(Virtue Online) - The Dean of the flagship cathedral of St. Matthew's, Dallas, the Very Rev. Kevin Martin, says The Episcopal Church is heading off a cliff into oblivion. He opines that the "20/20: A Clear Vision" set by GC2000 to double the church in the next decade is now an impossibility.
Writing in the October 3 issue of The Living Church Martin said, "I have come to the conclusion that the Episcopal Church is headed toward about 1 million members in 2020, an average Sunday attendance around 400,000 and around 6,000 mainly small congregations.THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: Some of my readers may wonder why I've spent so much time on matters related to the Anglican Communion and The Episcopal Church USA. My reasons are as follows...
"The 20/20 initiative was, among all things, a concerted effort to bring revitalization and growth to a long declining mainline church. It failed and we are now faced with an institutional decline that, save a direct intervention and miracle by God, cannot be reversed. There is insufficient leadership, desire, or institutional will to change.
"The failure of the 20/20 initiative, combined with the subsequent controversy around human sexuality, has placed our community in a very precarious position," he writes...
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- I used to be an Episcopalian before joining the Catholic Church
- Tens (perhaps even hundreds) of thousands of Anglican/Episcopalians have become Catholic over the last thirty years, just as I have.
- Hundreds of thousands more will soon come into the Catholic Church through the pope's Anglican Ordinariate provision.
- The Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church USA serve as a perfect object lesson for Cafeteria Catholics.
In contrast, the few Episcopal parishes that are doing well, even growing, happen to be those who have adopted the strict Anglo-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement. Meanwhile, those parishes that have adopted the most liberal progressive attitudes are those most suffering from an aging membership with little growth to compensate. Their funerals outnumber their new baptisms five to one. This is the potential future of the U.S. Catholic Church, if it were to follow the example of the Episcopal Church by adopting their liberal progressive policies. Cafeteria Catholicism, quite to the contrary of what it's proponents say, results in a dead Church. The evidence is before us, and The Episcopal Church USA provides a perfect laboratory for us to view the results.
6 comments; post here:
Mr Knight, your rhetorical questions to Liberal "catholics" have already been answered. Most catholics, who have been dumbed down the past 40 years, who have become moral and religious indifferentists, whould simply shake their head and say "why not"
"shouldnt the church be more tolerant/open/democratic/homowelcoming etc". Some day, rather soon, when push comes to shove, there will be a major schism in the church, leaving perhaps a remnant of true catholics. The average pew warmer is totally indifferent to whatever the church teaches. Pete Frey
Yes Pete, what you say is 100% true about the coming schism in the US Catholic Church. However, that time is not yet, and there are still many souls straddling the fence right now. My prayer is that this blog entry will help some of them get off the fence and back into orthodoxy. If this blog entry helps one such soul do that, than it's worth the effort.
Now in regards to the eminent uprising of the "liberal progressive" and schismatic Catholic Church in the USA, we know from the Episcopalians what their future will hold. Give them half a century and they'll be just as irrelevant as the ECUSA.
I am enjoying your excellent blog. However, I would like to point out that the Anglican churches which are growing are not simply of the ardent Anglo-Catholic style. Many are quite evangelical in their Anglicanism... For instance, Christ Church Plano comes as close to being a megachurch as is possible for Anglicans...and they are middle of the road (leaning low church). The Anglican District of Virginia parishes that are exploding in numbers are all Low Church (often with Morning Prayer as the principal service).
I know that your post was meant to warn current Romans about the inevitable results of progressivism. But I think it is not a full picture to say that the only thriving means of being an Anglican is to be an Anglo-Catholic. The genius of the evangelical catholicism of the Anglican Communion is that it makes room for a rather full spectrum of "ways of being religious" while holding to the unity of creedal Christianity and catholic order.
Sadly Anglicanism by whatever name it choses to use in whatever part of the world, is dying. Thanks to it's zeitgeist attitude and liberal revisionism of the latter half of the 20th century, Anglicanism's high priestess and priestesses particularly in the US & UK are excellerating the mass abandonment of the "church" from almost 3 million in 1960 to less that 2 million in 2011 in the US alone. The Episcopal/Anglican church is really nothing but an appendage of Labour/socialist party UK & liberal democratic party in the US not to forget is an apparachnik of the Liberal/NDP/Socialist party in Canada. The anglican church in Canada is almost as dead as the now defunct united church of Canada.The Christianity that is growing in all the aforementioned countries is the Traditional (Orthodox)Roman Catholic Church Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelical Christianity, these churches account for 2.5 billion humans on this planet and is growing very rapidly in Sub-Saharan African, Southern Asia and China.
I left the Anglican Church for many reasons, among them the ordination of Gene Robinson and the utter failure of the church to support heterosexual marriage. I am a cradle Anglican and am still searching. A priest failed me in the first place (lack of pastoral counseling and hard-heartedness) so I really have a hard time accepting the Papacy. Other than that,I have very Orthodox beliefs and I'd love to go to the local Catholic Parish. What is an Anglican to do?
Anonymous, you should look into the Anglo Catholic Ordinariate being set up by the pope this year!
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