Falls Church voting to leave

This strongly worded editorial was sent to me. Some will agree; others disagree. The one point on which we can all agree is that reconciliation seems to be very hard.

From the Falls Church VA News Press
http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?

Editorial: Descent Into The AbyssThursday, 14 December 2006
Few people in Falls Church, including many who attend the Falls
Church Episcopal here, fathom how bad what the church’s leadership is
asking its members to vote for this week really is. Balloting of the
2,800 church members will continue through services this Sunday, and
it is expected that the vote will be overwhelming in favor of the
church’s formal withdrawal from the Episcopal denomination.

This move has been coming since the Episcopal denomination, by wide
majority of its bishops nationwide, voted in November 2003 to
consecrate the openly-homosexual Rev. Eugene Robinson as a bishop.

Local church leaders have variously confirmed this, emphatically, and
also tried to cloud the issue with theological jargon, claiming the
denomination has, more generally, drifted from roots they claim are
grounded in “Biblical inerrancy.” That is, the claim there is not a
single mistake or outdated notion in the Bible. Therefore, since
homosexual behavior is condemned in a handful of random Biblical
verses here and there, it is anti-Biblical to consecrate a gay
bishop. You’d be surprised to see what other things are condemned in
different parts of the Bible.

The actions of the Falls Church Episcopal’s leadership, and that of
the Truro Church of Fairfax and some others across the U.S., is a
mild replay of the same sad history of centuries of division,
slaughter, discord and tyranny within Christendom. This week’s action
will not trigger another Inquisition, but the mentality is the same.

Rather than affirming a generosity of spirit and Good Samaritan
compassion that can embrace and nurture a complex and multi-faceted
humanity, in this case, the leaders of the Falls Church Episcopal
have chosen to stand against the civil authority of the U.S.
Constitution that promises equal rights for all, just as happened in
all those pulpits that, in the past, denounced what they called the
“un-Godly” acts of freeing slaves, ending segregation, or more
recently, ending prohibitions on interracial marriage. Church folk
experience such hate, emotionally, as a burning righteous indignation.

If this week’s vote results in the departure of Falls Church
Episcopal from the Episcopal denomination, the church will go down in
infamy as a regrettable and despised bastion of bigotry, prejudice
and hatred.

In order to earn this legacy, the church’s leadership is willing to
disenfranchise its members from access to one of the nation’s most
historic church structures and histories. On this one issue, of the
consecration of an otherwise completely qualified, but gay, bishop in
New England, this church’s leadership is descending from the heights
of grandiose plans for a major expansion in 2000, to years of
development paralysis, to now being expelled from its property by the
Diocese of Virginia following this week’s vote and its flock sent
wandering. The power of hate can be so strong.