Regarding the recent Episcopal dust-up in Fort Worth, Katie Sherrod has a wonderful blog today, which she calls “Flying Chickens.” Here are a couple of excerpts:

Did you feel that? It was yet another gust of hot air emanating from the Diocese of Fort Worth. Yes, our Executive Council voted almost unanimously—apparently one rector dissented—to announce once again that they are mad at The Episcopal Church and are thinking about three ways to leave it. Sounds like a song title, doesn’t it?

. . .

They make their usual offensive and false charges against Bp. Katharine. There is the charge that she has “refused to accept the key recommendations of the Windsor Report,” as if that were akin to heresy instead of being what an editor of mine used to call “a bunch of words masquerading as a meaningful sentence.”

I love it! And I love this sentence especially, though I’m quoting out of context:

Well, an old friend of my father’s said of such attempts that, “You can put your boots in the oven but that don’t make ‘em biscuits.”

It’s almost as though Molly Ivins had returned to poke holes in Jack Iker’s stuffed shirt. But Sherrod is also very serious:

What Iker and the majority of the Executive Committee—and others in this white-male-clergy-led schismatic movement—simply do not “get” is that in the end, it comes down to relationships: the relationship of individuals to God, and the relationships of lay people with one another. Members of parishes here—and in other schismatic dioceses—who have worshipped and worked together for years on parish rummage sales, on vacation bible schools, on altar guilds, on vestries, on parish picnics, on fundraisers for the church pre-school, who have cared for each other’s babies in the nursery in the midst of deep disagreements about the ordination of women, expansive language, and/or human sexuality are not ready to say they “have no need of one another.” They are not ready to not meet one another at the communion rail.

Read it all here.