The Episcopal Church as Rebellious Teenager

While cruising through the morning's news, I came across a link (h/t: Thinking Anglicans) to a piece published at the Huffington Post, and authored by none other than the Canon to the Presiding Bishop, the Rev. Canon C. K. Robertson, Ph.D. It seems that Canon Robertson is an official visitor from ECUSA to the current meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England (July 5-13). He took the occasion to remind his English hosts that the Episcopal Church (USA) is "independent but connected", as far as its relations with the Anglican Communion are concerned. He began with the official 815 Capsule Version™ of our Church's history:

The Rev. William White spent several years with the group we now know as the Founding Fathers. As chaplain to the Continental Congress, he met with them, dined with them, swapped late-night stories with them (his next-door neighbor was Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence). White's unique role gave him a front row seat to the debates of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest concerning the single most important issue of the day: independence. How could a collection of British colonies live into a new reality as a united, self-governing nation? How could they maintain the best of the values they had inherited while creating a new system that would fit their context? As they deliberated, White listened ... and learned.

White was also an ordained Church of England minister. Having witnessed firsthand the birth of a new Republic, he turned his attention to the labor pains of a Church that could no longer be "of England" in name or composition, but neither could it be wholly unfamiliar. Through the Constitution that White wrote for this Episcopal Church, as it would become known, he helped create "a church government that will contain the constituent principles of the Church of England, and yet be independent of foreign jurisdiction or influence." Actually, this was no newborn he was helping along, but rather an adult child ready to strike out on its own, leaving the nest and creating a life separate from the expectations of its parent.

An "adult child"? If that phrase accurately describes the nascent Church at the end of the eighteenth century, then how, pray tell, does one account for its 21st-century regression to being a rebellious teenager? Let's face facts: the Episcopal Church (USA) has done more to snub the Anglican Communion than any other single church among its members: for references, see this post, this post, this post, and many more at this page. (In fact, the Presiding Bishop went out of her way to make the snub personal to the Church of England itself.)

To read more, click here.

As may be seen in my latest article, "The Thirty-Nine Articles and Anglican Comprehensiveness (Part 1)," the departure of the Episcopal Church from the doctrines of the reformed Church of England began very early in her history. What we are seeing in the twenty-first century is the outcome of those earlier departures.