This morning my friend Bill, a briiliant but vociferously-conservative priest in our parish, circulated yet another email in passionate defense of "orthodox" Christianity. This particular email forwarded a like-minded letter by Mark Turner, a seminarian and sometime member of our parish, who is pursuing ordination in the Anglican Mission in America instead of in the Episcopal Church.
Often I don't know whether to groan, or grin, when Bill sends out his screeds. He and other traditionalists usually dominate the discussion in our parish, and it pains me to see them doing the same via email. Normally I don't go out of my way to confront them; quite the contrary. But I figure I was elected to the vestry to be one of the parish's leaders, so I frequently "reply to all" to Bill's emails, and I confess that I greatly enjoy taking up the challenge.
My response to Bill's forward of Mark's letter is reproduced below, slightly edited. It it, I assert that "apostasy," quote unquote, is the least of the Episcopal Church's problems, and that the church should be focusing instead on things like the growing challenge of radical Islam. I quoted a statement by the Archbishop of Cape Town that, in my view, demolishes the arguments of those who would expel the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion.
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Bill, I hate to add to yet another email debate on this subject, but here goes anyway.
1. I like Mark Turner very much. He and his family should always be welcome at SJD. But it's difficult for me to regard him as "our own" these days, inasmuch as he is consciously choosing (for reasons that baffle me) to separate himself from us by taking his holy orders in AMiA instead of ECUSA.
2. We continue to spend too much time and energy on the so-called apostasy of the Episcopal Church. The Anglican Communion, and Christianity as a whole, have more important things to worry about.
We've all seen quotes from evangelicals and pentacostals who note the numerical growth of their branches of Christianity. All that growth must mean that they've "got it right," right?
Whoa, not so fast. It turns out that Islam is reportedly the fastest-growing religion in both the U.S. and the world, and many Muslims regard this as proof that Islam "is truly a religion from God." (See http://www.islam-guide.com/ch1-7.htm.) And the extreme branches of Islam are not exactly friendly to Christianity. Events of recent years in the Sudan are proof enough. Or, consider this: Where can you find a church in Saudi Arabia? Don't even bother to look. In March of this year, the Saudi defense minister was quoted in a Chicago newspaper as saying there would never be churches in his country, the birthplace of Islam. ''There are no churches--not in the past, the present or future. . . . Whoever said this must shut up and be ashamed."
For months if not years, some Christians seem to have been concentrating more on our internal squabbling than on confronting (among other things) the challenge of radical Islam. If this keeps up, we're going to find more and more of the world falling under the Islamic law of sharia, which many Christians would regard as terribly oppressive. It's already happening in Nigeria, and fundamentalist Muslims are pushing for it in other countries.
The UK newspaper The Guardian recently ran an interview with the Archbishop of Cape Town, one of the most senior churchmen in Africa and Desmond Tutu's successor. In the interview, the archbishop leveled a blast directly at the Archbishop of Nigeria, who is one of the leading proponents of expelling ECUSA from the Communion: "There is a woman waiting to be stoned to death for adultery in Nigeria and yet we are not hearing any fuss from the leadership of the church there about that." That's game, set, and match, if you ask me.
The archbishop made another telling point -- possibly alluding to what conceivably might be the gradual workings of the Holy Spirit in ECUSA: "[The Episcopal church] is full of good people and they have followed one of the most transparent and democratic processes of decision-making in the whole Anglican communion. It is very arrogant to assume that the people in America do not know what they are doing. We have got to respect their decision."
3. No one is more a proponent of unity in the church than I, even if it's a boisterous and contentious unity. I believe that the loving, mutually-respectful clash of opinions in the church is one of God's engines of truth and progress.
But some of the more extreme traditionalists apparently don't see it that way. In the wake of the 2003 General Convention, they persist in badgering the rest of us, demanding that everyone else embrace their set-in-concrete views about the alleged fine-points of God's will.* After the 2000 General Convention, the shoe was on the other foot, yet few if any of the so-called liberals, who lost that time, displayed anything like the anger and bitterness that we have seen recently from some traditionalists.
* (I know you'll want to respond to my set-in-concrete language, probably by arguing the preemptive authority of Scripture. As you know, I'd be happy to move the debate to that topic, but perhaps we should do that on your EZBoard discussion site, so that people who are interested can read it there instead of getting more emails.)
The badgering -- which, I hesitate to say, sometimes seems to border on hysteria -- is becoming too disruptive of the church's larger mision, especially in this time of grave external challenges. I am reluctantly starting to think that maybe the Episcopal Church should indeed encourage its extreme traditionalists to go their own way. Then each camp could seek God, and try to preach his good news, in the way they believe the Spirit is directing them, with less mutual interference. That may well mean a schism in ECUSA and the Anglican Communion, which would be a pity, but perhaps it would be for the best. If so, then let's get it over with and get back to (God's) work.
Best personal regards,
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