The ESA and the AAC have agreed that they will protect parishes cut off from orthodox bishops by crossing diocesan boundary lines. At least two such events are already in the pipeline. The four ESA bishops and at least six others are "on call" for such duty.
If a parish in a hostile diocese first makes a sincere effort to ask its own diocesan bishop for permission for outside episcopal visitation, and if that is not granted, then someone from the cadre of "flying bishops" will go into action and meet the needs of that parish. Individual persons cut off are in the most painful circumstances, and they are urged to find a congregation which is Biblically faithful as near to them as they can. Or, to form one.
Parishes in danger of losing their property are urged to stand firm for truth even at the expense of such loss. It may be possible in some cases to buy out the diocesan interest in the parish property -- especially since so many of the rebel dioceses are in financial straights.
I made a recommendation at the meeting that all parishes should be given full title to their own property, in order to create a proper check and balance between our rightfully top-down episcopal authority in doctrine and practice by a counter-balance of bottom-up direction in matters of material and support.
This commitment of episcopal support for harassed parishes and persons had to come or there would be another massive draining of membership from the Episcopal Church. Whole parishes are ready to leap, and they would be scattering to the winds.
In my estimation, one of two things will happen out of the above plans.
(1) The orthodox will be able to implement a province in the sense that the word means another branch within the Episcopal Church, and from there be able to take back the Episcopal Institution for God and bring it back into the real Church of God. Or,
(2) The orthodox province will move out of the jurisdiction of the Episcopal Institution altogether and become a totally independent province in the Anglican Communion. If this happens, it will most likely be because the pseudo-liberal forces in control will, by presentments against the orthodox bishops or by vote in Convention, deny the orthodox leadership a seat in the Convention. There is already considerable support among the Asian and African bishops for the separating out of the orthodox Episcopalians from the neo-pagans.
The second option appears to be the expectation of the bishops, although the ESA continues to state that its plans are to be the real Church within the Episcopal Church -- at least until such time as we must leave.
From our new position of declared independence, we will be able to work that out whether or not the pseudo-liberal people like it. Because of their continued deceit and manipulation of due process, and because of their disdain for truth, they have lost the right to have jurisdiction over the people of God. And so we will be the Church -- at any cost to ourselves.
It is my prediction that the numbers of bishops, priests, and layfolk who will join the ESA/AAC alliance will grow as the impact of the 1997 General Convention begins to sink in. I suspect that some of those who voted in the pseudo-liberal direction (pseudo- because they have no idea of what freedom is -- "liberal" comes from the Latin "liber" = "free").
If we are led out by the Lord, we must go out orderly and in unity, and we must go out blowing up the gates of hell and setting captives free. That means continuing to speak the hard truth in love.
Much of Monday's meeting at the Church of the Good Shepherd was spent in fine-tuning the wording of the official statement of action which will be distributed abroad to the bishops and other leadership of the Church. We will post the final version, which will probably be known as the Good Shepherd Statement, as soon as it become available.
The events at Good Shepherd (in part) make the nonsense generated at General Convention for the last several decades irrelevant. Thanks to the bishops who are willing to stand tall, the betrayal no longer determines or controls the course that orthodox Episcopalians must take. We are much more free now to do as many have been saying, "Stop talking about sex and get on with the Great Commission."
A word of warning, however. We must discern why we got into the mess and take steps to ensure that we do not repeat the same errors. It will not be enough merely to "purify" ourselves from those persons in error if we bring with us the seeds of the same errors to sprout again down the road.
By that I mean we must learn how to deal with The Great Question of the 19th and 20th centuries: "How do you know you have the truth?" It has been our failure to do that which has brought the once powerful Christian community to such bad days. The corruption from within came upon us because we were unable to identify and stand against the work of the unholy trinity: the world, the flesh, and the devil. The father of lies was able to work his darkness in our very midst because we had failed to take from the hand of God the sword of the Spirit and to use it effectively.
There have been many committed, devoted, and intelligent Christians over the last two centuries, and some extraordinary missionary efforts, but for all that we were not able to answer Freud, Darwin, Marx, et al, as they tore down the foundations of western Christendom -- because we could not answer the question: How do you know you have the truth?
The answer, which has lain dormant in Scripture, has been given to us in an extraordinary new fullness during the last three centuries. But the Christian community has almost universally failed to integrate those lessons from God. Those lessons were two: the rise of science (how do you know?), and the founding of a democratic republic under God (due process in the administration of public affairs). When we learn what God has given to us in those two events, and when we weld back together again the two edges of the sword of the Spirit (revelation and reason), we will have a weapon and strategy for spiritual warfare such as the world has never seen.
David Virtue and I will be elaborating on this in Homosexuality: Good and Right in the Eyes of God? Please continue to pray for a publisher for that book.
Also, although we may not have to concentrate on sex with such ridiculous intensity, nevertheless we Christians had better do better than we were doing before this mess. Christian children did not (and still do not) typically get a good sex education from their parents or churches. We Christians had just enough of a negative and frightened attitude toward sex that there was lots of justification to the claim from the secular/pagan sexologists: "We are saving sex from those repressed Christians!" We told the world a lot about what we were against, but precious little about what we are for.
The Bible has a stunningly beautiful view of sex and gender that parents
would be proud and happy to tell their children, but we have done precious
little to spell that out. Emmaus Ministries has material on these subjects
which are listed on the Road to Emmaus website "Shopping Mall". [Yahweh or
the Great Mother? and Man and Woman in the Image of God spell out the Biblical
view of sexuality which can take on anything the world, the flesh, or the
father of lies have to offer. With help from adults who will take the time
to learn the materials, these are quite usable with high school students.]
The Bible has far and away the best and most workable view on any subject
at all. And we need to learn how to market those truths with spiritual, moral,
and intellectual integrity.
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