During a pre-service press conference, Bob Duncan, the former Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh and now archbishop-designate for the new church, told news media that he expects the Episcopal Church (TEC) to continue its decline and that in time, the new province will come to replace it.

He said, “The Lord is displacing the Episcopal Church.”

This year, TEC leaders have seen the decades-long downward spiral continue in both attendance and finances. By some estimates, attendance and membership are declining by 1,000 people per week. Many dioceses are cutting budgets and staff, and drawing down endowment funds to maintain operations. The denomination has about two million members. It is spending millions of dollars on court actions to prevent individual churches and dioceses from pulling out.

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Turns out, misery may not love company ”” but happiness does, research suggests.

A new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego documents how happiness spreads through social networks.

They found that when a person becomes happy, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy themselves. A spouse experiences an 8 percent increased chance and for next-door neighbors, it’s 34 percent.

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With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation’s employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

“We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s. “It is being driven down by a host of factors: falling home and stock prices, fewer work hours, smaller bonuses, less overtime and disappearing jobs.”

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The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church declared Thursday that church members who joined a newly formed conservative denomination “are no longer Episcopalians,” even as she predicted that the exodus had largely run its course and would not trigger further large-scale defections.

In her first public comments since a coalition of 700 parishes announced the formation of a new North American church Wednesday, the Most. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori also reiterated that church property must remain in Episcopal hands, a position disputed by breakaway leaders.

“They are no longer Episcopalians,” Jefferts Schori said of those who left. “They have made that very clear in their departures.

“Those who were formally bishops in the Episcopal Church are no longer understood to be bishops in the Episcopal Church,” she added in a meeting with Times reporters. “They are free to associate with whom they wish.”

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Episcopal Church experts and disaffected conservatives predicted yesterday that intense lobbying would soon begin over dissidents’ plans to leave the church and create a new Anglican community in the United States.

The two sides will try to convince Anglican leaders worldwide either of the value or the cost of a second branch of the U.S. church, one that would be based less on geography than on theology.

Bishop Martyn Minns, a Virginia-based leader of the breakaway movement, confidently predicted victory. “I think we’ve got a good basis of support for what we’re doing,” he said.

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“This is so quick and so sharp,” says Richard Yamarone, director of research at Argus Research. “We had some job loss the first seven or eight months of the year, but it was nothing like this.” He says declining stock values are leading firms to cut more than usual in December.

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The Rev. Hal T. Ley Hayek is the rector of Saint Anne’s Episcopal Church in Winston-Salem and the dean of the Winston-Salem convocation of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. His church does not plan to join the new branch.

“Our hope in the Episcopal church is to live in the highest degree of communion that we possibly can,” Hayek said. “Our living in communion is a witness to the world and the reconciling mission of Jesus. That’s the mission of all Christians.”

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Long-standing divisions between liberals and conservatives had already fragmented the Episcopal Church by 2003 when it consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of Anglican Church history.

That act further roiled the 2.1 million-member U.S. church and the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion of which it is part. In recent months, four dioceses, out of a total of 110, have split from the Episcopal Church in California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Illinois. The church says that fewer than 100 of 7,100 congregations had left or voted to leave before the recent diocesan defections.

The dissidents who met on Wednesday want to become a province within the Anglican Communion — on equal footing with the Episcopal Church. Achieving that status would require approval from two-thirds of the primates — the heads of national churches — in the Anglican Communion and ultimate recognition from the Anglican Consultative Council, another church body.

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I caught this earlier this week and thought it was a really nifty story. I was unaware of this research–watch it all and see what you make of it.

Go to the second link down where it says “Super Downsize Me” and click on those words. This is an excellent report on the way companies are raising prices on many food items while hiding that fact from many (most?) consumers. Watch it all.

When Baby Boomers think back to the influence TV had on their childhoods, they probably recall an ugly, rabbit-eared set perched in the corner of the living room that picked up a handful of channels. If their parents heard anything objectionable on the “boob tube,” they’d turn the channel or hit the off button.

