The Rev. Whayne Hougland, Jr., was elected at a special electing convention May 18 to be the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Michigan.
Hougland, currently rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Salisbury, N.C., was elected on the eighth ballot out of a field of four candidates. To be elected, a candidate must have received a majority of the votes in both the lay order and the clergy order. He received 87 of 139 votes cast in the lay order and 34 of 65 votes cast in the clergy order.
So they elected a guy who became Rector or a parish that lost 125 or so people on Sunday in the two years before he came (about the time of Gene Robinson) and in his 8 years they lost another 50 ASA down to 150.
http://pr.dfms.org/study/exports/2586-2715_20130521_11331333.pdf
An interesting detail pointed out on the Episcopal Cafe is that the elected candidate is the only one of the four who is conventionally married. In fact there is no biography in the election materials which sets out their familial situations. If you read the responses you can figure out that one of the women is a Lesbian and the other is divorced, but unless I missed something there’s no clue given about the other man at all. I wonder if this is going to be the pattern for future elections.