Reports of the Death of the Episcopal Church are Greatly Exaggerated

The Lord is displacing the Episcopal Church." This pronouncement was made back in December by Bishop Bob Duncan, of the newly formed Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
A quick scan of the media coverage of the new church reveals that the press has by and large bought this line, and gone along with the story that a select group of missional mavericks have ridden into crumbling church buildings as the white knights destined by God to preserve the “one true Episcopal church.”
While the media seems snookered by the idea that the US Episcopal Church has become moribund, one should not make the mistake of extrapolating from trend to the end. While ongoing Anglican antics by select liberal and conservatives representing the more polar extremes of Anglicanism make Monty Python’s Bishop sketch pale by comparison, the US Episcopal Church “is not dead yet.”

When I interviewed author Phyllis Tickle, she placed this current crisis into a much-needed historical perspective.

As Bishop Mark Dyer has observed, about every five hundred years, the church feels compelled to have a giant rummage sale. During the last such upheaval the Great Reformation of five hundred years ago, Protestantism took over hegemony. But Roman Catholicism did not die. It just had to drop back and reconfigure. Each time a rummage sale has happened, in other words, whatever held pride of place simply gets broken apart into smaller pieces, and then it picks itself up and to use Diana Butler Bass’s term, “re-traditions.”

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http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religionandtheology/1298/reports_of_the_death_of_the_episcopal_church_are_greatly_exaggerated