I was 18 and living in Tempe, Arizona. I was confirmed as an adult on the second day of 1977 in Phoenix at a conservative parish.
In recent decades I have worshipped in Continuing churches and in the REC.
It seems to me that many in the ACNA want the Episcopal Church as it was before the gay bishop and gay marriages, ignoring what you rightly point out are the many other changes which led to the collapse of the American church. The bishops declined recently to call for a moratorium on further female priestly ordinations, thus allowing the new denomination to approve the innovation by default. How long will it be before some popular, capable woman is elected to a bishopric, and how will the ACNA argue against her elevation, since its current position is illogical?
I had an early childhood ( circa 1960 ) in the Episcopal Church. My experience was invaluable in shaping my sense of what Christianity is and what Christian worship should be. I have a lifelong gratitude to our parish: at age seven, I'd nearly been killed emphatically ( the fact that I could survive such a thing makes me laugh occasionally ). Five months later, it appeared as though I might be started to slip, not thrive. I was anointed with oil and prayed for. Three weeks later, I was back in school.
It's one more unfortunate part of the legacy of the neo charismatic movement ( a factor in Episcopal life in the 1960s which shouldn't be overlooked as yet another source of deconstruction ) that when God does things, He doesn't do them halfway. Actually, that is true. The danger kicks in when mere humans presume to know exactly why certain things happen as they do chronologically. I recovered enough to go back to school, but I've lived with major impairments of my health ever since.
In the last thirty years, startling improvements in medical technology have made it possible for my doctors to see just how much closer to death I was than anyone knew at the time. One of them, a devout Roman Catholic who died last year, was certain that the anointing had kept me possibly alive but certainly out of a nursing home by age twelve at the latest. Another, who is secular, agreed with him.
I have much to be grateful to that Episcopal parish for. When my mother's atavistic Lutheranism ( once a Swede, always a Swede ) kicked in a year later, we began going to a Lutheran church. Until I read this article, I hadn't realized that Episcopalianism in the United States was as vibrant as it was until 1967. Our Lutheran church had beauty and taste in its worship. But an Android girlfriend will never be anyone's wife.
After 1969 I thought I was through with denominational Christianity forever, but I was dismayed to watch the Episcopal church falling apart as though Jesus had quit sustaining the integrity of its atomic structure, which may in fact have been what was happening. I heard about the ACNA's declaration of its existence, and was exhilarated, but within two minutes of the beginning of the broadcast, the news reader informed me that the ACNA had decided to leave the ordination of women up to individual Bishops. I do not mean offense to any parent to whom the following has happened, but when I heard that, my completely disheartened thought was that the ACNA had been stillborn.
The ACNA seems to have been formed primarily through reacting to trauma (whether 1966-1979 or 1998-2003) . And in attempt to wrangle back some 'bad fruit' of the zeitgeist of 2000s planting, the institution seems to be creating reactionary structures and policies that I think will inhibit the same growth that moved it so fast into formation (contra-continuum).
First priority would be to establish common sacraments before tamping down how and whom may be planting churches where, and by what process leaders are formed. Dioceses are not functionally in communion (ie, impaired) with each other, due to concerns of validity and threefold-order consistency. Until then, growth becomes a sort of Ecclesiastical gerrymandering according to duelling cultures; each following its own idea of relevance.
I was 14 years old in 1967. My family attended St. Edmond’s Episcopal Church in Southern California. My mother took my older brother and me regularly to Sunday services – one Eucharist each month and the other weeks Morning Prayer. Attending church with my mother and brother are some of my fondest childhood memories. I loved being in church. I felt “at home” there and had a sense of belonging. But when I left home to go to college, I stopped attending church other than Christmas and Easter. That changed in the spring of 1977.
I met my future bride on the first Saturday in May that year and the next morning we were sitting next to each other at St. James Episcopal Church. It was great to be back at church. I felt like I had returned home, but something had changed. The church was using a new Prayer Book. The priest stood behind the alter and looked out at the congregation as he consecrated the bread and wine. A charismatic service was held at 11:00 am. The church had changed and felt different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and I couldn’t put it in words. As time went on, I realized not everyone at St. James was happy with these changes and the church became increasingly frustrated with the liberal direction the national church was heading. After years of struggles during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and our voice being disregarded at General Convention, St. James left TEC and joined the ACNA.
I have heard many of the stories of why we left TEC, but I never fully understood the whole story, the “big picture.” But now, after reading Fr. David’s article, I understand the reasons why TEC felt so different in the 1977’s and why St. James had to leave.
I was 16, and a junior in high school. I remember a number of dinner-table conversations where the counter-culture vs traditional values were often the source of raised voices and arguments.
