Contact: James Ince, Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion, LEAC, 240-485-7357, [email protected]

WASHINGTON, July 12 /Christian Newswire/ -- Despite support of key leadership bishops, pursuit of nationwide church indictments “against radicalized Episcopal bishops who have lost their Christian way” was called off today.  “The recent terminal meltdown of the American Episcopal church rendered the proposed cases moot,” the lay sponsor announced.  Episcopalians are the embattled U.S. province of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The American branch was suspended from global proceedings for transgressions in homosexuality issues adopted at its 2003 national convention and later.  It has declined to affirm Anglican requirements stated in the now-famous “Windsor Report.”

“Practically speaking, the national convention in Columbus in June and the weeks since have made it obvious that there is no longer a stable legal jurisdictional path in the United States church,” the sponsoring Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion (LEAC) said. 

“That church has departed -- spiritually dead and about to be administratively isolated.  Its schismatic withdrawal from Christian doctrine has moved it away from traditional Anglicans in America and the big majority of international communicants,” said LEAC, which mounted the indictment initiative in May as a measure to test legally the church’s positions on controversial issues. 

“Many Episcopalians, trapped in the holds of a strangely Unitarianism-inclined religious vessel, are slow to waken.  Educating and rescuing them is a new challenge, requiring most of LEAC’s energies.  Reconciliation died at Columbus, but there is broad new commitment to sustained spiritual and governance affiliation with the Anglican Communion, as ECUSA sails away.”  (ECUSA was the acronym for the U.S. Anglican church, which now is simply “The Episcopal Church” (TEC).

“We go now full-bore into the most challenging and crucial mission since LEAC’s founding.  Our attention must now be directed to assisting what we call ‘the middle 80%’ in parish pews across the nation, many unwittingly led down a blasphemous path.  They have quietly if not secretively been taken away from their Christian vows and historic faith, although still mouthed in their creeds every Sunday. 

“If we don’t succeed, most will go innocently away from Christianity, perhaps forever, blindly favoring comfortable ‘unity’ while losing their historic Christian home.  We want to keep a robust national church, not a remnant.  We want to save souls in unity with Christ, not unity in Unitarianism.”

LEAC said it had successfully recruited traditional bishops to join pursuit of indictments against about 40 bishops who had participated in the 2004 “laying on of hands” consecration of New Hampshire’s V. Gene Robinson, a divorced family man and now an openly partnered homosexual, and Bishop Robinson himself.  Ten bishops with jurisdictions are needed to indict a fellow bishop under canon law.

“In direct conversations with bishops at Convention we had enlisted a sufficient core number to expect more than enough to proceed,” the group said in a news release.  “Now a schismatic, terminal meltdown has taken away even this valid inquiry into the status of justice under church law.”

Although legally unnecessary, the effort had included a nationwide paper and internet drive among lay persons and clergy, which is said to have enlisted petitioners in nearly all of the 110 U.S. dioceses.  LEAC said the entire project had advanced well in just a few weeks toward the first legal phase, which was targeted for later this year.

“The issue became legally moot last week,” explained the Washington-based nonprofit on its website and news release.  “There were again shameful affronts against Christianity and the Anglican Communion at the Columbus convention, followed by numerous faithful dioceses and other parishes seeking oversight by orthodox bishops rather than being under revisionist leadership which has destroyed the church.” 

“The disintegrating U.S. church is well on the way to becoming a cult on the edges of Christianity, without the Divine Trinity or pre-eminent Scriptural Authority,” LEAC declared.  LEAC advocates sustained unity with the 78 million-strong Anglican Communion, now reduced only slightly by departure of U.S. revisionists among about 2 million U.S. Episcopalians.

“The American church’s schismatic departure from the doctrine, faith and order of the Communion appears now to be irreversible.  Reconciliation is over.  We believe the international primates will not stand much longer for this heresy. 

“A new American province of the Communion is expected soon.  It will be without most of the proposed defendant bishops and their former Anglican dioceses, their having defaulted, along with ECUSA, in their essential, founding obligations to maintain a valid spiritual and administrative conduit to the Anglican Communion,” LEAC said.

On its internet website (www.layepiscopalians.org) LEAC thanked “the hundreds of faithful worked to advance the canon-law project toward fruition.  We now shift our focus to an educational and rescue mission to save innocent or dozing communicants who will be swept permanently into Unitarianism if we can’t show them the way out of the revisionists’ clutches.”

LEAC testified at the June convention in Columbus, Oh. and lobbied at its exhibit there against liberalizing measures in homosexual issues and what it calls “heavy-handed legislation which would have jeopardized lay persons’ rights in the American church.”

It repeatedly offered LEAC’s emblematic watchwords drawn from St. Paul’s ‘Sword the Spirit’):  TRUTH  +  CLARITY  +  COURAGE.  “With those cornerstones, the right path is always easier to find and follow,” a spokesman said.