ABC news is reporting this. Yuck.

Where are the affected churches and members?

Gloria Dei Church in Cocoa; Church of the Good Shepherd in Maitland; St. Edward’s Church in Mount Dora; Grace Church in Ocala; Trinity Church in Vero Beach and Holy Cross Church in Winter Haven, according to officials at the Diocese of Central Florida. The church affiliates are from St. Philip’s in Lake Nona and St. Nicholas in Poinciana.

Why are the churches leaving now?

“We’re not dialoguing anymore,” said the Rev. Paul Young, rector at Gloria Dei Church in Cocoa. The consecration of a gay bishop “is done, and it’s held up as a standard in a church. … Within our diocese, our bishop is highly respected. But he also has said he is going to stand behind the Episcopal Church. It makes it more difficult for us in that we do love our bishop.” Bishop John Howe, who leads the diocese, declined to comment on the impending departures.

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Fifteen years have passed since the stonemasons put down their chisels and mallets for the last time. Now, they can finally see what their carving wrought: the uppermost 55 feet 2 inches of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

In recent weeks, the cathedral’s southwest tower has emerged from the rusty scaffolding that had enclosed it since the last round of construction ended in 1992. The tower is still far from complete, but it has grown noticeably closer to the sky.

What is now revealed, in a limestone several shades blonder than the rest of the cathedral, are crisp buttresses, gables, colonettes, gargoyles, pinnacles, crockets and ornaments known as trefoils (three cusps), quatrefoils (four cusps) and cinquefoils (five cusps).

The tower has a newly imposing presence.

“It has been set free from its bondage of scaffolding,” said the Very Rev. Dr. James A. Kowalski, dean of the cathedral. Perhaps the greatest personal gratification, he said, was felt by those who labored so hard on the tower before the money ran out. “It was the first time they saw the magnitude of what was accomplished.”

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OOPS! The Episcopal congregations voted and then – following the Diocese of Virginia’s Protocol for Departing Churches – filed that vote in their local court house. WE DID NOT, repeat, did not seek the court’s declaration. We thought we were following the Diocese of Virginia’s Protocol and that we were entering into property negotiations by joining Bishop Lee’s official Diocese of Virginia Property Committee (the Diocese fails to mention that part – or the Standstill Agreement that the Diocese entered into with the Virginia Churches as we prepared for the next phase in the Protocol). The property negotiations had all ready been modeled for us by the property negotiations between the Diocese of Virginia and All Saints, Dale City. This all came to a sudden halt in January 2007 following a meeting of the Diocese of Virginia’s Standing Committee, Executive Board, and Bishop Lee with the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor, David Booth Beers. Within days of that meeting, the standstill agreement was abruptly cancelled, lawsuits against the 200 lay volunteers and their clergy were filed by the Diocese and then another set by 815, the clergy were inhibited (even the ones who were remaining Episcopalian), and health benefits for clergy and staff were cut off, including COBRA benefits that cost the Diocese nothing but their honor. One thinks that David Booth Beers could not have the Diocese of Virginia declaring the facts that division had indeed occurred (as the Protocol stipulated) or their whole House of Cards would tumble.

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The worldwide Anglican Church suffered a dramatic new split last night when a leading conservative archbishop approved plans to adopt breakaway American dioceses, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

Archbishop Gregory Venables is to allow conservative dioceses that are defecting from the pro-gay American branch of Anglicanism to affiliate with his South American province thousands of miles away.

The unprecedented realignment will rock the 70 million-strong worldwide Church and escalate the bitter civil war over gay clergy that is tearing it apart.

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When Paul Chan visited New Orleans for the first time in 2006, the gutted houses, abandoned streets and bare trees reminded him of Samuel Beckett’s legendary play Waiting for Godot.

“The sense of waiting is legion here,” Chan said. “People are waiting to come home. Waiting for the levee board to OK them to rebuild. Waiting for Road Home money. Waiting for honest construction crews that won’t rip them off. Waiting for phone and electric companies.”

The artist and activist says the desolation in New Orleans inspired him to “create art in places where we ought not have any.” This weekend, Chan’s vision comes to fruition in the Lower Ninth Ward, where the New York public arts group Creative Time and the Classical Theater of Harlem are staging free, outdoor performances of Waiting for Godot. They will continue next weekend in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood, in front of a flooded home.

Listen to it all from NPR.

“The financials are the bodyguards of the market and when the bodyguards are taking shots then the market can’t do well…A lot of the bad stuff is known; what the markets are worrying about is the unknown.”

—David Darst, chief investment strategist for Morgan Stanley’s global wealth management group speaking of recent market action

When a Boston television reporter gave then-candidate George W. Bush a pop quiz on foreign leaders in 1999, one of the names he missed was that of Pakistan’s president.

