The camp has already cost the diocese $6.7 million with another $3 million needed to pay off the loan. "We need nearly $10 million," said Diocesan Treasurer Kylius Jones. The cost to maintain it is approximately $300,000 a year. With more and more parishes closing and money being tight, delegates voted to sell the camp.

The Wapiti Farm property is located on Chesapeake Bay some 62 miles from Church House. Bennison described the camp as a 432-acre wilderness tract far from city lights, with more than a mile of waterfront, and within 2 hours travel time of every congregation in the diocese.

Bennison used his Mother's Day address to tug at the heartstrings of Pennsylvania Episcopalians, some of whom have finally woken up to the fact that a sociopath is running the show. Diocesan leaders, conservative and liberal priests, the HOB, the bishop next door and two PBs have done everything possible to get rid of Bennison short of sending him a hearing aid.

Short of an accident, the diocese is doomed to be stuck with him till he is 72. Perhaps when Katharine Jefferts Schori assumes her metropolitan powers in July, she might take him out.

In order to overrule Bennison's bullying and clear manipulations, Diocesan leaders are seeking an amendment to the Canons that will grant authority to the committees to follow the direction of Diocesan Convention and sell the Wapiti property without consent of the Bishop.

Bennison's ego, which depends on being fed by a book saying how wonderful he is, now wants his legacy to read that he kept a multi-million dollar camp for a handful of kids and a cathedral he has poured millions into for 30 little old ladies each week. Never mind that $10 million large could fly every kid going to the camp to Hawaii first class, stay at the Royal Hawaiian with carved wooden doors, four-poster canopy beds, flowered wallpaper, period furniture and a free set of golf clubs with an added spa treatment.

Unhappy that he might be overruled at the next diocesan convention, Bennison is making his pitch through the Internet and cyber pages of the diocese to sell his idea that the diocese should keep the hyper-expensive, over-rated, under-utilized camp. It is truly sad that the Diocesan Council and Standing Committee have the brains of empty oyster shells. They should have resigned and refused to work with Bennison from the get go, leaving him to talk to himself...and then the men in white coats could have taken him away.

(It should be noted here that Bennison's father, Bishop Charles Bennison Sr., of Western Michigan, built a $2 million cathedral - a monument to his own ego. When he died the diocese was forced to sell it at a loss to an evangelical mega church.)

Following his acquittal because of the statute of limitations at a show trial which found him guilty for covering up his brother's sexual abuse of a minor (conduct unbecoming charges still stand), Bennison rose to new messianic heights and had the gall and hubris to declare, "I am less anxious about the church's future than I was when I first became bishop.... I think I have shared in Christ's crucifixion." Say what?

Bennison, who knows no shame, publicly admitted in his rant to the diocese that the Episcopal Church is actually dying and so is his diocese. "Our diocese has one congregation closing every nine months largely because of the loss of young people..."

No, Charles it is dying because you have no gospel to proclaim to anyone, young or old, and the oldies are heading to funny farms and Florida for baked Alaska and golf. Warmth triumphs over gay-affirming parishes, Millennium Development Goals and endless talk of inclusivity and diversity.

Does Bennison think the way to keep young people is to provide them with a Donald Trump version of Trump Towers? What would $10 million do for a vigorous diocesan evangelism program that actually tries to convert people to JESUS, reinvigorate dying parishes with ALPHA, and may be, God help us, plant new parishes with young evangelists from say Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge from the very same state we all inhabit? Inclusivity bars such an orthodox mission.

Sociologist George Clifford writes of The Episcopal Church, "Unless TEC reverses the decline, TEC will soon become a remnant numbering in the tens of thousands. When that happens, the media will not care, and few non-Episcopalians will even notice, what the Episcopal Church says or does. TEC will no longer be a vital incarnation of God's love in Christ. Instead, TEC will have gone from being the established church in several eighteen century American colonies and states to being a twenty-first century anachronism."

"The role of the bishop is to keep the church alert until the Lord comes," wrote Bennison. The bishop had better hold his breath because he admitted that by 2030 there won't be much of an Episcopal Church left for the Lord to pick up when he returns.

END