A Presbyterian and an Episcopalian walk into a bar ...
Posted: July 18, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

It's 95 degrees today – too hot to discuss anything serious – so I'm going to write about the Presbyterians and Episcopalians, who seem intent upon turning their sacred franchises into a comedy show.

As you know, presbyopia is the visual malady that renders its victims unable to see what's right in front of their noses. Presbyterian comes from the same root word, presbys, meaning old, or perhaps in this case, over the hill. The theory behind the denomination is that if your church is run by a bunch of geezers who have been around the block a few times, they will keep you from doing anything excessively stupid.

The theory worked OK until 1965, when membership peaked at 4,254,597, and the church's liberals proposed a new confession. "The Confession of 1967," named for the year it was adopted, downplayed the authority of the Bible in favor of assorted social issues. By the end of 1999, membership had plummeted to 2,560,201, a 39.8 percent drop.

Last month, the PCUSA decided to test the basement again. At their general assembly June 20 in Alabama, the denomination approved what Richard Ostling of AP called a "two-sided unity plan" – surely one of the most hilarious phrases ever to emerge from the theological conflicts of our generation. As Ostling describes the rewards, "For the conservatives, a church law remains in place that requires clergy and lay officers to limit sex to man-woman marriage. ..."
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