ACI’s letter to the Bishops of the Episcopal Church – revisited

From Anglican Mainstream
November 30th, 2012

Read open letter from The Rev. Prof. Christopher Seitz, The Rev. Dr. Philip Turner and The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner here.

Read also some of the comments from Kendall Harmon's blog, including this one by Pageantmaster (an Englishman) :

If I were an Episcopal Church Bishop receiving this letter as an addressee, which thankfully I am not qualified to be, and therefore do not have to swear allegience to a particular interpretation of TEC’s constitution as Goodwin Proctor shall feel like making it up from time to time, I think I would not be very pleased with Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori. Consider:

1. She has a dreadful record of wasting Episcopal Church resources, mostly on the dreadful firm of Goodwin Proctor and its partner acting as her Chancellor.

2. She has made the Episcopal Church into a by-word for arbitrary and reckless behaviour and persecution around the world and in doing so has now purported to depose hundreds of priests and dozens of bishops, including Bishop Henry Scriven of the Church of England, to the extent that her actions are regularly quoted in England as an example we do not want to follow, and we treat her purported depositions which put Madame Defarge in the shade with contempt, including her presumption against Bishop Henry Scriven and her latest escapades against Bishop Lawrence.

3. Her latest little escapade has backfired massively, because she triggered by her latest attack on South Carolina an automatic dissociation of the entire diocese, and this is no tiny diocese like Nevada from which desert place she hails as its bishop and Dean of a divinity school which exists only as her ‘Truth’ in the Walter Mitty world in which she lives.

4. South Carolina is a huge loss to TEC – virtually its only consistently growing diocese, at 29,444 members.

5. Between 2010 and 2011, TEC lost 28,861 members. In one fell swoop, the Presiding Bishop managed to ensure a similar loss in 2012. Got to keep up her average, I suppose. Now in Episcopal Church terms, South Carolina is one of the largest dioceses, and is equivalent to the Presiding Bishop losing a small Anglican Communion province, being larger than the Scottish Episcopal Church, or the Province of South East Asia, or the Southern Cone.

Let me just repeat that figure, twenty-nine thousand Epsiscopalians in a diocese have been alienated by the sole actions of the Presiding Bishop. That is a breathtaking record of failure by this Presiding Bishop, all of which comes down to her personal mendacity and total incompetence. It need not have happened but so determined is this vicious zealot that it seems not to matter to her. If I were a TEC bishop, I would be appalled.

Read more here at TitusOneNine