Bishop Henderson: It's "Business as Usual" in the Church

The Right Rev. Dorsey Henderson has issued a statement to clarify the nature of the proceedings which the Disciplinary Board for Bishops, of which he is the President, is conducting against the Rt. Rev. Mark Lawrence of South Carolina. (H/T: Doug LeBlanc, Living Church Foundation.) The statement asserts that the Disciplinary Board is proceeding as an entire body under the special provisions in the canon covering abandonment of communion by bishops (Canon IV.16), instead of following the process dictated by Canon IV.17, which uses an Intake Officer, a Panel of Reference, and then other panels, as I discussed in this earlier post.

There is certainly a plausible case for reading Canon IV.16 as Bishop Henderson does in his statement, if one isolates its language from all the rest of Title IV. However, it must be noted that the drafters of the new Title left quite a bit open for argument, because they wrote the very next canon (IV.17) in this way (emphasis added)....To read more, click here.