That’s Our Church, Too

I’ve seen on-line comments by traditionalists saying, in effect, "you liberals ought to start your own church, instead of trying to change ours."  It seems to me that they’re missing a few points.

First, "our" church encompasses all Episcopalians, not
just those who wish things could just remain the way they used to be. I sympathize with
the latter group’s nostalgia for the church of 50 years ago.  In many ways, however,
that church was itself a significant departure from the church of, say, 150
years ago.  The traditionalists seem to lose sight of that fact.

That leads us to a second point, which is that whether we like it or not, things
change – life is a movie, not a snapshot. Some wish that society’s sexual mores
had remained what they were 50 years or 150 years ago, but they didn’t.
As a church, we have to face that fact, and to respond somehow,
or risk sliding into societal irrelevance.

Third:  Before any group can decide how it will
respond to such a change, it first has to know how it’s going to make the decision. In
the Episcopal Church, we already know how we make such decisions.  The process is built
into our constitution and canons. We don’t centralize power in a
papacy, nor in an oligarchical group of governing apostles like the Mormons do. Instead, we try to make such decisions at least semi-democratically.  We followed the process in the debate about homosexuality.  It’s not a perfect process, but even so, that’s “our” church, too.