Things have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Today’s mass media penetrate deeply and quietly, inflicting real damage on young children, an increasing body of research shows. Moms and dads today are less likely to witness what their children are watching and hearing, and less able to monitor it.

More than 170 studies going back over 28 years have concluded that heavy media exposure ”” everything from TV to cellphones to computer games ”” increases the risk of adolescent obesity, smoking, sex, drug and alcohol use, attention problems and poor grades, according to a report released this week by Common Sense Media (CSM), a non-profit child advocacy group.

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A top Roman Catholic cleric in England has accused Disney of corrupting children, encouraging greed and turning its make-believe world into a latter-day pilgrimage site.

Christopher Jamison, the abbot of Worth Abbey, in southern England, charges Disney with “exploiting spirituality” and helping to generate a culture of materialism while pretending to provide movie, book and theme park stories with a moral message.

Jamison, the star of a British Broadcasting Corp. television series, The Monastery, and a candidate to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor as leader of the Catholic population of England and Wales, lodged the accusations in his new book, Finding Happiness.

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After five years of battles over gay rights, the Anglican communion fractured yesterday with a new conservative denomination claiming to represent the historic tenets of the faith.

The self-titled Anglican Church in North America, claiming a membership of 100,000, unveiled a constitution and canons with a prayer service last night in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton. Founders said the new church hopes to be welcomed one day as the 39th province in the worldwide communion.

“It’s been a day that, in effect, reverses decades of Anglican history,” Bishop Robert Duncan, a leader in the breakaway movement, told a news conference.

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Conservative leaders, including former Episcopal bishops, announced the creation of the Anglican Church in North America on Wednesday. It is expected to begin with about 700 congregations and 100,000 members in North America.

“It’s a no brainer. We are already in, as far as I understand,” said Father Michael Fry of All Saints Anglican Church in Peachtree City.

Fry was happy to see theological conservatives in the U.S. finally form a national organization.

“It’s the opinion of the conservatives that the Episcopal Church has left its roots,” he said.

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Tim Morgan: Christianity Today. Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori released a statement 1 hr ago about TEC being the only recognized Anglican province in North America. Is the goal of this new enterprise to replace TEC or form a parallel structure?

Bp. Duncan: The Lord has been replacing TEC for 50 years. 2007 figures show losses of more than 1000 people a week in Average Sunday attendance. We will focus on our mission together. We are growing and planting new organizations of authentic Christian presence in US and Canada. Issue of who is the province here is not ours to determine. TEC is province now recognized. Of 38 provinces, 22 have declared broken or impaired communion with TEC. That’s roughly 75% of Anglicans around the world that are out of communion with TEC. Our anticipation is that the primates will recognize this province. One is official reality the other emerging reality. It is not ours to determine. The Lord called us to this work He blesses what he blesses. Standing where we stand, we expect a different result than our recent experiences in Anglican Church of Canada and TEC.

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The bishop who led a group of Pittsburgh parishes that split from the Episcopal Church will serve as interim head of the Anglican Church in North America, a new church being formed by conservative congregations.

Bishop Robert Duncan will lead the new church until an archbishop is appointed next summer, said Peter Frank, spokesman for the Pittsburgh churches that voted in October to leave the national church.

“(It’s) an important, concrete step toward the goal of a biblical, missionary and united Anglican Church in North America,” Duncan said.

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Leaders of the Third Province movement sidestepped the contentious issue of women clergy last night, and have endorsed a provisional constitution and canons governing the emerging Third Province in the Americas.

“God did a great work today,” Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan told supporters at a church service in Wheaton, Illinois at the end of the Dec 1-3 gathering, as the disparate members of the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) of Anglican traditionalists in the US and Canada “came together with the proposed draft of the constitution and canons” and after discussing each proviso, “adopted unanimously” each article of the code.

This was “staggering considering who was around the table” said Bishop Duncan ”” the moderator of CCP and now the interim primate and archbishop of the provisional province.

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Members of the 11 self-identified Anglican organizations that form the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) announced December 3 the creation of what they called an Anglican “province in formation” for those who say that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada promote erroneous biblical interpretation and theology, particularly in terms of the doctrine of salvation and acceptance of homosexuality.

