That's right, the Vast Majority of Episcopalians are no longer Christians

Los Angeles Diocese Wins Summary Judgment in Property Case

NEWPORT BEACH, CA (ANS) -- St. James Anglican Church in Newport Beach, California, has received a serious set-back in its legal case and in their fight to retain their property from being confiscated by the Episcopal Church, of which it was formerly a part, after it withdrew from it and joined the Anglican Province of Uganda and the Diocese of Luwero in August of 2004.

Steps to disassociate from the Episcopal Church were initiated by the leadership of this evangelical Anglican church as a result of widening differences of biblical interpretation an example of which was evidenced when controversial decisions made at the General Convention in the summer of 2003, most notably, the confirmation of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson.

In August 2004, this decision, along with other theological differences, led the Rector, wardens, vestry, and a nearly unanimous congregation, to vote overwhelmingly to disaffiliate from the Episcopal Church and to affiliate with the conservative Anglican Church of Uganda.

 St. James Church was soon joined by All Saints Church in Long Beach and St. David's Church in North Hollywood. All three churches were then sued for their property by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and the national Episcopal Church.

 Since 2004, the church has received national attention over its legal case against the Episcopal Church, but now, in a story by George Conger of Anglican Ink, the church's case, that it should be able to retain the property, has been rejected by an Orange County (California) Superior Court Judge.

 Conger wrote that the Judge had ruled that a Bishop of Los Angeles had "no authority to give the parish of St James in Newport Beach a written waiver exempting the congregation's property from the reach of the Episcopal Church's Dennis Canon."

 He went on to say, "In a ruling for summary judgment handed down on May 1, 2013, Judge Kim Dunning ordered the parish to hand its multi-million dollar properties over to the Diocese of Los Angeles."

 "The decision was unexpected," Daniel Lula - an attorney for the parish -- told Anglican Ink, as the matter had been set down for trial later this month.

 In an email to his congregation, the Rector, the Rev Richard Crocker said: "We have received notice this morning from our attorneys that the court has handed down a significantly negative ruling in our court case. This of course changes the landscape of next week's trial," he noted, inviting the parish to a meeting with Mr. Lula "to offer explanation of what we know about the ruling at this point."

Conger stated, "In her decision, Judge Dunning said the Episcopal Church's rules governing parish property on the diocesan and national level took precedence over civil property and trust laws. She dismissed as non-binding a 1991 letter signed by the then Canon to the Ordinary D. Bruce MacPherson, later to become the Bishop of Western Louisiana, on behalf of Bishop Frederick Borsch that released the diocese's claim to the property."

 Bishop MacPherson said in a deposition, "The purpose of the conversations between the Diocese and St. James was for St. James to hold title to its property in its own name free of any trust . . . [as] part of an agreement in order for St. James to secure substantial donations for its building program."

 Conger then wrote, "However, this waiver did not amend the parish bylaws and diocesan canons she held. Even if it did, according to the present leadership of the Episcopal Church's interpretation of the canons 'the Bishop of the Diocese did not, and does not, have authority to amend any of these instruments.'"

 Judge Dunning cited the declaration by the Episcopal Church's expert witness Robert Bruce Mullin in support of her deference to canon law over the evidence of the deeds and waiver noting the "Mullin declaration concerns 'religious entity governance and administration,' and this court is bound by it.

 "The court further stated that it believed a parish was a subordinate unit to a diocese and had no existence outside the diocese. While the Episcopal Church could exist without St James, St James could not exist without the Episcopal Church - and as it had no existence independent of the diocese, the loss of its property to the diocese could not harm it."

 Conger continued by saying that in 2011 the California Supreme Court rejected an argument of the Episcopal Church that the 1991 letter had been declared invalid by its first review of the case in 2009. The Court said, "We express no opinion regarding the legal significance, if any, of the 1991 letter. We merely hold that a court must decide the question," overturning an appellate court ruling that did not allow the parish to put forward a defense.

 In 2005 the Orange County Superior Court ruled the Episcopal Church's allegations were legally defective, but an appellate ruling reversed the trial decision and adjusted the approach to church property law in California. The Parish appealed to the California Supreme Court, who reversed the Appeal Court and returned the case to the Superior Court where St. James answered the complaint, raised affirmative defenses, and began discovery proceedings. This court denied a motion from the diocese, which took a writ to the Appeal Court for summary judgment in the case. This was granted before a trial had occurred and judgment given, and the Parish again appealed to the California Supreme Court. In early 2011, the California Supreme Court ruled for the Parish and sent the case back to the Orange County Superior Court.

