“This is our big, grand celebration to kick off all the other things that will be happening throughout the year,” explained Jan Pringle, tricentennial standing committee co-chairwoman with Bob Barrett. “There is a tremendous amount of excitement among our parishioners, and I personally am overjoyed because this is just an incredible opportunity to glorify God for the 300 years our church has withstood so many things.”

“I have never been to a church that seems to be so full of the Holy Spirit with teachers and preachers that lift you up every time you are there,” Pringle said.

It is one of the oldest continuously operating churches in the country and is the oldest public building in Beaufort with the original building completed in 1724.

Since its establishment in 1712 as a colonial parish of the Church of England, the church has withstood the 1715 Yemassee Indian War, Civil War encampment by federal soldiers, service as a hospital, the Great Depression and even hurricanes.

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Thus what the Diocese asked Judge Bellows to do is precisely what Judge Bellows did, and now the Diocese has to admit that it will have to sell some of the properties in order to pay off its debts. This is not acting prudently, or even out of a sense of fiduciary duty — a fiduciary acts to conserve assets, and does not sacrifice them to solve troubles of one’s own devising. This is more the story of the dog in the manger, only written on a truly grand scale. Nevertheless, like the proverbial dog, the Episcopal Diocese will now pretend that it really wanted that hay all along, even though it can make no use of it.

And what, in the end, has Judge Bellows accomplished? Did he uphold Virginia law and precedent? Yes, he certainly did — once he was instructed by his superiors that the division statute did not apply to the facts of this case. But by awarding all the property to the people least able to maintain it and keep using it for church purposes, he took “neutral principles of law” to a truly Pyrrhic level. And in the process, the decision makes a mockery of all the hundreds of years of tradition which it claims to honor and uphold….

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Changing demographics, a declining and aging membership, and economic pressures forced the congregation to make some tough decisions, and rather than close completely or move to the suburbs, it voted to merge with another historic Toledo church, Trinity Episcopal downtown.

Friday’s service, being held on the Feast of the Epiphany, in some ways marks the completion of a circle for the two congregations.

“It’s interesting that St. Mark’s began as a mission Sunday school of Trinity Church, actually beginning in the rectory of Trinity Church in 1888,” said Ohio Bishop Mark Hollingsworth, Jr., who will preside at the evensong service.

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Thirteen years have passed since I first met Christ’s Holy Comforter in our church. While courting my wife, Page, we entered worship here regularly before our marriage. Having known Christ as my Savior from a young age, I was nonetheless a “denominational mutt” and carried some unhealthy “fear of God” baggage for most of my young adult life. It was only here at Holy Comforter that I began to encounter Christ as I had never known Him. Most especially, His Holy Spirit began to move and to work within me as never before, when I began to engage with His body of Christ here. Having a bad start doesn’t mean you can’t have a great finish! Starting where I am, taking
what I have and doing what I can to advance His Kingdom on this Earth is the least I can do for the One who gave all for me.

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Ending three years of sitting on the fence during a breakup over doctrine, leaders of a historic Downtown church decided to break away from the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh and affiliate exclusively with the Episcopal Church.

Trinity Cathedral’s governing board last week voted 11-7 to withdraw from the more theologically conservative sect, overturning an October 2008 resolution to serve both the Episcopal Church diocese and the Anglican diocese.

“This decision was not made lightly or hastily,” the Rev. Catherine M. Brall, provost at the cathedral, said in a letter to members. “Many, if not most, of the comments made during the lengthy time of discussion had been previously raised.”

Anglican officials said they were “saddened” by the vote.

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Recently, we had to move out of our historic building because of damage caused to our walls by the August earthquake centered in Virginia. Within days we received several offers to help house our various services from Lutherans, Methodists, fellow Episcopalians and our generous neighbors at Mount Zion AME Church.

The next thing we know, we are benefitting from the gifts of our fellow citizens and worshiping on Sundays at 11:15 at the oldest Catholic parish in the Carolinas, St. Mary’s on Hasell Street….

…[and later] picture my surprise as an invitation came from the president of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Synagogue across from St. Mary’s to have Christmas services at their location. Did I get that right? Did our Jewish brothers and sisters just invite us for Christmas at the synagogue?

