The Episcopal Church will remain a work in progress as it rebuilds from a 2008 schism and seeks to attract members, its leader said on Tuesday.
“We’re a community that is on the road together, wrestling with what it means to be a Christian in this particular age,” Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said before a morning service at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Wilkinsburg. “In order to communicate that message, we have to go out into the community.”
That may or may not include establishing traditional churches, said Jefferts Schori, who last visited the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh about a month after a majority of clergy and lay deputies voted to break with the church she leads to follow their more theologically conservative bishop, Robert Duncan, who formed the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Although the two churches battled over property in court, Jefferts Schori said she forsees a day when churches will become something different.
She’s laying out her ambitious vision of the future course to be taken by TEC in the United States.
“More faith communities will decide not to have a permanent dedicated structure in the coming years,” she said. “They can be a blessing if they are used all the time, but many of them are only used on Sunday mornings. Is that an effective use of the resource?”
Hmm. Gotta wonder what Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and other megachurch pastors would say about that. For that matter, the folks at St. Thomas, NYC.
She’s whistling in the dark.
Then why fight over property. Move forward with your “small is more” program and stick those silly breakaway Anglicans with the buildings. That’ll fix ’em!
Jeff (3) – exactly. She speaks with forked tongue.
Darin+
Oh, TEC is [i]”something different,”[/i] alright! Just [i]how[/i] different is very apparent!
Great rationale for selling off the detritus. Can’t write successful grant proposals, can’t get enough members to give with the current new thang gozpell (r), just sell off the property to keep the errors afloat!
Quite the head of a seminary you guys have for a PB there!
She’s got to be kidding, on the church buildings remark. I don’t know of any church just used on Sunday. Is she downplaying the importance/use of buildings because she expects they’ll lose some in Pittsburgh?
If TEC does not have buildings, how is the Diocese going to collect an assessment? Where’s the incentive to support the hierarchy?