Belshazzar could not read the hand writing on the wall and neither can Episcopal Presiding Bishop-elect Sean Rowe

It has become apparent that TEC has ceased to be a meaningfully Christian church.

Abandoning the authority of scripture for the “authority” of the culture is costing The Episcopal Church dearly with plummeting attendance, nose diving incomes, merging dioceses and a new presiding bishop who believes that “structural changes” will save the church. This is fiddling while TEC burns. It is not structural change TEC needs but gospel change, and that is not going to happen when most of its priests are ashamed of the exclusive claims of Christ for an ungodly inclusion that saves no one and nothing.

Rowe publicly admits, “We don’t exactly know what that is or what it looks like. What we know is that God is in the midst of it and that love is the way,” echoing his predecessor; all flash but no splash down, Bishop Michael Curry.

God loves absolutely everybody does not translate into God saving absolutely everybody. Scripture is abundantly clear on that point.

Add to this the growing number of bishops and priests caught in compromising sexual situations documented by Anglican Watch and you’ll be forgiven if you think that decadence has replaced holiness as a prevailing moral concern.

If TEC were traded on the Nasdaq, it would be a penny stock, that not even Elon musk, a risk taker, would buy. Electric cars trump a church that ran out of spiritual electricity a long time ago.

Pension fund and Endowment money is keeping the church afloat with a little help from Trinity Wall Street. Individual parishes on fixed but dwindling revenues now must engage part time rectors just to keep the doors open. Merging dioceses tell the true story of a church with metastasized cancer.

The revelation this past week that TECs theological sister church, the Anglican Church of Canada is now on life support must have sent shockwaves through TEC’s House of Bishops, but not a word was reported.

New numbers for the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) show that Canada is the first major province of the Anglican Communion to have collapsed, The Living Church reported. This is highly significant, both for Canada and for other Western provinces following its trajectory.

The Data do not lie. The latest 2022 data reveal average Sunday attendance at 65,000. Now, half-way through 2024 would anyone be surprised if it had sunk to 50,000. And this in a country whose population has risen from 38.1 million in 2021 to 39.1 million in 2024. The ACoC has been unable to convince immigrants to join its ranks. Simply put, no gospel, no future. Spiritually dead churches don’t rouse spiritually dead people.

These are truly remarkable numbers. A church already in steep decline saw that decline speed up during COVID. Attendance in 2022 was 40 percent of attendance in 2001. And between 2017 and 2022, the ACoC lost a quarter of its Sunday attendance, reported TLC.

All the while TEC sinks, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) continues to rise in numbers because it insists on telling the truth about who God is, who we are, the mess we have made of it all, and the need for a redeemer to save us from ourselves.

By contrast, The Episcopal Church rails on about racism, reparations and feeling the endless pain of queers, the need to include transgender folk and God absolutely loves drag queens.

I try to imagine a faraway parish in the Adirondacks where 82-year-old Mildred turns to her husband Claude now 84, and asks if transgender is a new type of steak that they had never heard of, and if they, in the name of inclusion, should have it for dinner next Sunday.

I have met Sean Rowe on occasion at various general conventions and he is affable enough. I never dreamed that he would one day make PB against such cultural luminaries as Katharine Jefferts Schori and Michael Curry. Perhaps the House of Bishops had tired of prima donnas and wanted safe but ordinary again. They got it in Rowe. Rowe has no gravitas; he won’t rock the boat. Despite a brief sojourn at an evangelical college, it didn’t take, he will continue down the pathway of inclusion, diversity and equity that his predecessors did. He shepherds two dying dioceses that will disappear in time under his watch.

The figures are these. In Northwestern, PA average weekly attendance in 2022 was 874. The figure for Western New York is 1570 for the same time period. A resurgence in Covid, the realization that the rust belt will never become another Silicon Valley, the failure to call sinners to repentance all lead to closing churches.

America is littered with empty churches, On average, approximately 4,500 U.S. churches close every year, and only 1,000 new ones open. And every year, 2.7 million church members become inactive, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Western culture is hanging by a thread. It is now being marauded by paganism, post modernism, and pluriform truths a term given to us by the late PB Frank Griswold.

Christianity is dying in America even as it thrives in the global south. Pockets of resistance still exist of course, and startups like Tim Keller’s church reveal that renewal is possible. But this is the exception rather than the rule.

A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated — a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” — is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They’re more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).

No one is being fired up to join The Episcopal Church.

Rowe knows his church is not making it, but he has (blind) hope in hope that somehow the church will muddle through. Even a broken-down toaster works once in a while. Rowe said he looks forward to helping “usher this church into whatever it is being called into in this next phase and season of life.”

But the handwriting is on the wall, and Rowe is ignoring it. Mene, Mene Tekel Upharsin was written for Belshazzar it might just as well be written for Presiding Bishop-elect Sean Rowe.

END

Belshazzar could not read the hand writing on the wall and neither can Episcopal Presiding Bishop-elect Sean Rowe

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline.org
August 13, 2024

By any measure The Episcopal Church has ceased to be a Christian denomination.

From the moment avowed homosexual V. Gene Robinson was “consecrated” to the episcopacy, to the ordaining of multiple gay and lesbian priests to the priesthood; to its rolling over to multiple LGBTQI+ sexualities, embracing homosexual marriage, openly promoting gay pride parades, demanding reparations from people who had never enslaved a soul, to its pushing anti-racism training on people who are clearly not racists ending with faux revivals, the church has been on a downward trajectory. The tens of millions of dollars spent on lawyers to recover properties that will one day lie fallow cannot be overlooked.