Month: July 2009

According to this site, the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church said the following yesterday at the opening of  the General Convention:

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

I’m stunned. I’m speechless. I just… don’t even have words to respond to this. I’ll let the comments from linked post speak for me:

Did I just hear the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church dismiss as heresy the confession of millions upon millions of Christ followers, from the Apostles to St. Augustine to the Wesleys to the GAFCON gathering of Anglicans last year to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in the Church of England meeting in the UK right now to the multitudes throughout our own Anglican Communion who are invited to make a personal confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior — and who do so daily, often at great personal cost, as their churches and provinces explode with growth in numbers and mission?

How is it that a Church which has done everything to remove “heresy” from its vocabulary can now so confidently proclaim that confessional Christianity is heresy?  How is it that a Church can dismiss the clear words of scripture (see e.g. Romans 10:9-10) as a mere “individualistic formula”?  What audacity and pride drives a leader of a church to ignore the wealth of an over 2,000 years of uninterrupted tradition that holds that a person must confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in order to be a Christian?

I just can’t join the ACNA fast enough, folks.

Daughters of the King is a “spiritual sisterhood of women dedicated to a life of Prayer, Service and Evangelism”. It is, for brevity’s sake, a convent for Episcopalian women. Over the years, however, DOK has expanded their order by admitting women from Anglican, Episcopal, Lutheran (ELCA) and Roman Catholic churches.

However, the mania currently engulfing The Episcopal Church has taken over some members of the Order, and at the DOK convention this past Friday there was a motion to limit membership to only those in “approved” Episcopal churches. While those members from Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches would have been kicked to the curb, Anglican women were the real target of what amounts to a beer hall putsch.

Thankfully, the Episcopalian women of DOK voted down the change in the by-laws! BabyBlue says that

[a]t the end of the day and through much debate – some of it quite painful – the DOK Triennial voted down all the amendments and the bylaws in place that include all the members of the Order remain unchanged. The non-Episcopalian members were reseated and the Triennial continued into Saturday.

At least someone with “Episcopal” in their name is acting rationally these days!

Read more about it here.