It is Time, NOW, To Take A Look At The Proposed TEO Canon Changes - Comments Needed!

TEO put out a set of proposed Canon changes a couple of months ago that have, to date, not received much attention on the Anglican blogs.  Well, my friends, you REALLY need to take a look at some of this stuff - it will make some of you who are still in TEO wonder why you remain, and perhaps re-think your decision, because these new Canons portend a renewed reign of terror by the P.O. against any, clergy or laity, who oppose her "innovations."

Comments are still being sought by TEO on these proposed changes through June 30, 2008.  Comments may be addressed to TIVTF.topic@faithgroups.com .  If you decide to post a comment, be careful to address comments to specific proposed Canons and sections, or they will probably be disregarded.  Many of you are probably thinking, "what's the use?" but there is always value in letting many voices be heard even if we do not persuade.  Someone, somewhere will hear us.

Among the proposed changes are entirely new Canons for discipline and removal of laity from church offices (!), and for dealing with clergy who are deemed to be incapacitated from physical or mental causes.  Both of these seem at turns draconian and lacking in fundamental fairness and due process.  Title IV on ecclesiastical discipline has been completely re-written, so much so that it is extremely difficult to identify all of the changes.  To my view as an attorney, and former Episcopalian who held several Parish offices in my time, these changes range from the preposterous, to the ominous, to the downright scary.  Viewed in the context of the widespread practices within TEO to ignore and /or misuse the Canons as they presently exist, what you will see in the proposed changes will no doubt conjure up several bad scenarios for where the P.O. and her minions are going with these changes.

I am attaching to this post a memo I have written for Jackie Bruchi at Stand Firm; the link is at the bottom of this post.  Please take a look at what I saw in there, and then look at the proposed changes yourself.  Stand Firm will also be posting more on this in the next few days, and Jackie's post has links to all the necessary documents.  Both of our sites are asking that you post comments, at either or both sites, with other thoughts or observations you make as we take a serious look at what is about to come down.  It is only by looking at this massive proposed Canon change together that we will grasp the entirety of what is being done, and perhaps make our objections and collective voices heard.

Download bruchimemorecanonchanges.doc

Comments

[David Paisley]

This reminds me of nothing more than the church that inspired it: the USSR, where dissidents were routinely found to be mentally impaired and stuck in the looney bin--that and, of course, the debtor's prisons of the 19th century, which you could only leave upon payment of the debts for which you were imprisoned, but without any means of earning the money to do so.

But whether the evil is Dickensian or Soviet, the effect is still the same: the authors are saying what we already knew, that the current regime in TEC is all about money and the power it buys.

[BettyLee Payne]

David, do you think they will use ox carts to carry away the orthodox offenders?? You know, it would ALMOST have been worth staying in the morally and theologically bankrupt denomination in which ten generations of my family worshiped God to see just how Ted Gulick and Stacy Sauls would have gone about evicting my faithful friends and me! (Due to those well documented years of bringing in orthodox leaders to tell the very unpleasant truth to people throughout the Commonwealth of Kentucky about the unravelling of any semblance of Christian truth in the leadership ranks of then ECUSA.) I said ALMOST! I am thankfully long gone.