Experts on the church said the deposing of Bishop Schofield had set the stage for the next phase of the conflict, which would most likely be lawsuits over diocesan and parish property.
The Rev. Ephraim Radner, a leading Episcopal conservative and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto, echoed other experts when he said the removal of Bishop Schofield would send a message to others considering a split with the church. Two other bishops have been warned not to proceed with votes to secede. Episcopal bishops denied, however, that the vote to depose the bishop was “punitive.”
“I don’t think we are sending messages but dealing with matters at hand,” Bishop Suffragan Catherine S. Roskam of New York said in a conference call. “We have dealt with it with sober conversation, dealt with it prayerfully and even regretfully.”
The honorable thing to do for those whose convictions lead them out of TEC is to leave without taking anything belonging to or connected with TEC with you. Most all of the early churches in the Continuing Church Movement (most especially the Anglican Province in America) did just that and they have experienced, growth blessing and prosperity. Present day reasserters, unlike their earlier predeccesors, seem willing to shake the TEC dust off their feet but cling to the TEC infrastructure, and material goods that formed and nurtured them. If you want to move out of your parent’s house; fine but what right have you to evict your parents, take their property and coffers and claim its really yours because they have failed to be the parents they once were to you! The Anglican Province in America took the high road and totally stepped out from TEC trusting in God to bless their endeavor and He has. Let all who would leave today have the same courage and leave the kitchen sink’s behind them. http://www.anglicanprovince.org/history.html
Actually, the kids have moved in and want to expel the parents and have a party — fornication and dope and all.
Unfortunately, this willful, spoiled generation has left the church so marginalized numerically that property and place matters for survival. That is their doing, not tradtioalists.
Not “punitive?” Surely they jest!
The TEc is the fastest declining denomination in the country hardly needs more buildings. The churches were built to be houses of worship not restaurants, bookstores or discos. Fighting for the churches to keep them from the new age General Convention “Church” (see the PeeBee’s Easter sermon if you have any doubt that the the TEc has left the Christian fold) is the correct thing to do.
Not “punitive” but “daring charity”, if you will have postmodern definitions of reality actualized within the week. But don’t trust them to last. If the ABC pulls the invites to the “consecrators” of VGR, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about the injustice of it all and the punitiveness of it all, no matter how much regret he would have expressed.
But don’t hold your breath.
What an amusing headline! I find that this irony — the idea that it is intelligible to “oust” somehow who has already “seceded” — is present in most of the news stories in a way that it is clearly not in the mind of the House of Bishops.