What I can point to are the trends confronting our diocese.
1) In the past decade, our diocese has experienced not one, or two, but three tsunamis — General Conventions 2003, 2006, and 2009.
2) I can also say that there is a deep theological and practical divide between our clergy and laity, such that the conflict brought on by those every-three-year General Conventions is intensified and heightened.
3) The effect of those two things gives way to something that I have noticed not only in parish life, but also in individual lives and that is, simply, that we as Episcopalians have no further slack in the system. In the old days, parishes could go through the normal vicissitudes of parish life — a troubled rector, a search process gone wrong, a bad economy, some challenging diocesan issues, a layperson “in the news” for the wrong reasons — and recover from those issues, even thrive, fairly easily. But unfortunately, with the every-three-year tsunami, parishes simply have not recovered fully when met with everyday standard crises.
The effect is a rolling tide of cumulative loss and stress and conflict. Barely has one caught one’s breath from the latest General Convention than a local crisis hits. Barely has one recovered from — or just salvaged something — after the local crisis, then we have another General Convention. The diocese is in — and is likely to remain in — a constant state of stress. This is the “new normal” for TEC parishes, and it’s not something that we are prepared for at all.
What absolute insight! This kind of goes hand in hand with Executive Council’s continuing efforts to ignore the recent Church-wide poll that revealed that people are not hardly enthused about the New Thing. People are more concerned with traditional Christian expression than social experiments led by guilt-ridden progressives who never had the chance to be a part of a really important cause. The false social justice tsunamis that we have all been dealt all stem from egos run amok.