[Georgia] An Email From Bishop Benhase On His Consent To The Glasspool [Los Angeles] Consecration

I do not believe there will be much made over this. The former bishop supported Integrity and never took a stand otherwise.  He was quick to point out the similarity to slavery. Most folks in Georgia do not know how he voted on the GLBT issues not do they seem to care.

I think Benhase is orthodox except for this one itty-bitty thing. His predecessor certainly did not consent to the VGR mess.

I recall that the DioGA standing committee overwhelmingly voted AGAINST giving consent - there being only one person who was in favor of it.

The diocese is not financially secure. The pew-sitters have been waiting for him to turn from the path, and I suspect they will punish him (in part) by withholding contributions to their parish stewardship campaigns. It will be interesting to see if 815 will underwrite his salary the way they’ve been paying for the Christ Church lawsuit.

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Sarah—My prediction is that Waldo will announce a committe/commission to develop a rite for SSB’s at his first convention in October.

Well Benhase has made his tenure clear… “Damn the torpedos (and even Standing Committee) and full-speed ahead!” 

Still, noone in the diocese should be surprised, as Sarah states, he is acting completely consistent with his previous record.  It’s not news when a revisionist acts “revisionary”.  I feel sorry for the good people of Georgia who are meeting first hand the stark fist of “inclusion”.

RE: “a committe/commission to develop a rite for SSB’s at his first convention in October.”

Heh—I think he’d be more “pastoral” and subtle.

How about a “committee for dialogue and reconciliation of our polarized diocese”?

; > )

At the end of that, he could proclaim the diocese “reconciled” and everybody can calm down and just accept the revisionist side even though they don’t really have to “participate” in it, yet.

Isn’t it comical how everything simply HAS to be done by committees or commissions?  Sorta like the airplane designed for several missions but which can’t perform any of them well.

Of course Glasspool is orthodox—as she sorts through the theological, biblical and liturgical cafeteria, she takes up a conservative idea for every progressive one she picks. In TEC, this is considered positively right-wing!

1. She has done remarkable ministry in leading congregations. What does this mean?
2. How did this Diocese get a bishop that is so far out of sync with the parishoners?

This will be a surprise to many in this diocese of GA.  Most thought he was conservative, because he portrayed himself that way in his walkabouts.

My wife attended a session with the candidates. Bp Benhase said he would permit SSBs if the rector and vestry approved and TEC authorized them. He is not a surprise. DGA has been lobbied by Integrity for years and there has been no opposition from most congregations. Many congregatons are missions and will go along with the bishop.

How did the Georgia Standing Committee vote on Glasspool?

If she were orthodox she would haved renounced her orders long ago. You are right Sarah, she is orthodox as far as the “new orthodoxy” is concerned. The re-education camps will be coming to those in Upper SC who have not already lived in one as I have.

If she were really orthodox, she never would’ve been ordained a priest.

No surprises, the marching orders have been given.  The banner over them continues to be agenda driven rather than theology driven.  Somehow the shock of their machinations has been attenuated by their predictable decent toward extinction. I do pity those remaining Christians that hope in vain for a correction that is unlikely to occur.

Nope, FOTW, that correction will never occur.  They’ve had their chance, and they blew it.

#14, my understanding was that he made that admission in one of the 4 walkabouts but did not acknowledge it in the other 3.  I know several folks at the established churches in Savannah (including my sister), who were very surprised when I told them he was revisionist and did SSBs in his church in DC.  They all thought he was more conservative than Bp L. based on the walkabouts they had been to.  My knowledge of this diocese from living their several years and from my sister, who has lived there all of her youth and adult life, is that he laity is pretty conservative, though not the clergy.  I would be surprised if this bishop does not start to have some money problems pretty soon, if he begins SSBs, expecially since the largest church (Christ Church) has already left, and the 2d largest (now largest) St John’s is very conservative (doesn’t it still use the 1928 Prayer Book?).

Billy, I’ll be honest, but I just can’t have any sympathy for folks who didn’t know Benhase was a foaming revisionist.

1) The right questions should have been asked at all the walkabouts, and the fact that they weren’t is the laity’s problem, and no one else’s.

2) A cursory look at Benhase’s parish website would have revealed the a) liturgies for SSUs and the non-celibate gay man on staff. 

