Updated Thursday evening to add link to ENS article
According to Episcopal Café:
The Standing Committee of the Diocese of Quincy is studying the question, “Shall the Diocese of Quincy separate from the Episcopal Church?”
It has distributed a 35-page document, “The Church in Crisis: A Resource for the Diocese of Quincy,” to every member household in the diocese. The standing committee says it contains “reliable information on the current situation.”
The document is a 2.3 Mbyte PDF file and can be found via this page (follow Download link to extract the PDF itself).
Episcopal Café has more analysis of the content of the document at Quincy studies separation.
Quincy, with an Average Sunday Attendance of 1105 in 2006, is not the smallest diocese in The Episcopal Church.
The Diocese of Springfield is next door to Quincy and has an Average Sunday Attendance of about 2400.
Detailed ten year statistics for all dioceses are available in a PDF here.
Update Wednesday evening
There are reports about this in the Living Church Quincy Delegates will Consider Separation in November and also Quincy, Springfield Plan Joint Meeting.
Update Thursday evening
Episcopal News Service has a long article, QUINCY: Diocese offers ‘resource’ for making realignment decisions by Joe Bjordal and Mary Frances Schjonberg
…In a cover letter, the diocesan Standing Committee said that the 35-page document resulted from requests following a meeting last May attended by “all priests with a parish, mission or cure” and all elected officials of the diocese, clergy or lay. The reported purpose of the meeting was to begin “a discernment exercise where self-selected groups were asked to discern the following question: ‘Shall the Diocese of Quincy separate from the Episcopal Church? If so, why and how? If not, then why not?’”
Called “The Church in Crisis: A Resource for the Diocese of Quincy,” the document was included in a mailing sent to households on the mailing list of The Harvest Plain, the diocesan newspaper.
Also included in the mailing was a video recording of a presentation by Archbishop Gregory Venables, primate of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, to the Diocese of Forth Worth in March…
The Diocese of Quincy cathedral statistics for 2005 and 2006, posted on Episcopal Café, show a 33% drop in membership over the twelve-month period, paralleled by a 43% increase in income.
Truncated link in your reference:
Detailed ten year statistics for all dioceses are available in a PDF here.
the h in http is clipped off
SS adds, fixed now, thanks and sorry.
No-one should be held aginst their will! Let them go, but don’t let them corral the ‘Anglican’ title.
Just out of interest, comparable attendance statistics for the Church of England for 2005 and 2006 are athttp://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/2006provisionalattendance.pdf. I hadn’t previously realised that in terms of average Sunday attendances the Church of England is a fair bit bigger than ECUSA (983,000 as against 804688).
The information that the Diocese of Quincy is “considering separation” from TEC, having an ASA of 1.105 (!) makes me think of the present crisis in Georgia (Caucasus) where some traditionally Russia-friendly enclaves want to separate from Georgia into association with Russia… According to the BBC in 1991 when the last round of troubles started, Abkhazia had a population of 550.000, of which maybe 225.000 have fled. They remaining are Russian, Georgian and (minority) Abkhaz, many Abkhaz fleeing already after 1829-1859/1864/1878, Russians and Georgians moving in. Abkhazia became Sovietic in 1931, Stalin used to spend his vacations there; The population… Read more »
magistra,
The CofE nominally has 26 million members, in comparison TEC has 2.3. I think the attendance figures bear witness to the fact that the TEC is a more active church.
Father Ron Smith:
I agree about freedom to separate, but seriously doubt that Anglican brand confusion can be avoided in this or any of the splits that are now pressing for, or will soon seek legal resolution and title – in TEC or wherever. Regrettably, I don’t think any one party has full title to all variations and combinations that might involve use of the style “Anglican”.
Tiny dioceses trying to rock their boats very hard to create as large a wave as possible. I knew they were small but this is getting close to the vanishing point!
So let me get this straight…Quincy is a small diocese ergo they are meaningless. Hmmm… What then will be said about DSJ and FW and Pittsburgh? Are they also meaningless?
Degrading fellow Christians, notwithstanding, tell me how long will the mantra, “there’s no problem, everything is fine” continue? Is it time to at least agree that the TEC house is on fire? First it was a parish here and there, then groups of parishes, then entire dioceses…this isn’t a small matter…right?
John wrote: “this isn’t a small matter…right?”
You can repeat that in 50 years time, if you like.
