Stay Tuned, as 2 Churches Struggle With Gay Clergy
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: June 24, 2006

The only certain result of the Episcopal and Presbyterian church conventions that ended this week is that the participants will return to fight another day — and at future church conventions — over homosexuality.

For the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), as with other mainline Protestant churches, the summertime convention season has become a painful ritual. In each church, the conservatives and the liberals are bound together like brawling conjoined twins.
The liberals dominate the power centers of the denominations — the national offices and the legislative arms. The conservatives have threatened to walk away, but most have not because they say the church is rightfully, theologically, theirs.

"It's all very well to threaten divorce, but it's another thing to go to the divorce court," said David C. Steinmetz, a professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School who has spent the last few years on schism watch. the rest