January 31, 2006

Episcoup

Our diocese plans to elect a new bishop right soon. There’s been the usual search committee made up of worthies said to have considerable capacity for discernment.

Quite a few of them, however, are either members of or fellow travelers with one or more of the myriad of self-appointed groups whose current goal is to orthofix the church. Whenever we question just how those kinds of associations might affect their choices for our next leader, they lament, “just trust us.”

Well, they’ve recently announced proudly three of their candidates they’ve turned into nominees. They’re all, surprise, men. The sadness is that nobody seems to be asking about the spiritual maturity of these nominees nearly so much as about their church politics. At any rate, the answers are not all that reassuring.

Out in Minneapolis a few years ago, the church struggled like it does every three years to incarnate grace into resolutions and canon law. Scripture repeatedly suggests such an endeavor is a dead end and never works, of course, but it’s all we’ve got. We ain’t God, and God would be the first to remind us.

But we weren’t all that caught up in what would Jesus do about it so much as how would Jesus be about it. It got him crucified, of course. And it looks a lot like some of our colleagues are trying to return the favor. When those commissioned to episcope us episcoup us instead, there’s some considerable doubt about how much churching is going on.

No Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.