Now, few people are more important to the Bush administration than Pervez Musharraf. His efforts to quell violent protests against his government this week have put a spotlight not only on the chaos within the nuclear-armed Islamic nation, but also on how fragile Pakistan’s role has become in Bush’s war on terrorism.

There are increasing questions about whether Musharraf is effectively keeping his vow to crack down on Islamic militants, which are using Pakistan as a base to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Add this week’s political crisis, and Pakistan may have surpassed Iraq and Afghanistan as the most vulnerable front in Bush’s anti-terrorism efforts.

“There’s no way to win a war on terrorism without Pakistan’s cooperation,” says Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a Washington-based group that tracks Muslim terrorist organizations.

Pakistan’s uncertain future symbolizes how, six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration is facing tough decisions on how to protect the USA from another assault by Muslim extremists. In recent days, much of the news from the three major fronts of the war on terrorism has not been good:

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The House of Bishops is proceeding with disciplinary action against three of the six bishops who have resigned from The Episcopal Church during the past year. The bishops were briefed on active cases during an executive session of the fall meeting held Sept. 20-25 in New Orleans.

An ecclesiastical trial against the Rt. Rev. William Cox is still pending, despite the fact that he transferred to the Anglican Church of Southern Cone last March. Bishop Cox told The Living Church he was not aware that he was still a target of interest to the ecclesiastical court.

Bishop Cox served as Bishop Suffragan of Maryland from 1972-1980 and assisting Bishop of Oklahoma from 1980-1988. He previously admitted ordaining two priests and a deacon at Christ Church in Overland Park, Kan., in 2005 after he was asked to do so by the Primate of Uganda. A month later, he returned to Christ Church and led a service of confirmation.

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The video link is at the bottom of the page. I happened to catch this last night on the NBC news while running on the elliptical and it moved me to tears.

This is heartwarming.

For those of you with HBO, Five Days is really worth the time.

The Editor The CEN

Dear Sir,

We write to inform you that we are sending the following letter of support to Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh and his fellow Bishops in the Common Cause Council of Bishops following the letter last week to the Bishop of Pittsburgh,

Dear Bishop Duncan and Bishops in Common Cause

Warm greetings from the UK.

We have read the letter from Presiding Bishop Schori to the Bishop of Pittsburgh. We want to assure you, your dioceses and parishes of our prayers and fellowship as you take your stand on our shared Anglican heritage, accepting the Holy Scriptures as the rule and ultimate standard of faith, contrary to those innovators both in the British Isles and in the Americas who wish to give primacy to the demands of contemporary culture.

We are outraged by the threat and implementation of court actions against faithful Anglicans in the United States by the current leadership of The Episcopal Church who appear to be unitarian and universalist in theology, and coercively utopian in social practice.

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Mike Day, singer and guitarist, gathered his rock band around him.

Dressed in a faded black T-shirt, jeans and skateboard sneakers, he bent his shaved head. “God,” he said, “I hope these songs we sing will be much more than the music. I know it’s so difficult at times when we’re thinking about chords and lyrics and when to hit the right effect patch, but would you just help that to become second nature, so that we can truly worship you from our hearts?”

A few minutes later the band broke into three songs of slightly funky, distorted rock with heaving choruses, and the room sang along: 1,500 or so congregants of High Desert Church here, where Mr. Day, 33, is a worship director. This was Sunday night worship for the young-adult subset of the church’s congregation, but it was also very much a rock show, one that has helped create a vibrant social world in this otherwise quiet desert town.

There has been enormous growth in the evangelical Protestant movement in America over the last 25 years, and bands in large, modern, nondenominational churches ”” some would say megachurches ”” like this one, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, now provide one of the major ways that Americans hear live music.

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We seem to be having an increasingly frequent problem with folks pasting in URLs that are too long for the width of the comment box, which then blows out the margins and makes text overflow into the sidebar.

Thus, we’d like to request please don’t paste long-links in the comments. If your link is long, use anchor codes to make a link. If you don’t know how to do that, go to tinyurl.com and your long link will be transformed into a very short one you can copy and paste into your comment. Thanks!

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The Diocese of Dallas recently approved the second reading of a constitutional amendment that makes accession to the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church conditional on it remaining “a full, constituent member of the Anglican Communion.”

The amendment was one of several items on a busy agenda, which also included affirmation of Bishop James Stanton’s call for the election of a suffragan bishop. Convention met at Southfork Ranch Oct. 18-20.

The resolution approving the second reading of the constitutional change passed overwhelmingly on a voice vote by orders. Convention also approved resolutions affirming evangelism, the way that Bishop Stanton has pastorally dealt with those congregations wishing to leave The Episcopal Church and another affirming the primates’ Feb. 19 communiqué from Dar es Salaam which states that “we as a diocese do not believe that The Episcopal Church has complied with those requests.”

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About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.

While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.

Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.

“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”

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