Posted on 01/05/2020 6:13:37 AM PST by Kaslin
“This church has about 30 more years before it is dead,” stated one young man at a 2016 forum at the Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) in Alexandria, Virginia, as quoted in the recent book The Seduction of the Episcopal Church. Therein Anglican author David Virtue, a longtime critical observer of worldwide Anglicanism, reviews the Episcopal Church’s decades-long fall from grace in an exposé of Christian folly in accommodating a secularized, sexualized modernity.
Virtue tells the depressing, detailed “story of a once proud Christian denomination that stood as a landmark church in a nation that has seen presidents, senators and business leaders pass through its hallowed red doors.” “Spiritual and ecclesiastical death marks the present and future state of this denomination” today as Episcopal Church membership has cratered from a 1966 peak of 3,647,297, to 1,676,349 in 2018. Particularly the 2003 consecration of noncelibate homosexual V. Gene Robinson as an Episcopal bishop unleashed an “ecclesiastical tsunami wave” and the “worst single outflow of Episcopalians in modern history,” over 100,000.
In an Episcopal Church “intoxicated with the spirit of the age,” 31 percent of Episcopalians according to the latest statistics are 65 or older while 79 percent do not have a child under 18. Procreation seems a secondary concern for Episcopalians, 79 and 74 percent of whom, respectively, think abortion should be legal in all or most cases and favor same-sex “marriage.” Rather than walking any orthodox straight and narrow, 47 percent of Episcopalians say the Bible is not God’s Word and 51 percent of Episcopalians seldom or never read Scripture.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
They should go back to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.
I was raised in the Episcopal Church; my father had had misgivings about what was happening to “his” church since the 1970s, and finally pulled us out of there in the early 90s.
Even though I look back on the worship and think it was more “empty forms” than anything genuinely heartfelt, I still miss it.
In Kansas City, Episcopal is where all those who consider themselves high society (vacuous) attend.
Isn’t it interesting how the Left never tries to infiltrate and subjugate a mooselimb church?
Amen
When the Episcopal Church was established during the same time frame as the US Constitution, 13 diocese were formed. One for each State. It was set up like the Federation of States with each separate, yet connected with the others. The national church was to be governed by a General Convention meeting every three years and consisting of a House of Bishops and House of Deputies (half clergy and half lay people) The nominal head was to be a Presiding Bishop elected by the Convention. The Bishop elected was to remain a Diocesan Bishop as his only job was to preside over the House of Bishops and the Convention. He had no authority or power. What is today has all been added over the years,
When the present church finally withers and dies, then the individual parishes around the nation, at least in the South and mid-America may well rise again as most Episcopalians I know don’t pay any attention to the national church’s doings.
The early church had it right.
Believe it or not, there was a time a few generations ago when the church was known as, “The Republican Party at prayer.”
As a cradle Episcopalian who left and eventually became Catholic. I say you will find what you miss and more there.
I was baptized Episcopalian but the church left the station a LONG time ago. Now I’m just a plain old Christian.
I see them as partners in hatred. The Left likes how Islamists handle the -- what's it called? "Wet work"?
Yes, when the Christian denominations acquiesced to the decadence of Western Civilization and adopted its "new morality" (which was nothing but immorality, renamed in newspeak), they merely succumbed to the internal moral rot and decay that are the destroyer of civilizations.
Its advocates seemed to think that they had discovered something new, choosing not to recognize the immorality, the decadence, the moral rot and decay for what they are, so intoxicated were they with the seductive delights of decadence and its permissiveness,
And thus they followed the crowd and led their followers into one of the oldest traps in the world, where they continue to sink in willful blindness, denial, and hubris.
At the dawn of Western Civilization, its mythology warned against this trap.
How apposite that Western Civilization should end by ignoring those very warnings!
Ichabod.
Leave. Let them revel in their degeneracy. The corpse that was a church is hopelessly reprobate.
We are nominally still members of an Episcopal church. We attend less and less and only that because of a remaining attachment to a few of the congregants and one fellowship group. With the retirement of our rector the congregation went into a long process of seeking new leadership. Apparently it took a long time to find a suitable person in a same-sex marriage raising a child. All the politically correct boxes have been ticked and our virtue signalling committee can congratulate itself. We attended a service recently and found him insufferably dull and depressing. Why oh why?
See #13
Is that Ichabod in Hebrew script?
Yes
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