The past 18 months have been rough, but for the Episcopal Church, things are about to get worse. Specifically, the results of the annual parochial reports are about to come out, and they won’t be pretty. And that’s not the worst of it—folks who left the church during the pandemic by and large won’t be back. Nor is… Read More »
Not long ago, the Episcopal church launched an audit of race and racial reconciliation in the church. The resulting report was damning, utterly expected, and something the church desperately needed to hear. And while the church, in true TEC fashion, lumbers along in sharing the remarkably unremarkable results, it misses the larger points. These include: The fact that… Read More »
Title IV is the canonical framework for clergy discipline in the Episcopal Church. And while it’s constantly being tweaked and re-tweaked, there is a fundamental problem with Title IV. Simply put, the problem is that it does not fully appreciate the importance of disclosure and truth-telling, and leaves victims of clergy abuse open to retaliation. That is the… Read More »
The following is reprinted with permission from my dear friend Dee Parsons’ blog, The Wartburg Watch. The piece was written by Wade Burleson and can be found here. As someone who experienced firsthand an effort by the Episcopal Church to get me to sign an NDA, the article is spot on. Any church that requests one is morally bankrupt, and… Read More »
One of the givens of change management is that conflict is inevitable in a declining organization. With the Episcopal church now in a state of precipitous decline in almost every aspect of its fortunes, it seems that there is a rapidly increasing level of infighting, bad behavior, bullying, and more within every level of the church. With that… Read More »
The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s often a true statement, given our propensity as humans to prefer the comfortable and known, versus change and the unknown. But it’s nowhere more true than DioVA, where the recent passage of an annual budget — one quarter of the way into the new budget year —… Read More »
Apparently, it’s not just wealthy persons in Los Angeles who don’t want the homeless living in their neighborhood. Following his recent remarks in support of removing a homeless encampment near diocesan headquarters, Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles John Harvey Taylor appears to have a bad case of NNMC, or Not Near My Cathedral. The issue arises from the… Read More »