It was not as if these congregations chose the most theologically conservative new homes.
The great majority of congregations leaving the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) chose to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church or the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Few chose to join the larger Presbyterian Church in America, which does not permit women clergy.
Similarly, congregations leaving the ELCA overwhelmingly bypassed the more conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod denominations for the new Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ and the North American Lutheran Church.
Still, the future does not look bright for reconciliation, analysts noted.
“There is an exhaustion factor of having fought for decades,” Thompson said.
Among some denominational leaders, he said, there is a sense, “The bad guys have left.”
And leaders of congregations departing their former mainline Protestant denominations told Carthage researchers they were happy to be in a new place.
When the church leaders were asked if they had any regrets about their decision to leave, “The only thing they’d ever say is we should have left sooner.”
The article helps explain why first the lifeboat Anglican provinces and then the ACNA rather than one of the Affirmation of St. Louis churches was attractive to those who left the Episcopal Church in the past 10+ years.
RE: [blockquote]”The great majority of congregations leaving the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) chose to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church or the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Few chose to join the larger Presbyterian Church in America, which does not permit women clergy.
Similarly, congregations leaving the ELCA overwhelmingly bypassed the more conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod denominations for the new Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ and the North American Lutheran Church.”[/blockquote]
I’ve been commenting about this “reality of departure” from the mainlines for some years now. As each group leaves — for various often excellent reasons — that group forms an entity in keeping with their theological values and principles. Such an entity is generally “wrong” for the next wave that departs, because they have different reasons for departure, based on different values and principles, and the previous entity has embedded the original values/principles in its structure and dna.
The obvious example is that the Continuing Anglicans who departed in the 1970s and early 80s didn’t choose to join the REC — whose founders and then later developers obviously had entirely different values/principles that formed the entity. Those who left in 2003 didn’t announce a wholesale exit *to* the AMiA entity. And so on and so forth.
Six to seven years ago people were wondering if the new departures from the PCUSA would go to the PCA and I thought it was pretty clear that they weren’t but would instead create new entities more in keeping with their values/principles.