Would I Leave TEC?

Others are playing the parlor game I suggested last night, and I'm glad they are. I'm sure there are other, powerful voices, but these are just a few I have noticed tonight.

Cany (who is definitely more than "Just Another Black Sheep") tells a moving story about how he found his way back to the Episcopal Church, only to contemplate having to separate from it. Read it all here, but I found this especially moving:

There is a hollow place in my heart in typing this, reading the words that I myself am typing about my potential for leaving a church I have come to so love and respect. I don't let things go easily. This will be no different. I will have to reflect carefully and pray a lot over the many, many months to come. I can kneel at the rail with those who fully disagree with me. I cannot, however, belong to a church that doesn't respect all people and/or which does not include all people in every level of its Episcopacy.The simple matter of it is, however, that if TEC truly does not welcome all because of "who" someone is, then I don't belong there, either. While I am straight, if those who are not are not treated as I am, I simply cannot abide that, spiritually. Reject them, reject me.While some have chattered that Lambeth makes little difference, I do not share that view. I am fully set to accept that TEC leaves or is tossed out of the Anglican Communion or is considered an impaired Communion member. I can live with that. I cannot, however, live with TEC that rejects full inclusion in our church.

Even MadPriest quits fooling around and gets very, very serious here. He suggests the bishops at Lambeth face two options and "option one" is "going for a policy, wrapped up disingenuously in claims of unity and democracy, that excludes gay people from full personhood and membership of the Church." He concludes:

The problem for those of us in the Anglican Church who are not bishops is that, should our leaders go for option one we will all become complicit in their treachery and responsible for all future acts of violence against gay people, just as I would have been guilty for the deaths in Iraq had I voted for Blair a second time. This will become even more acute if we are forced by the proposed "Inquisition" to keep quiet about our own views. If regarding gay couples as sinful is made an equivalent doctrine to believing in the Incarnation of Christ, any Anglican of integrity will have just two choices: to leave the church they love or to publicly condemn the doctrines of the Church until the Inquisition throws them out.

I was also moved by the commentary offered by James here, at The Three Legged Stool:

I really like the bit [quoting Damian Thompson in Monday's Telegraph] “Yet hope springs eternal in the Anglican breast.” I really, really like that because it is so true. And why is it true, because Jesus goes before us and we follow in his steps.
The sad thing, though, is that Thompson, a Roman Catholic, and most of the press do not realize that this is not over sexuality or even gender: it is over power, who wields it (abuses it), and who is abused by it.
I wonder, is this the last Lambeth Conference?

I have not yet read all the analysis that has followed from the Windsor Group's "third reflection." But I certainly am not sanguine about their proposal. They demand that TEC and other churches step back from the Gospel as we have heard it, in order to cave in to the terror and hatred of the reactionaries. [Yes, I call them "reactionaries" intentionally.] Maybe the bishops gathered at Lambeth will concur with them. Maybe my own bishop will vote with them. If that happens, I will have to re-evaluate my participation in the Episcopal Church.

And let me remind you that I did that back in 2006. I took a sabbatical from TEC. I tried to find another church that offered me the faith, the faithfulness, the liturgy that I had found in TEC. I couldn't find it. If the bishops at Lambeth go with this proposal from the Windsor Group, I now recognize I will not find another church I can attend. There just aren't any out there. Instead, I will have to join the growing number of people who observe Sunday mornings at Starbucks with the New York Times.

I pray most fervently that my bishop and many other bishops will save me from that abysmal, secular retreat. I know this sounds hyperbolic, but I mean it: I pray that the bishops at Lambeth will save the Anglican Communion.

Mind you, I'm ready to ditch it. If the bishops at Lambeth cave in to the papers being offered by the Windsor Group, the Anglican Communion will be dead, and I will move on. But I hope and pray they will find another way.

The Episcopal Church was my last, best hope against fundamentalist Christianity of either the Roman or the Protestant kind. I pray the bishops at Lambeth will keep steering the middle course. But, tonight, I am not optimistic.