Falls Church News-Press – Editorial: No Surprise To Us Locals

The Falls Church Episcopal Church is now front page news all over the world for its vote, announced Sunday, to formally defect from the Episcopal denomination. But the 10,500 folks in the tiny City of Falls Church have had the Falls Church Episcopal — with its membership drawn from the wider region almost a third the size of their whole town — not only in their midst, but “in their faces” for much of the last 20 years since the church took a decidedly right-wing turn.

Many in the Falls Church school system recall its influence beginning almost that long ago, churning evangelical zeal among young people, in particular. An aggressive youth program in the 1990s preached to high schoolers that their parents had made too many compromises with the world and were hardly role models for the kind of holy warriors they could become. We listened to some of these sermons, ourselves, throwbacks to notions from the 1960s counterculture era when the mantra was, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Parents of Jewish students were alarmed that their youngsters were being drawn into a church where it is claimed that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.

Still, the countless high school essays that eschewed personal introspection to gush explicitly of personal relations with Christ, along with not infrequent claims on high school fields and courts that God was responsible for one team (our team!) winning and another suffering ignominious defeat, could be construed as mere nuisances. On the other hand, the stacking of family life education committees in the school system to block modern sex ed curricula, and a campaign to vilify a high school advisor for allowing his student newspaper editorial board to publish a free ad for a non-profit group offering counseling to young gays were more serious intrusions in the City’s daily life.

Maybe it's no coincidence that the 2 large churches in Virginia that recently defected from the Episcopall church to align with the ultra-conservative Nigerian Anglican church have non-standard names.  Most churches in our denomination follow a similar name convention – St. Somebody's Episcopal, or Grace Episcopal, or some such. Not these two – although they're historical bodies who've been part of the American Episcopal denomination for centuries, their usual names are The Falls Church and Truro Church. "Episcopal" is an afterthought in their names, especially in their stance in the last 20 years, when they became so much more conservative and un-Anglican in their views on the inerrancy of the Bible and teh evul gay agenda. Convenient for them, since they won't have to spend much to change their signage.