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KATE OLSON: Mt. Desert Island, off the coast of Maine, widely known as the home to the spectacular Acadia National Park. Here, at St. Andrew by the Lake Episcopal Church, a community of spiritual seekers gathered recently to hear about the Christian practice of contemplation from Martin Laird.

MARTIN LAIRD: (Speaking at St. Andrew) To navigate this ancient way of prayer is to “put out into the deep,” as Luke says, let down our nets for our catch. Paradoxically, we discover that it is we ourselves who are caught and held in this net”¦

OLSON: This is the central insight and discovery in the practice of contemplation, Laird says that the God we are seeking has already sought and found us. We simply are not aware of this union.

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Read them both.

I was interested to see the AP describe the Presiding Bishop’s remarks as “a rare comment on a local issue.”

For months, they were the best of neighbors: the slapdash champions of economic equality, putting down stakes in an outdoor plaza, and the venerable Episcopal parish next door, whose munificence helped sustain the growing protest.

But in the weeks since Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, relations between the demonstrators and Trinity Wall Street, a church barely one block from the New York Stock Exchange, have reached a crossroads.

The displaced occupiers had asked the church, one of the city’s largest landholders, to hand over a gravel lot, near Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, for use as an alternate campsite and organizing hub. The church declined, calling the proposed encampment “wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious.”

And now the Occupy movement, after weeks of targeting big banks and large corporations, has chosen Trinity, one of the nation’s most prominent Episcopal parishes, as its latest antagonist.

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Perhaps his infant baptism at Trinity Episcopal Church in Natchez cultivated the roots that had the Rev. Sam Tomlinson branch out in ministry but also pulled him home again.

Next week Tomlinson will celebrate 50 years in the priesthood. His friend and Bishop of Arkansas, Larry Maze, will lead what Tomlinson calls a “beefed up” festival service of Eucharist to commemorate his long career in the Episcopal Chuch.

Tomlinson was born in Natchez and grew up in Jackson. He attended Milsaps College where he majored in history.

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Watch it all.

Grace Episcopal Church, a fixture on Canal Street in Mid-City for nearly 60 years, will close next month, Episcopal Bishop Morris Thompson said Monday.

The Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana hopes the closure is not permanent. It may be able to reopen the church in a year or so after rethinking its mission and gathering new resources, Thompson said.

Thompson said he informed Grace’s small congregation of his decision Dec. 4. He said there were fewer 15 people in the pews at one of the two services that morning.

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A new church has literally “popped up” in Portland, Oregon, offering alternative and movable worship, an Advent vespers here, an Advent Mass celebrated there ”“ followed by pub conversations nearby.

“PopUp Church,” also known as All Souls, debuted Dec. 1 at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Portland with a weekly series of Wednesday evening Advent vespers.

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There’s a reason that St. Martin Episcopal Church’s Blue Christmass service comes on the shortest day of the year.

The annual service recognizes that holidays are a difficult time for some, especially those who have lost loved ones.

“It’s the day with the least light,” said the Rev. Murdock Smith, rector of St. Martin’s. “It’s not meant to be saccharine or ‘feel good.’ It’s to recognize this is what life’s about, and you don’t have to face it alone.”

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On Dec. 6, Christ Episcopal Church in Woodbury seated its fourth child bishop in observance of The Feast of Saint Nicholas. Selecting a child bishop is a tradition of many English cathedral choir schools and collegiate chapels.

This year, Kaitlyn Johnson, a fifth grader, was selected as child bishop.

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[The Episcopal Church]…is hemorrhaging members. In the last 40 years, the Episcopal Church in the U.S. lost 34 percent of its members and 3.66 percent in the last five. This year it declined 2.36 percent and counts just over 2 million members….

Jefferts Schori did not give any response about this decline, nor did she comment on the Catholic Church’s outreach to disaffected Episcopalians….

[Instead she said she] sees encouraging signs. “Engagement in God’s mission looks different in different places, but it usually has something essential to do with Jesus’ own primary acts of service – feeding, healing, and teaching people,” said Jefferts Schori, mid way though her nine year term. “I also see church members moving out into the community to listen to the deep spiritual questions of the unchurched and dechurched.” And she’ll find out this Sunday that is also what has revitalized Incarnation.

