What will happen in TEC in the next five years?
It will be necessary to implement the justice agenda for the GLBT bloc. “Marriage equality” will require a BCP with bona fide rites that are “equality” based and so identical to those now in existence for “traditional marriage.” This will come in phases: first, supplemental texts, and then BCP provision. But overtaking all of this will be media reports like the one regarding the National Cathedral that speak of “same sex marriage” right now. The decorations distinguishing “provisional rites” from “marriage rites” will be set aside in the area of public consumption.
This means that right now we will probably have over half of the dioceses of TEC performing same sex blessings in a context that demands these blessings be the equivalent to marriage, with the attendant news coverage of TEC correcting injustice and paralleling the “marriage equality” movement. It is now just semantics. The dioceses that bless these relationships will be keen on other “justice issues” and that will include novelties like communion without baptism and various “without precedent” tokens of “progress” (transgendered clergy, etc).
Initially, in the “provisional” phase, there will be talk of conscience being honored and so forth. This will extend to the individual serving Priest. It will include the right to be slow to change and backward, for the Bishop of a diocese. But within five years it will not be possible to hold the view that marriage is as defined by the 1979 BCP.
Now what will be happening on the other side of this juggernaut? Diocese like Dallas, Albany and Central Florida will resist the direction of the majority. If the Texas Court rules a diocese is autonomous, South Carolina will have some counterparts before the law. This could increase the members of an alliance having recourse to “extra-provincial” status. Let’s say that as many as ten dioceses, within five years and against the backdrop sketched above, belong to such an alliance. Let’s further say that the Anglican Communion at large acknowledges the need for such a status and recognizes these dioceses as fully (or more accurately, “genuinely”) Anglican. In this period the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England try to accommodate both sides of the struggle in North America, but the latter is itself under pressures very similar to those in TEC.
What does TEC then look like in five years? Clearly there will be a one million member church bearing the name and carrying on with the justice agenda virtually in place in one-half the dioceses right now. There could be an alliance of 8-10 dioceses, perhaps with allowances now for individual churches held geographical hostage elsewhere, which holds to the 1979 BCP and the C/C as written and interpreted. In effect there would need to be a separation of these two entities, and the only question is whether the “justice TEC” would decide to make it less bloody than it has heretofore. The “continuing TEC” of ten dioceses and other fellow-travelers would of course have alongside it whatever ACNA will have become in its quest to be a province of the AC.
This would be a sort of “remnant TEC” existing from the ashes of the justice conflagration in its march for “marriage equality” and such like. The open questions are, how is the above scenario affected a) if the Texas Court hands over a victory to the provisional diocese in FW, b) if TEC gains are made against South Carolina (unlikely), c) if “extra-provincial” is stalled and does not serve any real purpose as a vis-à-vis to ACNA, d) if parishioners in churches in the “remnant dioceses” declare that the outcome sketched above is undesirable. They fold into “justice TEC” or leave for the RCC and other denominations locally more attractive. They ignore rites that they disapprove of and ramp up local service sheets and other tokens of differentiation and are more or less tolerated by “justice TEC” as were eccentric anglo-catholic enclaves. That is, they are full-on exceptions to the rule and don’t really affect the face of TEC and its life and mission.
