THIRD WORLD CHRISTIANITY will change the faith worldwide

Friends at Good Shepherd,
The article below was published in Dec 11, 2003 but the points made are still true.  Television has given us a window on the disasters overtaking nations in the Mid East and Africa.  In spite of bitter persecution and povery, Christianity is making rapid strides in some third world countries.  There are more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England or the Americas. 

Where as many of the Northern European and American Churches have allowed their agendas to be dominated by political movements, and have gone into decline as a result, the churches in third world countries are growing.  This excerpt from Philip Jenkins book reveals why.

Pray for our Christian brothers who are being persecuted in the Mid East and Africa.
Pray for our churches here in this land that we will see we likewise are dependent on God from whom all blessings flow.

Charles R. Scott, Vicar
Church of the Good Shepherd
chasrscott@netzero.com

How Southern Christianity--as expressed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America--will change the faith worldwide.
By Philip Jenkins Excerpted from "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity"

If there is one thing we can reliably predict about the 21st century, it is that an increasing share of the world’s people is going to identify with one of two religions, either Christianity or Islam, and the two have a long and disastrous record of conflict and mutual incomprehension. For the sake of both religion and politics, and perhaps of simple planetary survival, it is vitally necessary for Christian and Jewish Northerners to gain a better understanding of Islam. But odd as it may sound perhaps the more pressing need is to appreciate that other religious giant, the strangely unfamiliar world of the new Christianity. Southern Christianity, the Third Church, is not just a transplanted version of the familiar religion of the older Christian states: the New Christendom is no mirror image of the Old. It is a truly new and developing entity. Just how different from its predecessor remains to be seen.

Studying Christianity in a predominantly Christian society can pose surprising difficulties. I teach in a religious studies program which, like most of its counterparts in universities across the United States, introduces students to the global dimensions of religious experience. In practice, that means providing a wide range of courses on the World Religions, such as Islam, Buddhism, and so on. The main religion that tends to suffer in this package is Christianity, which receives nothing like the attention it merits in terms of its numbers and global scale. Whatever the value of Christian claims to truth, it cannot be considered as just one religion out of many: it is, and will continue to be, by far the largest in existence. A generation ago, the neglect of Christianity in academic teaching made more sense than it does today, in that students could be expected to absorb information about the faith from churches, families, or society at large. Today, though, that is often not a realistic expectation, and one encounters dazzling levels of ignorance about the basic facts of the religion.

If Christianity as such receives short shift, the situation is still worse when it comes to the religion outside the West. Normally, textbooks discuss the faith in African and Asia chiefly in highly negative ways, in the context of genocide, slavery, and imperialism, and the voices of autonomous Christianity are rarely heard. Given the present and future distribution of Christians worldwide, a case can be made that understanding the religion in its non-Western context is a prime necessity for anyone seeking to understand the emerging world. American universities prize the goal of diversity in their teaching, introducing students to the thought-ways of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, often by using texts from non-Western cultures. However strange this may sound in terms of conventional stereotypes, teaching about Christianity would be a wonderful way to teach diversity, all the more so now that particular non-Western religion is returning to its roots. Significantly, though, few Religious Studies departments in public universities offer courses in Pentecostalism, say, compared with the substantial numbers teaching on Buddhism or Islam. Partly, this reflects political prejudices: at least in the humanities, most academics are strongly liberal, and take a dim view of Pentecostalism and fundamentalism. While colleges do discuss Catholicism, the issues involved in these courses are very much those of interest in the liberal West, rather than the lived realities of Catholic practice in Latin America or Africa.

Considering Christianity is a global reality can make us see the whole religion in a radically new perspective, which is startling and, often, uncomfortable. In fact, to adapt a phrase coined by theologian Marcus Borg, it is as if we are seeing Christianity again for the first time. In this encounter, we are forced to see the religion not just for what it is, but what it was in its origins and what it is going to be in the future. To take one example of these startling rediscoveries, Christianity is deeply associated with poverty. Contrary to myth, the typical Christian is not a White fat cat in the United States or western Europe, but rather a poor person, often unimaginably poor by Western standards.

