Posted on 07/12/2012 8:09:26 PM PDT by marshmallow
The headlines coming out of the Episcopal Church’s annual U.S. convention are stunning — endorsement of cross-dressing clergy, blessing same-sex marriage, the sale of their headquarters since they can’t afford to maintain it.
The American branch of the Church of England, founded when the Vatican balked at permitting King Henry VIII to continue executing any wife who failed to bear him sons, is in trouble.
Somehow slipping out of the headlines is a harsh reality that the denomination has been deserted in droves by an angry or ambivalent membership. Six prominent bishops are ready to take their large dioceses out of the American church and align with conservative Anglican groups in Africa and South America.
“An interesting moment came at a press conference on Saturday,” reports convention attendee David Virtue, “when I asked Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, if she saw the irony in that the House of Deputies would like to see the Church Center at 815 2nd Avenue, New Yorik, sold (it has a $37.5 million mortgage debt and needs $8.5 million to maintain yearly) while at the same time the national church spent $18 million litigating for properties, many of which will lie fallow at the end of the day.”
This is no longer George Washington’s Episcopal Church – in 1776 the largest denomination in the rebellious British colonies. Membership has dropped so dramatically that today there are 20 times more Baptists than Episcopalians.
U.S. Catholics out-number the Episcopal Church 33-to-1. There are more Jews than Episcopalians. Twice as many Mormons. Even the little African Methodist Episcopal denomination — which broke away after the Civil War — has passed the Episcopalians.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.beliefnet.com ...
This is one of those rhetorical question headlines, isn’t it?
Hollowed out by sodomites and one-world commies would be my guess. Do I win?
++This is one of those rhetorical question headlines, isn’t it?++
HAHAHA! You beat me to it.
Apostasy is a terrible thing.
I resigned the church in 1991 over their presiding bishop’s position on the 1st gulf war. The leadership are godless communists. I recommend that all faithful Anglican’s walk away and leave them and their property to their fate. After all, what’s the real market for homosexual marriage ceremonies, even though the flower arrangements will a thing to behold.
Wait this is a blog exerpt..where’s Humblegunner?
Oh gee. Where do I start?
Catherine of Aragon was not executed.
They'll be FABULOUS! ;o)
Disposing of his wives. He could have legitimized one of his bastards, but he was smitten of Anne Boleyn—and probably he was the cause of his wives’ lack of fertility. And look at his children. Mary infertile and dead before 40 and Edward dead much younger. And Elizabeth? Was she even fertile? Henry did not die as miserably as Herod, but he did not die well.
VD + Lead poisoning. Yow!
Perhaps because it was killed by the cancers of PC and liberalism? That’s my diagnosis, but I’m not Anglican.
“I resigned the church in 1991 over their presiding bishop’s position on the 1st gulf war.”
I don’t know the position, but a serious Christian could oppose that war on valid grounds. Having US troops go to liberate a Muslim monarchy from another Muslim country that tolerates Christianity, while asking the US troops to keep any crosses inside their uniforms so as not to offend our Muslim “clients”, was debatable. I would hate to be a Christian American soldier and find out I had killed an Iraqi Christian soldier as a mercenary for Kuwait/Saudi Arabia...
Good point. Also, GWI brought our troops into SAudia and later the Saudis said that they didn't want us, while AlQa used this as a pretext for 9.11 (saying that "infidels" had "dirtied" the "holy soil of Arabia")
One of Osama Bin Laden’s demands was that US troops leave Saudi, and we acquiesced.
A friend has a son in Kuwait now with the Army; he enlisted recently and will be in Afghanistan soon. While she was understandably concerned for his safety there, I told her she should also be concerned that he didn’t do anything he’d spend the rest of his life regretting. As I understand it, there are such reservations by some of the Americans that attacked the Iraqi convoys leaving Kuwait; they understood too clearly they were attacking people who weren’t even combatants at that point. Finding out afterwards that many of the stories of Iraqi “atrocities” didn’t help, either, and while Saudi (our “ally”) supplied 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, Iraq supplied none.
The most westernized Iraqis miss Saddam, and the protection he awarded them, in the wake of that whole fiasco. If the US wanted a real war, they could have defended Georgia when Russia invaded - but that didn’t happen. We don’t defend Christian nations like Georgia or Serbia; we fight for Bosnia, Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
Our policy has been for the last 20 years at least, drive out the Christians, set up the muslims, let them kill all the rest who won't or can't leave.
I like to think that for the first 16 years we were just stupid. A stupid hangover from Afghanistan — on hindsight it would have been better to let the Soviets crush the Mujahideen and then advance on Pakistan.
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