Stability and the Liturgy

General Convention is coming up in July, and we now have a resolution to amend Article X of the church constitution to specifically authorize forms outside the BCP (the bolded material represents the addition):

But notwithstanding anything herein above contained, the General Convention may at any one meeting, by a majority of the whole number of the Bishops entitled to vote in the House of Bishops, and by a majority of the Clerical and Lay Deputies of all the Dioceses entitled to representation in the House of Deputies, voting by orders as previously set forth in this Article:

a) Amend the Table of Lessons and all Tables and Rubrics relating to the Psalms.

b) Authorize for trial use throughout this Church, as an alternative at any time or times to the established Book of Common Prayer or to any section or Office thereof, a proposed revision of the whole Book or of any portion thereof, duly undertaken by the General Convention.

c) Provide for use of other forms for the renewal and enrichment of the common worship of this church for such periods of time and upon such terms and conditions as the General Convention may provide.

This addition has become the focus of some small controversy. I think Tobias Haller is correct in pointing out that this regularizes the anomalous position of the Book of Occasional Services (and to a lesser extent, Lesser Feasts and Fasts: most of the latter is covered under clause (a) above) in the collection of our liturgical texts. But these are not the only books we have, and Enriching Our Worship is really the focus of most people's concern, together with the writing of same-sex blessing rites.

Historically, western liturgy was divided into several volumes, e.g., missals, ordinals, psalters, each of which fit into a different context of worship. In the reformation these were all wrapped up together in the Book of Common Prayer, which due to a certain paralysis has never been updated itself. The US BCP has always followed the pattern of its ancestor in terms of what it covers, but the need for a supplement was felt over a century ago, leading first to the Book of Offices and thence to the current BOS.

There's a substantial shift in content along the way, however. The vast majority of the 1914 book is devoted to dealing with consecrated things; the order for compline (which made its way into the BCP in 1979) is an exception. The 1940 offices show the same pattern, but the BOS adds a whole new category of services, listed there under the heading "The Church Year". This section contains, in large part, services people were already doing, mostly keyed to the church year. One can argue the need for some of this, as anyone who wanted to do Lessons and Carols at Christmas already had copies of Carols from Kings 1 (in order to do the Willcocks descants if nothing else) and therefore had the order laid out for them, but the section as a whole reflects the high-and-wide interest in recovering all these seasonal liturgies as part of the official cycle of things (which, by the way, the Anglo-Catholics were already doing without benefit of GC authorization).

Some of the material promulgated of late by the SCLM fits into these two patterns, whatever the merits of the texts in question. By and large I don't think much of it, but that's not the main issue here. A lot of the most egregious stuff from the last round is material that nobody is every going to be subjected to unless the rector gets bored with the prayers in the BCP and goes on a hunt for novelty. Thus we got a devotional cycle of prayer which I found it hard to tell whether the theology or the writing was worse, but I would venture to guess that it would never appear on a Sunday morning, so no doubt the average parishioner will never be exposed to it.

But that leads to Enriching Our Worship, which is not a prayer book supplement. Indeed, when it was first promulgated, it was set forth as material for the future revision of the BCP. These days, it's an alternative service book, except that it has never gone through the trial process because it is permanently stuck in it. And it has a lot of problems, bad enough to where I won't take communion if it is used. It enjoys no permanent approval, and yet it appears to be the basis and standard for all of SCLM's other output— not the BCP, the supposed standard for our worship.

That's the problem in this resolution: in authorizing whoever writes liturgies for the church to produce whatever anyone feels they need, it follows the spirit of exactly what's being done wrong now. I suppose we ought to amend things to allow for extra-BCP work, but that material also needs to go through the same kind of review as the BCP itself, including sunsetting of trial liturgies.

Defrocking by Some Other Name

Her Most Reverend Majesty has issued a statement in which she "accepts" a renunciation of orders which Mark Lawrence, by any observation having the slightest grip on reality, surely did not make. The misrepresentation is so gross that even Lionel Deimel, hardly a friend of Lawrence, finds it hard to swallow. Not that the nicety of invoking the wrong process matters in the end, or even in the middle, though some perversity of my own hopes to see a gaggle of bishops concelebrating with Lawrence in the sort of defiance that as been a feature of liberal churchmanship for decades.

Lots of other liberals, of course, are overjoyed that the matter is now over, as though this isn't going to grind through the courts for some time. Tony Clavier laments this as a "refus[al] to make adequate space for dissent", but really, that seems to be precisely the point for a more severe progressives. The various "good riddance" remarks I've seen here and there bespeak the campaign, heavily supported in the church establishment, to push the wrong-headed over the side if they can't be barred from positions of power. As Bishop Martins says, and as I said earlier, this looks like a coup on the part of the diocese's dissidents, and the picture isn't improved by the revelation that the PB and her legal rep had been making preparation for Lawrence's deposition with the dissidents for months.