The grim fact of Christian impoverishment becomes all the more true as Africa assumes its place as the religion’s principal center. We are dealing with a continent that has endured countless disasters since independence, measured by statistics that become wearying by their unrelieved horror, whether we are looking at life expectancy, child mortality, or deaths from AIDS. Africa contributes less than 2 percent of the world’s total GDP, although it is home to 13 percent of world population, and the GDP for the whole of sub-Saharan African is equivalent to that of the Netherlands. Since the 1960s, Africa’s share of world trade has all but disappeared. Overall, “the continent is slipping out of the Third World into its own bleak category of the Nth World.”…That is the underlying reality for the Christian masses of the new century.

African and Latin American Christians are people for whom the New Testament Beatitudes have a direct relevance inconceivable for most Christians in Northern societies. When Jesus told the “poor” they were blessed, the word used does not imply relative deprivation, it means total poverty, or destitution. The great majority of Southern Christians (and increasingly, of all Christians) really are the poor, the hungry, the persecuted, even the dehumanized. India has a perfect translation for Jesus’ word in the term Dalit, literally “crushed” or “oppressed.” This is how that country’s so-called Untouchables now choose to describe themselves: as we might translate the biblical phrase, blessed are the Untouchables.

Knowing all this should ideally have policy consequences, which are at least as urgent as redistributing church resources to meet the needs of shifting populations. Above all, the disastrous lot of so many Christians worldwide places urgent pressure on the wealthy societies to assist the poor. A quarter of a century ago, Ronald J. Sider published the influential book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which attacked First World hypocrisy in the face of the grinding poverty of the global South. The book could easily be republished today with the still more pointed title Rich Christians in an Age of Hungry Christians, and the fact of religious kinship adds enormously to Sider’s indictment. When American Christians see the images of starvation from Africa, like the hellish visions from Ethiopia in the 1980s, very few realize that the victims share not just a common humanity, but in many cases the same religion. Those are Christians starving to death.

Looking at Southern Christianity gives a surprising new perspective on some other things that might seem to be very familiar. Perhaps the most striking example is how the newer churches can read the Bible in a way that makes that Christianity look like a wholly different religion from the faith of prosperous advanced societies of Europe or North America. We have already seen that Southern churches are quite at home with biblical notions of the supernatural, with ideas like dreams and prophecy. Just as relevant in their eyes are the book’s core social and political themes, like martyrdom, oppression, and exile. In the present day, it may be that it is only in the newer churches that the Bible can be ready with any authenticity and immediacy, and that the Old Christendom must give priority to Southern voices. If Northern churches cannot help with clergy or missionaries or money, then perhaps they can reinterpret their own religion in light of these experiences.

When we read the New Testament, so many of the basic assumptions seem just as alien in the global North as they do normal and familiar in the South. When Jesus was not talking about exorcism and healing, his recorded words devoted what today seems like an inordinate amount of attention to issues of persecution and martyrdom. He talked about what believers should do when on trial for the faith, how they should respond when expelled and condemned by families, villages and Jewish religious authorities. A large proportion of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, addresses the sufferings of God’s people in the face of evil secular authorities.

As an intellectual exercise, modern Westerners can understand the historical circumstances that led to this emphasis on bloodshed and confrontation, but the passages concerned have little current relevance. Nor, for many, do the apocalyptic writings that are so closely linked to the theme of persecution and martyrdom, the visions of a coming world in which God will rule, persecutors will perish, and the righteous be vindicated. In recent decades, some New Testament scholars have tried to undermine the emphasis on martyrdom and apocalyptic in the New Testament by suggesting that these ideas did not come from Jesus’ mouth, but were rather attributed to him by later generations. The real Jesus, in this view, was a rational Wisdom teacher much more akin to modern Western tastes, a kind of academic gadfly, rather than the ferocious “Doomsday Jesus” of the Synoptic Gospels. Rom this perspective, Jesus’ authentic views are reflected in mystical texts like the Gospel of Thomas. For radical Bible critics like the Jesus Seminar, Thomas has a much better claim to be included in a revised New Testament than the book of Revelation, which is seen as a pernicious distortion of Christian truth.

