Starting Friday, the largest convention to ever come to Killeen will fill the Killeen Civic and Conference Center with more than 1,000 attendees, 70 vendors and the goal of a clear direction for Episcopalian churches across Texas.

The Episcopal Church Diocesan Conference annually brings together delegates from across the state to discuss problems that arise during the year, find solutions to those problems and consider ways to implement those solutions.

The group alternates the location of the conference between its “headquarters” in Houston and other cities. St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church of Killeen is hosting the event this year.

The first-time hosts have worked for about two years to bring the conference to Killeen, said Connie Kuehl, director of the Killeen Convention and Visitors Bureau.

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Check it out.

Average Sunday Attendance has gone from 7,224 in 1998 to 6,428 in 2008, a decline of some 11%.

The Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida signaled its intent Saturday to remain a conservative voice within The Episcopal Church, even as the national denomination moves ahead to liberalize its policies toward gays.

The diocese, meeting in its annual convention at The Lakeland Center, approved four resolutions that in one way or another declared its opposition to recent decisions of The Episcopal Church that may lead to [noncelibate] gays being consecrated as bishops and their unions being blessed in church ceremonies. But the mood of the convention was calm, and diocesan leaders seemed eager to turn away from controversies and focus on strategies to strengthen the diocese’s spiritual health.

About 380 clergy and lay delegates representing the diocese’s 88 parishes, including 11 in Polk County, gathered for the convention. There was little of the tension and sharp debate during votes on resolutions that marked the diocese’s conventions between 2004 and last year, mostly because a strongly conservative wing of clergy and lay persons who advocated that the diocese withdraw from The Episcopal Church has left to form independent churches or join a traditionalist Anglican denomination.

Read the whole article.

Speaking to about 325 attendees at the annual diocesan convention at the Washington Cathedral, Bishop Chane, 65, admitted he was stepping down during a time of flagging growth and stagnant giving in the 42,000-member diocese.

“Parochial reports filed by the parishes of our diocese for the most part tell a story of no real measurable growth in membership within the last 12 years,” he said. “Financial giving has been stagnant.”

The budget that supports the missionary work of the diocese to its congregations, schools and our mission outreach beyond our borders has been stagnant as well. Any financial growth has come primarily through the bishops annual appeal and from the generosity of individuals, some who are not even Episcopalians.

Read it all. I salute Bishop Chane for being open and naming the numbers, unlike too many other TEC leaders–KSH.

Things are calmer these days in the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida.

Following the 2003 election of openly gay priest Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, the largely conservative diocese was in turmoil, contemplating whether to join other dioceses in leaving the Episcopal Church to create a new, traditionalist Anglican church in America.

Under the leadership of Bishop John Howe, the diocese decided not to split from the Episcopal Church, as at least two other dioceses have done, and those in the Central Florida diocese who were advocating for the split mostly have gone. Both clergy and laypersons say the diocese is healthy and moving forward

The diocese will hold its annual convention Saturday at The Lakeland Center, and in an interview earlier this week, Howe predicted the meeting would be calm.

Read it all.

Please note: A list of resolutions to come before the Convention is here.

Four married men with years of clergy experience have been nominated as finalists to be the next bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, succeeding the retiring Bishop Ted Gulick.

The four men ”” including the pastors of cathedrals in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Missouri and a former Kentucky pastor now leading a Texas church ”” will visit the diocese to meet with parishioners and answer their questions. An election convention is scheduled for June 5, with the new bishop’s consecration on Sept. 25.

The list of finalists is notable for its lack of gay or lesbian candidates ”” given the ongoing controversy involving the Episcopal Church and its global partners in the Anglican Communion over the role of gays in ministry ”” and for its lack of women.

Read the whole thing.

The search and nomination process for the diocese’s eighth bishop began more than a year ago after Bishop Ted Gulick announced in October 2008 his retirement plans. Between Sept. 15 and Dec. 1, the 21-member committee screened 78 applicants from 27 states and the District of Columbia. After choosing the final group of 10 candidates, the committee then visited and had multiple interviews in their home dioceses as well as commissioned background checks and conducted additional reference interviews and intensive interviews with the candidates in Louisville.

