Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori put out a statement regarding the withdrawl of the Pittsburgh diocese that deserves a close look, because it contains several common assertions of the liberal mainline denominations that need to be challenged. According to the Episcopal News Service:

I believe that the vast majority of Episcopalians and Anglicans will be intensely grieved by the actions of individuals who thought it necessary to remove them from The Episcopal Church.

It isn’t just the syntax that gets mangled here. Despite the pretense that this was just the action of rogue individuals, the undeniable fact is that this was a diocesan vote. If the actions of a General Convention aren’t simply the acts of isolated individuals–a contention Jefferts-Schori would defend to the death–then there’s no way that the Pittsburgh convention’s action can be seen that way.

I have repeatedly reassured Episcopalians that there is abundant room for dissent within this Church, and that loyal opposition is a long and honored tradition within Anglicanism.

This is something you can hear on at least a once a week basis out of one mainline church or another, and it’s based on a fundamental fallacy. Mainline liberals like Jefferts-Schori think of Christian churches the way they think of political parties, as big tents that collect people who may disagree on just about any idea or principle, but who have institutional loyalty and some common ends to hold them together. But churches aren’t like political parties; they are communities that are gathered around a common confession and a common mission. The mainline churches have done everything they can to eliminate common confessions, and no longer even agree on a common mission (in ECUSA, for instance, virtually any discussion of evangelism has been supplanted by MDG-talk, and that’s in large part because of the confessional issue–liberals no longer see evangelism as necessary, or desirable, because they no longer have any good news that they think anyone needs to embrace). The point is this: to speak of “abundant room for dissent” is meaningless, because the dissent itself is a priori ruled out of bounds. That’s because it involves calling the denomination back to a particular confessional stance, when the very idea of a common confession has been jettisoned. Conservatives in the mainline churches are arguing, not just about doctrinal or moral particulars, but about the intellectual and cultural foundations, the ethos, of their denominations. The problem is that for liberal leadership, you can talk about particulars until you’re blue in the face, but to suggest that the real problem is that the mainline churches are built on the ethos of a political party rather than a church is the unforgivable sin.

Schism is not, having frequently been seen as a more egregious error than charges of heresy.

What’s the worst sin a Democrat can commit? Being pro-life? Nope. It’s supporting a Republican (check out the response to Joe Lieberman if you don’t believe me). For the hard-core party faithful, It wouldn’t matter if a Democrat ran for office on a platform of handing out condoms in pre-schools, euthanizing all black children under the age of two, and using trained badgers armed with tulips in place of police officers, they’d still vote fot her. In the same way, Jefferts-Schori doesn’t care if an Episcopalian is an atheist (think Spong) as long as he doesn’t dis the institution. The truth is that the charge of schism is virtually meaningless among Protestants–either it is as serious as the Presiding Bishop maintains, in which case all Protestants should be looking for readmission to Rome, or it is a valid response to situations in which the truth of the gospel has been compromised, in which case the conservatives can do nothing other than what they have done, institutional loyalty notwithstanding.

There is room in this Church for all who desire to be members of it.

But not for those who believe that the denomination has fatally compromised the gospel and abandoned its calling to proclaim the faith once delivered to the saints.

The actions of the former bishop of Pittsburgh, and some lay and clergy leaders, have removed themselves from this Church; the rest of the Church laments their departure.  We stand ready to welcome the return of any who wish to rejoin this part of the Body of Christ.

I think it would be fair to say that, in the view of those who voted to leave, the Episcopal Church as an institution is no longer part of the Body of Christ, and that the only way they could remain within that Body was to disaffiliate and be admitted to a genuine part of that Body. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t lots of faithful Christians remaining in ECUSA; some are even bishops. But it means that as an institutional entity, ECUSA has apostasized in its abandonment of the common confession and common mission of Christ’s Church.

We will work with remaining Episcopalians in Pittsburgh to provide support as they reorganize the Diocese and call a bishop to provide episcopal ministry. The people of The Episcopal Church hold all concerned in our prayers — for healing and comfort in time of distress, and for discernment as they seek their way into the future.

Nice sentiment, but essentially dishonest. Once people leave the Episcopal Church, or most of the mainline churches, the leadership is to all evidence no longer interested in them or their ministry, but is interested solely in who gets the property. Both ECUSA and PCUSA have inventories of empty churches that could be used by the congregations that left them behind, but the leadership wouldn’t dream of giving back to them facilities for which those congregations paid.

The mission of God, in which The Episcopal Church participates, is to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We cannot do one without doing the other.

Empty words. To speak of the love of a Person when you have no clue who He is is to speak in terms of an abstraction that costs nothing and means nothing. There are many leaders–bishops and priests–in ECUSA whose understanding of God in Christ is so bizarre, so disconnected from reality, that it is safe to say that they have no clue who the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Father of Jesus Christ is. What they “love” is a self-generated conception of deity that has no more in common with the God of the Bible than Madonna has with the Virgin Mary. They may love their neighbor, but not their neighbor’s Creator.

We believe that it is in serving the least among us that we discover the image of God, and the presence of a suffering Christ.

This has been affirmed as true throughout the history of the Church, but in the mouth of a Jefferts-Schori it doesn’t have anything like the same meaning. For her, as for so many mainliners, it means that as long as they are doing what they think are good deeds (i.e., working for liberal political, economic, and social policies), they have fulfilled all the requirements to be a Christian. But the gospel makes clear that, as important as that is, it isn’t enough. If our service to our neighbor isn’t to simply be politics, or humanitarianism, or a path to self-righteousness, it must be grounded in saving relationship to God in Christ. But if you have no idea who He is, that relationship becomes essentially impossible, which in turn empties our service to neighbor of meaning and ultimate significance.

It is in serving those least that we rediscover our common mission, which transcends our differences. Jesus weeps at the bickering of his brothers and sisters, particularly when they miss him in their midst.

Again, this is blather. Common mission (which, as I’ve said, no longer truly exists in much of the mainline) is founded in common confession–which, because of those “differences” that she so blithely dismisses, no longer exists, either. Unless we agree on Who it is that we serve, and what He has commanded of His people, there’s no way that common mission is possible. At that point, there’s no question that Jesus weeps, but it isn’t because His people are “bickering.” It’s because so many of His people have forgotten who He is, and what He has said and done, and are no longer capable of recognizing HIm when He is standing right in front of them.

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