The New Episcopal Religion on view in the candidates for Bishop of Chicago

Comments follow, beneath this extract from website describing a candidate for bishop

http://www.bishopforchicago.org/content/view/66/88888902

The Very Rev. Tracey Lind

Dean, Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio, 2000-presentwww.trinitycleveland.org

Greetings from another windy city on a lake. I am honored to be one of your nominees for bishop.

My call to proclaim God’s justice, love, and mercy for all creation has led me to spend 20 years strengthening and sustaining urban and suburban congregations. In doing so, I have integrated my background in community planning, organizational development and nonprofit leadership.

I believe in the abundant grace that springs from practicing radical hospitality; in the power of quality liturgy, stewardship and education to sustain us in Christian life; and in the urgent and absorbing errand of community engagement to which we are called as witnesses of God’s love made known to us in Jesus. Through my spiritual journey, I have developed an abiding hope that the things that separate us from one another may be overcome in the oneness of God.

My life with my partner, Emily Ingalls (a cradle Episcopalian), is the gift that most sustains me. Together, we tend our garden, travel, hike, bicycle, enjoy the arts, and spend time with family and friends. And I like to fly fish, run, read, write and look for God in silence though the third eye of my camera.

Thank you for asking me to participate in your process to discern the future of God’s people in the Diocese of Chicago. I am excited about the possibility of serving and leading a diocese that is Midwestern, metropolitan and motivated by mission. May God bless your work with wisdom, grace, and joy.
Other Nominees

COMMENTS

Tracey provides a near perfect example of the person who has fully embraced the New Episcopal Religion. She is well educated and informed, has a full and varied life, and is deeply religious. Her spirituality, however, flows from a view of the Church as being an agent of social, cultural and political change in society in order to create true community and to bring compassion and justice into the whole of life in this age. Jesus is the model of compassion and justice and as such his maleness has no more significance than the color of his eyes. As to God, though there may be use of Trinitarian language this is more often a basis for claiming God for community (“three in oner and one in three” etc) than describing the Transcendent Being who is in traditional Faith, One Godhead and Three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In fact Deity in this religion is more that of the Deity of Panentheism and/or Process Theology (that the world is in God and that God and cosmos are in a process of cosmic evolution together).

Tracey is a Lesbian with a partner, Emily, and this relationship she celebrates as within the love of God The two of them have been gifted and oriented a certain way and to gain happiness and fulfillment they follow their orientation and desires. To do so is to form a basis for holiness.

IT IS OF NOTE that the Diocese of Chicago has not in any way restricted or refused this Nomination even though it flies directly in the face of the requirements placed on The Episcopal Church by the Global Anglican Communion Further, it reveals that the Dean of a Cathedral in TEC (the lady herself) is intent on setting aside the requirements of The Windsor Report and the Primates’ Meeting and the expressed will of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It seems that a dominant part of TEC as an institution is intent on going its own way believing that it has been given by a Deity (but not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ) a new form of Religion, loosely related to historical Christianity and very much tied to modern views of human beings as bearers of rights and of natural dignity, which in their fulfillment provide wholeness and holiness. It is a Religion for those who wish to be—in 21st century terms—both in the world and for the world, as Deity’s co-workers, with little or no sense of eternal salvation through the sacrifice and atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ.

No wonder that the Primates of the Global South find the new Episcopal Religion to be not anything like what they believe, teach and confess and what they received from American and European missionaries a century ago


The Revd Dr Peter Toon
President of the Prayer Book Society 2007