The nominees will visit the diocese May 13-16 for what is known as “walkabouts,” a series of three forums held in various locations in the diocese to give the clergy and laity who will be participating in the special electing convention an opportunity to meet and question all of the candidates to be presented for election. The election will be held on June 5 at Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville.

The consecration of the eighth bishop of Kentucky is expected to take place on Sept. 25 at the Galt House in Louisville.

Read it all.

Read it carefully and read it all.

You can view the ASA numbers from 1998-2008 here (7th line down).

A visual depiction of some of the statistics of the diocese from 1998-2008 may be seen here.

The Diocese of Central Florida’s annual convention will have an opportunity in late January to affirm the now-completed Anglican Communion Covenant.

In a letter to members of the diocese, the Rt. Rev. John W. Howe urged delegates to support the Covenant by voting for a resolution by the Rev. Eric Turner.

A list distributed by the Episcopal Church Center mentions eight dioceses that have scheduled conventions in January: Central Florida, Florida, Newark, North Carolina, Southwestern Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington. To date, only Central Florida has posted any resolution that addresses the Covenant in any form.

In his letter, Bishop Howe acknowledged that drafting the Covenant has taken a few years and provincial approval of it will take more time still. “It has been a lengthy process, and it will not be concluded soon,” he wrote.

Read it all.

…there apparently is a new ACC constitution (now referred to as Articles of Association) that changes the membership procedures for the ACC. This new constitution (which has not been made public) also applies in some way to the adoption of the Covenant by other churches.
11. On the second question, “who can invite,” the Covenant is explicit in saying that this may be done by the “Instruments.” On its face, this means that any of the Instruments, e.g., the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Primates’ Meeting, could issue such an invitation, which would then invoke the procedures indicated: approval by the Standing Committee and consents from the Primates.

12. None of this is meant to suggest that such an invitation is necessarily imminent, but the procedures are far more flexible and responsive to developing circumstances than many have been led to believe.

13. With these principles in mind, we urge all churches and dioceses interested in committing to the life of mutual accountability and interdependence required by the Covenant to adopt and affirm the Covenant as soon as practicable and communicate their decisions to the Communion and its churches. We note that paragraph 4.1.6 provides that “This Covenant becomes active for a Church when that Church adopts the Covenant through the procedures of its own Constitution and Canons.” Thus, the Covenant will become active as soon as member churches begin to adopt it, and the Global South churches have indicated their intention to begin doing so as early as April 2010. By committing to the Covenant, a church or diocese will immediately begin to share in the Communion life represented by the Covenant even as the formalities of the Communion Instruments necessarily will take longer to implement.

Read it carefully and read it all.

…true encouragement comes from honesty before God and self and the strength of purpose to serve in the face of disappointment or uncertainty. Or so it should. I know a young person who sneered at the faith of an Episcopalian ”“ a more conservative person ”“ who chose to leave TEC for another set of ecclesial structures. “You would do such a thing”, this young person said to him: “yours is the generation, after all, who invented no-fault divorce”. In fact, in this case, the complaint was less directed at a purported hypocrite, than at what he perceived to be the witness of an impotent God, unable to garner the sacrificial steadiness of His adherents. But either way, faith is scandalized by those who do not have the strength, nor certainly seek the strength, to stand in the face of upheaval.

I will come back to this at the close of my remarks: honesty need be neither angry, miserable, nor defeatist. It should be the seed for hope, because it is the first and necessary turn to God who alone saves.

What is the difficult thing to speak, honestly? It is this: the Episcopal Church, as it has been known through the past two centuries, is no more, in any substantive sense. TEC is simply no longer the church filled with even the strength of purpose we saw only 10 years ago ”“ yes, even then, a church with a good deal of vital diversity and disagreement; but a seeming sense of restraint over pressing these in ways that overwhelmed witness and mission. And as a result, even then, it was church that was growing in outreach and faith. That church, shimmering still with some of the vibrancy of love spent for the Gospel seen140 years before, even 90 years before, is now gone. And TEC will not survive in any real continuity with this past and its gifts.

