A rector’s plea to the Lambeth Commission

I bring your attention to an excellent and moving submission to the Lambeth Commission by Rev. Ian Montgomery, the Rector of St. Thomas Church in Menasha, Wisconsin.

I encourage you to read it for yourselves. I will say this submission is interesting for a number of reasons. Note the cross currents Fr. Montgomery’s parish is experiencing with people leaving and coming and preparing to leave over Episcopal revisionism. It’s a microcosm of much of the ECUSA.

This submission is right on target, particularly in two areas. First, Fr. Montgomery has all the talk of “reconciliation� and “dialogue� nailed:

Why not reconciliation?

For the last twenty years in which I have been involved in dialog on either a local or national level there has been one goal. That goal has been the conversion from a biblical, orthodox and traditional view into a more liberal and revisionist one. Coupled with this we have seen increasingly intolerant and totalitarian rule by bishops who bring all their canonical authority to intimidate and force out clergy and congregations whose only “sin� is to conform to the doctrine and teachings of Scripture and the Anglican Communion at large. Dialog effectively ended on November 2, 2003.

To put it another way, so-called “dialogue� has been merely a tactic the liberals use in consolidating control of the Episcopal church (and other mainline denominations for that matter). That a number of bishops are indeed driving out orthodox clergy without a word of protest from Mr. Dialogue And Reconcilation himself, Presiding Bishop Griswold, speaks volumes about what a sham “dialogue� is in the ECUSA.

Finally, Fr. Montgomery sets forth eloquently what the Lambeth Commission must do – discipline the ECUSA and provide a place for orthodox North American Anglicans out from under the liberals. For . . .

Not to both discipline ECUSA . . . and to give our people a choice as to where to go will be to abandon us.

I would go further and say the Anglican Communion doesn’t deserve to stay together and will probably never receive my allegiance if it doesn’t provide a place for those faithful to traditional orthodox Anglicanism in North America.

Fr. Montgomery, my prayers are with you and with your kind. God bless you.