. Clarence C. Pope, Jr., who as the diocesan was also the head of the associated Corporation. That Corporation, in turn, was established to hold legal title to the real property of all the parishes in the Diocese — including the Church of the Holy Apostles. Thus when the Rev. McCauley and his vestry claimed the right to continue to occupy the parish’s property after they had joined the Orthodox Church, the Corporation of the Diocese had to become the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed to oust them from possession. The attorney who participated in drafting the complaint and supporting affidavits for the plaintiff Corporation, and who signed his name to the pleadings, was Jonathan Nelson, of Broude, Nelson & Harrington, P.C., Fort Worth, Texas.

Now that same Jonathan Nelson is representing the minority who, with their provisional bishop, has brought suit against Bishop Iker and the other trustees of the diocesan Corporation. And he has the gall to offer, on behalf of his current clients, the very pleadings and affidavits which he mainly drafted in the 1993 lawsuit as ostensible “judicial admissions” on the part of his former clients.

Read it all.

This is the third in a series of essays on the proposed Anglican Covenant.” The first, entitled “Communion, Order and Dissent,” attempted to present what might be called the inner logic of the covenant”“a logic that rests upon a commitment by all the provinces to “mutual subjection within the body of Christ.” The second had the subtitle “On How To Dissent within a Communion of Churches.” Its purpose was to show that communion, as understood by Anglicans, must have as a part of its ideation an understanding of how to dissent from common belief and practice. Apart from such an understanding communion cannot survive the inevitable disagreements that arise within and between its member churches. This third essay explores ways to address dissent that serve to sustain communion even in the face of actions that plainly are at odds with Christian belief and practice as “recognized” within the Anglican Communion. If an agreed upon understanding of the nature of dissent is necessary to sustain and strengthen communion, so also is an agreed upon understanding of appropriate ways to address dissent. No matter how deep their divisions may be these are questions the Primates dare not ignore if the communion of Anglicans is to be sustained.
In the near term, however, it is a virtual certainty that they will address neither the question of dissent nor that of response to dissent. The Archbishop of Canterbury has invited the Primates to meet in Dublin, but he has done so in a way that guarantees that no significant business will be done. By inviting the Primate of a Church that has acted against the request of all the Instruments of Communion he has called for a meeting a significant number of Primates feel they in good conscience cannot attend. In view of these circumstances, there seems no good reason to call such a meeting. What of any possible value can be achieved?

A primary Instrument of Communion appears to have reached an impasse. The Communion’s mechanisms for sustaining communion have become dysfunctional. A part of the reason for this sad state of affairs is what the Bible calls “hardness of heart.” A part, however, stems from a lack of understanding of how to dissent and how to respond to dissent within a communion of churches.

This essay addresses the question of response to dissent….

Read it all.

Tucked away in the hardwood hammocks of the Middle Keys, tiny St. Columba Episcopal Church carries a hefty history.

President Harry S Truman worshiped there. Its 19 cut glass windows are on a national registry of historic arts. Parishioners have gone on missions to Honduras, Sudan and Madagascar. And though its summer congregation numbers only about 25, the church has helped thousands in the community.

So for its 50th anniversary, the small congregation thought big. They invited Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the elected leader of the Episcopal Church’s 2.4 million members in 16 countries and 110 dioceses.

Who knows if it was divine intervention, but she said yes.

Read it all.

As a trained oceanographer, pilot and high-profile prelate, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori seems like the ideal ambassador to bridge the widening chasm between faith and science.

She will step up to that challenge Friday in Chicago when she champions collaboration between the religion and health care communities at two area hospitals.

During a public lecture at Rush University Medical Center, Jefferts Schori is expected to discuss healing ministries that Episcopal congregations have developed around the world. Later that day, she is expected to ordain Stroger Hospital’s first paid trauma chaplain.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

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

Portrayed historically as the spiritual home of the well-to-do, it has produced 21 presidents and a batch of Supreme Court justices.

Yet, Bishop Jefferts Schori said, the Hispanic mother and father from California who were recently featured in an advertisement broadcast on a digital billboard in Manhattan’s Times Square are more representative of today’s church.

She said the American church is like a large spiritual umbrella and she wants to open it up further to welcome more.

“Our strength is diversity and that drives some crazy,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said. “We might struggle with the boundaries that define us as a church but we have to be welcoming of new groups. We cannot be monochromatic.”

Read it all.

….behind the scenes conversations between Dr. Williams and the primates remain on-going, CEN has been told. While reservations and supplies have been laid on by the ACC staff for the 38 primates and the Archbishop of York to meet at the Emmaus Conference Centre outside of Dublin, it is not clear how many primates will attend the gathering.

In 2008 Dr. Williams called the bluff of the Global South bishops and declined to honour their request to postpone the Lambeth Conference, due to their objections to the presence of the US and Canadian bishops. As a result a majority of African bishops sat out the every ten year meeting of the communion’s bishops.

In his Oct 7 letter, Dr. Williams warned the primates of the substantial “damage” to the communion a boycott of the meeting would entail. Whether he can find a synthesis between the opposing camps within the communion, offering suggestions as to ways the primates could meet together without actually having to meet together, remains unclear.

Read it all.

Read it all (3 page pdf).

Conflicts between the Episcopal Church and many in the Anglican Communion who reject same-sex unions and gay clergy, [Jefferts] Schori said, have eased in the past two years.