“First it was a parish here and there, then groups of parishes, then entire dioceses…this isn’t a small matter…right?” Let’s see, 500 years ago, England was a small nation, militarily the weakest in Europe, ruled by a son of usurper. The uncertainty of his succession made him a little dotty, so that he wanted to divorce his first wife, who was related to the ruler of the greatest power in Europe. For political and theological reasons, the Church in England made an alliance with him to escape what they saw as unwarranted foreign control which had introduced error into the… Read more »
Ford, what’s your point? So Henry VIII’s libido was the mechanism to release the full force of the English reformation. OK. That hardly makes Henry a saint nor does it portend that w/o Henry that there would not have been an English Reformation. (Don’t you recall that the “Morning Star” of the Reformation was an English theologian?) Moreover, you confuse revisioning with reforming. The former seeks to innovate – it’s the work of novelty – whilst the latter is an attempt to return to former glory. The English Reformers certainly took advantage of the freedom HVIII offered, but they did… Read more »
No, we don’t, Joe. Stop “degrading fellow Christians.”
Joe:
“…the very foundation upon which the Christian faith stands: the Word of God.”
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John wasn’t talking about a book.
>>>They want a religion that outwardly looks Christian but meanwhile denies the very foundation upon which the Christian faith stands: the Word of God.
John, could you please tell us–specifically–who these people are (names, in other words) and what they have done?
Thanks!
Joe wrote: “The difference now is that the revisionists of the 21st century seek a church that is POST-biblical. They want a religion that outwardly looks Christian but meanwhile denies the very foundation upon which the Christian faith stands: the Word of God.”
Well… I for one want reliable and trustworthy de-sexualized translations, not a choice between un-Biblical post VV or Dynamic Equivalence Gnosticist/Neo Platonist forgeries, as it is now.
Joe, God did not remain incarcerated in The Bible. Abp. Cranmer helped the English to read the Scriptures in their own language – which helped to bring about the reformation of understanding of what the Bible was about. For Christians, the object of our worship has always been primarily about the revelation of God in Christ, so that at the Incarnation, “(God’s) Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory – the glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Christians (cartainly faithful Anglicans) are not encouraged to worship the Bible,… Read more »
“…the very foundation upon which the Christian faith stands: the Word of God.” ???????????
“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11; KJV).
Hum? It’s interesting that the very people who make so much of the authority of Scripture don’t seem to be able to abide what Scripture itself teaches. As that glorious hymn says, following what St. Paul writes to us in 1 Corinthians, “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord….”
Joe asked “So let me get this straight…Quincy is a small diocese ergo they are meaningless. Hmmm… What then will be said about DSJ and FW and Pittsburgh? Are they also meaningless?”
Let’s paraphrase that “so let us get this straight… GLBTs are a small minority ergo they are meaningless. Hmmm… What then will be said about eunuchs 2 Kings 9:30-37 & Isaiah 56:1-9. Mathew 19:11-12. Are they also meaningless?”
“Let’s paraphrase that “so let us get this straight… GLBTs are a small minority ergo they are meaningless.”
Oh, touche’, Cheryl Va! Thanks!
***
Let’s play the Framing Game. Here’s an example of how the Framing Game works:
My side: Freedom fighter.
Your side: Terrorist.
Got it? Go!
My side: “Reformers.”
Your side: “Revisionists.”
What my side does: “took advantage of the freedom … by returning the Church to its BIBLICAL foundation”
What your side does: “innovate … seek a church that is POST-biblical”
Repeat ad nauseum… (it’s a very silly game)
JCF:
I’m reminded of a line by Ben Franklin in the play 1776:
“All revolutions are illegal in the third person–THEIR revolution; it is only in the first person–OUR revolution–that they are legal.”
“The English Reformers certainly took advantage of the freedom HVIII offered, but they did not innovate, they rather sought to reform the church…” Joe, first of all, the Catholic faith does NOT have a Biblical foundation. The Bible is part of Holy Tradition, not all of it. Second, the Reformers couldn’t return the Church to Her former purity, for two reasons: first, they didn’t have as much reliable information as to what that early purity was in those days. Second, they mistakenly assumed that Scripture was the source of the faith. In fact, the faith originally had much more in… Read more »
Ettu- I am in the Diocese of Quincy and a member of the lay organization Remain Faithful- what does the size of our Diocese have to do with anything? We are as faithful and important as any other Diocese.
We have an incredible leader in Bishop Ackerman and we will remain faithful Christians. Our numbers don’t minimize our feelings or mission.
“Our numbers don’t minimize our feelings or mission.” Absolutely! But you need to realize that one of the things that keeps getting thrown at gay friendly people here is that they are a) preaching a “new Gospel”, GAFCON stated this outright and called TEC “apostate” for this, b) that they are doing this merely to seek the approval of society, and c) this “new Gospel” is not working and “liberal, reassessor” churches are emptying as fast as time while so-called “orthodox” churches are brimming with believers. So, when a conservative diocese is small, the low numbers get thrown back at… Read more »