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Local pastor's bishop bid rejected
| Thursday, Mar 15 2007 10:30 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Mar 15 2007 10:35 PM
In a rare move, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church Thursday declared "null and void" the election of the Rev. Mark Lawrence to be the bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina.
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Lawrence is the pastor of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in downtown Bakersfield.
The blocking of Lawrence's bid essentially ends his monthslong quest to be bishop after he was elected bishop of the South Carolina diocese in September.
After election, Lawrence needed to overcome one more hurdle: to get a majority of the 111 Episcopal Church dioceses to consent to that election.
Despite receiving 57 consents this week -- a majority -- three of the dioceses' notifications of consent were not done according to canon law, said the Rev. Haden McCormick, president of the standing committee of the Diocese of South Carolina, in a statement on the South Carolina diocese's Web site.
So Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori declared that the 54 official consents Lawrence received were not a majority, thus ending his bid.
The three dioceses were in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, Lawrence said. The three consents were not signed by a majority of the standing committees and were submitted electronically, McCormick said.
It is a "tragic outcome," McCormick said.
Reached after Schori's decision, Lawrence said that "canons are canons, forms are forms."
But Lawrence said that the process he was subjected to over the last few months "opened a curtain on the state of the Episcopal Church."
Behind the curtain, he added, is a "theater of the absurd" that revealed the polarization of the church between the progressives and the conservatives; Lawrence and the Diocese of San Joaquin Valley are considered conservatives.
The majority of American Episcopalians are progressive, believing that God's word is an evolving revelation.
But conservatives, Lawrence said, believe in the "trustworthiness" of Scripture. They have also objected to the 2003 consecration of a gay Episcopal bishop and the 2006 election of Schori as the presiding bishop of the national body, citing her liberalism.
Lawrence was quick to caution that he, and the South Carolina Diocese, do not object to Schori's authority because of her gender. Lawrence said that he objected to her ascension because of her past blessing of same-sex unions.
The San Joaquin diocese, which oversees 50 Central valley churches -- including three in Bakersfield -- is only one of three in the country that refuses to ordain women.
Lionel Deimel, a Pennsylvania-based Episcopal activist who was at the forefront of opposition to Lawrence's bid, sent out a statement to the media Thursday: "I'm sure that most Episcopalians that have been following the quest for consent to consecrate ... Lawrence are relieved to know that he will not now become a bishop."
Deimel added: "Not since 1875, when the Rev. James De Koven was rejected as Bishop of Illinois, have diocesan standing committees prevented the consecration of a bishop in the Episcopal Church. The last bishop-elect to be rejected by the church's ruling body ... was John Torok, in 1934."
Lawrence said he will continue to be a content pastor of his Bakersfield congregation, and if called upon by God, will help the South Carolina diocese with their next election.
"God has been faithful in this process," Lawrence said. "I felt his presence every step of the way."