The New Province

A few initial thoughts about the new province:

1) Christians getting together outside of their own church can be a good thing. They leave the provinciality of their local congregation, once founded, for example on hating Anglo-Catholics or objecting to wimmyn on the altar of God. Those edges, now revealed to be adiaphora, will be smoothed.

2) I’m impressed with an organiation where Evangelicals are hanging with Catholics, Catholics are hanging out with wannabe catholics and whites are submitting to blacks.   Those who hated the idea of Women on the altar will room with people who merely didn’t like the 1979 prayerbook.  Those who didn’t like Pike will hang out with those who only left because of some other reason, like incense.  In this way they will be kind of like TEC, except for the gay thing.

3) A new province doesn’t mean that TEC won’t be recognized. It simply means that instead of engaging with TEC on a national level, they’ll be engaging at an international level.  They’ll probably run into us in coffee shops or some Renaissance Festival.

4) Question: Does Bob Duncan secretly want to be a pope?

5) The curmudgeonly priests who didn’t like to hang out with other diocesan clergy now have a home with other curmudgeons.

6) Common Cause doesn’t quite recognize they have an image problem.  They don’t realize that an image problem might be important when dealing with the press.

7) Perhaps, now that we’re out of their system, they’ll discover that the challenges of the culture to the Christian Churches are far deeper than sexuality or reading the bible.  People are going to continue to have sex, and would rather watch the bible on YouTube.

8) They’ve got a lot of bishops. Bishops are trouble.  Mad trouble.

9) TEC’s challenge remains. Does it have the leadership to capitalize on being liberated from these continuing churches? The institutional church is dying. Can TEC reconfigure itself to make tentmakers?

10) If the liberal church dies, it is the remnant conservatives who will inherit the body of The Episcopal Church.  And they will be in a much stronger place to proclaim the Gospel.

11) Yet, if there remains a witness to an intellectually credible, progressive church, we modernists have nothing to worry about.