The #SouthCarolina Supreme Court risks hurting church based on a massive misunderstanding https://t.co/oTndwTTnCH #law #religion #history pic.twitter.com/tcPtnkYWER

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) October 24, 2017

From here:

COLUMBIA, SC
The state Supreme Court’s decision taking church buildings and millions of dollars of real estate from the Diocese of South Carolina prompted retired Chief Justice Jean Toal to call it “nothing less than judicial sanction of the confiscation of church property.”

The key to this unfortunate decision is the false assumption that the Episcopal Church is hierarchical. F.V. Mills’ Bishops by Ballot: an Eighteenth Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York: 1978) documents that the church’s founding fathers were adamant that they were establishing not a top-down but a bottom-up governance based on republican concepts “in place of hierarchical ones.”

No wonder delegates from Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina insisted at the organizing convention for the Episcopal Church that they have no bishops. The hostility toward tyranny was built into the church’s foundation, accepting only bishops whose authority would be “spiritual” and subject to checks and balances from the bottom up.

As one who has taught history for more than two decades, I can confidently assert that the national church was carefully founded not to be an hierarchical church. We have never even called the presiding bishop an archbishop, as most Anglican provinces do. The one time the General Convention considered creating a truly hierarchical church (1898), the proposals were clearly and forthrightly rejected.

Practical examples of this reality abound. One is especially applicable: Several dioceses separated from the national church when their states seceded from the union; following the Civil War, they returned only after voting to do so. Such is the inherent independence of dioceses.

As a bishop in the Episcopal Church, I could never have imposed a candidate for rector on any parish; I could only suggest. Quite often, my suggestions were not followed. Nor could I simply remove a clergy person, no matter how badly the parish might wish it, without a long canonical procedure.

From start to finish, the history of the Episcopal Church testifies to a body that is not a hierarchy of the sort this court ruling has presumed. To dispossess at least 29 congregations and more than 20,000 worshipers on the basis of such a flawed understanding of history would be a terrible injustice.

Silicon Valley’s start-ups have always had a recruiting advantage over the industry’s giants: Take a chance on us and we’ll give you an ownership stake that could make you rich if the company is successful.

Now the tech industry’s race to embrace artificial intelligence may render that advantage moot — at least for the few prospective employees who know a lot about A.I.

Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from face-scanning smartphones and conversational coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous vehicles. As they chase this future, they are doling out salaries that are startling even in an industry that has never been shy about lavishing a fortune on its top talent.

Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them. All of them requested anonymity because they did not want to damage their professional prospects.

Read it all.

Five existing Anglican and Lutheran churches in Peterborough could be merged into a single church, and a new “mission church” planted elsewhere in the city, under a proposal put forth earlier this month by the area bishop.

On October 1 and 2, Riscylla Shaw, area bishop for Trent-Durham within the diocese of Toronto, presented the plan to parishioners at two public meetings. It foresees three Anglican churches—St. Barnabas Anglican Church, St. Luke’s Anglican Church and All Saints’ Anglican Church—and Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church all closing “in the immediate future,” with parishioners gathering to worship for traditional services at the one remaining church, St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church.

At some point after that, Shaw proposed, a new church might be built, probably in the city’s southwest corner, to house a “new missional congregation.”

The idea, Shaw told the Anglican Journal, is that the newly-merged congregation at St. John the Evangelist would focus energetically on “bringing the Word, the good news of Jesus out into the street, into Peterborough and out to meet the people where they’re at,” gathering new parishioners to the point where the new church would need to be built to house them.

Read it all.

From there:

The litigation between the Diocese of South Carolina and the Episcopal Church (TEC) has been an important contest over the past five years. Its outcome will determine whether 23,000 citizens of this state will have their freedoms of association and religion affirmed, or if they will be dispossessed of the properties faithfully established for their work of ministry.

The latter outcome would be particularly grievous, given it is possible only because the deciding vote on the state Supreme Court was provided by a justice with membership in the Episcopal Church. That is a clear and massive conflict of interest.

Recently Judge Joseph Anderson set Nov. 6-8 as the dates for mediation of both the state and federal cases. Those meetings in Columbia have the potential to finally bring peace and a fair resolution to all matters in both. That would certainly be a more just outcome than what has been provided so far at the hands of our state Supreme Court.

One can only hope that the high court will respond to the motions for rehearing and recusal, uphold its credibility, and give justice to the Diocese of South Carolina.

But with attendance stagnating, maintenance costs rising and the population of Christians from which to draw shrinking, the two have decided to join forces. If the Baltimore Presbytery gives its approval next month, they’ll become one congregation before the end of the year, bringing more than 280 worshippers and 230 years of history together under one roof.

The merger would be the latest example of an increasingly common phenomenon: faith leaders closing or consolidating houses of worship as a way of adjusting to a culture that has grown less hospitable to their mission.

The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland has closed a net eight churches since 2007 and plans to shutter one more — 174-year-old St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charles Village — if the congregation can’t present a feasible financial plan by January.

Read it all.

O God, whose love we cannot measure, nor even number thy blessings: We bless and praise thee for all thy goodness, who in our weakness art our strength, in our darkness, light, in our sorrows, comfort and peace, and from everlasting to everlasting art our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, world without end.

—Daily Prayer, Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs, eds. (London: Penguin Books 1959 edition of the 1941 original), p.126

To thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in thee I trust,
let me not be put to shame;
let not my enemies exult over me.
Yea, let none that wait for thee be put to shame;
let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.

Make me to know thy ways, O Lord;
teach me thy paths.
Lead me in thy truth, and teach me,
for thou art the God of my salvation;
for thee I wait all the day long.

–Psalm 25:1-4