Charlie Butts – OneNewsNow – 1/12/2011
The Episcopal Church is bearing the brunt of the controversy stemming from the “wedding” of two clergy in Massachusetts.

Bishop Thomas Shaw conducted a wedding ceremony for Mally Lloyd, a ranking official of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and Katherine Ragsdale, dean and president of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, on New Year’s Day in Boston. And as Jeff Walton of The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) tells OneNewsNow, the majority of the Episcopal Church is increasingly practicing a separate faith.

“This is really just one more instance that is expanding this wedge that has been driven between the U.S. Episcopal Church and conservative Anglicans overseas, where the vast majority of Anglicans live,” he notes.

The U.S. branch has been asked not to consecrate more homosexuals, while lesbian bishops and clergy are to avoid participating in further homosexual union ceremonies. But Walton says they have flouted the mother church in both areas. As a result, “the Episcopal Church, [which] used to be about three and a half million members back in the mid-1960s, [is] now down to just over two million members in the United States.”

So most churches within the denomination have lost membership, but smaller parishes have seen a bigger impact, as some report having less than 70 members.