Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Anglicat: TEC's New Tool: "Public Narrative" over Biblical Narrative

Kathryn is an Episcopal priest in Minnesota, and sounds a valuable warning in this piece.

Anglicat: TEC's New Tool: "Public Narrative" over Biblical Narrative

She's tuned into the way that the self-proclaimed Episcopal "hierarchy" is deconstructing everything that used to be distinctive about the Episcopal church:

"The Rev. Anderson, quoting Public Narrative trainer Marshall Ganz, explained recently, 'Making moral choices in the absence of emotion is pointless.' The effective path to inspiring action, she emphasized, travels from values through emotion to action. Note the decidedly un-Anglican absence of reason in this trajectory. It's as if Hooker's famous 3-legged stool of scripture, reason, and tradition is being replaced solely by emotion. Can a stool with one leg stand?"


Likewise, Kathryn catches this quote, which reveals a church more caught up in its own press and propaganda than in proclamation of the Gospel:

"According to EGR's Devon Anderson in a recent training session, the art and technique of Public Narrative enables the user to 'keep control of the narrative.'"


Add to this recent Episcopal leader comments about "peer review" for blogs and other forms of communication, and you see that what used to be "the thinking person's church" is now one long, screechy appeal to ignorance.

While the Episcopal Church remains in a state of disarray and decline - an increasingly small club for self-refrencing, self-congratulatory and self-serving elitists - Anglicat's warning remains worthwhile for any person considering any church: if the message is too much about the institution or its personalities and not enough about the Gospel of Christ, run for the door and visit some other place.

2 comments:

Floridian said...

Indaba Ubuntu, the ultimate authority in TEC for setting doctrine and practice.

Undergroundpewster said...

I just can't wait for this Saturday's exhibition of self congratulatory and self serving elitists in LALA land. Now that will be their idea of controlling the narrative.