The newly ordained Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island is helping to bring the church into the 21st century with the use of social media, church officials say.
The Very Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely Jr. is one of only six Episcopal bishops in the country who use Twitter, said Arizona Bishop Kirk Smith. Knisely was ordained Saturday at Dorrance Field House at St. George’s School in Middletown.
Nick and I were part of a Tuesday morning clergy Bible Study in 1997 and 1998 when he was rector of St Barnabas Brackenridge PA and I was rector of St Paul’s Kittanning PA both in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Nick’s tenure in Brackenridge was clearly the highwater mark in that parish’s history. It’s been a long downhill slide for them ever since he left. All of us in the Bible study knew Nick was destined for greater ministry — first a cardinal rector of a cardinal parish in the Bethlehem PA diocese, then Dean of Phoenix AZ and now Bishop of Rhode Island. I hope he can use some of his quick mind and deep faith to turn TEC around as they drift off into apostasy at the national level.
+Nick will not change TEC. He will be lucky to stop the dift in RI. Since 2002, the Cathedral has closed, ASA is down by about 30 percent, inflation adjusted Plate & Pledge is down 15 percent, Infant Baptisms down 43 percent, and Marraiges down a sad 66 percent. Statmann
That’s setting the bar pretty low, praising him for using a tool popular with millions of pre-teens. I suppose it’s an improvement over those bishops at that convention several years back who thought they were logging out of their email accounts by turning off the monitors. By that measure, though, any high school dropout with a smart phone would make as good a bishop, and be more benign in matters of theology.
RE: “I hope he can use some of his quick mind and deep faith to turn TEC around as they drift off into apostasy at the national level.”
Uh . . . Nick Knisely is a raving revisionist, voted for Bishop Robinson, and is in support of same sex blessings. His writing is full of all the bromides and vacuous aphorisms with which we conservatives became so depressingly familiar since 2003, and then he also affects a veneer of scientism.
For an array of incoherence:
http://entangledstates.org/2010/11/29/sometime-clarity-is-impossible/
http://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/06/how_shall_we_de.html
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/dojustice/j465.html
http://www.askthepriest.org/askthepriest/books/
So I’m sure he has a “deep faith” — but we don’t share the same faith and he will certainly be aiding the plummet towards apostasy — albeit in portentous tones about how Deeply Truly Moderate he is. ; > )
When he was in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, he had the veneer of a centrist believer. Perhaps he was a chameleon or total faker. And now I guess he has come out of the closet — so to speak.