Episcopal Church Takes A Stand On Gun Manufacturers
BY Herschel Smith6 years ago
Shareholder advocacy is nothing new for the Episcopal Church. With an investment portfolio worth about $400 million, the church has long used some of those investments to influence companies based on Christian principles and General Convention resolutions that set church policies and priorities.
What’s new is one of the investment tactics the church plans to implement in the new year to address gun violence.
General Convention passed a resolution in July that calls on Executive Council’s Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility to research investing in gun manufacturers to give the church a new voice in how those companies do business. The goal: “to minimize lethal and criminal uses of their products.”
“We’ve never purposely gone out and bought [shares in] what we’d consider a bad actor in order to press the company to change behavior,” said Brian Grieves, the outgoing chair of the committee, which oversees the church’s shareholder advocacy.
The resolution, B007, was proposed by Western Massachusetts Bishop Douglas Fisher, a member of Bishops United Against Gun Violence, who will take over for Grieves as committee chair in January. Fisher’s diocese is home to the headquarters of Smith & Wesson in Springfield, and in March he participated in a rally outside the gun manufacturer led by high school students in the wake of a deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Fisher acknowledged a “sense of frustration” among anti-gun violence advocates in response to Congress’ inaction. “The federal government is doing nothing about the public health crisis of gun violence,” he said. “So where can the church engage this big issue?”
Here’s how. Believe first in Jesus, that He is the only begotten Son of the living God, in His birth, death, burial and resurrection, His vicarious atonement, in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the infallibility of His Word, and then you’re more likely to get your politics right.
Focus first on leading people to Christ, and then preach good doctrine. But since you don’t really believe in anything any more, you’re nothing but a vapid, vacuous and boring social club, and no one listens to you or comes to your “services” any more. So no one will listen to you on this either.
I understand that you’re just following the lead of your masters, but you’re small potatoes, dude.
On December 16, 2018 at 11:49 pm, Tom said:
Moses was God’s friend.
“And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.” Exodus 2:12.
Be God’s friend.
On December 17, 2018 at 1:03 pm, June J said:
Episcopal Church USA is an apostate church and has been for decades.
On December 17, 2018 at 1:19 pm, Fred said:
It’s all right there in Acts and James and further outlined in paul’s letters to the seven churches and John’s to those same churches in Revelation.
-Shareholder Advocacy is a primary tenant of the faith.
-Organizing into conventions is paramount.
-Executive committees are christ’s highest desire.
-investment tactics destructive to wealth is a rock of salvation.
-Neo Marxist Social Responsibility Advocacy against Roman sword and shield craftsmen is the vocation of our calling.
-Believers the world over know that the ‘feeling’ of ‘frustration’ is the holy writ by which we learn our faith and are to live.
-And christ himself called on all bishops to submit to the devil Nero, and to the Sanhedrin to give the ‘Church’ a ‘new voice’ in pressing for private business destruction. /sarc
Welcome to ex-Christian America. You don’t have enough ammo.
On December 18, 2018 at 5:39 pm, Gryphon said:
Alleged “christians’ advocating against the God-Given Right of Self-Defense seems Weird at first, but one has to remember that ANY “church” that is Acting as a “501c” CORPORATION (Dead Body) under the Corporatist State (and its non-Constitutional “Admiralty Law”) is Representing the $atanic Moneychangers and MUST OBEY these “laws”, Not God’s Laws, or even the Constitution.
To Paraphrase someone, “They Call themselves christians, but they Do Lie. They are of the Synagogue of Satan…”
On December 19, 2018 at 4:04 am, Terclinger said:
These communists masquerading as Christians already stand with jihadis against Israel.
Hopefully no police officers will show up to protect these Churches from terrorists, rapists and thieves.
On December 19, 2018 at 5:39 am, H said:
The Episcopal Church has been against the American people for a long, check near the end of the “Days of Rage” essay on the book by the same name, on Leftist violence in the 1960s and ’70s, and you’ll find this gem:
One of the points the author makes in his essay, one we see continuing to this day, is that you cannot overstate the institutional support the Left provides to it’s violent factions. Or the cover the MSM gives them, I didn’t not remember they continued their terror attacks into the early 1980s.