Anglican Curmudgeon: Why General Convention and 815 Are Irrelevant

In response to a recent post about 815's latest outrages on Christian principles and charity, a commenter posed this question:

You wrote, "In other words, for ordinary Episcopalians, local is everything; national (so long as it remains corrupted) is nothing." As one who has departed, I felt like my understanding of catholicity wouldn't allow me to make an assertion like that. No matter how hard I tried, I still kept coming back to the notion that how could I have an 'Episcopal Church Welcomes You' sign in front of our building, and the other parish in town had one as well, yet I knew that we were preaching, teaching, and proclaiming two different versions of the Gospel. However, as St. Paul says, there aren't two! It would be very easy to say that the local congregation is everything, and weave a cocoon around ourselves, and do our own thing, Yet, I kept being confronted by the universal nature of the church and her teachings, and I kept being confronted by that. Can you flesh that out for me, and how you've reconciled that in your mind?

We start with the observation that the Church's national leadership is corrupt -- and by "corrupt", I do not mean that they are accepting bribes, or committing high crimes and misdemeanors in office. Rather, I mean that they are corrupt as Christians: they continually do and say things that emphatically are not Christian. (Suing fellow Christians; treating the Resurrection as allegorical and spiritual, rather than physical; preaching religious pluralism; supporting abortion -- the list could go on and on.)

And this corruption extends not just to the leadership at 815 Second Avenue; it permeates the House of Bishops and the entire General Convention, as well. The House of Bishops is corrupt, because after selecting the Presiding Bishop, it has given her free rein and refused to curb her petty despotism -- to say nothing of its sanctioning same-sex blessings and now marriages, in open violation of the rubrics and canons. And General Convention shows its increasing corruption with the legislation it sees fit to enact at each new session. It also has allowed the Presiding Bishop's litigation agenda to run amok, while funding it willingly out of Church trust funds and other monies it is robbing from mission work. Read more