The Fourth Moratorium - Report from ACC-14 Day 5 Part 1

On a day when the cloud of litigation surrounding The Episcopal Church grows darker, many couldn’t help but notice it even from the sunny shores of Jamaica. However this litigious church tempest seems to have escaped the sight of the 14th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council and some of the Anglican Communion’s top officials.

Today, a pastor and his wife are being evicted from their home in Colorado Springs. At the same time, the individual members of the vestry of Saint James Newport Beach are being sued by the Diocese of Los Angeles for $500,000 a piece in legal fees for a total of $6 million being sought by the diocese.

This has been the state of affairs in North America for several years now. Like a small crack in the dam, churches started leaving TEC in 2000 and even earlier. TEC and its team of lawyers, bishops and bishops who are also lawyers attempted to squash those churches in court. Shortly after, what’s turned out to be a longer yet more amicable process to shore-up the dam, began in the form of the 2004 Windsor Report. According to Bishop Gregory Cameron, Bishop of Asaph and Secretary of the Windsor Continuation Group, this five year process is now concluded and the appropriate recommendations have been made as to how the Anglican Communion can stop the dam from breaking and The Episcopal Church from tearing itself and the Anglican Communion apart. These recommendations were made in the form of the Windsor Continuation Report, a report commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. There is just one small problem with this report. It seems that when its authors, one of which was Bishop Cameron, wrote the 22 page paper that includes sections titled, "the Seriousness of the present Situation," "Breakdown of Trust," "Turmoil in The Episcopal Church," and "An Ecclesial Deficit," they left out any direct advice on how to deal with what some see as the most glaring and terrible result of this break-up, that black cloud of litigation. Read more
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