 "If the parish does not appeal the decision it will have to vacate the property in the near future," said Conger.

 In his invitation to the parish meeting Mr. Crocker said: "I ask that all members of St. James come together in unity at this time to hear from our attorney and to pray together. The Lord is not surprised by this decision and He is in our midst. But His strength is particularly manifested when we come together in unity and prayer."

Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, sent a letter to Christianity Today magazine offering the campus of his Lake Forest, California mega church to St. James to use if they are forced to vacate their Newport Beach property. Rev. Crocker responded to Warren's offer with the following, "We are overwhelmed by his generosity. It is an encouraging sign of support from Christians in the community."

Christianity must change or die, but not like Gene Robinson suggested

I've been told that the church must change in order to continue as a living organism. But the people who tell me that, usually belong to churches that are dying, exactly for implementing the changes they suggest to me.

Ross Douthat, has written a good piece dealing with this issue in the New York Times, where he deals with this issue. Liberals have been telling us for years that the church must change in order to stay alive, but the churches lead by liberals are the ones dying because of their misguided change.

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States. 

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Spong was wrong then, and is wrong now. He wants to kill of Orthodox Christianity, so it doesn't stand in the way of his sinful life, but at the end, he seems to had inflicted a wound to his own type of christianity. The issue was then, and is now, that those who should have known better, did nothing, instead went on to dismantle the Episcopal Church in order to be in the good graces of today's society and culture.  So there's no interest in defending the truth of the Bible against a society that needs it so much, rather, picks up their political fights, which contradict the Gospel at its core.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Well, there's nothing they can offer but the same thrush that the young people are facing outside the church. We don't see a great increase in the audience they intended to target. In Australia, the Uniting Church, is experiencing something similar. Yet, the churches it was meant to replace, seem to either thrive (the Methodist), or at least survive (the Presbyterians).

This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital. 

Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.

My sentiment as well. But I wouldn't call prosperity Gospel people "traditional believers". They are as far from the Gospel as the Mormons or Jehova Witnesses. They have a total different religion. These churches thrive, not because they are Gospel driven, rather, because they are money driven. People want money and wealth, so they go to these churches to get a hand of how to obtain it, or make it.

But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

Not all Methodist, Lutheran or Presbyterians are going the way of the dinosaurs, but those denominations that have adopted the Episcopal way, are going the way of the Episcopal church.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2006 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.) 

Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor. 

 Liberals don't want to accept their peril. As we see in the case of Katherine Jefferts Schori, she wants to window dress their declining numbers by passing it as a way of "stewardship of the earth". This type of denial would not be allowed in other quarters. And in the case of "progressive" Catholicism, it just won't get people inside their orders. If some progressives nuns wants to affirm somebody's homosexuality, why would, they in turn, would quit being a lesbian in order to turn into a life of celibacy?

But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

May the Lord deliver us from the right to take the face of Christianity!!!!

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.” 

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

I wonder then, how these "liberals" couldn't pass on their faith to the next generation. There's still much we have to learn. 

Where Have all the Liberals Gone? -- The Riverside Church Seeks New Pastor

New York City's famous temple of Protestant liberalism, the Riverside Church, is looking for a new pastor. As The New York Times reports, the search committee is not having an easy time of it.

The paper describes the historic church as "the Vatican for America's mainstream Protestants," but also as "the capital of a theological movement that has been slowly eroding."

As reporter Samuel Freedman explains, the church's storied past has given way to an uncertain future:
Yet now, as Riverside prepares to search for a new senior minister for only the sixth time in its history, mainstream Protestants are struggling to reverse a decades-long pattern of losing numbers, vitality and influence to their evangelical Protestant competitors. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, mainstream denominations like the Episcopal, Presbyterian and United Methodist Churches and the United Church of Christ lost 5 percent to 15 percent of their members, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. Riverside is interdenominational but is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Baptist Church.

The confluence of challenge, opportunity and visibility, then, makes Riverside's selection of a new leader important not only for the 26 million adherents of mainline Protestantism but also for the shape of American religion as a whole.

