Week Ending 08/01/22

All Stories are Continuations of Previous Topics

 

Parish Number Three Returns to South Carolina

The Diocese of South Carolina has now announced plans for a third parish to return to the Episcopal Church following the South Carolina Supreme Court Decision specifying which parish properties had acceded to the Dennis Canon and thus could not leave the Episcopal Church and which were exempt.  Update has already noted the return of St.Johns on St. John Island, and  Christ Church in Mt. Pleasant.  Now the diocese has announced that in August St. David's in Cheraw will also reopen as an Episcopal Parish under the leadership of the priest who has been providing services to a group of Episcopalians meeting in alternative space in Cheraw. There are still a number of parish properties that have not begun the transition, including several that are still trying to get the decision overturned.  

 

 

Lambeth Conference Latest Updates 

The meeting of bishops from around the Anglican Communion at Lambeth is now under way, and the situation seems to change every day.  Update reported last week that many bishops felt blindsided by a document outlining the Lambeth Calls that they were to discuss and then either assent to, or promise to give it further study.  There was no way to say "no," and the whole idea of using letting electronic devices to record the votes seemed to violate the promise that this meeting would not be focused on voting on resolutions.  The most controversial item in the calls was slipped in to the document after the working group for that call had finished its work, and it was a reaffirmation of a statement  from 1998 opposing same sex marriage and homosexuality. Since last week's Update was posted, the organizers first added the possibility of voting "no," then scrapped the voting devices and went to oral affirmations through silence, rewrote the controversial call to drop any mention of the 1998 resolution, and reworded the statement so that it said there was no agreement on a position on sexuality in the Communion.  This needless to say, upset the GAFCON bishops attending, and they have written their own resolution to present, refused to take communion at the opening service, and have requested their own separate space for worship since the "sinners" are not being excluded. The outcome of the discussion on this call on "human dignity" has not been made public at this point. Thinking Anglicans has a page with links to the various responses and issues here.  As a warm-up to the human dignity discussion, the bishops took up a set of statements about what constitutes Anglican Identity, and even these raised some hackles since the classic definition outlined in the call does not address morality issues at all, but did propose a fourth body to be created as an instrument of communion.  This was voted down, but a world conference on mission did get the go-ahead.