Pentecost - AD 2004    
It is a year since we went to Minneapolis and turned the Church upside down; at least we turned some folks’ church upside down.  For most of us, the Church is just what we expect it to be and hope it will continue to be.  For some, however, the Episcopal Church in the United states of America (to be referred to as the ECUSA) has left them.  We have spent the year saying that we understand the pain and hurt of those who disagree with the consecration of a bishop who is openly gay, and we do.  We have listened to every sort of explanation of why we should do what needs to be done, all of which shakes down to defrocking the bishop who is gay and repent.  This is not going to happen.  No amount of pressure from the minority within the Episcopal Church, or from the probable majority in the rest of the Anglican Communion is going to cause us to go back and undo what has been done.  It may not even be canonically possible.  There are those who would tell the ECUSA to shape up or be drummed out of the Anglican Communion.  This also will not happen for many reasons, not the least of which is that the Archbishop of Canterbury will never say to the American Church, we have no need of you.

What is the Anglican Communion anyway?  It is said to count its membership at about 87 million Christians.  It is a group of churches which has grown out the of the English Church constituted during the reign of Henry VIII.  These churches are found in every former English colony, including the U. S. A., and by missionary zeal, in every other part of the world (164 countries in all).  We share a common heritage and a common understanding of how the ministry of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, should be lived out in our various communities.  These communities exist in urban societies such as ours, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as well as many countries not in the front ranks of economic and political power.  The Anglican Communion does not look at itself as a protestant church apart from the Roman Catholic Church, but rather as another branch of the one catholic and apostolic church.  We do not need permission from the Pope to think this way, because the Roman Catholic Church does not have a copyright on the idea of Christ or the formation of the early church.  In a like manner, the ECUSA does not need  permission from Canterbury or the rest of the primates of the Anglican Communion to think and do as it sees fit.   Since we, as a Communion, are bound together by tradition, not by a constitution or set of laws, it is difficult to see how a given church can be moved unwillingly in or out of the group.  The thirty-eight primates of the provinces in the Communion, meeting together, have no power to order any church or province to do anything.It will come as no surprise that most of the people calling the ECUSA their home, care little about the Anglican Communion, or much else beyond the church and community in which they live.  This is as it should be.  There are voices on what, for lack of better terms, we will call the conservative side and the liberal side of our church, that call for greater involvement in national and international church affairs.  The liberal or inclusive persuasion seems to hold sway in the ECUSA, and the conservative or traditional side is asking for help from outside the national church (principally from the Anglican Communion) to bring control back to a more orthodox view.  This sort of thing is not new, and will always color our church life.

There are countless avenues and not a few dead end streets to be traversed should one wish to follow all the points of view on such topics as human sexuality, gay bishops, ordination of women, etc.  This discourse suggests that if you want to get involved, then ask questions and plan to do a lot of talking and considerable reading.  If, however, you are comfortable in the via media, relax in the knowledge that our current dislocations are not one bit different in nature from the dislocation of ten, fifty, five hundred, yeah, even two thousand yeas ago.  Christ came to redeem and to reform.  These are really two different things.  If we concentrate completely on Jesus as one’s personal redeemer and savior, we lose the perspective that informs our life in today’s world. If we constantly think in terms of reformation and discount the redemptive nature Christ in our lives, we are lost.
       
        ~James “Noah”  Wilson