By Mark A. Kellner, The Desert News.
As Episcopal Church leaders prepare to elect a new presiding bishop and vote on a “special liturgy” for same-sex marriage ceremonies and organizational changes to the 1.8 million-member denomination, not all are in agreement over the health and future of one of the nation’s oldest Christian faiths.
Some understandable soul-searching has taken place in the wake of the church losing half its membership since 1966, 12 percent in the past nine years alone. The denomination’s progressive stances are blamed for much of the exodus by conservatives, while other clergy say the church is going through needed “pruning” as it becomes more inclusive to reflect today’s society.
The Rev. W. Frank Allen of Radnor, Pennsylvania, is one of 800 lower-house delegates coming to Salt Lake City for the movement’s triennial General Convention beginning Monday. He is pleased the denomination accommodates a diverse following of worshippers.
“I think that our church is poised for some real growth,” said the Rev. Allen, rector of 300-year-old St. David’s Episcopal Church in the Philadelphia suburb. “Sociologically and theologically, we’re open we have people at all ends of the spectrum. Spiritually you can have (Episcopal) churches that are very high church, with lots of ceremony, incense and bells; other times you don’t know that you’re in a church.”
His own flock at St. David’s is flourishing: Membership totals 3,300, of which between 650 and 700 attend one of multiple worship services each Sunday. St. David’s first church, constructed in a year by the Welsh-immigrant farmers who tamed Radnor’s fields, still hosts three of those weekly sessions; the other meetings are in a new chapel on a 40-acre campus.
Four hours south of St. David’s, in Richmond, Virginia, the Rev. Charles Alley leads the 600-member St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church. An average of 270 attend worship each Sunday, he said. Although the parish counts its history in decades, not centuries, the congregation remains vibrant, even if its rector is a bit anxious about recent trends in the parent church.
“There is a certain flavor of chaos” in the Episcopal Church, the Rev. Alley said. He said “a lack of consistency” between the church’s constitution and laws, called canons, and the way leaders are operating is confusing and somewhat “intentional, to get a certain agenda accomplished.”
The Rev. Alley believes the Episcopal Church, which voted to ordain women as priests in 1976 and installed its first openly homosexual bishop in 2004, may be “so interested in being relevant (that) in many ways we’ve rendered ourselves irrelevant as a church.”
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According to the graphic, the Episcopal Church only lost 27,423 active members last year. According to the Layman Online’s Comparative Statistics Spreadsheet, the last time the PC(USA) lost that small a number of active members was 1999, when it lost 27,473. Since then, the PC(USA) has lost 892,434 members (not counting membership losses so far this year), amounting to 59,496 members lost on average per year, and last year alone, it lost 92,433 members. And in the same time period in which the Episcopal Church lost 18% of its members, the PC(USA) lost 29.4%. Ten years ago, the PC(USA) had nearly 100,000 more members than the Episcopal Church; today, the Episcopal Church has nearly 200,000 more members than the PC(USA).
Both denominations have been actively working on alienating their more theologically orthodox constituencies and seeking to divest departing congregations of their property, all the while making themselves blend in more with the world, adopting its philosophies and ideologies, so they can’t tell anyone why in the world they should become a Christian, let alone an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian.
So then, if the two denominations are having a competition to see which can rid itself of unwanted membership the fastest while making itself completely irrelevant, it would seem that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is winning.
ecusa and the pcusa holding hands on the slip-n-slide to irrelevance, when the outside world can’t tell the difference between them and the church, why bother going.
Paradoxically, the more inclusive these churches become, the fewer members they have and the more everyone thinks the same way. Hmm.
“Sociologically and theologically, we’re open we have people at all ends of the spectrum.”
But being “open” is not the same thing as actually having a diverse membership. They are still mostly aging white liberals.
As one might say “these are the times that try all souls”.
Last time I looked, PCUSA has lost 50% of its national membership in the past 20 years. And why do you think this has happened? It has occurred because congregations have had enough of the “go along, get along” idea that contemporary thought relegated the Bible to only a reference that is nice to know but not an absolute authoritarian plan for living our lives. Its as simple as that. Folks who want to live a lifestyle that is not in accordance with Biblical mandates want the sanction of the church. Its as simple as that. The Bible is NOT a flexible document. Its interpretations are absolute. People leave the PCUSA because they want a belief system that can change their lives and be a part of an insurance policy for salvation. You can NOT find those things in PCUSA which can only flaunt its failure to provide Biblical assurance.
Time for the marsh mellow, cream puff preachers to seek a new line of work because the real battle is emerging where the political left and progressives want many of us to accept same sex marriage or else, that is conform to the abomination of gayness or be cast out. The girly men so called preachers will wet their pants when confronted by the gay society to conform because better to conform than fight.
Brilliantly said.