Bishop: Focus on personal salvation is 'heresy', 'idolatry'

Jul 10, 2009

Sex, politics, and poverty evidently aren't hot enough topics for The Episcopal Church's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. Wednesday, she threw a grenade on personal salvation, too.

She even took a swipe at the "sinners prayer" -- a brief-but-intense prayer admitting to sin and submitting to Jesus. There's no agreed text for this prayer but variations of it are central to evangelical/pentecostal Protestantism. The Episcopal Church has been boiling for six years in a fundamental disagreement over its theological direction, its understanding of the Bible and the roles of gays and women in leadership.

Last month, traditionalists broke away to formally create a new national church, the Anglican Church in North America. Unlike the Episcopal Church, it will have no gay or female bishops, no talk of blessings for same-sex marriages and its focus is on evangelization rather than social action in the name of Christ. the rest