Former Episcopal Church Diocese of Pittsburgh bishop and CCP moderator Robert Duncan, who will become the proposed province’s first archbishop and primate, told a December 3 news briefing that the movement he leads is a descendant of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Both periods in history required Christians to reassert the power of revelation that some of their leaders had lost, he said.

“That, brothers and sisters, is what I would submit is happening right now in the 21st century across the whole Christian church, particularly in the West,” he told reporters. When asked, Duncan refused to claim that the announcement amounted to a schism of the Anglican Communion. Cynthia Brust, communications director for the Anglican Mission in the Americas (a member of the partnership), told reporters that the communion “has been fractured, it has been damaged, it has been in disarray, it’s been coming for a long time.”

“Rather than today being about division and breaking apart in disunity, it’s the day that the Anglican Communion began to be healed,” she said.

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Members of Congress wanted Detroit’s Big Three automakers to redo their homework before they resumed begging for a government bailout today. So how’d they do?

It doesn’t matter. If a Senate Banking Committee on the matter Thursday was any indication, America’s automakers failed badly enough and pose such a danger to the economy that lawmakers seem less focused at this point on whether they’ll give the automakers a bailout, and more so on how they’ll do it.

“We’re not going to leave town without trying,” committee chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said of their efforts to provide funding for General Motors , Ford Motor and Chrysler.

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On Nov 11, Kenyan Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi told The Church of England Newspaper that a meeting had been tentatively set with Dr. Rowan Williams in London for Dec 5. He said the timeline under which the Gafcon primates were working was that on Dec 3 the leaders of the Common Cause Partnership would gather in Wheaton, Illinois to endorse a draft constitution for the emerging province.

The Gafcon archbishops: Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya, Peter Akinola of Nigeria, [Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda] Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone, Valentino Mokiwa of Tanzania, Henry Orombi of Uganda, Justice Akrofi of West Africa would then meet on Dec 4 in London to receive and endorse the agreement and bring it to Dr. Williams the following day.

Speaking to the congregation of Truro Parish in Fairfax, Virginia on Nov 30, Bishop Martyn Minns publicly confirmed the proposed timeline adding that the Gafcon primates were also planning on briefing the primates standing committee the day before the start of the Jan 31-Feb 6 Alexandria Primates meeting-however, US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will likely miss the pre-conference session as she is scheduled to attend the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council meeting from Jan 29-31.

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Anglican archbishops will hold an emergency meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury today to discuss the unfolding schism in the Church in America.

The meeting between Dr Rowan Williams and the primates of Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and the Southern Cone comes two days after conservatives in the US unveiled the constitution and canons of the new Anglican Church in North America.

With a membership of 100,000, drawn from disaffected members of the Episcopal Church of the US and from churches that broke away over the women’s ordination dispute, leaders of the new “province” claim they are not splitting from the 75 million-strong Anglican Communion.

A formal proposal arguing for recognition as the 39th province of the Anglican Communion will be put before the primates at their meeting in Alexandria, Egypt, at the end of January.

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The Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota’s decision to close nine Pine Ridge Reservation churches and reduce services at two others had ended up in Oglala Sioux tribal court.

Members of 11 churches also want the diocese to be prevented from deconsecrating buildings and cemeteries in the process.

The papers were served Nov. 24 in Sioux Falls but had not been signed by a tribal judge as of Nov. 25. The plaintiffs want a hearing to stop the closures, which were planned for Nov. 30.

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[Bob] Duncan said 22 of the 38 Anglican provinces have broken or impaired communion with the Episcopal Church.

“We think many of them will begin to recognize this province,” Duncan said. “We stand in the mainstream of Anglicanism and Christianity.”

Alan Crippen, spokesman for the breakaway Grace Church and St. Stephen Parish in Colorado Springs, said the groups behind the new province have provided a safe haven, a sanctuary, for former Episcopalians alienated by the church’s increasingly liberal views.

“It’s become increasingly clear that these differences weren’t going to be worked out,” Crippen said.

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