For the average Western audience, New Testament passages about standing firm in the face of pagan persecution have little immediate relevance about as much perhaps as farmyard images of threshing or vine-grafting. Some fundamentalists imagine that the persecutions described might have some future reality, perhaps during the End Times. But for millions of Southern Christians, there is no such need to dig for arcane meanings. Millions of Christians around the world do in fact live in constant danger of persecution or forced conversion, from either governments or local vigilantes. For modern Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, the Sudan, or Indonesia, it is quite conceivable that they might someday find themselves before a tribunal that would demand that they renounce their faith upon pain of death. In all these varied situations, ordinary believers are forced to understand why they are facing these sufferings, and repeatedly they do so in the familiar language of the Bible and of earliest Christianity. To quote one Christian in Maluku, recent massacres and expulsions in that region are “according to God’s plan. Christians are under purification from the Lord.” The church in Sudan, the victim of perhaps the most savage religious repression anywhere in the world, has integrated its sufferings into its liturgy and daily practice, and produced some moving literature in the process (“Death has come to reveal the faith/It has begun with us and it will end with us”).

Churches everywhere preach death and resurrection, but nowhere else are these realities such an immediate prospect. As in several other crisis regions, the oppressors in Sudan are Muslim, but elsewhere, they might be Christians of other denominations. In Guatemala or Rwanda, as in the Sudan, martyrdom is not merely a subject for historical research, it is a real prospect. As we move into the new century, the situation is likely to get worse rather than better.

Persecution is not confined to nations in such a state of extreme violence. Even in situations when actual violence might not have occurred for months or years, there is a pervasive sense of threat, a need to be alert and avoid provocations. Hundreds of millions of Christians live in deeply divided societies, constantly needing to be acutely aware of their relationships with Muslim or Hindu neighbors.

Just as relevant to current concerns is exile, forcible removal from one's homeland, which forms the subject of so much of the Hebrew Bible. About half the refugees in the world today are in Africa, and millions of these are Christian. The wars that have swept over the Congo and Central Africa over the past decade have been devastating in uprooting communities. Often, it is the churches that provide the refugees with cohesion and community, and offer them hope, so that exile and return acquire powerfully religious symbolism. Themes of exile and return also exercise a powerful appeal for those removed voluntarily from their homelands, the tens of millions of migrant workers who have sought better lives in the richer lands.

Read against the background of martyrdom and exile, it is not surprising that so many Christians look for promises that their sufferings are only temporary, and that God will intervene directly to save the situation. In this context, the book of Revelation looks like true prophecy on an epic scale, however unpopular or discredited it may be for most Americans or Europeans. In the South, Revelation simply makes sense, in its description of a world ruled by monstrous demonic powers. These forces might be literal servants of Satan, or symbols for evil social forces, but in either case, they are indisputably real.

Christianity is flourishing wonderfully among the poor and persecuted, while it atrophies among the rich and secure. Using the traditional Marxist view of religion as the opium of the masses, it would be tempting to draw the conclusion that the religion actually does have a connection to under-development and pre-modern cultural ways, and will disappear as society progresses. That conclusion would be fatuous, though, because very enthusiastic kinds of Christianity are also succeeding among professional and highly technologically oriented groups, notably around the Pacific Rim and in the United States. Yet the distribution of modern Christians might well show that the religion does succeed best when it takes very seriously the profound pessimism about the secular world that characterizes the New Testament. If it is not exactly a faith based on the experience of poverty and persecution, then at least it regards these things as normal and expected elements of life. That view is not derived from complex theological reasoning, but is rather a lesson drawn from lived experience. Christianity certainly can succeed in other settings, even amid peace and prosperity, but perhaps it does become harder, as hard as passing through the eye of a needle.

