March 28, 2006
ED
It’s not all that comfortable for OoN to sound off in lamentations and probably an imposition on our readers, but the possibilities for the currently realized electile dysfunction in Tennessee have been roaring in like a freight train for at least ten years past, and I’m weary with it. Covenant, the journal and alternative press which I edit and publish (covpubs.org), has been reporting on this creeping miasma right along over that time, but in spite of that, still an embarrassingly too many act like it’s a big surprise.
The indifference of the laity and the intimidation of the clergy have generally allowed all this to happen.
It’s not the nominees. They’re a generally reasonable lot, some seemingly distracted by an Anglicanism distorted from their side of their fuchsia-colored glasses. It’s no doing of theirs, that’s just the way they are and choices consistent with the Network fellow travelers on our Search Committee, our Standing Committee, and our bishop. They’re very generous to stay this long, and I wouldn’t be too discomfited to see them begin to withdraw.
I suspect we’ll not get past the scheduled the May 6 scheduled “third go” at electing without adjournment. Perhaps we could head this off by some attempt at, but not likely, reconciliation among the presbytery with political common sense as its goal. We’re in a sadness of times here, a testimony to inadequate an episcopal leadership and cloning deployment compromised by denial and grandiosity and a parochial myopia, the Great Commission blinding many to the Great Commandment.