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The first such ceremony in the state is likely to be during the New Year’s Day worship service at Trinity Episcopal Church in Wilmington, where Wilmington attorneys Lisa Goodman and Drewry Fennell will say their vows in front of their families, friends and fellow congregants.

Goodman is president of Equality Delaware, the advocacy group that drafted the law and steered it through the General Assembly. Fennell is executive director of the Delaware Criminal Justice Council.

“To have someone ask for a Sunday morning service made perfect sense to me — that’s when my wedding was,” said the Rev. Patricia Downing, rector at Trinity. “It’s when the community gathers traditionally, and it’s a wonderful witness to the fact that these relationships are lived out in community.”

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After nearly 130 years as one of the Near West Side’s richest landmarks, the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany is closing its doors.

The massive structure at 201 S. Ashland Ave. had a congregation that dwindled down to almost nothing. Only five to seven people were showing up every Sunday, and what few parishioners remained came to the decision in early November that it wasn’t sustainable to keep the building open.

With such a small group of parishioners, it was impossible to fill the coffers just to meet the basic needs of the church, according to one of the congregation’s leaders, Nikki Shields.

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“If the threat of property disputes is the only thing that holds us together, what sort of mission do we have?” he said. “Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom, not the keys to the building.”

He does not believe the quitclaim deeds will make congregations more inclined to separate from the diocese.

“Frankly, the people already believe they can leave because of the All Saints’, Pawleys Island, decision” by the South Carolina Supreme Court.

Distributing the quitclaim deeds was a liberating decision, the bishop said.

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[Bishop Mark] Lawrence said the national Episcopal Church is threatening the unity of the Anglican communion. He said in the diocese “while we are in the vast minority of the Episcopal Church, we hold positions that Anglicans have held for the past 400 to 500 years.”

The 2 million-member Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, which has 77 million members worldwide.

“I don’t believe that the founders of the Episcopal Church ever envisioned a day when issues of theology and constitutionality would have arisen as they have arisen right now. I ask myself: ‘What are we here in the Diocese of South Carolina called to do?'” he asked. “My gut reaction was this day would come.”

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A $15 million rebuilding effort lies ahead for the Washington National Cathedral, and questions remain about whether that amount is sufficient, said Andrew Hullinger, the cathedral’s senior director of finance and administration.

Extensive earthquake damage to the stone cathedral on Aug. 23 includes fallen hand-carved angel and cherub carvings and stone chunks, cracks, crevasses and fissures, Hullinger said at a forum at All Saints Church in Chevy Chase, Md. A $2 million stabilization program made it possible to reopen the cathedral Nov. 12 for the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde as the ninth Bishop of Washington.

“The earthquake shook with such force and such violence it just blew these stones apart,” Hullinger said, adding that he does not want to imagine the damage if the brief quake had lasted longer.

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This article put me in an awkward position. Because the article is poor and misleading, I do not want to post it. However because I have an Episcopal/Anglican related site and a contextual site, and I am located in the area where this is the local paper which comes to the end of our driveway daily, I feel I have no choice. Once again I trust readers to be discerning and thorough–KSH.

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

The Bishop of South Carolina, the Rt Revd Mark Lawrence, is cur­rently under investigation by the disciplinary board of the national Church on charges of having “ab­andoned” the Episcopal Church (News, 14 October). He is charged with a variety of omissions and commissions, includ­ing failure to take legal action against a parish in his diocese which had realigned itself…

The Church’s crusade against conservative dis­senters is pointless, wasteful, and self-destructive. And, although Dr Jefferts Schori has defended her actions as necessary to protect the Church’s assets, it is hard to understand what material benefits the Church’s programme could reasonably achieve. If the Episcopal Church retains the properties of departing congregations, it will be stuck with church buildings that the few (if any) remaining loyalists cannot afford to maintain. In the best-case scenario, it may be able to offset the cost of litiga­tion by selling them for use as mosques or saloons.

The Episcopal Church has plunged into a maelstrom of institutional turmoil and litigation, alienating some of its most committed constitu­ents. Representing less than one per cent of the American population, it has not affected the at­titudes of the general public, or benefited gay men and women, who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. And it has not impressed the secular élite, who are as contemptuous of the Episcopal Church, for all its political correctness, as they are of all Christian groups, whose members they regard as superstitious ignoramuses.

