KATIE’S PROJECT-A-PALOOZA

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Fort Worth’s Katie Sherrod used a sermon she delivered before a recent meeting of La Cosa Nostra the Episcopal Organization’s Executive Council to play the martyr as well as to get a little more Jack Iker bashing in:

It is very meet and right that these readings should arrive on our calendars as we do our work here in the Diocese of Fort Worth, for they speak to the survival tools we have used through the last few years, especially the last two years when Episcopalians have been split one from the other by decisions made by our former leaders. And believe me, there were days when it looked darker than midnight under a skillet.

Faced with the loss of sisters and brothers and of beloved church homes, we turned to God and to each other.

These readings speak of the food that has sustained us – the grace, shield and hope of God’s unlimited love, the delight of inviting others to the feast to which we’ve been invited, the challenge of creating a healthy welcoming diocese out of the remnants of a diocese founded in anger and fed on dissatisfaction, dysfunction and disinformation.

How do we in this diocese welcome back those who sat in silence while many of us were called terrible names, subjected to public shaming, asked – or told – to leave our church homes because we are “not real Christians?”

Believe me, while our heads may agree with our bishop that we should offer them prodigious welcome, still raw broken hearts aren’t so sure. I suspect that’s the case with some in this room too.

How do all of us reach out to those who reject the invitation to the feast, who indeed claim that the feast is poisoned – not just here in this diocese but in the wider communion?

Katie? If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over there and not give a crap about your feelings. You got called names, did you? Well, hey, at least you and I finally have something in common.

Traditionalist Anglicans get called “bigots” all the time and are regularly compared to Klansmen and Nazis just because we think that overturning 2,000 years of Christian teaching and understanding ought to be based on something slightly more theologically substantial than feelings. So with all due respect, bite me.

A bunch of you got kicked out of your meeting houses, did you? Join the club, babe. Folks from one end of North America to the other have been sued out of their “beloved church homes” simply because they preferred to be honest while their dioceses preferred to play the role of the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinners everyone knows them to be.

And you know what they say. If life gives you lemons. These folks were legally evicted from their building by the Diocese of Missouri early on. They’ve done more for the Anglican tradition around St. Louis in six or seven years, give or take, with their three church plants, than the “official” Diocese has done in twenty-five or so.

Oh, and Katie? You really cut the ground out from under both your credibility and your Christian witness when you tried to make Jack Iker out to be Stalin.

Jack Iker’s only crime was to disagree with you. If diocesan refusal to implement every single addled idea in your head constituted “anger…dissatisfaction, dysfunction and disinformation,” then you and I have a little more common ground. Now you know how traditionalist Episcopalians in liberal dioceses feel.

As far as the non-Christian blasts are concerned, well, if it walks like a duck. Would a Christian church order one of its dioceses to renege on an previously-agreed-to and quite civilized separation agreement in favor of lawsuits, as happened in Virginia?

Would a Christian diocese sue a traditionalist Anglican Christian parish out of its church and then turn around and sell the building to non-Christians for less than that traditionalist parish was willing to pay for it?

Do you consider conservative Anglicans to be fellow Christians, Katie? If you do, then how can you justify the course the Episcopalians have taken? If you don’t, then as all the kids these days say, STFU when they return the compliment.

One last piece of advice, Katie. Look in the mirror before you even consider the possibility of entertaining the idea of writing something like this again.