Dumbing Abandonment Down

From The Living Church-

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori notified Bishop Mark Lawrence on October 15 that the Disciplinary Board for Bishops had certified that he “abandoned the Church” by certain actions he took in 2010 and 2011. Few would deny that was an eventful exchange: pursuant to the abandonment canon, the Presiding Bishop restricted his ministry, which suspends him until the House of Bishops can meet to vote on whether to remove him completely. These steps immediately triggered existing decisions by South Carolina’s standing committee that separated the diocese legally from the Episcopal Church and called a special diocesan convention within 30 days.

These sudden developments raise many questions, including why the disciplinary board took this step, how those opposed to Bishop Lawrence and South Carolina justify the summary imposition of the ultimate ecclesiastical penalty, and what those sympathetic to South Carolina are to make of the diocese’s response.

The place to start in grappling with these questions is with the specific charges leveled by the disciplinary board, which has welcomed several new appointees as others completed their service. The first charge relates to changes made in 2010 and 2011 to the diocesan constitution that modified but did not remove the “accession clause,” the provision that recites that South Carolina accedes to the Episcopal Church’s constitution. The second charge concerns an amendment to the corporate charter — the diocese is incorporated under South Carolina law — replacing a reference to the Episcopal Church’s constitution with one to the diocesan constitution. Neither of these first two charges was new. Both were considered by the disciplinary board only last year when it refused to certify Bishop Lawrence for abandonment after concluding that those were the actions of the diocese, not the bishop.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/dumbing-abandonment-down