I think most of the Reconquista crowd are going to waver in their conservatism or find themselves declined for ordination. The more effective approach may be to concentrate their efforts in para-church work.
If they go about it through ordained ministry, even if they are able to pass themselves off as conforming to the majority opinions during ordination, they might well be deposed or have their career stalled after the fact.
However depending on the denomination, there are other vectors of obtaining influence.
So this is something I can’t oppose, but its a very difficult path. I should know, because of my … experience, of the confessing movement in a denomination which ran a number of advertising spots such as one rather disagreeable one in which a church was depicted with doormen deciding who to admit and not admit, which was such a cheapshot at both traditional churches and traditional members. I believe we should never put a comma where God intended a period (for that matter, regarding some matters, if we are faithful to Scripture, the Holy Apostle St. Paul, in Galatians 1:8-9 and 2 Thessalonians 2:37 requires us to not have open minds and open doors, but if open hearts was defined as a willingness to pray even for those who we disagree with, than that part of the UMC slogan could be accomodated.
On the other hand, I can find no fault with “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” as a slogan except in the case of some dioceses where that welcome was denied to traditional members of certain parishes who desired to leave, and were locked out of their parishes, and the real estate later sold; this also happened in the UMC, indeed the earliest instance of this happening that I am aware of happened at a UMC parish in suburban Anchorage, Alaska, St. Paul’s UMC, in which the congregation was locked out of a building they had paid for, despite not even having expressed a desire to leave, rather the dispute was over the pastor assigned to them by the bishop of the conference. I think its wrong to lock people out of a parish where that parish was not substantially financed by the denomination, and wrong to lock them out in general anyway, except for causing disruption to the services.
I also am opposed to forcing liturgical changes on people (every major schism among traditional churches has involved forced liturgical changes, such as the 1666 schism Nikonian Schism with the Russian Old Rite Orthodox, which led to various Old Believer sects which have not been reconciled as well as some sects which adopted strange non-Nicene doctrines, such as the Molokans and even more unpleasant groups like the Doukhobors, which were basically 19th century proto-Unitarian Universalists, who immigrated to Canada via money provided by Leo Tolstoy, where they later caused much annoyance by protesting various government policies by marching au naturel, which required the Canadian government to pass indecent exposure legislation (which had previously been unneccessary, perhaps due to the cold climate;
@MarkRohfrietsch had you heard of them? they’re mainly out west, in BC, Alberta, Sask, and to a lesser extent the Northwestern US states). Later, even as the Old Believer schism was largely repaired by the canonical ROC allowing Old Rite parishes and other canonical Patriarchates receiving Old Believers we saw similar schisms over the New Calendar in the Eastern Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East (and the impact this had on worship), and over the forced adoption of the 1979 BCP in much of the Episcopal Church (although I was surprised to find there are Episcopal parishes that never adopted it, such as the Anglo Catholic parish of St. John’s in Detroit, which I was stunned to discover was not a Continuing Anglican parish), and most spectacularly, over the Novus Ordo Missae. In all these cases, schism could have been avoided by not mandating the change, for example, in the LCMS, some parishes use the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal, some use the Blue Hymnal of the 1980s (Lutheran Worship), some use the Lutheran Service Book, and I’ve heard of a few that use the Green Hymnal, the Lutheran Book of Worship, which is a cousin to the 1979 BCP.
For my part, I actually like the 1979 BCP other than the lectionary, especially in traditional language forms such as the Anglican Service Book (1994) and suspect that it would have been adopted without causing a controversy if it were made optional (and also if the Episcopal Church had not rocked the boat on ordination; that act had the effect of, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal ,wrote in The Orthodox Church, making Anglican-Orthodox dialogue theoretical (since previously there had been several attempts at unity, and unfortunately it hasn’t occurred to any Orthodox hierarchs to talk to the Continuing Anglicans).