Thus, the Riverside Church's search for a new pastor becomes a metaphor for the future of liberal Protestantism -- and a reminder of its past.

The church was built in order to provide Harry Emerson Fosdick with a place to preach. That explanation is overly simplistic, but accurate. Fosdick's liberal theology ran into controversy as he was the preaching minister at New York's First Presbyterian Church. After that controversy cost Fosdick his pulpit, a group of prominent New Yorkers established Riverside Church and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. led in the construction of Riverside's massive and elegant edifice in Manhattan's neighborhood of Morningside Heights. The church sits adjacent to New York's Union Theological Seminary, another symbol of liberal Protestantism.

The church's main sanctuary is one of the nation's most beautiful Gothic structures. Fosdick and Rockefeller envisioned the church as a fortress of sorts for Protestant liberalism. As a preacher and controversialist, Fosdick pulled no punches. His denials of central Christian doctrines and his reputation for theological revisionism were infamous. But, at the same time, he was one of the most powerful pulpit orators of his day.

Fosdick defined preaching as "pastoral counseling on a group scale," and his liberalism set the trajectory for the future. He was followed in the pulpit by Robert James McCracken (1946-1967), a former professor of theology. The Scottish-born McCracken defined his approach as "life-situation" preaching. His tenure, like Fosdick's, was 21 years.

McCracken was followed by Ernest T. Campbell (1968-1976). Campbell, oddly enough, was a graduate of Bob Jones University. He was later to graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary. Like Fosdick, Campbell considered himself a modernist in theology. He was followed in the pulpit by William Sloan Coffin (1977-1987).

Coffin, like Fosdick, was well-known before assuming the Riverside pulpit. He had previously served as chaplain at Yale University, where his liberal views and anti-war activism were legendary.

The most recent pastor at Riverside was James A. Forbes, Jr. (1989-2007). The church's first African-American pastor, Forbes came from a Pentecostal background in North Carolina. He was Professor of Preaching at Union Theological Seminary when called to the Riverside pulpit.
Forbes continued the Riverside tradition of theological liberalism and social activism. Reflecting on his pastorate, The New York Times observed that he had been successful at integrating the church racially and ethnically, but that he had also run into significant opposition with some members of his "highly educated, highly involved congregation."

The search for Riverside's new pastor reveals the troubles faces by Protestant liberalism. For one thing, there is no long list of well-known preachers. As the paper reports:
At this early stage, the most notable aspect of the search is the dearth of names being bandied about. If Riverside wanted to break the sex line, it could look to the Rev. Vashti McKenzie, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, or the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, former president of the Hampton Ministers Conference. Both of these women are African-American, as are two prospective male candidates -- the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the Rev. Michael Livingston, outgoing president of the National Council of Churches.

"Compared to Bill Coffin or Harry Emerson Fosdick, neither Jim Forbes nor anyone else in mainline Protestantism cuts that kind of profile," said Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford. "Who are the big dogs today? It's true in Catholicism, too, for that matter. Where's the Spellman or the Cushing? The religious leaders worth listening to have to make the case for themselves -- running their own organization, writing books, being in the media

."

The challenge faced by the Riverside Church is indeed the challenge faced by Protestant liberalism as a movement. Once the vital content of the Christian faith is removed, denied, or marginalized, all that remains is a vaguely Christian spirituality and an agenda of social activism.
The problem for liberal churches is this -- Americans have learned that they do not need churches for "spirituality" or social activism. They can find these alone, in their yoga group, in political involvement, and in a myriad of other places and institutions. As the Times reports, liberal churches and denominations have been losing members for decades. Movements in such a pattern of decline are not likely to produce long lists of well-known preachers. There is no Harry Emerson Fosdick in the wings.

Beyond this, many liberal churches and denominations have become, in essence, collectives of special interest groups. These different groups are likely to hold very different expectations for a future pastor. As one nominee to the church's pastor search committee admitted, the congregation will have to "face up to the fact that Riverside has had a fairly public reputation of irritating our last two senior ministers to the point they got exasperated."

The basic problem with liberal Protestantism is theological. The movement's subversion of biblical authority and denial of basic orthodoxy lead, inevitably, to a sub-Christian message.

Professor Peter J. Paris of Princeton Theological Seminary once described the Riverside Church as "the world's most prominent institutionalization of Protestant liberalism." Where does it go from here?