In May 2012, Bishops Marsh and Langberg and their wives along with APA Bishops Loiselle and Grundorf and their wives did a spiritual and reconciliation retreat to Greece retracing the steps of St. Paul and St. John in this ancient land discussing and getting to know each other in preparation for our anticipated unity.The ACA version expands on the holy purpose of this mission:
This trip afforded an opportunity for worship, collegiality and long-range planning. . . . They spent four nights on Rhodes, an island visited by St Paul and used as a base by the Knights Hospitallers during the Crusades, two nights on Patmos, where St John spent his last years, and five nights on Samos, also visited by St Paul, and from which they took a day trip to Ephesus on the coast of Turkey. The scenery was beautiful and the people, culture, accommodations, and food were all great.Hey, great cruise! Er, who paid for it? Rank has its privileges, of course, and while it's churlish to ask such a thing, it couldn't help but pop into my mind in the context of the shrinking ACA. In addition to the Diocese of the Northeast, which we looked at yesterday, the Diocese of the Missouri Valley lists only 16 churches on its web site, of which, if we rely on the designation "Priest in Charge" for the clergy, nine are missions.
The Diocese of the Eastern United States lists just fifteen, of which possibly five are parishes, the rest missions (several don't even have web sites). The Diocese of the West has eleven churches, of which five appear to be missions (St Mary of the Angels is a special case, of course).
By my count, this comes to 68 churches, of which by my estimate 43 are missions. A mission has fewer than 20 baptized members and is not self-supporting, or by other definitions I've seen does not pledge to its diocese. In other words, in most of the ACA dioceses, more than half of the churches aren't paying for their bishop, and by extension, about two-thirds of all ACA churches are not paying for their presiding bishop, either. Yet Marsh does quite a bit of traveling -- in 2012 alone, there was the trip to Johannesburg to get rid of Hepworth, the ecumenical cruise to Greece, a trip out to Hollywood to create a visual at St Mary of the Angels, a trip to Florida for the APA synod, all this in addition to his episcopal visits. Who pays for this extravagance?
Any info out there?
