As a new and renewing church, The Episcopal Church celebrates the joys and challenges of a global community called to mission and filled with hope. Amid growing concern about the state of the Church in turbulent times, there are signs of
growing mission, transformation, resiliency, and the presence of the ever-creative and renewing work of the Spirit. Our Church is changing as we shift our gaze from an inward view on conflict resolution to an outward focus on mission. Hope, collaboration, and joy are the images that will describe the State of the Church as we move into a new triennium.
Over the past three years, a group from across the Church has been listening to stories, analyzing data, and developing a snapshot of our collective health and vitality. This information has been compiled into a State of the Church (SOTC) report,
which will be presented to the 2015 General Convention. This report not only provides a glimpse of the Church in action, as it is now, captured into freeze-frame stillness, but it also will be an important artifact, serving as a point on a historical timeline–something to observe and say wisely with the clarity of hindsight, yes, this is when THIS all began, or ended, or shifted.
“The advanced—and still advancing—age of the Church’s membership, combined with a low birth rate, means that the Church loses 16,000 people a year—nearly the equivalent of one average-sized diocese per year through deaths over births. .. We need to change the ways in which we assess vitality.”
Translation: we don’t like these figures so…instead of asking what is happening and what needs to change, we’re going to ignore these and try to measure something else that makes us look better, or at least not so bad.
My favorite line in the piece is this one: “Money has replaced issues of sexuality as the most commonly reported topic of conflict.”
Heh.
Wonder why on earth that is???
Have only read the blurb. Sure this had to be Satire… and that really this was Sarah or somebody impersonating TEC-speak.
Wow! Just Wow. What were they smoking when they wrote this?!?!
I’m too tired now, but I’m looking forward to reading and savoring this in the morning for the sheer humor and absurdity of this. (Though actually, it’s terribly sad too to see such incredible delusion and deceit.)
Sigh. I’ve long since decided that these things are not worth the effort of fisking, but oh well. Once more into the breach . . .
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH TODAY
HOW WE SEEK AND SERVE
o Our congregations are dying
o We’re running out of money
o So, we need to collaborate and share resources more
o And it’s much nicer since all those orthodox creeps left
o But things are so bad, our Potemkin dioceses look like the wave of the future.
HOW WE LEAD
o We need more unrepentent sinners (esp. those with SSA) in leadership
o Our seminaries are failing (financially and spiritually), but if we jettison all that God stuff we can shorten up/cheapen the path to ordination
o And it’ll be even easier if we combine all the seminaries into one
o Or even better, if we close them all and let the dioceses choose their own ordination standards.
DeeBee, excellent summary!