One would like to hope, with Fr. Clavier and others, that this whole crisis could be unwound and South Carolina be put back in place, and then some less destructive course chosen. But too many people have taken actions which they claim are irrevocable, and nobody could possibly admit that the only think that cannot be turned back is their intransigent pride. And besides, it's all according to plan, as both sides have cooperated in the departure/expulsion. So the plan moves forward and the lawyers start to burn the billable hours.

Episcopal Coup

The latest wrinkle in the South Carolina "abandonment" crisis is a couple of curious meeting notices sent under the letterhead of the diocese. It quickly came out that neither of these letters came from Bishop Lawrence or the diocesan standing committee, but were instead promulgated by the same rump group which is trying to get Lawrence thrown out. Indeed we find out that the reason there were two of these notices is that the rector of the parish announced as a meeting place in the first letter discovered the misrepresentation and balked.

Anyone can see that the pattern established with the four previous departures is being worked through again: a new bishop is named from above, a competing corporate structure is erected, and the battle to claim the property is commenced. The first wrinkle in this case is the move to evict Laurence before he can leave, and the (in my opinion stupid) suicide clauses in the SC canons. The problem with the latter is exactly that, had they not been enacted, the fraud of claiming to be the real diocese wouldn't be even remotely plausible.

But there is a second wrinkle, which has come to light in this review of the affair from the Anglican Communion Institute. There is rather too much evidence, not utterly conclusive to be sure, but strongly suggestive that the whole action is something of a coup against the diocese, mounted with the approval and assistance of the presiding bishop's office. Apparently all the mechanism for replacing Lawrence and the standing committee has been sitting ready for some time, awaiting only the moment when abandonment could be claimed; and that claim was made possible, it may appear, by the change in the composition of the disciplinary board. And in all of the this preparation there are traces of the presiding bishop's influence if not direct action and assistance.

And that leads directly to the other hole in all of this. One of the peculiarities of the Episcopal Church governance is a lot of checks and balances against clerical power. As a rule, parishes and dioceses pick their own bishops, and while there are counterbalances to prevent them from picking someone too objectionable, normally they cannot have someone imposed on them, and once they seat someone, it is difficult to dislodge that person, either from the inside or the outside. There is even less control over laypeople. The loophole, however, is that when there is a vacancy, some interim appointment must be made, and this is the hierarchy's entrance into control from above. The only thing preventing the naming of so inmicable a character of Jack Spong to the South Carolina throne is that he is unlikely to accept the appointment. And not only that, but a whole new standing committee may be named, populated of course from the list prepared by Lawrence's enemies.

It's hard to look at all this and not see some traces of a scheme specifically to oust Lawrence and the standing committee, and to replace both with figures more acceptable to the progressives and thus steer the diocese on a more acceptable (to them) course. And given the ACI timeline, it's extremely tempting to suspect that this was done with the knowledge and even connivance of national church offices. And once again, we're back to the four-decade-old problem: church governance only seems to work when it helps the progressives, but not when it would hinder them. Is it any wonder the SC expected to have to leave?

A Couple of Lawrence Observations

...not from me, but I wanted to point them out. First, from The Living Church we have Dumbing Abandonment Down about the questionable canonicity of the current forced abandonment process. Taking a bit wider (and more pointed) look is Tony Clavier, who writes of Lawrence's "evaporation". There is little that needs be added to either analysis; I would only comment that it seems likely that the whole sorry process will be made moot by the diocese's and national church office's determination that the two shall be made twain.

Keep Trying Until You Fry Him

In the ongoing campaign to find a griddle for bishop Lawrence, the most conspicuous problem is the process. Here it would seem that Bishop Martins of Springfield and I are in agreement: the charge of abandonment is utterly preposterous, and I would go further and say that it should be disregarded as a fraud intended to avoid the unpleasant task of putting Lawrence through a trial in order to oust him.

But there's another element to the history of this which didn't occur to me until I saw this analysis by A. S. Haley. If one looks at what happened the last time, you will see that the accusations were put forth around the beginning of October last year, and that Lawrence was exonerated at the very end of November. OK, so we take a look at the certification this time around, and we can see that every act used as a basis for the charge happened before the last verdict was delivered. It would appear that this is nothing more than a repeat of the previous investigation.

