A.S. Haley: The Via Media Movement: No Orthodoxy -- We're Episcopalian!

Thursday, August 12, 2010

In February, after Bishop Mark Lawrence published the correspondence between his Chancellor and Mr. Thomas Tisdale, who called himself "South Carolina counsel for the Episcopal Church", I put up a post entitled "What in the World Is Going on in South Carolina?" I asked how it could be that the Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor had hired their own attorney to investigate Bishop Lawrence's actions, unless there were some kind of a move afoot to lay charges of "abandonment of Communion" against the good Bishop. Such a move, if taken before there was any action by the diocesan convention toward leaving the Church, would have eerie parallels to what the Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor had done in the case of then-Bishop Robert Duncan, of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Let it never be said that Episcopalians are ones to let a good title go to waste. For the Episcopal Forum of South Carolina, a group first organized in 2003 as a counterweight to reaction in the Diocese to the confirmation of the election of the Bishop of New Hampshire, soon announced a series of forums across the State in April and May of this year, entitled "What in the World Is Going on in the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina"?

I began doing some delving into the pages at the Forum's website, and what I found sheds a little more light on what is really going on in the Diocese of South Carolina. Mark Lawrence may not have realized just what he walked into when he was elected a second time by the Diocese to succeed Bishop Edward L. Salmon, Jr. -- a second time, because the Presiding Bishop ruled that the consents by a few of the standing committees had not been "in order" following the first election. He was the only candidate on the second go-around, so it is obvious that a strong majority of the clergy and the laity in the Diocese were determined that he should be their bishop. However, the members of the Episcopal Forum were not as convinced as the majority. the rest