“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’” –1 Corinthians 12:21

“The liberal cannot say to the conservative, ‘I have no need of you.’” – Dan Hooper

I have avoided any mention of the beleaguered Episcopal Church in the U.S. Until the election and consecration of [1] New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson in 2003, who paid attention to the Episcopal Church?

More than a little affected, rich, and loaded with a disproportionate share of gay people, if you didn’t have fastidious tendencies and English roots, what the Episcopal Church did wouldn’t matter much to you. I admit, I went through seminary with many Episcopal friends, and enjoyed faintly contrived sophisticated conversation over glasses of properly-aged sherry.

“Lutherans,” it has been said, “are saved by faith, Roman Catholics are saved by good works, and Episcopalians by good taste.”

The election of Bishop Robinson changed all that, as the Episcopal Church revealed that it has a spine (unlike numerous other Protestant denominations which shall remain nameless). But the controversy has not quieted down, as it becomes more and more evident that some conservatives within the denomination want to do major back surgery to remove that spine. And then there is the worldwide communion to deal with.  Sadly, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has already been co-opted. (But I am not in agreement with much of the [2] public whipping he was given recently by retired New Jersey [3] Bishop John Shelby Spong whom, I feel, is grand-standing in order to continue to sell stuff on his web site.)

This weekend an errant conservative, Bishop Robert Duncan in Pittsburgh, [4] announced the formation of Common Cause Partnership that seeks to circle the conservative wagons and probably form an independent province of the world wide Anglican communion. Ecclesio-politically, I’m not sure how this improbability could exist. For Anglicans and Catholics, loyalty and obedience to Bishops is one of the absolute guarantees of church unity. To have competing bishops is some kind of Christian “overlay zones” like area codes would create a genuine farce of orders.

Duncan’s new group purports to consist of not only parishes but dioceses which are profoundly angered by the presence of a homosexual in the House of Bishops. But how can an entire Diocese of the Episcopal Church hurl itself out of communion with the whole body? I am imagining an entire wing of a major hospital that walls itself off from the rest of the facility in order to practice alternative medicine! Or a right arm amputating itself because it does not approve of where the left hand has been. If a diocese —say, the Pittsburgh Diocese— did withdraw, would not the larger body simply have to establish another one in the same geographic area by the same name and issue a cease-and-desist order against the wayward Bishop to stop claiming to be authentic?

Some of this feels strangely like the skirmishes by which the Eastern and Western churches excommunicated one another in 1054 A.D., or the antics that fueled the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th Century. Only this time, [5] Common Cause Partnership seems like an Episcopal Counter-Reformation. Besides, there is already a previous break-away Anglican Church of North America, isn’t there?

But, oops, when I did a quick Google search. . . . there is the Orthodox Anglican Church in the USA. In fact, I thought I remembered the correct name, only to discover at [6] Anglicans on Line no less than 74 other Anglican organizations “not in communion” with Canterbury.  At least six of them have formed in the last ten years, and many more in the 20th century.

It’s almost as bad as Lutherans. Or Presbyterians, or Baptists. Well, not that bad.

It seems Christians are genetically disposed to disagree, and when they disagree, inclined not to listen to or speak about their differences with compassion and open hearts, but simply to insist on their own way, regardless of the damage done to our witness to the world.

I have long admired the wording of the New English Bible for St. Paul’s famous “love chapter”, 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offence. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men’s sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance. – 1 Cor. 13:4–7

How I would commend this spirit of love to warring denominations!! It’s probably too late for the Episcopal Church, however, since so many of the factions are still causing frictions over loyalty to the Prayer Book of 1928, they probably don’t like the New English Bible of 1976 very much either.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles