Separation of faith
Vestal church's parting from Episcopal Church not a one-issue decision
By Warren Musselman
Tuesday July 10, 2007

As a member of St. Andrew's Anglican Church, I was disappointed that the June 22 article "Vestal church to sever ties to Episcopal organization" on our separation from the Episcopal Church (TEC) emphasized homosexuality as the issue. The acceptance and blessing of homosexual behavior by TEC is only a symptom of the theological problems that we, and most Anglicans in the world, have with it.

Radical changes over the last 40 years or so have made it acceptable in TEC to deny the Trinity, the Resurrection, the divinity of Jesus, and many other basics of Christianity. Even some priests and bishops deny these basic tenets of the faith, and are not corrected or disciplined in any way. We know that no church on Earth can be perfect, but we cannot belong to a church that openly and blatantly contradicts the faith that we believe. Homosexuals are welcome at St. Andrew's. We do not reject them. We will accept and embrace them as we would anyone else. Their sins, whatever they are, are no worse than ours. Just don't ask us to bless any sins, either ours or theirs.

TEC, however, seeks not only to overturn 4,000 years of Judeo-Christian teaching on morality, but tries to work on the premise of "he who has the gold makes the rules." With recent losses, TEC has only about 2 million members officially on its rolls, with only about 750,000 in church on any given Sunday. Yet because TEC funds much of the operations of the 77 million member Anglican Communion, it thinks it should get away with defying repeated admonitions from councils of the Communion that denounce TEC's new direction. This defiant behavior has resulted in the Primates (leading archbishops) of 22 of the 38 churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion declaring their church out of communion (or in a few cases, in impaired communion) with TEC. These 22 Primates lead more than 75 percent of the practicing Anglicans in the world. the rest