General Convention will extract revenge on those conservatives who have remained within the Episcopal Church, and it will not be pretty. I am sure Mr. David Booth Beers (Mrs. Jefferts Schori's attorney) will have all manor of things waiting for us at GC2009.

That is the more or less the immediate future.

But, what of the real future? Let's look at the Episcopal Church. If TEC were a publicly traded company, is this a company in which you would buy stock? Your average Episcopal congregation has about 70 people in it.

To me, this means your average Episcopal Church will likely close in 40 years. The number of churches declining in the Episcopal Church outnumbers those that are growing by more than a 2 to 1 margin.

Moreover, as the church contracts, the remaining bureaucratic structure will fight to survive and force more resources from beleaguered congregations to support Diocesan offices and the national church.

If you have a church with 70 people, you can hardly afford a regular full time pastor. Rather than being supported by your Diocese, your Diocese will have its hand out. That won't last for long.

I would further predict that, given the current state of affairs, as Dioceses leave the Episcopal Church, they will not be reconstituted. Rather, the liberals and property that is won through litigation will simply be attached to another Diocese.

Look for the San Joaquin "loyalists" to be attached to either Northern California or El Camino Real (my bet is on ECR). Look for the Ft. Worth "loyalists" to be attached to the faltering (at least financially) Diocese of Northwest Texas. Look for Pittsburgh "loyalists" to be attached to Northwest Pennsylvania. And so on.

Moreover, we are churning out priests who have no Gospel with which to evangelize, but who are maintenance priests, created from the beginning, to service the current constituency of the church. In forty years, that aging constituency will be pushing up the daisies. In bankruptcy parlance, this church is the equivalent of a buggy whip manufacturer in the religious sector.

On that note, given the current rates of decline, I would predict that Katherine Jefferts Schori will be the last Presiding Bishop to dwell in a swanky Manhattan penthouse and have a swanky office on Second Avenue for the entire duration of her tenure as Presiding Bishop. The 28th Presiding Bishop will continue to be a Diocesan Bishop with jurisdiction over a domestic Diocese, rather than merely the convocation of American Churches in Europe.

This will occur 16 years from now. At that point, the Episcopal Church will be about on the level with the Unitarians of today, numerically and, probably, theologically, only with vestments. The demand for buggy whips continues to decline. What will come of those parishes and Dioceses that choose to realign or otherwise hold fast to the faith in a church bent on its own destruction because of some ill founded belief that the demand for buggy whips will come back?

Well, they will either fragment like the continuing church movement, or they will create a missional minded and vibrant denomination that carries forward the traditions and structure of the early Church that will some day receive into its ranks former Methodist, Presbyterian, Assemblies of God, non-denominational, what-have-you congregations that want to be a part of the Church Catholic. This is the crossroads at which we stand. Previous behavior being the best predictor of future behavior, I believe it will be the former which will happen.

As Bishop Michael Marshall once wrote, "so much of renewal heralds a time and season of reaction, not of a desire to get the right answer, but to get a different answer."

So has most of the reformation of Christianity since it began. To further paraphrase Marshall, if we are to create a household of faith like a castle, where we have blown up the drawbridge, shut down the portcullis to separate those within and without it, we have missed the point of the Gospel.

Rather, the new Anglicanism in North America must be like a family reunion, providing a home for Christians who know where they belong before their longings take them to new places; being truly free to explore new territory yet above all knowing where they can return and where they can be welcome even when they get it wrong.

If Anglicanism does not preserve this aspect of its true self, then the experiment of the via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, the Church Catholic listening to and placing in positions of leadership rather than marginalization, reformers and enthusiasts calling for a return to the Gospel and the basic teachings of Jesus Christ to bring the Church back into oneness for which Christ prayed before he died and of which a broken world is in dire need, will be lost. If that occurs, I will grieve my entire lifetime, while today, I grieve the loss of unity in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, no more.

At a meeting today, I heard from a prison chaplain who is building one Protestant Church behind the walls of a prison. Kairos, when it begins in this prison, will be a collaboration between this church (supported by a number of outside churches of various denominational stripes) and the Roman Catholic Church. Anglicanism could be this sort of thing. The future will be what we make it.

Much of what I call for in this piece, and pray for as regards Anglicanism, requires humility that I am afraid we just don't have. But, I remain hopeful. The other main thing that I think is required is patience.

It will take another 20 years for your average Episcopalian to even figure out what is really going on with the Episcopal Church, and that long for liberal Episcopalians who truly believe in Jesus to realize that belief will ultimately not be supported by their church; in fact, it may not even be tolerated.

It will take 20 years before there are numerous Anglicans in North America who were never Episcopalian and do not carry with them all of the baggage from these times. Athanasius never lived to see the heresies that distressed the church of his time abate. So is the way of things. Is this a call to delay action? Hardly. It is a call to realize that we will feel lonely for a good long while, as Athanasius must have surely felt.

For me, all I can do is remain focused on Jesus. In the coming year, I will have a great deal to do with planting a new Kairos ministry in another prison, and this is what I am to be about. Lots of things have pointed me to this, not the least of which was a very Cursillo looking rainbow I saw on the way back from my meeting today.

God is still so in charge of all things, and He will continue to be in charge of my life - if I let him, if I don't let my own baggage get in the way, if I don't let the Episcopal Church and its politics, its trappings, its needs get in the way of that.

I still have work to do in my Diocese and in representing my Diocese at General Convention, but that isn't the main thing.

The only good part in all this is that the future is a bright as it could possibly be, lit by the light of Jesus Christ.

--- Mr. Drell is a Christian, Anglican, lawyer, father and prison minister. He owns Drells' Descants, a blog discussing Episcopal issues of the day.