Why is this a news flash, she asks? "Because, if you read the newspapers or follow events in the Church online, all you read about are the congregations that are splitting up, about priests leaving, about lawsuits in which the Episcopal Church and its dioceses are being forced to defend the canonical structures of the Church in order to keep the property of the Church.

"And if that is all you read - in newspapers or online - no one would criticize you for thinking that the Episcopal Church in the United States was on the verge of collapse. So it is a news flash to find out the Episcopal Church is not teetering on that verge, and that the majority - the vast majority - of members have decided not only to stay, but to get on with God's mission and ministry in this broken world."

Ms. Stanley is out of touch with reality.

First of all, there are not 2.3 million Episcopalians, as the National Church likes to tell us. Most of those are names on the rolls that should have been removed years ago. Because rectors are loathe to take names off of the books, they stay on there. Some are even dead and buried. Many have moved onto other denominations because of the Episcopal Church's endorsement of pansexual behavior. Hundreds of thousands of folks have simply stopped coming.

The raw, ugly truth is that there are less than 800,000 practicing Episcopalians on any given Sunday. That number is declining at the rate of 1,000 a week. According to a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey, the Episcopal Church is the fastest dying mainline protestant denomination in America. It dropped 1.5% in attendance last year. That figure is projected to only increase and escalate in 2008.

The Episcopal Church has declined in absolute numbers. According to statistics presented by Kirk Hadaway, the Episcopal Church's director of research to the Executive Council, the church is losing 1,000 parishioners per week. Only one in three Episcopalians attends a parish church on a weekly basis. Membership in all 110 dioceses of the Episcopal Church totalled 2,320,506 in 2006, down 2.2%, or 51,502, from 2,372,008 in 2005. That's the equivalent of 1,000 Episcopalians walking away from the Episcopal Church each week. There is no indication it will turn around any time soon, if ever. Since 2007, the decline has only accelerated.

One entire diocese, - San Joaquin - taking about 90 percent of its members, has departed the Episcopal Church. Three more dioceses, - Ft. Worth, Quincy and Pittsburgh, will, in all likelihood, leave over the next year taking thousands more with them. In the past 10 years, over 10 of the largest Episcopal parishes in the country have fled to other jurisdictions, my rector tells me. What does that tell you?

The figures don't lie. The Episcopal Church is not growing, it is dying.

The average age of an Episcopalian is now in the early to mid 60s. Within a decade or so, most of them will be dead and gone. They are not reproducing themselves. Their children left the Episcopal Church a long time ago and show no signs of returning. Their parishes will wither and die, sold off to new Evangelical upstarts, (like the cathedral in Kalamzaoo) or have become boutiques, nightclubs, venues of one sort or another.

Most congregations are graying. With inclusivity firmly in place as the new Episcopal gospel, young people are simply not attracted to an institution that differs so little from the world around them. Dressing up and saying a creed that is at odds with Hollywood and "Desperate Housewives" is a non-starter for the children of the baby boomer generation. Only those congregations that preach a firm gospel of faith and repentance are growing. My own parish, The Church of the Good Samaritan in Paoli, PA, is watching as the average age gets lower with the influx of young married couples with children. It is the exception, not the norm. It is not preaching that homosexuality is good and right in the eyes of God.

Ms. Stanley says that bad news still sells, good news does not."The bad news is, some parishes, some priests, some individuals, and at least the leadership of one diocese have left the Episcopal Church. Which certainly is newsworthy. But the good news far outweighs that bad news, for the good news is that the majority of Episcopalians in this country are staying. But excitement doesn't trump the truth, and the truth is, the Episcopal Church is in fine fettle, thank you very much, and those of us who are staying would like the rest of the world to know this."

This is a fiction. In 2005, 62% of all churches had an ASA of 100 or less. Today that figure is closer to 75% of all parishes in The Episcopal Church. They now have fewer than 70 attending and graying with no discernible youth to fill the ranks. Recently, three Episcopal seminaries announced they were either closing or consolidating because of the high cost of education and because they are not attracting a new generation of students.The ones they are getting are well into their 50s, second career wannabe clergy who get the "call" late in life. Most of them are angry, divorced, white women, many of them lesbians who see the church as a place to vent their spleen on congregations sympathetic to their concerns.

There is no interest in hearing a gospel of transcendence, a gospel that frees from sin and death, but one that says, "come as you are and stay as you are." After a while, any thoughtful person will ask, why bother coming to hear something I am already living out? Who needs the Episcopal Church for that?

Ms. Stanley opines that the majority of the Episcopal Church, and the majority of the Anglican Communion, do not care one whit about the sexuality and gender controversies revolving about it.

That is an outrageous lie. The Anglican Communion cares deeply about these issues, so much so that there will be an alternative Lambeth for the first time in its 500-year history. Bishops, representing the vast majority of the Anglican Communion, will be meeting in the Holy Land a month before Lambeth. If they didn't care, why would they bother?

Then she cited the Rt. Rev. Musonda Trevor Mwamba, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Botswana, who said at the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina that the majority of Anglicans around the world do not care about the disputes over sexuality, or about the possible split in the Anglican Communion.

He said, "The truth of the matter is ... we must understand the majority of African Anglicans, about 37 million, are not bothered by the debate about sexuality. The majority of African Anglicans ... have their minds focused on life and death issues, like AIDS, poverty ... and not on what the church thinks about sex or the color of your pajama pants. Villagers who live on less than one dollar a day aren't aware this is going on."

This, too, is a lie. The homosexuality issue is the reason for the dissolution of the Province of Central Africa. All this came from a vociferous campaign by Mwamba, who has been on a long campaign around the world, particularly in Britain, Spain and America, where he claimed to be the "speaker" for the Province of Central Africa. He campaigned heavily on the notion that African Bishops drop the issue of homosexuality in their debates.

His fellow African bishops blasted Mwanba saying that he was misleading the flock of God. He should resign the post as Botswana Bishop now, said a fellow African bishop at that time.

"Can this kind of thing come from a Bishop? If so there is a problem of sex differentiation in the Bishop. On whose behalf was he speaking in London? He knew what he was saying. He wanted to protect his paymasters. Who does he think he is? He is implying that African Anglican Bishops do not know sex differences? We know what he means and what he is looking for, it is 'money' and 'power'." The report also said that Mwamba aided and abetted in the push for pro-homosexual London cleric, the Rev. Nickie Henderson. to be the next Bishop of Lake Malawi. Mwamba was the "biggest, loudest and noisiest supporter, a bishop who has aided and abetted in his unremitting push for the job," said the report.

Ms. Stanley completely misreads the African mind if she takes her cue from one isolated African bishop who is constantly being courted by the West for his misleading state of the church in Africa. Archbishop Peter Akinola, Primate of Nigeria, and his 18 million fellow Anglicans are leading the charge against the innovations in the Anglican Communion. Akinola is powerfully supported by the archbishops of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, who together make up more than 70% of the Anglican Communion.

The notion that the "crisis" in the Episcopal Church is largely a creation of some anxiety-laden conservative clergy is a total fiction. The vast majority of Anglicans are orthodox in faith and morals, and, one suspects, if you get past the pro-homosexual hierarchy in the Episcopal Church, most of the laity are conservative on the same issues. The noisiest, most obnoxious people in the Episcopal Church are the 2000 in your face homosexuals and pansexual friendly "inclusivist" types who are doing their best, with Mrs. Jefferts Schori's help, to blast the orthodox right out of the church altogether and take it over.

They may well succeed. A number of orthodox bishops have been deposed in recent weeks. There will undoubtedly be more to follow out of conscience, consciences that the liberals don't respect - never have and never will.

END