This brings back may memories. I was 19 and in the Navy based in Bremerton outside Seattle. I don't remember the convention but it was a busy summer and I still may have been in the South China Sea. Thanks for your articles and the history lessons.
Even for a 12-year old, the summer of love, the Vietnam War, and rock music from Jimi Hendrix was jarring to me. Growing up in a strong Baptist church however, insulated me to a degree. Strong but unsettling memories.
My Eastern Orthodox parish is full of former Episcopalians - including me, my current priest and his wife, my former priest (now retired) and his wife. We have quite a few catechumens from ACNA now. May God bless us all.
I was 14 years old, living in Denver, Colorado. My family attended St. Michael’s church. It was a “high”, Episcopal church, with incense, priests were always referred to as Father, confirmation at 12, and no communion before confirmation. Everyone was in their Sunday best clothes, and women covered their heads. The best changes I have felt in the years since childhood are: having the congregation study and learn the Bible, and the beauty of praise music. Thank you, David, for staying true to your beliefs and for being a good and faithful servant of God. May God continue to bless your efforts for many years to come.
I was 20 and a college junior in a commmuter college. I belonged to anEpiscopal church in the diocese of Newark(before Spong)) and you’re right this is when it all began.
I was 11. I remember the Zebra prayerbook and my parents occasionally talking about the changes in the church, but it didn’t really affect me, EYG stayed the same.
Later however my godmother was ordained. She was in her mid-50s. That caused division in our church and dome left.
Our priest left for a large liberal parish, where he very openly embraced all things new. Most surprising was that he served on the committee that wrote the liturgy for same sex blessings.
We thought we knew him well. I babysat his children and he wrote one of my brother’s letters of recommendation for military college. He had graduated from that school himself.
In 1989, my husband and I saw the writing on the wall and made the decision to leave TEC. We had been attending a cathedral in a large southern city. I asked my mother, “how did this happen?” Her reply was that they had been young, busy with jobs and raising children, and that they trusted their bishops and clergy and the people who went to synod to do the right things.” My mother was still Episcopalian, although not happy with the direction they were going, when she passed away. My husband and I found the Continuum two years after we left TEC and have been there ever since. Currently we attend a parish in the APA.
My grandfather was a godly Methodist minister/missionary...but he left Methodism in about 1920, as he saw its theologically liberal drift, going to the Church of the Nazarene.
Mainline Protestant seminaries in America--seeking academic prestige--began to hire European theologians starting in the late 1800s. Most of these professors had long since given up the infallibility, and thereby authority, of the Bible...following the siren song of Higher Criticism. Without an anchor of trust in God's Word, who knows where one can go in their theology. SO, 20th C. ordained ministers were often trained by non-Christian, higher-critical scholars... eroding, or even destroying, their own faith. This began in the 1920s with the fundamentalist controversies, and kept going, culminating in the 1960s, with what you've described here. It began though, in the seminaries....by "experts" who had no trust in God's Word, the holy Scriptures.
In '67 I was in Vietnam in the middle part of a 19-month tour. I had no idea that when I got back, my Episcopal Church would be in turmoil. I stuck with it, hoping for a revitalization, and thought the rise of the ACNA would bring the whole church back to Godly worship, but the "modern" Episcopal Church had gone beyond reform. We were attending Christ Church Plano when it became clear that the Episcopal Church was dead, but that the old faith might be reborn in a new, Anglican, context.
I was eight years old and blissfully ignorant. In a couple more years I'd start reading more of the newspaper (not just the comics), listening to the radio, and paying more attention to what the grown-ups were talking about.
Thank you for solving the mystery I never could figure out. I was born after 1967 into a family that identified as Anglican/Episcopal, but virtually never attended church, unless we went back to visit family in Canada or England.
Hi Fr David, Joe Geare here. ‘67 was a strange year in Arizona as well…a lot of unrest happening in the EC and the Diocesan Youth Choir (an Episcopal high school folk rock group that played in the churches) was in the middle of it. We had people walk out of the services because they said ‘it wasn’t traditional’.
I was 18 and living in Tempe, Arizona. I was confirmed as an adult on the second day of 1977 in Phoenix at a conservative parish.
In recent decades I have worshipped in Continuing churches and in the REC.
It seems to me that many in the ACNA want the Episcopal Church as it was before the gay bishop and gay marriages, ignoring what you rightly point out are the many other changes which led to the collapse of the American church. The bishops declined recently to call for a moratorium on further female priestly ordinations, thus allowing the new denomination to approve the innovation by default. How long will it be before some popular, capable woman is elected to a bishopric, and how will the ACNA argue against her elevation, since its current position is illogical?
