The Road to Tanzania

Captain Yips Secret Journal ^ | 2/07/207 | Jack White

[sionnsar]

A big deep breath, a short look back.

Anglican Christianity is a smear or a gradient, including a range of opinion and practice. This drives some people a little crazy - they want it to be a pinpoint - and others try to take advantage of it. They have found that if they attenuate it enough, you can sneak in anything, including Canaanite goddess rituals or Wiccan hocus-pocus.

For quite a while, The Episcopal Church has been acting more and more outside that smear; eventually the rest of the Communion took notice. They asked TEC to stop, to become aware that it was acting hurtfully, and to please not do it again. The Windsor/Dromantine requests set a very low bar for settling the dispute: stay within the agreed consensus of Anglican Christianity, even when you disagree; respect the boundaries of opinion even when you lose a vote; and don’t act outside the consensus again. Unless, of course, you want to leave, to launch your own boat. It was the broad side of a barn if there ever was one.

TEC couldn’t hit it.

In fact, the core leadership of TEC doesn’t even seem to understand the requests, much less respond to them. It is as if your teenager, after years of increasingly bad behavior, threw a wild party in your absence during which he and his guests trashed the neighborhood, pulverized the family heirlooms, and tried to put the cat down the disposal. Now he’s mad at his younger brother for calling the police, at the police for breaking up the party, and at the neighbors for pitching in to clean up the mess (and take the cat to the vet). And when confronted says, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”

So now we come to the point where the family gathers to decide what to do with the teenager. The aunts and uncles all have ideas about what to do. “Tough love” is the prevailing sentiment - but what kind of tough love? And some of the aunts and uncles are pretty suspicious of each other. And at the head of the table sits Grandpa Williams, who still hopes that the delinquent can reform, but knows that something has to be done to protect the rest of the family. For years he has let everyone else talk; he stirs, seems about to speak. What will he say?

[sionnsar]

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