This is something we must face. To be sure, I am not speaking here of this or that diocese or bishop or congregation or clergy person within TEC: there are many through whose service the Gospel shines bright and the witness of the Kingdom flourishes. I am speaking of an institution as a whole ”“ not even in terms of its legal corporation, but in terms of its character and Christian substance given flesh in the Spirit’s mission.

Read it all carefully.

I want to stress, please, that people in the comments interact with what Ephraim is arguing for and actually saying. Comments not doing so will be dispacted into the ether. Many thanks–KSH.

Some delegates were overjoyed with the choice. Some were disappointed. The emotions of still others may have been somewhere in between.

But the delegates fulfilled their charge, and we have a bishop-elect. Once the required consents are received from the standing committees and diocesan bishops of The Episcopal Church, Fr. Waldo will be consecrated bishop.

He will be our bishop. He will be my bishop.

Therefore we become a people called together with our bishop as the Body of Christ to do the work of Christ.

I am alarmed to discover that the bishop-elect is already under attack. I’ve read only a few of them; all are examples of the “anxious voices” we have pledged to avoid. And in some I’ve discovered twisted information, statements taken out of context and misused, and-I regret to say-some blatant untruths about Fr. Waldo. Some are even vicious.

Read it all.

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

The list of finalists to be Wyoming’s new Episcopal bishop has shrunk to four after one of the nominees withdrew his name last weekend.

The Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming didn’t give a reason why the Very Rev. Robert “Bob” Neske, dean of St. Mark’s Episcopal Pro-Cathedral in Hastings, Neb., took his name off the shortlist to succeed Bishop Bruce Caldwell, who is retiring next year.

Read it all.

At the Episcopal church’s General Convention last summer, Thompson was with the majority of delegates who voted to declare partnered gay men and lesbians eligible for any ordained ministry. He also voted to direct church resources to preparing rites for same-sex unions.

Indeed, as the New Orleans convention was ending, Episcopalians in Los Angeles were on their way to electing the second openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican communion. There delegates elected the Rev. Mary Glasspool of Baltimore as an assistant bishop. Her election seemed likely to further damage relations between U.S. Episcopalians, and Anglicans in Africa and Asia, who vastly outnumber them.

“I believe the church is moving in a direction that is more inclusive when it comes to the issue of sexuality, and I think the church needs to support people who are gay,” Thompson said in an interview Saturday.

“But that’s not big the issue for me. That’s not the platform people will know me by.”

Read it all.

December 12, 2009

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo elected eighth bishop of Upper South Carolina

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo was elected eighth bishop of Upper South Carolina by the 87th Diocesan Convention meeting today at Trinity Cathedral, Columbia. Fr. Waldo was elected on the third ballot.

The Rev. W. Andrew Waldo has been rector of Trinity Church, Excelsior, Minnesota, since 1994. He was born in Douglas, Georgia, and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, the second of six children in an Episcopal clergy family. He received his M.Div. from Sewanee, M. Mus. from the New England Conservatory of Music, and B.A. from Whittier College, and is a graduate of Indian Springs Preparatory School, Helena, Alabama.

Previous clergy positions include curate, Grace Church, Manchester, New Hampshire and rector, St. Mark’s, LaGrange, Georgia. He currently serves on the Minnesota Diocesan Council and Constitution and Canons Committee. His previous service includes Standing Committee, Liturgy and Music Commissions (Minnesota, Atlanta, and New Hampshire), and Diocesan Board of Examining Chaplains. He is a member of the Spiritual Faculty of CREDO, a national clergy wellness initiative of the Church Pension Group.

Fr. Waldo is married to a Minnesota native, Mary Halverson Waldo, a musician and teacher. They have three sons: Jonathan (Amber); James; and Benjamin. They reside in Shorewood, Minnesota. His recreational interests include biking, music, history, and model trains.

Read it all.

