Episcopalians and the Little Sect on the Prairie

"Kiss my ring. Bow down before Me and despair."

Pope John the Malefactor is crowing about a $100,000 gift, possibly more coming from an ELS donor. His leadership caused the sect to cut $80,000 from the budget as congregations left with their property and benevolence donations. The permanent damage is difficult to assess.

Pope John will be remembered for creating a new Lutheran denomination by his determined application of the Left Foot of Fellowship.

The ELS and WELS have a nifty solution for the problems they create. Instead of facing their own doctrinal incompetence, they invent new rules. The ELS solution is "No more LCMS colloquy pastors!"

That was the problem. Pastor Rolf Preus came into the ELS (where his father and uncle both served) with the same concept of the congregation as many ELS pastors held. But lo, the Wisconsin sect wanted to impose its Fuller Seminary papism on the ELS through Moldstad and Schmeling. Those two lapdogs immediately began telling the clergy what they would believe, teach, and confess. Years later the lapdogs finessed a vote. Some clergy objected, so Pope John took action.

Norm Teigen confessed to being doctrinally fatigued. Doctrinal debates should be welcomed, not shunned. The trouble is, the papal-Lutheran leaders--like other apostates--cannot tolerate any dissent. Clergy should be able to discuss polity without threats, defenestrations, shunning, excommunication. Pope John walked up to one pastor and said, "Do not take communion with the rest of us." (I am paraphrasing.) Exactly what convention, resolution, or confessional document gave Pope John the Malefactor the power to do a drive-by excommunication? The clergy should be ashamed of themselves for tolerating his oppressive yoke.

Lutherans should look at the Episcopalian Church to see what lies ahead of them if they continue their cowed, subservient attitude toward the hierarchy.

Here is a note about church history. The Lutheran Church was vital and growing when there were dozens of little groups based on ethnic ties to Europe. The more they merged to form large synods, the more they engaged in navel-gazing and power plays. ELCA is the largest and worst.

The Little Sect on the Prairie has been known as the Little Norwegians because they refused to take part in the 1917 merger of Norwegian groups, a merger based on doctrinal compromise and ambiguity. The big Norwegians eventually merged into ELCA.

"Error loves ambiguity." Krauth.

Episcopal Crack-UP

Caption Created by Episcopalian Who Left To Join Rome

SAN JOAQUIN: Whither Bound?

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
12/10/2007

The question is what will happen now that the first diocese, in the history of The Episcopal Church (TEC), has officially voted to leave the denomination. San Joaquin is just one of four dioceses, and possibly six or seven more, ready to follow suit.

Several things are assured.

The lightning rod issue of Gene Robinson's consecration, as the first openly homoerotic bishop living in a same-sex relationship with another man, brought to a head what has been the church's simmering, underlying rejection of Holy Scripture as normative on all matters of faith and order.

The Episcopal Church's rejection of 2,000 years of church history and biblical exegesis on human sexuality is the final straw for orthodox Episcopalians. (The Anglican Church of Canada is also breaking up for the same reasons.)

We will now see a huge exodus from The Episcopal Church exposing what will become an enormous public relations nightmare, a disaster that it cannot possibly reverse, despite the fiction put out by homosexual leaders like Louie Crew and Bishop Robinson that an inclusive church would see an enormous influx of Roman Catholic homosexuals and other closeted homosexuals who want a place to worship. That hasn't happened. Robinson's consecration four years ago has only emptied churches .

An ecclesiastical blood-bath is clearly in the making. Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of TEC, has made it abundantly clear, in less than reconciling language, that there will be "potential consequences", code for lawsuits, now that Bishop John-David Schofield and the majority of his diocese have voted to leave the national church.

She will inhibit Bishop Schofield on the grounds that he has abandoned the communion of the church, though in point of fact he has abandoned neither its doctrine nor the Anglican Communion. She will declare the diocese hers and those remaining in the Episcopal Church will organize with a new diocesan convention and elect a replacement Standing Committee. Meantime Mrs. Jefferts Schori will probably put in an assisting bishop with an office to serve the handful of parishes she says belong to her until a new diocesan bishop search process is initiated and a new bishop elected and consecrated. This will change nothing. Schofield has declared himself under the ecclesiastical authority of the Most Rev. Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone and is answerable only to him. He is now outside the jurisdiction of the Episcopal Church. He will not be intimidated by any of the actions of TEC, Mrs. Jefferts Schori, HOD leader Bonnie Anderson or legal schnauzer David Booth Beers. The bishop has had plenty of time to prepare for whatever they will do.

A legal blood-bath is now in the making in which millions of dollars will be spent by both sides to retain properties through secular law courts. Whoever wins or loses, it is an overall public relations disaster for the Episcopal Church that no amount of fine talk about inclusion and diversity can or will reverse. The net loss is to the denomination. The net winner will be Beers' law firm. Furthermore, the issues will be aired publicly in the media where TEC will be officially known as "the gay church" that ordinary straight folk run away from in revulsion in order to protect their children. (They will make sure their sons join the Boy Scouts, a movement also reviled by The Episcopal Church for its lack of sexual inclusion.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury, from whom we have yet to hear, will issue a statement that can be read by both sides as a win or a loss depending on how one chooses to interpret it, but it will, in the end, change nothing. The die has been cast and whatever he says will be ignored by the orthodox as they have waited long enough for a definitive stand from him. The House of Bishops meeting recently in New Orleans,reconfirmed their worst fears that there will be no change of direction by TEC. The communion is effectively in tatters.

Dr. Williams retains the option of withdrawing Bishop Schofield's invitation to Lambeth, next year, but the San Joaquin bishop might not care as more and more Primates and bishops have said they probably won't be attending, anyway. Nigeria, the largest province in the Anglican Communion, has said they will not attend if their North American franchise (CANA) bishops are not invited. They won't be. Other African provinces including Uganda and Rwanda have said their bishops won't be attending. Lambeth itself might be irrelevant by that time.

All in all, Bishop Schofield and the majority of his diocese are free at last from the revisionist clutches of a Gnostic Church bent on its own self-destruction. The Episcopal Church has declared itself forever motu proprio from the truth of the gospel by the actions of General Convention in 2003. The winner is Jesus and the gospel, and the freedom the diocese now has to proclaim that message in a clear unalloyed fashion, no longer burdened by having to hear endless whining about inclusion and diversity, sodomy and transgendered behavior.

The Kingdom of God can now be advanced in an atmosphere free of spiritual pollution, with the diocese free to make its own mistakes, but never free to compromise the message. That message can now be shouted from freed parishes unhindered by compromise.