Although before and during these months of Cathedral transition there has indeed been prayerful preparation, God always moves in what from our perspective is a mysterious way! We certainly experienced such a "cloud of unknowing" not least in the protracted three-year transition between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Bishops of South Carolina, and we are now experiencing various kinds of longing, anticipation, and uncertainty in our time of parochial transition.

God’s eternal Providence and its temporal unfolding are not of Man’s making. From the "Call" process to identify my successor, to the development of the Vestry’s more than provisional budget for this transition year (and in the context of global economic implosion!), to the next Dean and Rector’s leadership – necessary, as Bishop Lawrence reminded our Vestry, before coming to consensus about the Cathedral Parish’s renewal in mission and ministry – you as a congregation, as well as individuals, are also "called" to step out in faith (because we’re not in charge!), in hope (because God’s own vision outshines both our failures and our successes), and love (because spiritual pride, factiousness, despondency, strife, revilings and the like are not of God). We are members one of another in the mystical Body of Christ and Christ alone is Head.

Christ’s Body, though broken before God for His providential purposes and for our spiritual healing, is always and only His Body, His Church, not ours, not mine, not yours, not St. Paul’s. (That is why, incidentally, I resist the implication of references to the Cathedral as "our" church!) For fourteen years the Headship of Christ over this parish family has been my first and last vision for the Cathedral: that, above all, not just as a local congregation but as the diocesan seat of our Chief Pastor and apostolic representative of the Church’s continuity with Christ, this Cathedral should fulfill its distinctive Anglican vocation in the greater scheme of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

It is to God’s glory that this Cathedral should be renowned for faithfulness in Prayer Book worship and Church Music in the great liturgical tradition; for its orthodox theological witness and servant leadership at diocesan, national and international levels; for its hospitality and mutuality in relation to the arts and college communities of Charleston; and for its sharing of the Gospel and the Spirit, witnessing to the healing, transforming, saving power of Christ Crucified and Risen, in graceful, never coercive, evangelical mission close to home on Charleston’s "skid row" or waterfront as well as farther afield, whether in the Dominican Republic, Africa, Europe or other places of our parishioners’ outreach.

So my fourteenth and, God willing, final Annual Charge to you is simply this: remember to be true to the Anglican tradition, remember that the Anglican tradition itself is only true as it is faithful to the Word of God, and remember that the "Word of God Written" is in turn the Revelation of the Eternal Word, the only-begotten Son of the Father, the God-Man, the Church’s Bridegroom, the unique and universal great high priest, the ultimate Bishop and Shepherd of our souls, Christ Jesus, Crucified, Risen, Ascended and Coming Again. It’s all about Him! Amen.

TRUTH, UNITY, AND THE CHURCH OF CHRIST

by the Very Reverend William N. McKeachie

Dean of South Carolina

In its report of the recent meeting between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church – in post-Katrina New Orleans, of all places – the Associated Press accompanied its article with a color photograph of several vested bishops taking part in a rendition of "When the Saints go marching in"!

Considering what had, or more importantly had not, transpired at that meeting, my first reaction on seeing the photograph was to recollect a poem by the late T. S. Eliot entitled The Hollow Men. On further reflection, and taking into account the visually gender-correct prominence of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori in the front row, I was at length struck by the realization that the entire Anglican process of "compromise" since the publication of the Windsor Report in 2004 has been all too much like the re-arranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Although I have commended the Christian virtue of patience as we watch and pray during this time of a New Reformation, it is becoming more and more questionable whether the present Archbishop of Canterbury, in his repeated reluctance to assume the risk of prophetic leadership, is able or willing to see what is lurking in the ecclesiastical waters rising around him. But is there not now a clear irreversibility to The Episcopal Church’s institutional descent into apostasy? Even if the Windsor process has so far taken the form of indecision and procrastination, the imperative of decisiveness is now, with the collapse of any common witness on the part of the so-called Windsor bishops in this country, looming over us.

Those seeking to re-arrange the ecclesiastical deck chairs want to persuade us that the disagreements in the Anglican Communion are "really" about polity, power and the purse rather than doctrine, theology, and biblical faithfulness.

It is, of course, to the Devil’s advantage that Mammon should seem to trump God!

In any case, it is certainly mischievous at best for anyone to try to lay the blame for schism on those, like the Diocese of South Carolina, who have gone so many extra miles in seeking to repair the breaches in the Anglican Communion which have developed and widened so relentlessly in recent years. After all, it is not traditionalists who have broken faith with the biblical teaching of the 1998 Lambeth Conference or two thousand years of Christian moral consensus. It is not we who have played fast and loose with the content of the creeds or the conciliar tradition of the church catholic. It is not we who have sundered communion and continuity.

Of all the inordinate and self-deluding aspects of Anglican pride about the "genius" of our have-it-both-ways ecclesiology – having our cake and eating it too – perhaps the most enduring (but, by the same token, the most insidious) has been the notion that, as heirs equally of the Catholic Tradition on the one hand and the Protestant Reformation on the other, we of the "middle way" would never, ever have to choose between doctrine and historicity, creeds and continuity, Chalcedon and Canterbury, or even between the Bible and Baal.

But the ruling oligarchy of The Episcopal Church is forcing such choices by its willingness simply to lie about the present state of affairs – in which the Presiding Bishop, when questioned directly, declines to affirm the uniqueness and universality of Christ as savior of the world; her chancellor resorts to litigious legalism in order to prevent conscientious conservatives from seeking theological safe havens; the General Convention claims putative "autonomy" understood in a modern and revisionist sense unknown to the Church Fathers or the English Reformers; and increasing numbers of clergy impose the substitution, in liturgy and life, of political correctness for orthodox doctrine.

The evidence for all of this is legion, but it remains willfully unacknowledged by the majority of American bishops, by the national leadership of The Episcopal Church, or by the staff of the Anglican Communion Office in London and the Anglican Centre in Rome.

In 1999, Archbishop Rowan Williams’s predecessor, Archbishop George (now Lord) Carey made an eloquent plea on behalf of "The Precious Gift of Unity" in a lecture here at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke and St. Paul in Charleston. But as Lord Carey himself has come to recognize, the failure to heed that plea began with seeds sown not by upholders of orthodoxy but by those who thought unity could be separated from truth.

On the contrary, unity "in Christ" can only exist as rooted and grounded in the biblical, doctrinal, and moral truth of God’s trustworthy Word . It is otherwise a sham.