Tim Fountain has a comment also:

Episcopalians are embracing stasis – which in a declining denomination means decline. Folks who mouth revisionist slogans and whose congregations have declined keep being elevated to diocesan leadership, while people like them take their place at the congregational level. This means death by attrition given every current membership and participation marker of the denomination: Episcopalians are older than the U.S. church average, and there is no growth by birth, evangelism or transmission from parents to kids.

This comment from Deacon Tim is of interest as well:

The problem with this entire process has been our (the people of this Diocese) inability to get our minds wrapped around who these candidates are. As a result, opinions are being formed based on what people have written in the past or upon what they said in two minute responses to questions from delegates and interested members. We have had virtually no real interaction with these candidates in the form of thoughtful, nuanced and well-articulated dialogue. Which is a pity, really, since we are going to live with one of them for a very long time.

Find them here and please join me in praying for the election.

Update: here is the proposed schedule

Reconvening for the Election of the 8th Bishop of Upper South Carolina
December 12, 2009
Averyt Hall, Trinity Center for Mission and Ministry
Host ”“ Trinity Cathedral, Columbia
9:00 am Registration
10:00 am

Mission and Ministry ”“ Session I
Check in for registered delegates closes for the 1st ballot
The Holy Eucharist
The First Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the 1st ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn singing
Check in for registered delegates closes for the 2nd ballot
Results of the 1st Ballot announced
The Second Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the 2nd ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn singing

The process continues until there is an election.
12:30 pm Lunch
The Next Ballot
Check in for registered delegates reopens after the next ballot is closed.
Continuing prayers, meditations, hymn sing

The process continues until there is an election.
The Song of Praise
Concluding Prayers
The Blessing
The Dismissal
All delegates proceed to check-in tables to sign the testimonial of election.

The new bishop will be elected by clergy of the diocese and by lay delegates representing the diocese’s 64 congregations. Voting will continue until a nominee receives a majority of both clergy and lay votes on the same ballot. Results will be posted in real time at www.edusc.org.

The election comes during a tense time in The Episcopal Church, which affirmed earlier this year that gays and lesbians in monogamous relationships are eligible for “any ordained ministry,” and that same-sex unions can be blessed. In response, the Diocese of South Carolina called a special convention during which four of five resolutions were passed, including one that calls on the bishop and standing committee “to begin withdrawing from all bodies of The Episcopal Church that have assented to actions contrary to Holy Scripture, the doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as this Church has received them.” Burwell, citing allegiance to his bishop, said he voted in favor of this resolution, but that it was misunderstood by many observers.

“I voted for it because our bishop (Mark Lawrence) asked me to vote for it,” Burwell said in a telephone interview. “It was a strategy, not theological.”

Read it all.

Read it all.

One of the things that I see when talking with slightly-left-of-center and even-more-left-of-center Episcopalians is that they do not yet understand how traditional Episcopalians make their decisions to stay or go. Traditional Episcopalians have, I think we can all grant, taken some huge blows. Every three years, the General Convention makes sure to grind the point home further that on a national level the church has no interest in the values and theology of traditionalists. And every six months or so, we have some national news item that further drives that point home — just last week, for instance, the election of a non-celibate lesbian bishop. The effects of that news are now rippling through TEC, and some traditional Episcopalians will throw up their hands and decide to leave their parish, their diocese, and TEC as a whole. They’ll give up — it was one last blow that did them in.

Read it all.

The link is here.

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles elected the first woman bishop in its 114-year history today but had yet to decide whether to select an openly gay priest for a second bishop opening.

Clergy and lay leaders, meeting in Riverside for their annual convention, chose the Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce, a local favorite from Orange County known for her financial expertise and ability to build up congregations.

Bruce, rector of St. Clement’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in San Clemente, edged out five other candidates, including two openly gay priests, for the first “suffragan” bishop post. Suffragan bishops assist a diocese’s primary bishop.

“All my life I have known that I have been called to serve God in Christ in God’s church,” Bruce wrote in her biography on the diocese’s website.

Read it all.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The information on the nominees may be found here; note the links to biographical information as well as the link to the videos toward the bottom of the page.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Delegates at the 170th convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri learned on Friday afternoon that one of the mission churches in Lake St. Louis had become a parish. About 75 members of the Church of the Transfiguration were on hand to provide a presentation of the mission’s history and the work it took to become a parish.