I had an early childhood ( circa 1960 ) in the Episcopal Church. My experience was invaluable in shaping my sense of what Christianity is and what Christian worship should be. I have a lifelong gratitude to our parish: at age seven, I'd nearly been killed emphatically ( the fact that I could survive such a thing makes me laugh occasionally ). Five months later, it appeared as though I might be started to slip, not thrive. I was anointed with oil and prayed for. Three weeks later, I was back in school.
It's one more unfortunate part of the legacy of the neo charismatic movement ( a factor in Episcopal life in the 1960s which shouldn't be overlooked as yet another source of deconstruction ) that when God does things, He doesn't do them halfway. Actually, that is true. The danger kicks in when mere humans presume to know exactly why certain things happen as they do chronologically. I recovered enough to go back to school, but I've lived with major impairments of my health ever since.
In the last thirty years, startling improvements in medical technology have made it possible for my doctors to see just how much closer to death I was than anyone knew at the time. One of them, a devout Roman Catholic who died last year, was certain that the anointing had kept me possibly alive but certainly out of a nursing home by age twelve at the latest. Another, who is secular, agreed with him.
I have much to be grateful to that Episcopal parish for. When my mother's atavistic Lutheranism ( once a Swede, always a Swede ) kicked in a year later, we began going to a Lutheran church. Until I read this article, I hadn't realized that Episcopalianism in the United States was as vibrant as it was until 1967. Our Lutheran church had beauty and taste in its worship. But an Android girlfriend will never be anyone's wife.
After 1969 I thought I was through with denominational Christianity forever, but I was dismayed to watch the Episcopal church falling apart as though Jesus had quit sustaining the integrity of its atomic structure, which may in fact have been what was happening. I heard about the ACNA's declaration of its existence, and was exhilarated, but within two minutes of the beginning of the broadcast, the news reader informed me that the ACNA had decided to leave the ordination of women up to individual Bishops. I do not mean offense to any parent to whom the following has happened, but when I heard that, my completely disheartened thought was that the ACNA had been stillborn.
Excellent and insightful post.
However too much of ACNA hasn't learned its lesson and has become like what you just wrote of:
"Faithfulness makes a church relevant. Relevance, pursued for its own sake, makes a church unfaithful."
The Church of What's Happening Now always becomes a has-been church.
Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral in London said it best: If You Marry the Spirit of Your Own Generation You Will Be a Widow in the Next
The ACNA seems to have been formed primarily through reacting to trauma (whether 1966-1979 or 1998-2003) . And in attempt to wrangle back some 'bad fruit' of the zeitgeist of 2000s planting, the institution seems to be creating reactionary structures and policies that I think will inhibit the same growth that moved it so fast into formation (contra-continuum).
First priority would be to establish common sacraments before tamping down how and whom may be planting churches where, and by what process leaders are formed. Dioceses are not functionally in communion (ie, impaired) with each other, due to concerns of validity and threefold-order consistency. Until then, growth becomes a sort of Ecclesiastical gerrymandering according to duelling cultures; each following its own idea of relevance.
I need to think deeply about this.
Thanks, Mark. I appreciate your perspective and you voice.
D
I was 14 years old in 1967. My family attended St. Edmond’s Episcopal Church in Southern California. My mother took my older brother and me regularly to Sunday services – one Eucharist each month and the other weeks Morning Prayer. Attending church with my mother and brother are some of my fondest childhood memories. I loved being in church. I felt “at home” there and had a sense of belonging. But when I left home to go to college, I stopped attending church other than Christmas and Easter. That changed in the spring of 1977.
I met my future bride on the first Saturday in May that year and the next morning we were sitting next to each other at St. James Episcopal Church. It was great to be back at church. I felt like I had returned home, but something had changed. The church was using a new Prayer Book. The priest stood behind the alter and looked out at the congregation as he consecrated the bread and wine. A charismatic service was held at 11:00 am. The church had changed and felt different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it and I couldn’t put it in words. As time went on, I realized not everyone at St. James was happy with these changes and the church became increasingly frustrated with the liberal direction the national church was heading. After years of struggles during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and our voice being disregarded at General Convention, St. James left TEC and joined the ACNA.
I have heard many of the stories of why we left TEC, but I never fully understood the whole story, the “big picture.” But now, after reading Fr. David’s article, I understand the reasons why TEC felt so different in the 1977’s and why St. James had to leave.
I was 25, a US Army Officer, and serving in Vietnam
I was 16, and a junior in high school. I remember a number of dinner-table conversations where the counter-culture vs traditional values were often the source of raised voices and arguments.
