I am sure there are many in the denomination who are as appalled about this as I am.  After all, the Episcopal church could hold the mantle of "compassionate Catholicism."  I am really surprised that these churches are in NoVA, which I would think would be more liberal.

As an Epsicopalian I can tell you that these guys are not part of the mainstream of the Episcopal Church and havn't been for a long time.  I look forward to Falls Church and Turow being declared vacant by the Bishop (the controlling legal authority), and new less divisive leadership being put in place. 
One of the reasons the Bishops chose Schrori as the new Presiding Bishop was that she is very tough and is going to fight for every peice of property.  There are people in Falls Church who've been long term members who've been driven off, or have been trying to ride it out.  They deserve a church that reflects their theology.  There are plenty of fundemnentalist churches; so let the fundementalists go there.  Also I object to these folks being called Orthodox.  They are splitting from the views as established by vast majority of the church.  I would prefer if the term heretic was used; since that's what they are.

I'm an ex-Episcopalian because I converted to "no church" but it is a great denomination.  (I occasionally go to Unitarian services.)  I still contribute to international relief efforts through the Episcopal Church because I trust the mainstream hierarchy.

Remember, there are also people in this heretical segment of the Episcopal church that don't want a woman as bishop.  The Episcopal churches I attended all stressed freedom to think, freedom to have a personal relationship with God based on your own interpretation of scripture, etc.

I say good riddance to this fundamentalist group.  I only hope that the mainstream church gets to keep the property.

BTW, Clarence Thomas worships at Truro, and Alberto Gonzalez at one of the two churches.  Ollie North did at one time -- I don't know if he still does.  Get the picture?  Nice, rational, compassionate conservatives. 

How does Gonzalez justify going to Communion, based on his personal approval of torture?  Well, that's between him and God (if there is one, but that's another story.)

The Nation did an article on Truro.  http://www.holysmoke...  Essentially, they preach hellfire and damnation.

Some choice excerpts from that article:

"On a recent Friday night, several hundred suburbanites gathered in Farifax, Virginia, so sing battle songs. 'We are an army of salvation,' they chorused. 'Lead us into battle,' they roared. The congregation vowed in song that they would fight until every nation is on its knees before Jesus Christ. The site of this religious pep rally -- the Truro Church -- is where Judge Clarence
Thomas worships.***

Withing the charasmatic Christian movement, the Bible is taken literally; followers are born again and see Satan all over. The Friday everning ceremony was a jubilant occasion. The fatithful stood much of the time with arms lifted high, palms facing skyward, singing tributes to Jesus Christ. Some seemed transfixed; some spoke in tongues.***

During a 1987 sermon at his church, according to two people who were there, Cox preached that the goal of charismatics is to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, adding, 'The Kingdom of God is not a democracy.' After
that sermon, he embraced a member of his flock, Oliver North.

I was thinking of trying the Truro church in Fairfax but now I won't. Besides I don't think I could get used to the funny hats some of the leaders wear. I was raised in an American Protestant Church (as opposed to the Church of England). I've been looking for a church with a nice pipe organ and they do have that.

When will the churches stop and realize how they are being manupulated with the gay issue?

I'd bet just about all religions have funny hats.

As to pipe organs -- when I attended Unitarian services in Minneapolis the music director was a jazz pianist and on most Sundays his group would come in and play mellow jazz.  But good mellow jazz -- not the new age stuff.  It was great stuff.

I stumbled across this site where a costume shop owner has a whole, largely serious section dedicated to religious dress around the world, with tons of links. http://www.costumes....

As to the manipulation issue, using fear in various forms seems to occur in just about every Christian denomination (and other religions, too, of course).  It's what is used to keep the faithful coming back.  Think about the GOP tactics -- the divisive wedge issues -- used in recent years.  Lots of preachers do the same thing.

Sorry if this offends anyone, but it's my belief based on thousands of hours reading serious theology and scriptural analysis.

