Recently the worldwide Anglican communion has been in an uproar over the unilateral move by the Episcopal Church USA to bless homosexual marriages.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has a story about the controversy on their website. There are several interesting aspects to this story. The first is that, under strong pressure from African Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to have put down his foot. The Americans are to stop blessing homosexual unions or face expulsion from the the Anglican communion.

The report says that, "The Episcopal Church is an autonomous church, and some American Episcopalians say they're getting tired of having to deal with international concerns." The ministers and Bishops pushing their radical social agenda under the cover of ecclesiastical authority are the same folk that, on other issues, want us Americans to be more solicitous of world opinion. When it comes, however, to paying some respect to creational norms (e.g., heterosexual marriage) the "progressives" will have nothing to do with "world" (2/3 world) opinion, even if it is African.

The Bishop of Pittsburgh says: "The division in Anglicanism has gone deeper. It's harder than it was when we started this meeting." Based on this report it appears that the rift is even more profound than the PBS report suggests and it seems to be getting deeper.

The point of this post is not to "cluck" about the troubles of the Anglican communion, but to note how difficult it is to be both "mainline" and faithful to the Word as it has been confessed by the historic Protestant churches. Everyone has to pick his battles. In the sideline we have our own issues and in some ways, as D. G. Hart points out in A Secular Faith, they are only different by degrees from the problems of the mainline.

The Anglicans did not get into this soup overnight. The roots of their current crisis run deep, at least to the middle of the 17th century. One of the great contributing factors was a rise of latitudinarianism. These reports should be a stimulus to us to take our confession seriously and to challenge and even discipline those in our midst who do not or it may not be long before we're having our own Gaia conferences and having to defend the very basic issues of the faith - oh wait, we're doing a little bit of the latter already aren't we?

(HT: Michael Gregga and David Alenskis)