LAWRENCE'S FAREWELL ADDRESS:

May we one day share a toast at the taste of victory.

Bishop Mark Lawrence gave his farewell address to the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina on 11 March 2022 at the annual meeting of the diocese. An audio file of the speech is available here . It is thirty minutes long.

If one were expecting great oratory or fireworks, one would be disappointed. It was a low-key, lackluster, mostly innocuous and emotional listing of self-serving generalities and thank-yous. The only slightly edgy comment came in his thank-you to the standing committee when he said to them, "May we one day share a toast at the taste of victory." Actually, his diocese has lost in both the state supreme court and federal court and although both are on appeal, it is dubious that he will see "victory" in either.

In the first half of the address, Lawrence briefly tried to justify the schism by putting his actions in the context of the Anglican Church in North America and the GAFCON world. He gave a long list of activities various people had done with ACNA. To be sure, he used the word "province" for ACNA repeatedly. In fact, ACNA is an independent religious denomination. It is not a province of anything. As "province," he used the word "Anglican" time and again as if repeating it enough would make it authentic. The ACNA and ADSC are faux Anglican. They are not recognized by the Archbishop of Canterbury. They are not in the Anglican Communion. Their bishops will not be invited to the Lambeth conference this year. 

He tried to justify his leadership actions as necessary for "the battle for the soul of Anglicanism." He tried to wrap them in Anglicanism with "the larger Anglican church came to our rescue." What came to his rescue was not the Anglican Communion but the collection of reactionary Anglican bishops resolved to keep homosexuals and women from equality and inclusion in the life of the church.

In the second half of the address, Lawrence went through a long list of emotional thank-yous to various diocesan groups and people. The only slight dig he made at his critics came when Lawrence sneered at critics' references to the clergy as "lawrencian lemmings and other insulting absurdities." Blogger Steve Skardon often called the followers of Lawrence Lawrencians but I do not recall that he ever labeled the clergy as Lawrencian lemmings although it does have a ring to it.  

Interesting too at what Lawrence did not say. He left out an awful lot he could have mentioned. He said nothing directly about the schism and nothing at all about the litigation. He gave no hint at a possible union with Steve Wood's diocese. He did not say when his last day of bishop would be. He said nothing about the severe and unrelenting decline in membership.

On the whole, the Lawrence we hear now seems tired and old, seemingly a far cry from the vibrant man who arrived in 2008. Gone is the fire and soaring, if grandiose, rhetoric of his long and impassioned diocesan addresses of the old wrestler's fighting days. In fact, we have not heard much from him since the schism of 2012. The most we have gotten from Lawrence was in his rally tour of the diocese after the SCSC decision of 2017 when his diocese was expecting to leave the properties and reconstitute in exile. We saw the old fire of combat return then. It was not in his farewell address of 2022.

I will return later with an assessment of the Lawrence years.