3) Not to mention, of course, that all of this information was blazoned on the skies over here at SF and T19.

4) Plus, the job of voting delegates is to find out what the candidates believe, period.  If they can’t do that one simple job, then why are they delegates?

Oh, Sarah, don’t get me wrong.  I pointed all this out to my friends and sister, that you have mentioned, except for the info on all the blogs.  They just are not involved enough (like most Episcopal laity) to look behind the surface of a nice-looking, easy smiling, young-looking priest, who looks like good bishop material from a fair-sized church in DC.  But then, this diocese is probably filled with the most “go-to-church-and-then-to-country-club-for lunch” bunch I’ve ever witnessed.  That’s why their liberal clergy run the diocese and voted for this revisionist.  But I think there will be some money problems for these liberal clergy (in fact, I know there already are) and for this bishop in the future.

Sarah,

Great point!  If the voting delegates cannot find out what the candidates believe, if they can’t do that one simple job, then why are they delegates?  Indeed!!  I knew this Bishop was, as you write, a foaming revisionist.  My only problem is incredulity that he can use the word “orthodox” to describe Rev. Mary Glasspool!!!  Amazing!

My wife and I once belonged to a “go-to-church-and-then-to-country-club” bunch, with a nice-looking and easy-to-get-along-with young rector, who as it turned out had a penchant for getting himself into one financial jam after another.  The vestry bailed him out twice, but the third time, they fired him.  And he was a revisionist heretic, too!

And #24, I believe he used that word “orthodox” often in his walkabouts before his election.  It easily fools people who are not really up on the issues - in fact, my memory of the PB’s “give-and-take” with the Bp and clergy of D. of SC, she took great umbrage at not being considered “orthodox” and said so.  I suspect 90% of bishops in TEC would say they are orthodox bishops and priests.  It is apparently a meaningless word, or means whatever a bishop wants it to mean, within whatever context that is chosen.

Informed voters? That’s not the American way.

Some GA friends tell me that in the walkabouts, Benhase had a big smile, came across as young and friendly. Intelligent and articulate.

And, like others, I’ve also heard that the electing convention thought that they had someone on the conservative side of moderate. They obviously had not been reading Stand Firm.

To bring about change in that diocese, he has a long row to hoe. The current Standing Committee is pretty conservative, and not a few rectors have seen wealthy conservative parishioners move on already. I suspect they will do what they can to resist destructive change.

In some parishes, pledged giving is down. The Old Guard aren’t pledging (lest their money go to fund lawsuits, abortions, etc.). They just make ad hoc gifts when the need arises. I’ve heard that the diocesan budget is bare-bones, and that the new bishop has already been cutting staff positions. Perhaps Disintegrity will underwrite his salary when the time comes.

And I’m sure that ACNA will be planting new churches. It will be interesting to see how they do.

Some of the parishes are pretty old, even colonial. The temporary annoyance of a carpetbagger bishop or a new rector isn’t going to get the long-term parishioners (great-granddaddy was baptized right here, and you weren’t) to bolt. They will simply use time-honored methods to make their lives a foretaste of you-know-where.

I guess DioUSC is next.

Why is anyone surprised by this?  The heterodox use glitz and smiles to sell their lies and could care less what it does to the “old-fashioned” churches under their charge.  They will suck the diocese dry to promote their agenda and declare victory standing on the ashes.

The orthodox never learn that to combat this, they must get together and choose one truly orthodox candidate and persuade the other orthodox candidates to resign in his favor.  This is the spirit of sacrifice that our Lord showed us.  There also must be no hesitation to expose the revisionists for what they are.  The orthodox voters should have only one choice when the election rolls around.

Billy, Ralph, Ricardo, and others.
No one should be particularly surprised by the election.  What should shock everyone is that this supposedly orthodox diocese with a supposedly orthodox standing committee stacked the nominating committee with revisionists who then nominated a bunch of revisionists.  Remember, THEY did the research and found exactly the candidates THEY wanted.
The major error here was that the laity trusted the people elected or appointed to the nominating committee to actually represent them.  They expected them to weed out heretics.  That was, after all, their job 1.  There is no excuse for NOMINATING people who are not competent, or not orthodox.  And 20 years from now, with uber-revisionists in charge of all the diocesan machinery, the future nominating committee will be WORSE.
Get with it folks.  Read Sarah’s book on little stone bridges.  Organize.  Run for vestries, challenge the folks who have rep’ed the parish at diocesan convention for 20 years.  Or else this will happen to you, too.  There is a TEC sponsored organization in every CP diocese planning to take over the day the bishop retires, readying campaign strategy, choosing people to run for convention delegates and standing committee seats.  Either fight this, or quit complaining when your opponents get exactly what they have worked for over the last 30 years.  Or join ACNA, and then quit complaining about it.