“We started out with about a dozen members,” said Mary Ruth, a longtime member of the newly established parish. “It moved from place to place, meeting room to meeting room, until we finally settled on our present building. Now we’ve added on rooms for Sunday school and meetings.”

Building up missions was a large part of convention business as 300 delegates met to discuss and review the church’s progress on missionary work, not only in Africa but also in Missouri. It was the ongoing theme emphasized by both Bishop George Wayne Smith, 10th bishop of Missouri, and the keynote speaker of the weekend, Dr. Dwight Zscheile.

Read it all.

Resolution C056, entitled Liturgies for Blessings, calls on the Church to gather theological and liturgical resources to help explore how we might serve and support the growing numbers of partnered same-sex couples in our congregations and communities. To meet that call I will appoint a task force to gather such resources from our congregations, clergy, and communicants, in order that the Diocese of Ohio might play a constructive and leadership role in the larger Church’s carrying out of this endeavor. So now, I ask you and your prayer partner each in turn to pray aloud for The Episcopal Church and its leadership, for our commitment and witness to the
Anglican Communion, and for fidelity to our vocation to serve and be served by all of God’s beloved. Ask God to lead us into new ways that offer the world models of living together with difference. Ask God to bring our church growth in mission and lead us into all truth.

Read it all.

Every Christian must have a prayer discipline. Every Christian can give time to God every day. We need to teach one another and be clear about this as the bottom line. It’s the only way to stay sane in an insane consumer culture. I keep saying that we will not legislate our way through our disagreements in The Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion, but we might pray our way to the place where Christ is, which is Holy Communion.

I am determined that our work in 2010 and beyond is to be about reconciliation. I have been talking with a group in 2009 to create A Center For Reconciliation because as Christians our calling is to be reconciled. We believe the waters of baptism are deeper than any division””any division. My intention is to establish a framework and then invite parishes to use it to create conversations across all kinds of divides: race, sexual orientation, class, ideology, gender, faiths, economics, geography and so on. I want to get bring together groups like: Developers and Organic Farmers; or African Americans, Whites and Latinos; or Sheriffs and men and women who do not have green cards, or Jews, Muslims, and Christians; yellow dog Democrats with die hard Republicans; gays and lesbians with those who are opposed to the consecration of gay bishops. I want us to have honest and loving conversations so we can go deeper than our divisions and be a sign to a broken world. The Church is the only safe container for everyone to have a voice. The Church is where we go to the Center and invite everyone there. And it’s about salvation.

Read it all (pdf).

Now that the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth and the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth (Southern Cone) are separate entities, they are both reporting unanimous decisions by their respective legislative bodies. The decisions move the dioceses away from one another and toward their respective theological commitments.

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The bishop gave his address. He made a distinction between leaders and managers. We need managers, but we also need the visionaries who can provide direction to the managers and others. Times are tough, these days, with a bad economy, violence in our streets and around the world, insufficient health care and political wrangling, etc. However, we as Christians and particularly as Rochester Diocese Episcopalians must work harder to address problems to the best of our ability.

Three resolutions were presented that were related to the bishop’s address. These would establish task forces to review the “apportionment” process that calculates parish giving to the diocese, the models of ministry for rural communities and the opportunity to “plant” new congregations in this diocese. These were discussed and passed.

Time was allotted for the groups at each table of 10 to discuss how we came to be Episcopalians and how we might reach out to others. A few groups summarized their discussions.

The Youth Advisory Report proposed a new structure for youth ministry, splitting the diocese into five parts. There was some discussion about the proposal to combine urban and suburban parishes, and the resolution passed.

The 2010 diocesan audit and budget were discussed. Parish apportionments will be discounted 10% from the formula calculation (compared to 15% for the 2009 budget). At last year’s convention, the shock of the economic downturn was fresh and unprecedented since WWII. The bishop’s address at this year’s convention called for renewed energy even in the face of continued trying times. 2010 spending is slightly higher than in 2009, and the delegates passed the budget.

Read it all.