Episcopal Church in Southwestern Virginia

So here I am sitting at a PC at the media centre of the council for the episcopal Diocese of Southhwestern Virginia surrounded by southern-states accents and the smell of coffee. I'm actually also waiting for the labyrinth to be set up that in about 40 minutes I'm supposed to be helping people to make use of. The Hotel Roanoke has become a hive of activity and full of people embracing friends thay haven't seen awhile and earnest conversations in corners. On the whole I'd have to say people are in good heart, though.

Last night I co-presided at communion with a woman priest of the diocese of SwVa in a fairly straight ECUSA eucharist [save for the multimedia intercessions and having the presider in two persons -and it was in the round, a modern language Lord's Prayer was used, people came and stood round the communion table to receive -okay so not so straight]. We divided up the service and the Eucharistic prayer for two voices. Our biggest challenge was being in the centre of the room and finding a good way to talk to everyone. For the sermon I ended up walking around a bit and Clare and I opted to make sure that where we addressed the rest of the congregation we simply looked to them; we needed to avoid apparently talking to one another when we were standing opposite one another at the communion table.

Earlier in the evening we'd said a little about the diocesan link from our perspective to adult youth leaders. I said that I thought that we were a church divided by a common heritage [shades of ?was it Churchill? "divided by a common language"]. I had met the assumption on the part of episcopalians that the CofE was pretty much like ECUSA in churchmanship etc. The episcopal church in the USA is pretty catholic -much more so that most CofE churches I've been involved with. So I repeated to them Revd Bob Stamps [he who wrote 'God and man at table are sat down'] who was doing a PhD when I was training for ordination and he told us that he felt that many of us would actualy find his church [the United Methodist Church] more like what we used to than much of ECUSA.

They seemed to take quite well my observation that for us coming to ECUSA was a little like stepping into church life in the 1950's. I didn't have time to go into that much at the time but on reflection I think it was mostly about the style of worship and a liturgical conservatism that is unhappy with more contemporary music and flexibility in putting content together -the canons covereing worship matters seem more tightly defined and defining than ours. This all seems very odd becasue theologically ECUSA seems to come out as quite a bit more liberal on the whole than the CofE [though we are dealing with generalities here -with all the problems that such brings].

Any way that's about all I can do now so maybe later today....