This brings back may memories. I was 19 and in the Navy based in Bremerton outside Seattle. I don't remember the convention but it was a busy summer and I still may have been in the South China Sea. Thanks for your articles and the history lessons.
Even for a 12-year old, the summer of love, the Vietnam War, and rock music from Jimi Hendrix was jarring to me. Growing up in a strong Baptist church however, insulated me to a degree. Strong but unsettling memories.
I was also 12 growing up Southern Baptist in San Antonio, Tx blissfully unaware of most of these issues and likewise insulated. What a blessing.
11-years old, in 1967😊
My Eastern Orthodox parish is full of former Episcopalians - including me, my current priest and his wife, my former priest (now retired) and his wife. We have quite a few catechumens from ACNA now. May God bless us all.
I was 14 years old, living in Denver, Colorado. My family attended St. Michael’s church. It was a “high”, Episcopal church, with incense, priests were always referred to as Father, confirmation at 12, and no communion before confirmation. Everyone was in their Sunday best clothes, and women covered their heads. The best changes I have felt in the years since childhood are: having the congregation study and learn the Bible, and the beauty of praise music. Thank you, David, for staying true to your beliefs and for being a good and faithful servant of God. May God continue to bless your efforts for many years to come.
Blessing to you, friend.
I was 20 and a college junior in a commmuter college. I belonged to anEpiscopal church in the diocese of Newark(before Spong)) and you’re right this is when it all began.
It is shocking, but here are the statistics under John Shelby Spong:
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
1976 (Start of Spong's tenure): 62,732 baptized members.
2000 (End of Spong's tenure): 36,674 baptized members.
2019: 23,045 baptized members.
I was 11. I remember the Zebra prayerbook and my parents occasionally talking about the changes in the church, but it didn’t really affect me, EYG stayed the same.
Later however my godmother was ordained. She was in her mid-50s. That caused division in our church and dome left.
Our priest left for a large liberal parish, where he very openly embraced all things new. Most surprising was that he served on the committee that wrote the liturgy for same sex blessings.
We thought we knew him well. I babysat his children and he wrote one of my brother’s letters of recommendation for military college. He had graduated from that school himself.
In 1989, my husband and I saw the writing on the wall and made the decision to leave TEC. We had been attending a cathedral in a large southern city. I asked my mother, “how did this happen?” Her reply was that they had been young, busy with jobs and raising children, and that they trusted their bishops and clergy and the people who went to synod to do the right things.” My mother was still Episcopalian, although not happy with the direction they were going, when she passed away. My husband and I found the Continuum two years after we left TEC and have been there ever since. Currently we attend a parish in the APA.
My grandfather was a godly Methodist minister/missionary...but he left Methodism in about 1920, as he saw its theologically liberal drift, going to the Church of the Nazarene.
Mainline Protestant seminaries in America--seeking academic prestige--began to hire European theologians starting in the late 1800s. Most of these professors had long since given up the infallibility, and thereby authority, of the Bible...following the siren song of Higher Criticism. Without an anchor of trust in God's Word, who knows where one can go in their theology. SO, 20th C. ordained ministers were often trained by non-Christian, higher-critical scholars... eroding, or even destroying, their own faith. This began in the 1920s with the fundamentalist controversies, and kept going, culminating in the 1960s, with what you've described here. It began though, in the seminaries....by "experts" who had no trust in God's Word, the holy Scriptures.
Hello David!
In '67 I was in Vietnam in the middle part of a 19-month tour. I had no idea that when I got back, my Episcopal Church would be in turmoil. I stuck with it, hoping for a revitalization, and thought the rise of the ACNA would bring the whole church back to Godly worship, but the "modern" Episcopal Church had gone beyond reform. We were attending Christ Church Plano when it became clear that the Episcopal Church was dead, but that the old faith might be reborn in a new, Anglican, context.
Thank you Richard for your service. I was 12 and hadn’t a clue what you were enduring.
And thanks for being a loyal and faithful member of Christ Church.
Peace,
David Roseberry
I was eight years old and blissfully ignorant. In a couple more years I'd start reading more of the newspaper (not just the comics), listening to the radio, and paying more attention to what the grown-ups were talking about.
Thank you for solving the mystery I never could figure out. I was born after 1967 into a family that identified as Anglican/Episcopal, but virtually never attended church, unless we went back to visit family in Canada or England.
Indeed, it was a mystery to me too!!!
Hi Fr David, Joe Geare here. ‘67 was a strange year in Arizona as well…a lot of unrest happening in the EC and the Diocesan Youth Choir (an Episcopal high school folk rock group that played in the churches) was in the middle of it. We had people walk out of the services because they said ‘it wasn’t traditional’.