"Once your parish registers as a Believe Out Loud Congregation, you will be added to a national database of welcoming and affirming faith communities.

The memo asks, does your congregation already have a history of publicly welcoming and affirming lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender [LGBT] folk?

The memo offers a Faith-Based Community Organizing workshop offered by the Institute of Welcoming Resources. It then offers an Inclusive Church Toolkit to evaluate, organize, educate and prepare the congregation

They then suggest that people work with IntegrityUSA to make congregations even more welcoming and affirming.

With some 700,00 ASA, the Episcopal Church overall has only 2,000 known homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered, though the latter might be little more than single digit numbers.

Last year Louie Crew, TEC's lay emeritus homosexual, issued a call to gay Roman Catholics to leave their church and come to The Episcopal Church. The call went unheeded.

The Roman Catholic Church regards homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered". They have a ministry called "Courage International" which is an apostolate and Christian ministry of the Roman Catholic Church, ministering to those with same-sex attractions. They encourage homosexuals to abstain from acting on their sexual desires and to live chastely according to the Catholic Church's teachings on homosexuality. Protestant equivalent organizations include Exodus, Regeneration et al.

When IntegrityUSA did a survey of its membership and "friends" in 2007, it discovered that most were gay white males, not quite the inclusive crowd this letter would indicate.

To all intents and purposes, the handful of noisy, loud whiny pansexualists are not able to stir up legions of secular or religious pansexualists into attending Episcopal churches, many of which are filled with aging Episcopalians on the verge of closing. Most "Christian" gays attend the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and don't seem interested in switching to TEC. Ex Catholics are more inclined to join TEC because of its close liturgy, but gay Catholics have not shown much interest at all.

Since the Gene Robinson consecration in 2003, there has not been any growth in The Episcopal Church. Every diocese, with the exception of South Carolina, has suffered a decline in ASA, some more than others.

The Bishop of Iowa and fourteen Episcopal clergy recently signed a letter endorsing same sex "marriage". This diocese, like those in the state of New York, and the dioceses of Newark and NJ have experienced losses.

The only conclusion one can draw is that the louder and noisier Episcopal pansexualists become, the greater the pace of decline continues with churches emptying and closing.

As one blogger observed, "(homosexual) activists are feeding off the carcass of what was once a proud church."Gone too is the talk of "monogamous same-sex couples" to the inclusion of bisexuals who, if sexually active, can't possibly be monogamous.

"Believe Out Loud" is yet another vain attempt at filling the spiritual vacuum in The Episcopal Church, even as it embraces an array of unbiblical sexualities that scare parents, alienate orthodox rectors and parishes and send signals to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Global South Primates that TEC has no interest in a Covenant that prohibits them from pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the wider Anglican Communion.

END