Readers are asked carefully to note the legal and historical fiction in the article in which it is claimed the 224th annual Convention of the Episcopal Church in South Carolina was held. That cannot be true legally or historically since no entity of that name existed until the last few years when TEC founded the new diocese–KSH.
“The East Cooper Episcopal Church is the only member church of the Anglican Communion in the East Cooper area.”
Leaving aside issues of ecclesiology, and just looking at it from a missiological perspective, this seems like a bizarre thing to put in a press release, or to mention in an interview for a secular newspaper. Does that sentence mean anything to anyone who is not fairly already fairly immersed in the Anglican world? Can you picture some Mom-Dad-Bud-Sis unchurched family trying to decide on a Saturday afternoon where to attend church for the first time in years, and saying, “Well, we could go to the Pentecostal Church down the street, or that new community church, but I think we should go to this other church because it is “the only member Church in the Anglican Communion in the East Cooper area.” It sounds like members of the Club looking for new suitable members, rather than welcoming in people from the world. By the way, if my understanding is correct, the sentence is inaccurate from an ecclesiastical perspective. Provinces are members of the Anglican Communion, not congregations. The congregation in question may well be (and, I am sure, is) a congregation of a diocese within a province that is a member of the Anglican Communion, but the congregation is not a member of the Anglican Communion.
Actually, I understand that there is a canonical issue as to whether the “Episcopal Church in South Carolina” is a validly formed diocese. But that for another day….