The Episcopal Church is even in conversation with more Anglicans around the world than it was a decade ago, she said. “The conflict has been an encouragement and an invitation to deeper dialogue and conversation.”

Whether the larger Anglican Communion eventually will accept the Episcopal Church’s approach isn’t clear.

“It takes a long time for people’s prejudices and people’s justifications for things we think are wrong to be overturned,” she said. “My hope is that eventually people will come to understand human sexuality in a broader context.”

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council has authorized its finance office to seek a $60 million line of credit to support the church’s operations. The loan will be secured by a mortgage on the church’s headquarters at 815 Second Avenue in New York, and by offering as collateral its unrestricted endowment funds.

The Oct 23-25 meeting in Salt Lake City of the church’s governing council between meetings of its General Convention also voted to cut its budget by 5 per cent next year in response to a $2.1 million shortfall in income.

A memorandum from the church’s Finance Office to the 38 council members stated that diocesan contributions to the national church were expected to be $700,000 below budget, while cuts in spending at the national church offices were expected to depress income also.

Read it all.

Read it all.

From here:

Citing “malicious prosecution and abuse of process” in bringing a suit which has “no factual or legal foundation,” a response filed Friday, Oct. 29, asks for sanctions on the lawyers who crafted litigation against Bishop Jack Iker on behalf of All Saints’ Episcopal Church on Crestline Road in Fort Worth.

Bishop Iker’s response denies the charges of harm to the Crestline Road congregation and notes that federal law provides “a remedy against counsel who unreasonably and vexatiously multiply the proceedings in a case.” The Oct. 15 complaint, filed in federal court, was intended to harass the Bishop and multiply the cost of litigation, the response explains. In addition, the federal suit multiplies the proceedings on an issue already under consideration in a Texas state court. The plaintiff and counsel are well aware of that suit, which covers the question of who owns certain church properties, including intellectual assets such as trademarks. That suit already represents the Crestline congregation’s interests.

Bishop Iker’s response asks the federal court to deny relief to the plaintiff church and to direct the plaintiff’s counsel to repay the Bishop’s legal costs.

The rector and most of the members of the former St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Parish in the Town of Tonawanda, once the diocese’s largest congregation, broke from the diocese in 2008 and now refer to themselves as St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church.

But Jefferts Schori insisted the Episcopal Church isn’t about numbers but about being a prophetic voice.

“The Episcopal Church has never been large in this country. It’s always been a leader; it’s always included a number of leaders in the wider community,” she said. “Part of that has been our willingness to engage the human condition. We think that’s very important. We’re going to stay engaged in the community, even when it’s messy.”

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US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has dismissed claims the legal campaign waged against traditionalists has been suicidal for the Episcopal Church, stating the funds expended on litigation have actually declined in recent years….

Asked at a post-meeting press conference whether the church’s suicide was by litigation, which had drained the church’s coffers, the presiding bishop responded this was not so. “Our legal costs have gone down in the past couple of years,” she said.

However, according to an analysis performed by canon lawyer Allan Haley, the national church and its dioceses have dedicated over $21,650,000 to lawsuits and disciplinary actions against the clergy.

Read it all.

How do you come up with an extra $10 million in a budget which you are already slashing by $2.1 million? “Voodoo economics” is a term which Episcopalians may have to revive to apply to the solution for the hurting Diocese of Haiti which the Executive Council finds in this particular situation. Once again, I am somehow certain that whatever that solution turns out to be, it will not involve the settling of any pending lawsuits . . .

And then today, we have ENS’s next item about the Executive Council Meeting, which reports — among other things — the opening address to it given by the Presiding Bishop. I hesitate to criticize the ENS reporter, who is an experienced professional, and has always has done her job superlatively. Therefore, in copying that reporter’s exact words in what follows, I leave it to the reader to determine whether what is reported is, shall we say, more or less coherent:

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori challenged the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council Oct. 24 to avoid “committing suicide by governance.”

Jefferts Schori said that the council and the church face a “life-or-death decision,” describing life as “a renewed and continually renewing focus on mission” and death as “an appeal to old ways and to internal focus” which devotes ever-greater resources to the institution and its internal conflicts.

Does anyone else besides this Curmudgeon perceive in these words a certain parallel — not exact, I grant you, but close enough to be exceedingly troubling — with a certain situation involving a sinking ocean liner, whose Captain is urging everyone, while facing a “life-or-death decision,” not to spend too much more time rearranging the deck chairs, and instead to scramble for the lifeboats?

Read it carefully and read it all.

…[Council member Katie Sherrod] said that her “deeper concern” is a “growing sense” that “some bishops are dangerously close to saying to the clergy and deputies, ‘We have no need of you.'”

Jefferts Schori said that she was not aware of bishops who want to do away with the House of Deputies, adding that she was “sorry to hear that.”

She said she was trying to point to the tension between bishops “who ideally in vocation are called to care for the whole and deputies who are elected by individual dioceses who represent the interests of those dioceses.” When a murmuring of “no” arose, the presiding bishop said “just a minute, let me finish,” explaining that she meant that dioceses elect deputies from out of the context of the diocese’s stance on the issues facing the church.

“I’m not impugning the understanding of individual deputies that they are called to serve the whole church,” she said. “What I am simply saying is that deputies in their election are called by particular dioceses. That’s not a perfect distinction, but generally it’s a tension and I hope I was careful to say that I don’t think we should resolve that tension.

Read it all.