Posted by
KsReaganite on Monday, July 27, 2009 9:15:01 PM
It was once called the ‘American Establishment at prayer’ and counted everyone from George Washington to George H W Bush among its congregants. Today, thanks to thirty years of ‘modernization’, only a rump remains of the Episcopal Church (ECUSA). As someone whose affinity to that church is more than ordinary, it has pained me to see its growing descent into irrelevance and theological atrophy. In the last thirty years, the ECUSA has gone from a respectable symbol of a mainline via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, to becoming the ecclesiastical mouthpiece of the Democratic National Committee. Part of the blame for this descent must rightly be placed on those traditionalist Episcopalians who were too busy to care while dedicated groups of activist ‘progressives’ took over parish after parish, diocese after diocese, and committee after committee to impose an ironclad agenda that has little resemblance to Anglicanism anywhere else outside the dying parishes of Canada and the United States. For a ‘church’ that doesn’t believe in the basic tenets of the Nicene Creed, the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of life and marriage, or the Biblical qualification of bishops and priests is strange, to say the least. No wonder, the vast majority of Anglicans worldwide have little respect, though abundant abiding Christian love, for the Episcopal bureaucracy in New York that has made socialized medicine, homosexual ‘marriage’, and taxpayer funded abortion on demand the centerpiece of its ecclesiastical calling.
The ECUSA is not a church anymore…it is simply another liberal interest group. The good news is that finally the different Bible based groups of Episcopalians have banded together to launch a true alternative to the decrepit ECUSA: last month different strains of America’s and Canada’s Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, and traditional Episcopalians came together to prayerfully initiate the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) that seeks to become a full fledged province of the global Anglican communion. The journey is tough, the obstacles immense, and the resources meager since almost all of the material wealth of the ECUSA has been taken over the by New York based bureaucracy and its allies. The most powerful tools of the ACNA are the prayers of its congregants and the solid support of orthodox Anglicans from Nigeria to Uganda to Jerusalem to Sydney. It will be a long journey. A journey that Anglicans hope will stiffen the spines of those Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and other mainline Protestants who hunger for the meaningful church of their forefathers.
But then, every generation of Christians has been called upon to bear its own Cross in the turbulence and scorn of its own times.
This is our time.