The End

http://hillsofthenorth.blogspot.com/2008/09/end.html

[Hills of the North] 20 Sep 2008--I suspect through the years many death certificates have been prepared for the Episcopal Church, and many obituaries have been written. And certainly there are armchair physicians out there diagnosing the ills of this very sick patient who would feel some satisfaction if their diagnoses and prognoses are proven correct. But the fact is that the Episcopal Church as an organization is not going to die, however chronic its many maladies. It has the life support of substantial assets, assets that would be there even if every disgruntled parish and diocese were allowed to take their property with them. It has endowments that will enable it to continue however small its membership may be, and however irrelevant it has become. In short, it is almost impossible to envisage the Episcopal Church dying as an institution. After all, if Revolution and Civil War did not bring about its demise, it's hard to see what would now. Those orthodox believers who seek vindication in such a demise are destined to be forever disappointed and tragically distracted.

That said, for all intents and purposes the Episcopal Church as a church died yesterday. In purporting to depose Bishop Robert Duncan, two-thirds of those bishops who attended the House of Bishops meeting did something so blatantly and brazenly unlawful under the canons and so patently violative of Robert's Rules that they in effect announced that within our church words and laws and truth no longer matter. All that matters is power. Not the power of the Gospel, mind you--but raw human secular power, exercised for political purposes. Those bishops who voted to depose (and the one cowardly Judas who changed his vote after being sure it wasn't needed to destroy his brother bishop) openly and proudly embraced what was a lie--that there had been abandonment of Communion--and did so by embracing transparent lies about what the canons and parliamentary procedure actually said. Those charged to guard the truth yesterday gleefully showed their fealty to the very opposite.