Episcopal Church - Working To Stop The Long, Slow Slide To The Bottom Rung :: MAXINE

It has taken eighteen months for a diocese in the Episcopal Church here in North America to change the direction of its "new" tradition.

In June of last year, The Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to become the first woman elected to lead a church in the global Anglican Communion when she was picked to be the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. It was another groundbreaking and controversial move for a denomination that consecrated Anglicanism's first openly gay bishop just three years earlier.

Tradition based churches here in North America have been in a quandary ever since. The churches and their congregations had to ask themselves -- Do we stand on the side of change where Gay Marriage, and Openly Gay and/or Female leadership at the highest levels is pursued and embraced, or do we match up with the centuries old traditions that had come to define the global Anglican Communion?

Churches that are confirmed in the belief of tradition, are voting to join up and answer to church leadership that governs geography other than the leadership that features this new approach set by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Anglican traditionalists believe gay relationships violate Scripture and they have demanded that the U.S. church adhere to that teaching or face discipline.

Just as has happened last February when two Virginia churches voted 92% to leave The Episcopal Church, the U.S. wing of global Anglicanism, and join up under the leadership of Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin voted 173-22 (or 87.28%) to bolt and join up with a conservative South American congregation of the Worldwide Anglican Communion.

The Bishop of San Joaquin, the Rt. Rev. John-David Schofield. Photo taken July 31, 2007. Image Credit: geoconger (Rev. Canon George Conger)

The break is likely to spark a lengthy, expensive legal fight over the historic properties in the San Joaquin valley, which are worth tens of millions of dollars.

This excerpted from the Sacramento Bee -

Diocese votes to split with Episcopal Church
By Associated Press - Last Updated 12:45 pm PST Saturday, December 8, 2007

An Episcopal diocese in central California voted Saturday to split with the national denomination over disagreements about the role of gays and lesbians in the church.

Clergy and lay members of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin voted 173-22 at their annual convention to remove all references to the national church from the diocese's constitution, according to spokeswoman Joan Gladstone.

The Fresno-based congregation is the first full diocese to secede because of a conservative-liberal rift that began decades ago and is now focused on whether the Bible condemns gay relationships.
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The decision is almost certain to spark a court fight over control of the diocese's multimillion-dollar real estate holdings and other assets.

The head of the U.S. denomination had warned Bishop John-David Schofield of the Fresno-based diocese against secession.

"I do not intend to threaten you, only to urge you to reconsider and draw back from this trajectory," Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, head of the U.S. denomination, wrote in a letter to Schofield earlier this week.

Schofield responded that the Episcopal Church "has isolated itself from the overwhelming majority of Christendom and more specifically from the Anglican Communion by denying Biblical truth and walking apart from the historic Faith and Order."

The Fresno diocese has explored breaking ties with the American church since 2003, when Episcopalians consecrated the church's first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The resulting uproar throughout the world Anglican fellowship has moved the 77 million-member communion toward the brink of schism.
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