This is the latest evidence that evangelicals have laid out a deliberate program of schism within Protestant churches everywhere, not just the Episcopalian. The mainstream has finally awoken to the danger, and is fighting back, but it may be too little and too late. This latest evidence is proof of what was a few years ago considered a wild-eyed conspiracy theory... until the Baptists got gobbled up. Believe me, Methodists and Presbyterians also face similar movements, boring from within. It is a truly serious matter.

This is a decades-long program of splitting churches, organized by the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which is a neocon organization.  They organize conservatives inside congregations for the "renewal" of the denominations targeted.  See the website Talk to Action for background from many of the liberal religious who have been organizing to counter this attack.

A couple of years ago the moderate Presbyterians were talking about disvesting from their investments in Israel to protest the policies in Palestine. They got threats via letters saying that the churches would be burned down with the people in them if they proceeded. These threats were reported in the church's official newsletter.

But my church is definitely a progressive Episcopalean church. From what I understand, the Nigerian Bishops haven't really abandoned the practice of keeping concubines. But, you know, as long as they aren't GAY...

The problem is that these people want to keep the  property and the priests want to keep their pensions. They would have left some time ago if it weren't fot that. So, really, it all comes down to money.

This really is such a shame. There are so few of us left here in the U.S., and the Episcopalean church is, for the most part, quite enlightened.

I was a backsliding Catholic looking for a home. Took religious instruction at the Episcopalean church. I remember the introduction to the tenets of the church. Like the Catholics--scripture and tradtion. But then we add one more: reason. The three-legged stool; none more important than the other, as if any leg is missing or damaged, the whole stool falls down. Honestly, I felt like a light shone through the ceiling and a chorus shrieked "Eureka!" Hallelujah, found a home. 

Catholicism had too many irrational "don'ts", like on contraception.  And the treatment of women is poor. 

The three-legged stool analogy is great.

When I was taking Episcopal confirmation lessons, with about 20 other people, the rector went through the Nicene Creed and asked people to raise their hands at every phrase they had problems with or wanted to discuss in depth.  "I believe in one God, the 'Father'" --- 15 hands go up.  Most of us thought that just conjured up the old guy with the beard.  And adult religion classes were -- adult.  We debated and discussed moral issues; we were trying to find answers -- not be spoon fed dogma.

In the Episcopal churches I attended, there were lots of people who had left other faiths -- people who wanted a deep religious experience but didn't want to be talked to as if they were children.

Sigh.

As a resident of greater Falls Church, I have to ask if I want my address associated with The Falls Church if it goes in this backwards direction.

So, if it does vote this way, I would propose the following response:

That we start a movement to change the name of the town. 

All in favor?

Who wants to live in a place named after something that stands for bigotry?

Imagine if the name of the town was White Supremacy, Va. or something.

Not everyone, of course. But if you look at history religious people have been bickering forever. That's why the Catholic church had the inquisition. They figured if they could make everyone say the Nicene Creed at every service, and burn alive the ones who wouldn't, that will stop all the bickering. That forced everyone to super imposed the pagan trinity concept onto Christianity. It's not in the Bible.

People who were devoted to a faith which respects science and the use of the mind had to go underground. Then when they started translating a lot of the ancient texts they found that Jesus may have been somewhat different from the one in the Bible, though still a great teacher. This is one reason the church reacted so strongly against science. They didn't want people to discover the contents of ancient texts.

Then when the ordinary people began to read in large numbers (the invention of the printing press) you had the Reformation. Although they carried with them a lot of the presposterous distortions.

Now you have the end-times folks who are advising the president with their Monday phone calls. These nuts think chaos in the Middle East is just what God wants. The fact is all that end-times crap is from a book written in the 1800's. It was some guy's idea of what the Bible means in revelations. It is not part of the Bible so, in the strictest sense, it is a heresy.

Where I came from in Tennessee these end-times beliefs were generally associated with people out on the farm who didn't have much education. You can do research on the internet to find out how many times Jesus was supposed to have come back, but didn't. I guess he is going to do this on his own schedule, if at all.

