…Yet for all the rage these nearly seven years since that day, the Episcopal Church in Hudson County and much of New Jersey, while aware of what is swirling around them, is at peace.
The parishes continue to minister. The Episcopal Diocese of Newark, which covers the northern part of N.J., is one of the most liberal in the U.S. and has had its share of controversies.
Rev. David Thomas, the priest-in-charge of Christ Church in Harrison, believes, “There will not be much effect whatsoever.” And while much of the debate swirls around the morality of homosexuality and same-sex unions, he sees it differently.
“Personally I would say that the Anglican Communion is split on economics,” said Thomas, 67, a retired, psychiatric emergency clinician. He believes that it’s a first world/third world division.
You can’t really spoof this.
The ASA for Christ Church Harrison was . . . [wait for it] . . .
8.
That’s right.
I stared several times.
Looked to see if I was misreading the scale. If maybe the 10s on the y-axis stood for “hundreds” or “thousands.”
If a fiction novelist wrote this, nobody would believe her. It’s so ironic and delusory that it’s *got* to be faked, something that the novelist just spun out of whole cloth with no real connection with reality.
Yes, indeed, Sarah the ASA of 8 looks truly sad. But the Members data are suspect. They are constant (at 41) for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. The one thing you always expect to see in TRUE data is some evidence of change, dispersion, or randomness. A perfectly straight line time series must likely is false. Statmann
“And Episcopal parishes are withholding their assessments from the national church.”
Interesting that he mentions this. The withholding must be starting to bite…
“But Thomas thinks that the work of the local parishes will be unaffected.”
Well he is either right or he is wrong, and soon we will find out. There is nothing of substance in this article to shed any light on what is really happening in these liberal parishes.
I was struck by the implicit racism in the comments about the Third World Church, saying that those poor boobies are stuck in a ‘pre-Dead Sea scrolls’ time-warp. Thus managing simultaneously to dismiss so many brown and black Christians, while asserting some kind of gnosticism (we, the privileged, who have read and understood the message of the Dead Sea Scrolls). The more you read it, the sadder you feel. ‘They shall look and look and never see; they shall hear and never listen.’
Part of the message of the Jesus Seminar folks is that the Dead Sea Scrolls somehow expose Christianity or change its proclamation. I’ll bet this person has never read any of them.
Not to mention, Statman, that the Diocese of Newark has gone from 36,000 in membership to under 30,000 in the past decade, and lost approximately 1500 in ASA.
So how this man can say that there isn’t “much effect” or “local parishes will be unaffected” from being in the most liberal mainline denomination in the US is beyond me. Perhaps he means they have already been so “affected” that there is not anything else left to “affect.”
I get what he says about “peace” though — certainly it must be peaceful to be in a church of 8 attenders.
Quiet too.
Incredible. You can’t make up such inanity to save your life. If I were locked into a room and forced to write such vacuity from a made-up character — an Episcopal priest — I couldn’t do it.
Heck — Jane Austen couldn’t come up with something approaching this level, and she came up with Mr. Collins.
[blockquote]
the Episcopal Church in Hudson County and much of New Jersey, while aware of what is swirling around them, is at peace.
[/blockquote]
Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant
Dorpsgek – the early portion of Tacitus’ quote also applies to what ECUSA is doing to the confessing churches:
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium;
( To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire;
and where they make a desert, they call it peace.)
What is the “North American Anglican Synod” that Thomas suggested could be a home for the orthodox? I Googled it but only found references to the recent C of E synod and its action vis a vis ACNA.
This far on in the discussion I feel able to go off track. Dorpsgek, what does your pseudonymn mean? I ask out of curiosity, because I can speak Dutch, and in Dutch dorp means a small town, and gek in colloquial Dutch means strange, although it can also mean odd. So I would translate Dorpsgek as town oddball … This translation makes it sound derogatory – whereas in Dutch it would not really be so. Or am I way off beam here?
#10 – when I googled it, I got a wikipedia page which translates to “Village idiot”
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorpsgek
Thanks William. I never thought of that! Contrary to what I said above about it not being derogatory the first sentence of the wiki article could more or less be translated thus: Dorpsgek is a derogatory name for a person who could not care less about local norms of behaviour and therefore stands out strongly among the crowd.