As far as whether the leadership of the organization trusts its membership, of course they don’t. I wouldn’t, either. That’s why we don’t allow state secrets to be broadcast on the CBS Evening News, because we don’t trust our own citizens. President Ford famously said that he’d be happy to tell every American every secret the government had, as long as it wouldn’t go any further. I suspect the same thing is true of the leadership of the Episcopal Church: They’d be happy to tell every loyal member the cost of the litigation and their full litigation strategy as long as it wouldn’t go any further.

The problem is that confidentiality really is necessary in litigation, if for no other reason than it gives the parties room to negotiate and try to work out their differences. And, if they do need to litigate some of these things, they need to be able to do that with some reasonable degree of confidentiality, too.

What is necessarily wrong with journalists being adversarial? After the eight years of GWBush it is danged obvious that we need the media to ask tough questions and persevere if necessary. It’s their moral responsibility. HOWEVER…that does not mean that the subject of their scrutiny should just answer any and every question that is posed. To restate my earlier post: 1) The ECUSA leadership could have (and probably should have) been better prepared to explain why the membership numbers were not made public, and 2) the ECUSA spokespersons would have been downright stupid to answer Frank’s request for them to ad lib an approximation and an explanation. Which I think was Dave’s point too.

However I would rather not take someone’s word regarding whether the NYT and WaPo have been unfairly kind in their reporting of the troubles of the ECUSA. If these newspapers happened to neglect a bit of titillating gossip, or if they actually reported something newsworthy about the mission and outreach of the church instead of scandal, then bully for them and too bad for the disappointed spectators.

As to your first post, though, I disagree. I used to do a lot of legal work in the area of shareholder disputes in closely held corporations and the like. In these situations, you’re often fighting people who are sitting on your own board of directors, and often litigation committees are formed to keep these matters confidential even within the organization itself.

Ditto the Episcopal Church: Release of the type of information that has been sought to the membership would naturally release it to everybody else, too. For better or worse, in law, the procedure has always been to keep things like the cost of litigation confidential until after it’s over, even for governmental bodies spending taxpayer money. One of the primary exceptions to Kentucky’s open records act is the need for confidentiality in ongoing litigation.

So, if we don’t require governmental bodies paying for legal services with our own tax dollars to release the cost, why should we expect a private organization to do so? We’d be amazed if General Motors or Microsoft released information like this. I realize that the Episcopal Church must be held to a higher standard than private businesses, but it still needs the breathing room to either settle its disputes or litigate them. After this is over, there will be no need for confidentiality, but there is today.

This fellow, who was retired by this point, had run a printing company in Cambridge and came to every church service, though he rarely said anything. At the dinner, the minister asked him how he came to be a member of the church. I expected to hear something about a big faith experience or something, but what he said was, “Well, the minister came to see me in 1935 and said that my sister had joined this church and she thought I should come here, too. So I did.” And that was it.

The problem is that few people are finding their way to mainstream churches that way anymore. We are dwindling down to a core of True Believers, people interested in the social gospel and who believe that religion doesn’t have to be fundamentalist to have an impact both on the member and the world. That leaves out most church members of any denomination, so I imagine we’ll continue to shrink.

Here is the information. You will have to complie these yourself.

Charts:
http://12.0.101.92/Charts.aspx

DCF
http://12.0.101.92/reports/PR_ChartsDemo/exports/ParishRPT_1082009103705PM.pdf