The Diocese of Chicago is not the only body claiming to be Anglican in the environs of Chicago.
Jason Byassee has written a fascinating article in the Christian Century describing the fragmentation taking place there. The article is titled Splitting up.
There are some very interesting comments about this article, including several by its author, in Jason Byasee: Anglican angst in Illinois and Beyond at titusonenine.
The splitters have split, and are splitting. Color me shocked…Not.
[Let me also register my objection to Mr. Byasee’s characterization of those protesting Archhomophobe Akinola’s Chicago-area visit last fall as “mugging for the camera”. Considering that Akinola encourages the *actual mugging* of LGBTs in Nigeria, Byasee’s flippant dismissal of those resisting him, was most DISTASTEFUL.]
Lord have mercy!
Wheaton has long been a rock and a bastion of conservative evangelical worship, witness, and scholarly practices inside USA Bible Belt religion. Now that the USA religious right has triumphed, at least for the time being, in taking over the Southern Baptists successfully – narrowing the ranges of Southern Baptist autonomy and internal diversity that did happen to obtain, pretty much in similar ways by confession and policing as such campaigners would redo the global Anglican communion – surely Wheaton sought other fish to fry as one religious USA species got their special brand of religion. This sort of religious… Read more »
As pointed out by some of those “on the ground”, the divisions aren’t so divided. E.g., All Souls – Wheaton has an AMiA priest and one under Bolivia and just had Bp Harvey of ANiC perform their first confirmation service. Also, Church of the Resurrection has ~700 in attendance and they just bought property to build a facility that will hold 1500. Compare this to the 9% drop in membership of the diocese of Chicago from 2003 to 2006 and an average Sunday attendance drop of 10.3% in the same time period. (http://tinyurl.com/68g9hw) Dr Danfee’s “big tent”, which isn’t big… Read more »
Boy, robroy, talk’in tough! So why don’t you all build new facilities everywhere and get on with attracting all those people you’re going to get, instead of throwing money at lawyers to steal what isn’t yours to begin with?
I am currently reading American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. In one early chapter, he discusses how American Christianity has always been about the decline of the “centrist” denominations (whatever they might be in any one period) and the growth of schismatic sects. Here’s a relevant paragraph: “The religous history of the United States…rests heavily on sectarian emotion and revival–a process under way since the eighteenth century, in which churches become establishmentarian, ‘compromise their “errand into the wilderness” and then…lose their organizational vigor, eventually to be replaced by less wordly groups, whereupon the process is repeated.” (page 107) IOW, there’s nothing… Read more »
Rather than lose a struggle about change in church life, conservatives apparently have opted to try to change the game. Changing the game worldwide is precisely the goal. Engaging Anglican hot buttons are only a passing means to that larger end. Homosexuality has been quite useful. Maybe WO is at least partly useful, too? Modernity as nothing but a danger and a problem has been useful, too? This new game aims to roundly displace the substantive intellectual aspects of our typical hot button Anglican issues, because the problem is that hot buttons can be viewed from more than one modern… Read more »
“Dr Danfee’s “big tent”, which isn’t big enough to contain Forward in Faith/Anglo-catholics or evangelicals like J.I. Packer, will soon be a pup tent especially when the new Anglican province of North America is established.” And it’s this perceived loss of influence that bothers you, right. I mean, you are obviously not concerned about failure to reach society with the message, or else you’d be interested in finding ways to actually do that. Instead, you congratulate yourself that conservatives are banding together to revile and judge everyone else, while all around them society blithely goes on about its business, unconcerned… Read more »
“Believe radically in your own unique righteousness as conservative.”
drdanfee, by and large I agree with you, but the above statement is unnecessarily restrictive. Liberals are just as radically convinced of their own unique righteousness as conservatives.
We know that Chicago’s shrinkage is due mostly to low birthrate, as Episcopalians generally have 1.3 children per couple and replacement is 2.1. I have to wonder how much of that growth that roboy is talking about is from Christians switching congregations and how much are really converting “the heathen”, so to speak. I used to move in evangelical circles and know that most of the growth I saw in churches was the already-Christian looking for a new and different experience. Looking at overall stats for conservative churches, their growth isn’t much better than liberal ones. The Roman Catholic church… Read more »