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From that first Sunday at St. Bartholomew’s [Episcopal Church] in February 2003, Dr. Marion never goes a week without attending worship. He tithes. He becomes a warden and a member of the vestry.

In the spring of 2003, he stumbles onto a poem titled “The Only Animal,” by Franz Wright. It is a poem, like many of Mr. Wright’s, about the interplay of faith and doubt. “You gave me in secret one thing to perceive, the tall blue starry strangeness of being here at all,” one passage goes. “You gave us each in secret something to perceive.”

Dr. Marion immerses himself in Mr. Wright’s work. In 2006, when he discovers a new poem, “The Hawk,” he feels it has the qualities of a biblical psalm, and he becomes fixated on the idea of setting it to music, something liturgical. Dr. Marion wonders if it is too late for him to learn composition, though his musical training ended with a med school production of “Guys and Dolls….”

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At the time of the Revolution, the Anglican church in the American colonies was the established church in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and the southern counties of New York. It was funded generously by monies coming from England. It had legal standing, wealth, and power. It was comfortable. But, it was entirely absent of bishops. Nominally, the bishop of London was solely responsible for every single Anglican in the colonies. All of the priests serving in the colonies had to face the perilous journey to England for their ordination, and also submit to the requisite oaths of allegiance to the Crown.

After the eruption of the Revolution, the Anglican parishes in the colonies were ripped apart by division and argument over the rifts between the colonies and Great Britain. Gone was the security they had known under English rule. Many of the clergy, in particular, felt bound by honor to respect the vows they had taken to the Crown, and publicly opposed the Revolution. By the end of the war and the emigration of Loyalists to Canada or back to England, the Anglican parishes in the new United States were disestablished, no longer received funding from England, and half of the parishes were closed or destroyed. It’s estimated that almost 65% of clergy left for Canada; North Carolina had no priest; Virginia’s pre-Revolutionary parish count of 107 dropped to 42. And, there was an ocean and some sour feelings dividing the Anglican churches in the US and the closest bishop. Eventually, though, priests traveled to Great Britain, and were consecrated bishops for the American church, first in Scotland, then in England. But the sense of loss and change wasn’t entirely gone even after America obtained its own bishops: the first bishop of New York, Samuel Provoost, despaired that the church would survive, so in 1801, he retired as bishop and became a botanist, convinced that the Episcopal Church would fade away when the last members of the pre-Revolution generation died. At his time, there were only 10,000 Episcopalians in the entire nation of 4 million.

But that wasn’t the end of the story….

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A celebration of the 350th anniversary of Staten Island will include a service of Evensong with prayers and music from that time period on Dec. 4 at Christ Church New Brighton.

The ten Staten Island churches that are part of the Richmond Interparish Council of the Episcopal Diocese of New York will participate in the 4 p.m. service that will use the 1559 prayer book.

The Rev. Charles Howell, rector of Christ Church, will lead clergy from the other Episcopal churches. Representing the Episcopal Diocese of New York will be Suffragan Bishop Catherine Roskam and the Rev. Andrew Smith.

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The US Episcopal Church reports that attendance has fallen 16 per cent over the past five years with the number of Episcopalians dropping below two million.

According to statistics released last week, the number of Episcopalians fell from 2,006,343 in 2009 to 1,951,907 in 2010. Over the last 10 years the Church lost 16 per cent of its members, while the rate of decline for the past five years was 11 per cent.

After holding steady in the 1990s membership and attendance began to drop in the wake of the controversies surrounding the consecration of the Church’s first [non-celibate] gay bishop. Over the last 10 years attendance has fallen by 23 per cent to 657,831.

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The church building was designed by William Halsey Wood. It is an example of two English styles of the 16th and 17th centuries, Jacobean and Elizabethan.

“I think it’s one of the most beautiful churches in town, and it’s intimate. It’s not one of those huge Gothic churches you seen in Europe,” said Carolyn O’Brien, a Valley resident.

The building also reflects the influence of the turn-of-the-century arts and crafts movement, which sought to revive the hand-crafted quality of pre-industrial times. Wood used rough-faced random limestone, massive stone arches, timber roof trusses and other “handmade” materials to introduce the arts and crafts aesthetic to Youngstown.

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