Lanette Carpenter can’t say enough about the people of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Hurst, especially choir members she has sung with for years.
“They’ve walked with me through the best and worst times of my life,” she said.
But the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, including St. Stephen’s, is to break officially from the Episcopal Church today, becoming the fourth diocese in the nation to leave since last year over such issues as the ordination of female priests and the acceptance of an openly gay bishop.
Though Ms. Carpenter doesn’t agree with everything the Episcopal Church does, she loves it, and doesn’t want to leave.
So on Sunday, she and other Episcopal Church loyalists from St. Stephen’s plan to hold services at a local women’s club.
“It’s like a man and woman getting a divorce, and now they have to have two households,” she said. “It saddens me greatly.”
Read it all. This is not mainly over “social” issues, but theological ones, the nature, authority and intepretation of the Bible, how the church makes decisions, marriage, Christology and yes, even soteriology, the nature and means of salvation.
Sorry, but I think it ‘is’ over social issues – namely one, gays. Trying to hide it under Biblical interpretation, theology, etc. is just an attempt to hide behind discrimination. Thus, the truth is that some of us believe God made gay people gay, and some of you believe that people sinfully “choose” to be gay. It’s about gays. If it was just about women, Iker and his friends would have left twenty years ago. It’s about gays, just be honest about it.
[i] Sorry, but I think it ‘is’ over social issues—namely one, gays. Trying to hide it under Biblical interpretation, theology, etc. is just an attempt to hide behind discrimination. [/i] —Mark Johnson [#1]
How can you know that? Can you read our minds? If so, when you read the minds of leaders like Bishops Duncan, Ackerman, Guernsey, and Schofield, is this really all you see?
ECUSA has taken a huge lurch to the theological left over the past two decades and the position of orthodox Anglicans in ECUSA has become increasingly untenable.
#1
Wrong. The breaking-point issue was and is over [b]morality[/b]. It doesn’t matter who or what made you gay — whether God (as you suggest), a genetic mutation, influential early-life factors, choice, or whatever else — we are =all= under the same biblically defined and mandated moral order: heterosexuals and homosexuals alike.
You may not want to be. The majority of those in power in TEC have chosen not to be. For those who believe the Church ought to be serious about its profession of faith, this rejection of God’s moral order was the last ill wind in decades of theological drift away from the authority of Scripture. Their conclusion: Time to get in a different boat and change course. With a compass set to “true north.”
w.w.