I fear (and I hope I’m not being overly dramatic here) that we are moving toward a train wreck between the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops. I sense an unwillingness among the bishops to listen to these voices of the laity and clergy. I hope I’m terribly wrong, but it seems that bishops feel they have some special access to God’s will and nothing will persuade them otherwise. I shutter to think of a church where the Bishops are so disconnected from the will of the people they serve. Please God, let me be terribly wrong about this perception, and may the scales fall from my pessimistic eyes and reveal an episcopate who has listened to the Spirit’s movement in the people of this Church. Nothing would make me happier than to be wrong about this. Only time will tell.
Read it all. As I said at the outset of General Convention, watch the distances between the two Houses.
What in the world do you people have bishops for, then, if not to lead? Seriously? Is he a talisman or something? Someone to look good in a cope and miter? This is insane.
Yeah, I agree with #1. If this bothers him so much, he shouldn’t be part of an “episcopal” church.
Well said, Phil and Anglicanum. I might add: That is what bishops are for.
This may be the most revealing comment of the entire GC. Gene tilts the TEC hermeneutic in the direction of a pneumatology of the people. The Holy Spirit is associated exclusively with a consensual process within the confines of TEC’s GC. The bishops, apparently, prefer a more catholic pneumatology… one that encompases the wider Communion.
Don’t be deceived into thinking it is a more canonical catholicity, however. Me suspects it is merely a larger scale of consensual processing, still strangely devoid of normative teaching from Scripture as received in the Great Tradition.
This potential train wreck is the ONLY interesting thing going on at GC.
Well, let’s just remember that Kendall told us to watch for the distance between the two houses….Bishop Robinson is in agreement with the HOD and not the HOB because they support his own person political agenda…
I do believe the one positive outcome of Lambeth is that the EC bishops heard how the EC has damaged the Anglican Communion but its unilateral action.
There are a number of signs…notice how many bishops are retiring early so they can escape the ensuing battles and war. Even without 4 dioceses the bishops know the damage and that it is not simply tenuous but hanging by a thread and the HOD is ready to cut it off and let the chips fall where they will.
Train wreck or crashing thud….they are all one in the same.
God be with both houses and may they seek His wisdom and not follow the devices and desires of their own hearts.
It’s interesting that he bids prayers for the opportunity to learn from others in the church. Seems that’s conditional on the learning being a reinforcement of innovations in Christian theology and practice.
Darin+
Maybe Gene has just missed it and the spirit is “doing a new thing.” With nothing authoritative in his life, how can he tell?
VGR doesn’t seem to notice that his organization *is* a trainwreck and has been for several decades. You see, he doesn’t know what a non-trainwreck looks like. Like everything else he says it’s based on un-reality. The best one could say about the bishops of ECUSA is that they are the source of wreckage and revel in it. It pays them well.
Is it possible? The bishops might actually have some backbone and stand against the HOD, even if for poor reasons?
The Lord does work in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.
The bishops “aren’t listening” to the people? Where’s the evidence of that? It seems to me the bishops hear, but do not agree. Why don’t the laity “listen” to the bishops? Why don’t the deputies “listen” to the 68 million other Anglicans?
#10, I bet, in the end, they will not. The HOD has turned into a full-fledged mob, complete with pitchforks and torches. Frankly, I think the bishops are afraid of them.
If the bishops were thinking strategically, they would realize the Jacobins have nowhere else to go; this is, by far, the closest they have ever gotten to throwing a mainline Christian religious body off the cliff, and thus achieving nihilist goals that go back 40 years, to the summer of sex. They should call the deputies’ bluff. They won’t. What they’re doing now is putting up resistance in the manner of the British at the Battle of Princeton. This GC will end up with similar results: over in 15 minutes with the bishops running for their lives.
The radicals and the unwitting are in control of this church. As a dear gay friend of mine said a while back: “These people are turning your church into a gay bar. And once they destroy you, they will move on.” I had asked him to take a look at the video of the Clown Mass at Trinity Wall Street and tell me what he thought.
It is so careful and clever.
Hmmm…interesting. If it were the other way around and the HOD were throwing hissy fits about allowing full inclusion, and it was the HOBs who were for it, I am willing to wager serious money that the good bishop would be calling the HOB’s actions “prophetic.”
Phil (#12),
I guess it will depend on whom the bishops fear most — the laity in the HOD or the laity back home.
The bishops, along with the laity and clergy, should be concerned with the will of God and not the will of the people.