While the majority of the laity are on the orthodox side of conservative, most of the priests are graduates of the liberal school of theology at Virginia Seminary.  During Bishop Louttit’s tenure, he sent postulants almost exclusively to VTS which is no bastion of orthodoxy.

At the walkabouts, only previously submitted (screened) questions were submitted. The whole process was orchestrated to produce the present bishop who represents the clergy of the diocses. This is not good but it was no surprise. The only surprise was that the token nominee was almost elected.

A couple of things are obvious to me about the mismatch between the liberal bishop and conservative parishioners. The preceding bishop had shaped the future of the diocese with his determination of where postulants were trained. There was already a mismatch between the liberal clergy and the conservative parishioners when bishop Benhase was selected. The bishop is the key to shaping a diocese. In our diocese (DSJ) our bishop had his postulants trained either locally or at Nashota House or Trinity. Over the span of twenty years, the clergy in our diocese (including me)were actually more conservative than the parishioners. Lay people generally trust their clergy to lead them in the selection of bishops and don’t want to be involved in the politics or the theology of bishop candidates. The point is that a diocese is shaped by the bishop over time by the determination of what seminaries locals parishioners are trained at, who is selected to train and who is selected from outside the diocese to replace clergy. Once a liberal bishop is in place the diocese is destined to remain or become liberal.

Sadly, I am no longer surprised by any of the goings-on in the Episcopal Church.

Thank you, all of you.  Many of you have articulated
much better than I could have just what has been done to
many of us sincere Christians and how slow we were to
catch on to the deliberate, cold, and dishonest nature
of it all.  (Sorry folks, but like you, I finally feel
like calling it as I see it.)

Thank you, especially, Undergroundpewster, for making
it easy to explain why I finally decided I must
find a different Church home.  I belonged to a very
conservative parish (Morning Prayer twice a month,
everything almost always Rite I) which was turned into
a re-education camp, complete with a rector who approved
and an assistant who did most of the dirty work.

Thank you also, Billy, for touching on obvious tactics
used by the revisionists for gaining control, e.g.,
(1) Pleading ignorance of any problem (2) Trying to
control language to prevent discussion of the problem.
In the midst of the usual attacks on the Bible, the
uniqueness of Christ, etc., the assistant spoken of appeared
mystified that anyone, either in the parish or in the
larger church, should think that any of this was a big
deal, and said it was unkind, or words to that effect,
for anyone to be labeled as “revisionist.”  (I know that
the revisionists themselves hate that label with a passion. But what do they call themselves?)
And of course, she proclaimed that everyone, no matter
what their theological persuasion, was “welcome.”
I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but I’ll just tell you
that this, my last parish as an Episcopalian, was in
the diocese of Southwest Florida and is now trying to
gain new members (to replace all those they have lost)
by building an expensive new physical plant. Good luck
to them—they will certainly need it!

Sarah, Can you tell me if this was excerpted from a personal e-mail message or if it was part of an official statement to be released to the Diocese at large; i.e., are you able to share the entire message? I am still in the Diocese of Georgia and have not seen nor heard anything about the consent or denial of consent by this bishop. I’d like to share this with others in my parish and want to “credit” my source appropriately! I’m in one of those, “if I don’t think or talk about it, it won’t be so” parishes. Thanks.

Several friends in Georgia tell me independently that their clergy learned about this first at Stand Firm (nice work Sarah Hey) and that the diocese has not released anything officially. These clergy have not had a good week.

They (and I) see this as a serious error, theologically, morally, and politically. Not only does it indcate that he has chosen sides, but it has also thrown his lay and clergy leadership under the bus. He came on very strong at the diocesan convention and appeared to be a bridge builder.

One needn’t have the gift of discernment of spirits to see where this diocese is headed if it’s leadership doesn’t Stand Firm.

Hi Ithink—it was not part of an official diocesan statement.