My theory is that the domination of the Roman Empire was extended through the Catholic church to the present day. You have to admit that if you can control someone's sex life they pretty much have them by the balls (pardon my Latin).

on Catholic thought and philosophy, as you appear to have little understanding of it.  The Inquisition was not simply a matter of making people recite the Nicene creed and burning the rest.  It was a vastly more complex issue than that, but would take several volumes to discuss.  The charge that the Trinity is not in the Bible and is therefore a pagan concept is interpretation, but since Catholicism has always relied upon tradition AND scriptures you can't really argue that it's pagan unless you believe that ALL things outside the Bible are pagan.  That's a Protestant concept. 

Re your apparent belief that Catholicism does not respect "science and the use of the mind", it's wrong.  The Vatican has a world-renowned astronomy Observatory; one of the earliest and foremost theoreticians on human evolution was the Jesuit priest, Teihard de Chardin; and many contributions to science have actually come from Catholic clergymen such as Gregor Mendel, a monk known as the father of modern genetics.  The Catholic catechism says there "can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason" and Catholics are just fine with concepts like evolution. 

The Catholic Church in Ireland gathered, copied, and preserved all known literature, scientific treatises, and learning, from whatever source, throughout the Dark Ages, so I don't understand the charge that the Church was trying to keep everyone from learning to read.  This was a charge made since the time of the Reformation, but a lot of it was a smear, sort of like attacking the Church for the Inquisition while carrying merrily on with thousands of witch burnings throughout Protestant England and Northern Europe.  The Inquisition co-existed with the civil authority, and there were times during its history that subjects of investigation asked to be treated under the Inquisition rather than the civil authority. Like I said, a REALLY complicated history.  And don't forget on the Protestant side Queen Anne's Laws, which disenfranchised and persecuted Catholics and Dissenters alike.  The question of ancient texts discarded appears to refer to the differences found between the Catholic and Protestant bibles.  Once again, it was a question of scholarship and judgment made as to what constituted inspired versus uninspired books. 

I am a little perplexed at the posters here who say they finally found reason in the Episcopal church, as if the Episcopal church's concept of reason does not track the Catholic concept. I mean, it's fine that you're happy with the change, but reason has been a major component of
Catholic thought and dogma since the time of Augustine.  In fact, Pope Benedict XVI's famous academic talk, the one that got him into such hot water with Muslims, also reiterated the Catholic concept that God is bound by reason and cannot rise above it.  This competes with the Muslim concept that God is so transcendental as to be outside of reason, which appears similar to the position taken by some Christian fundamentalists, who will maintain a "Biblically pure" position in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

That one might find some of the Church's positions unreasonable is because the reasoning starts from premises which might arguably be faulty.  The reasoning which flows from the premises, faulty or not, is often flawless.  To assert, for instance, that the Catholic church's position on sex is because they want to control everyone is like setting up a straw man so you can knock him down.  The Church has always taught that at its heart the purpose of sex is  procreation, although recently there's been a lot more talk about the union of one man and one woman.  This meant the purpose of marriage was essentially one of procreation.  Marriage performed by the Church is a sacrament which "no man may put asunder", thus explaining that whole divorce problem.  The Church has always held that a marriage which cannot be consummated is a void marriage, thus explaining annulment.  It is in the context of this rather rigid concept of sex that the Church builds its opposition to premarital and extramarital sex and homosexual sex.  The essence of the teaching is if you divorce sex from its main purposes and use it for entertainment or simple self-gratification, then you cheapen it.  An understandable and logical concept whether you agree with it or not, and a much more sophisticated position than simply reading whatever meaning, informed or uninformed, rational or irrational, one can find in the Bible, which seems to be the way the "end times" groups do it.

I read recently that fundamentalists in Africa are trying to get the museums to put skeletons of the ancient ancestors of our species in the back rooms where fewer people will see them.