News
The topic of marriage – who is included, how the church is involved, and what the rites should look like – has been in front of every General Convention for at least 40 years. The 79th General Convention will be no different. The focus this time will be on the recommendations of the 19-member Task…
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It’s Time to Pay the Presiding Officer of the House of Deputies. Until yesterday, three resolutions were being considered to authorize some form of compensation for the President of the House of Deputies: A028 from Task Force to Study Church Leadership & Compensation, B014 from a group of bishops led by Bishop Sean Rowe of…
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The 79th General Convention will be my second as a deputy. My first foray into the inner workings of our denomination’s national structure was prompted by the calls to reimagine the church. I believed, and still believe, that the Episcopal Church is going to have to make some difficult and imaginative decisions if we are…
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Miguel Escobar, director of Anglican studies at EDS@Union, hosts the first of his nightly #GC79 podcasts. Guests: The Rev. Megan Castellan is the new rector of St.John’s in Ithaca, NY, and an alternate deputy in the diocese of West Missouri. Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale is a deputy, and serves as canon to the ordinary for administration and evangelism in…
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Meet a few of the deputies gathered for the 79th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). This one verse in the Gospel of John reminds us, as we gathered in Austin for the 79th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, that we are invited to continue God’s movement toward people by all means possible. What Resolution A070 proposes represents this…
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Since January, when the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM) released its Blue Book Report, the subject of Prayer Book revision has been a hot topic on Facebook, in clergy groups, and at gatherings of liturgy aficionados, For the last three years, the commission has been addressing Resolution A169 of the 2015 convention, which…
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I remember it like it was yesterday. A friend and I were walking from our high school, through a white working-class neighborhood to catch a bus home. This was often a perilous walk, as it was on this particular day. Within a few blocks of our journey a couple of young neighborhood boys began throwing…
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It hadn’t occurred to me that the political methodology of Donald Trump would see daylight at the 79th General Convention! But, then, I hadn’t looked at a proposal for reconstructing how the church speaks of God and man. And of woman. Woman in particular. The Trump methodology: First you blow it up; then, with whatever…
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I am an eager proponent of prayer book revision, but we’re not ready. We’re not ready because we haven’t had the conversation well. There have been many forums for conversation about liturgy and liturgical change in the past few years. In my experience of sampling such forums, I’ve found them to be prickly at best…
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The House of Deputies at the 79th General Convention in Austin comprises 852 deputies, 53 percent of whom identify as women, 46 percent of whom identify as men, and slightly less than 1 percent of whom identify as gender queer. According to the Pew Research Center, the Episcopal Church’s membership in 2014 was 55 percent…
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Like the insurance agent on television commercials who “knows a thing or two” because he’s “seen a thing two,” Lynn Schmissrauter, former deputy from the Diocese of East Tennessee, knows a few things about bishop elections. She’s been a consultant to bishop search committees for the past two decades. Schmissrauter is ready to retire, but…
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