So what gives? Well, as Haley spells out, we have a different set of people on the disciplinary board, with three of the eighteen members being replaced after General Convention. One pretty much has to assume that some members were persuaded to change their votes, or that members who voted against deposing Lawrence were replaced by new members who voted for it. This would tend to imply that it was a relatively close vote the first time around, unless there were a lot of changed votes. But it also shows, as Haley also points out, a big double jeopardy issue. Basically, at whomever's instigation, they got to keep rendering judgements against the bishop until they got the one they wanted. And it's obvious that the they includes the presiding bishop and a lot of other liberal clergy.

I do not feel moved to opine as to the merits of charging Lawrence with canonical violations. The current action, however, is such a gross violation of process that any Christina should condemn it. And of course, the likelihood of this backfiring is very high; given the previously expressed opinions of the SC supreme court, the departing diocese could very well leave with all but a couple of parishes, free and clear; the national church could end up with naught but a slightly better majority towards the revisionists, a pile of legal bills which we already cannot afford, and a mountain of ill-will.

UPDATE: Now that the identity of the accusers has been revealed, we can see the same old Episcopal Forum/St. Mark's Chapel gang at work. The latter group, in particular, have been trying to force a new parish on the diocese, for whatever reason; I'm given to understand that it's a group of dissidents from one of the major conservative parishes. So are they going to get to be the cathedral of the soon-to-be-formed rump diocese?

Looking for Golden Eggs?

Word has come down that the national church is going to depose Bishop Lawrence of South Carolina for abandonment. If you want to look, you can see the papers here. The form of the action looks, to my admittedly non-legalist eye, utterly invalid: the charges are a list of canonical violations, and therefore he by right must be tried for these violations in order to depose him. It's a nice shortcut not to actually take testimony from him or hold proceedings out in public or any of those other niceties, but Bishop Lawrence obviously hasn't gone off to join a different church or otherwise quit his post, and therefore the charge of abandonment looks fraudulent as all get out.

One gathers that the point of this is to set off the diocesan convention recently put into that diocese's canons. At that point the genuine legal machinery can kick into gear so that KJS can attempt to seize all the property and change all the locks.

On one level this is supremely stupid. SC is not a huge diocese, and surely not everyone is going to leave, but they have about 1% of membership and 1.8% of attendance, so booting them is going to hurt. SC is also pretty much the only diocese with a strong record of growth. Also, nothing that Lawrence is supposed to have done wrong, it seems to me, was going to have adverse consequences unless the national church pulled a stunt like, well, this. I have to think that it is going to increase friction in the House of Bishops yet again, because there are surely a lot of bishops who do not agree that this act is legitimate, much less that it is well-conceived. In the public relations department, it gives the appearance that the national church cannot let pass any insult to its dignity.

The joker in the pack is that SC case law may favor the diocese and not the national church. Their courts have already given indication that they do not have to accept the ex post facto rewrites from above of the diocesan corporate charter. Thus the national church may well be left with nothing.

It is really is long past time for this sort of destructive act to be set aside. Litigation is costing the national church a pile, and even if they get the real estate, they aren't going to get the people. The atmosphere of hostility is palpable, and we cannot afford it.

Let Us Now Praise the Late Sixties

Today, in recollection of the uncanonicalirregular ordinations in Philadelphia back in 1974, we have been given a paean to their ilk by Louie Crew. It is praise afflicted with a certain nostalgia, not to mention some self-exaltation: Dr. Crew, as a founder of Integrity, surely must be numbered among those whom he praises.

And perhaps some did sit in jails; but nobody involved in those ordinations was at any risk of that. The worst that could have happened was that a bunch of women would continued to be numbered among the laity, and a few retired bishops might have had some ineffectual discipline directed at them. I eventually realized that what I was seeing was not a group of isolated rebels, but a more or less organized coup.

Dr. Crew's part in this was carried out during his rise through the academic establishment. In the same era, women's studies enjoyed the same elevation (the department was established at UMCP before my arrival there in 1977). The protest establishment still waxed nostalgic over "four dead in Ohio" (ignoring the two dead in Mississippi), but the inconvenient fact that these six constituted the entire scope of the carnage was giving way to the more prosaic reality that the next generation wasn't going to get to live as well or with such noble causes at hand. It was easy enough to see that the church was being taken over by liberals who intended to use the structures of the church to push their views on everyone else. Or in other words, they just wanted to supplant and become their supposed oppressors.

But beyond that, the attitude fostered (and which the conservatives unfortunately picked up from them) was that being a jerk for Jesus was not only perfectly OK, but that it was the way people should act: contemptuous, loose with the facts, power-hungry and, well, self-righteous. When I look back at 1974, I think about how much more civil and mutually respecting the church might be if they had waited for GC's approval. And a little remorse for the damage they did to church order would also be in line. But humility, it appears, has passed away.