Source: Living Church
6/6/2006
More than 1,000 ordained priests of the Episcopal Church have signed an internet petition seeking to remind the House of Bishops of their ordination vows. The petition, which was conceived by the Rev. Canon David Roseberry, rector of Christ Church, Plano, Texas, will be delivered in a letter to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and each member of the House of Bishops.
“It is our hope to demonstrate to the House of Bishops with absolute clarity that the clergy of this Church want to return to our historical, Biblical roots,” said Canon Roseberry in a prepared statement. “We are praying that they take the Windsor Report to heart and do the right thing this summer.”
The petition makes four requests of the House of Bishops:
1) Refrain from approving any further consecrations of same-sex partnered bishops;
2) Stop all actions that allow or promote the blessing of same-sex unions of any kind;
3) Fully endorse the Windsor Report as the roadmap for maintaining full communion with the worldwide Anglican Communion; and
4) Turn the attention of the church to the mission of reaching the lost for the sake of the gospel.
Jill Kinsella, director of communication for Christ Church, Plano, told The Living Church that four people worked nearly eight hours a day for almost six weeks in order to devise the petition, compile the names, and verify the 1,062 online signatures.
“We will retain a record of everyone who signed and when they signed,” she said. “We went to great pains to authenticate every signature. This included manual verification in some cases.”
Mrs. Kinsella said the first resource used to authenticate the signatures was the Episcopal Clerical Directory published by the Church Publishing Corp. Clergy ordained since the last issue of the directory was published were checked using a variety of other methods, she said. The 2006 edition of the Episcopal Church Annual lists 17,209 priests in 2004, the last year for which information was available.