It’s more like the Inside Non-strategy.

No, Donna, it’s an Inside Strategy, just like the one Philippe Pétain and Vidkun Quisling had in World War II.

Chris, This Captain Yips sentence is too good to leave behind:
“The EpiscoLeft is sterile imaginatively, liturgically, theologically, and morally, and will ultimately shrink into a fairly small probably almost exclusively urban sect, providing a comforting but not very interesting Oprahfied content.”

The last two words ‘Ophrafied content’ describe today’s trend toward a unique personal designer ‘mosiac’ religion…you take a bit of buddha and hindi, a smidgen of native american spiritualism, a bit of allah, shake with a spoonful of wiccan and druid essence and that’s ‘MY OWN’ specially developed religion.

The Captain makes the good point that the conservatives are declining at a slower rate than the heretics and might be the last ones standing. But the fundamental weakness remains: Episcopalian conservatives simply don’t have the stomach to deal with heresy as heresy. Bishop Kinsman, the anglo-catholic bishop of Delaware complained of this a century ago (he ended up Roman Catholic) and it’s true today. Bp. Iker has tolerated homosexualist heretics within his diocese for decades, as has Bp. Stanton, Bp. Duncan, and the rest.

Please note, the heretics know how to deal with those who don’t agree with them: how many stories have we heard about parishes that are welcoming of gays, but become family unfriendly. There are decent, charitable liberals (Geralyn Wolf is said to be one), but are they the future of TEC? Or is Bishop Kate Herself the future, attended by Kaeton, Russell, and the like? The Christians leaving TEC are willing to give the heretic parishes their property, but the heretics want it all – every prayer book, hymnal, and alter hanging.

So, should “we”, the good guys, become like “them”, the heretics? No, but heresy is a cancer that kills the individual soul and the community. Excommunication is for the healing of that soul and it’s restoration to the Truth and also for the health of the body politic. The heretics do it because they desperately need validation and personal assurances. So even if we do the same things, the reason we do them are opposites, leading to opposite goals.

And FWIW, I think giving the heretics the property is a reasonable course of action.

The “inside strategy” is a euphemism for co-dependency.

Or idolatry.

-Jim+

[...] L. Captain Yips demonstrates why the “inside strategy” is a waste of time: from the MCJ In short, I don’t think that the Inside Strategy can work, not on it’s own. It’s [...]

Straight up trade, our liberals for your conservatives, and to sweeten the deal we’ll throw in a number of Jesuits to be agreed upon later. You can keep your buildings and property as we really don’t need them.

It’s not that the conservatives couldn’t do it as the majority fifty years ago. Not at all.

It’s that they wouldn’t do it fifty years ago. Now, it doesn’t matter if they would or not.