Hopefully, every rightwinger will simply leave any and every social circle they belong to and hide out for the rest of their pathetic hateful lives in lonely, dark, shamed misery.

it was painful. a very appropriate post.

Just got a lot better.

people should not care what any sanctimonious assholes think

why does anyone need a church to advise them how to be decent people

I can think of several, can you?

I just try to be a good person because it is the right thing to do, not because I expect some kind of reward in the end.

Over and OUT.

Hardly condescending at all.

especially because food and football were beckoning.

While a few sourpusses undoubtedly disagreed with the bishops, I'm going with "I got better things to do" to explain the high number of people who didn't stick around.

I sat tgat because it's a fairly liberal denomination. Most likely the Klanners had departed for megachurches and other places to hear false prophets before now.

In fact, I'm a little surprised 70% did stick around.

It's possible that some people did not attend for other reasons of course. Some definitely left for good and notified the rector why. Thats how we know.

You can bet there are other little churches scattered around that will be more to their liking, featuring hellfire preachers with little education and even less reading comprehension than education.

One thing the south has never lacked is churches.

Likely there will be a reshuffle, Harris voters becoming uncomfortable at the wingnut churches and coming to yours. Stranger things have happened.

... for megachurches and other places to hear false prophets before now."

You'd be surprised to see the political makeup of churches in the boonies, even Episcopalian.

My church is made up of mostly Democrats, but there's one older man, who has a walker with an "Impeach Biden" sticker on it.

Good for your church leadership.

But sad there 30% are either white supremacists or white supremacist adjacent.

The UMC Book of Discipline says homosexuality is not compatible with our beliefs. For years the UMC has wrestled with this.

It’s a long story but eventually those who wanted to retain the prohibition could “disassociate” and go their way. Churches had to decide by Dec 31, 2023. My little rural UMC did not even discuss it, we stayed with the UNITED Methodist Church. Of the eight little Methodist churches in my rural VA county, five disassociated, thanks mainly to the efforts of one MAGAt in one church.

It’s not one year later and already we have gained 15 members from churches that disassociated while one of the disassociated churches has closed, could not afford to stay open, and two others are shaky.

Meanwhile, the UMC is changing the Book of Discipline.

My United Methodist Church found that with the pandemic-forced delay in the final decision about "divorcing" over the issue of full inclusion of LGBTQ people in all aspects of our membership and worship, plus being closed to in-person worship for many months over the pandemic, caused a walk-put by many of the old guard. They were also part of a faction who were mad at our then-pastor for a variety of reasons. After we reopened and started looking around, we found all the impediments to full inclusion had taken themselves out. I miss some of them (not all left because of the LGBTQ stance of the church) but am relieved God moved the obstacle out of the way.

That doesn't mean we don't have some financial struggles. We are still rebuilding. But new folks who believe God's love is for everyone, no exceptions, have found us in the last year and a half.

The national church is doing good things against Christian Nationalism. I hope you are able to hang together. It's been so hard for some folks in the south.

However, being an Episcopalian myself, I felt the need to relate a similar experience from my parish

We went through a huge rift back in the days when the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire ordained a gay Bishop. We're in Georgia, so the happenings of the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire would seem to have little to do with us. The rector of our parish at the time had a different opinion, however. He was very upset about the ordination of the Bishop in New Hampshire--so much so that he established an Anglican Church in a town that's in the same county as ours. When he left, most of our congregation left with him, including some people who had been members of our parish long before he got there. His last Sunday there, we had over 100 members in attendance. On his first Sunday at his new church, we had 13 people for that day's service.

Time has past since then and our parish seems to be back to something resembling normalcy. For what it's worth, our current rector is gay...and no one is upset about it.