People that wanted to leave left six years ago.

This is patently false in my parish in Roseville, Diocese of Northern California.

A family left our church on Monday after the vote on D025.  That was the last straw for them.  Rather than leaving immediately 6 years ago, they waited and hoped things would change.

Things changed—for the worse.

A Western Michigan priest:

“People that wanted to leave left six years ago.”

No. 1: That’s right. Hard to know where this priest has been or if this is wishful thinking. Yes—definitely—many loyal Episcopalians have been following events carefully and hoping that the Anglican Communion, or the abp of Canterbury, or some structure or mechanism could be found to enable them to stay. It’s not as if everything seemed done, decided, six years ago.

Article: “On this issue and others, dialogue only goes so far. Sooner or later a church has to decide which way it’s going to go and live with the losses.”

The problem for many of us is that we don’t define “a church” as simply TEC. It’s, rather, the Anglican Communion worldwide. And there the dialogue, as +RDW has said, is ongoing. The point is that TEC… well, you know the rest.

If everyone left 6 years ago why has all of Michigan be going down at a rate of 3% a year?

I think it identifies one key component of the successful progressive strategy. Put facts on the ground. Regardless of the commonly held understanding of the meaning of the canons - start ordaining non celibate gay clergy, begin blessing, begin marrying or almost marrying etc. (plausible deniability at first is important), put non celibate gay teachers in seminaries. The legislation and the legislative theological discusison must not occur at the start of the process. They must occur at the end. At the end - when amazingly 25% of a small episcopal church may be gay (as announced at General Convention), when dioceses have had out gay clergy for two or three decades and a partnered gay bishop for 5 years, when hundreds of SSB taken place - then at that point you permit talk about “what everybody thinks theologically”. The facts on the ground must, must, must be done first.

Maybe, in his Diocese. The fact is there was a great many congregations that left in 2006 as well. It wasn’t just because the Presiding Bishop is a women, there are many factors as well. It is becoming clearer for some folks that there are two Gospels and for some, they can’t trust their bishop, nor the one who will replace him or her. Just look at what happen in the Diocese of Florida.

Randy Muller,

Please contact me about people who left St. John’s.  I am working with some folk to organize a new Anglican Parish near you.

Ed McNeill
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http://www.NewAnglicanChurch.com

Re: “People that wanted to leave left six years ago.” - Rev. Spaid
                                &
“We spend so much energy arguing about sexuality,” said the Rev. Michael Fedewa of St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Grand Rapids. “It’s time to put it behind us as best we can and move on to other things.”

I was in this diocese from 2000-2007 and observed the following three things:

1) Many people left before 2000, when the diocese pushed the ‘inclusive’ agenda.  After that point, people have steadily left every year.

2) Between 2000 and 2007 very little energy was spent “arguing about sexuality.”  This diocese ‘moved on’ quite a while ago, and every year has held out hope that the promised “huge influx of progressives sure to fill the pews” would arrive.  As you can see this is the result:

http://12.0.101.92/reports/PR_ChartsDemo/exports/ParishRPT_718200995456PM.pdf

3) That chart was the good news.  The bad news?  Those numbers, sobering as they are, are likely highly inflated.  Some parishes continue to report baptized members that they haven’t seen in years. 

When in 2004 I cleaned up the books in my parish to reflect reality (and conform to the standards laid out in the parochial report guidelines), the number of Baptized members dropped nearly 40%.  You can see the chart here:

http://12.0.101.92/reports/PR_ChartsDemo/exports/ParishRPT_7182009102151PM.pdf

If each parish reported accurately, I have no doubt that the diocesan numbers would plummet.