A healthy distrust of worldly power and success is all the more necessary given the remarkable reversals of Christian fortunes over the ages, and the number of times that the faith seemed on the verge of destruction. In 500 Christianity was the religion of empire and domination; in 1000, it was the stubborn faith of exploited subject peoples, or of barbarians on the irrelevant fringes of the great civilizations; in 1900, Christian powers ruled the world. Knowing what the situation will be in 2100 or 2500 would take a truly inspired prophet. But if there is one overarching lesson from this record of changing fortunes, it is that (to adapt the famous adage about Russia) Christianity is never as weak as it appears, nor as strong as it appears. And whether we look backward or forward in history, we can see that time and again, Christianity demonstrates a breathtaking ability to transform weakness into strength.

POSTED AT BELIEFNET Excerpted from "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity" with permission of Oxford University Press.  

Deacon John Novak leads in a missionary effort in Northern Kentucky.

On Monday night, January 15, John Novak and I visited with the Governing Board of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Taylor Mill, Kentucky. Taylor Mill is a growing community immediately South of Newport, Kentucky. The Northern Kentucky area is growing rapidly with over 300,000 population.

The Seventh Day Adventists at Taylor Mill have a beautiful, well maintained building. The design is well suited to Anglican Worship, and will seat 300 people.

The SDA board members were very congenial; the pastor very enthusiastic and all greeted us warmly. They appeared willing to assist us any way possible and share in outreach.

Fr. John’s wife, Ginger Novak, has been working with MOPS. She has studied at a Bible College and along with another well experienced and well educated layman will direct the Church School. John will preside at Deacon’s Mass at 10:00 A.M. on Sunday mornings.
They plan to begin Church school at 9:00 a.m. and Christianity Explored outreach for inquirers on Sunday evening.

Please pray for the success of this mission.

Charles Scott, Church of the Good Shepherd, Indianapolis

Episcopal Churches' Breakaway in Va. Evolved Over 30 Years

By Alan Cooperman and Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 4, 2007; A01

Parishioners say it happens quietly, unobtrusively: As the sick make their way to the altar, some worshipers begin speaking in tongues. Occasionally, one is "arrested in the spirit," falling unconscious into the arms of a fellow congregant.

The special faith-healing services, held one Sunday night a month at The Falls Church in Fairfax, are a rarity in the Episcopal Church. But members of The Falls Church have long felt at odds with fellow Episcopalians, who they believe have been drifting theologically in an ever more liberal direction.

Shortly before Christmas, The Falls Church and neighboring Truro Church -- which in Colonial times belonged to a single parish -- vented those feelings by voting overwhelmingly to break away from the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church.

The vote reverberated across the country because Truro and The Falls Church are two of the Washington area's most wealthy, historic and prestigious congregations. Their pews are studded on Sunday mornings with such regulars as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and former CIA director Porter J. Goss.

Moreover, they are reversing the usual relationship between Christians in the United States and the developing world by joining seven other Northern Virginia congregations in a new missionary branch of the Anglican province of Nigeria.

The decision was emotionally wrenching and fraught with legal issues, not least of which is a potential battle with the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia for control of the two congregations' land and buildings, conservatively valued at $25 million.

But the votes appear less sudden or surprising when one realizes that for more than 30 years, Truro and The Falls Church have been part of a "charismatic revival" within mainline Protestantism, said the Rev. Robert W. Prichard, professor of Christianity in America at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria.

Charismatic, in this case, refers to an ecstatic style of worship that includes speaking in tongues, a stream of unintelligible syllables signifying that the Holy Spirit has entered the worshiper. It is a hallmark of the fast-growing Pentecostal movement but unusual for Episcopalians, who are so thoroughly associated with solemnity and tradition that they are sometimes referred to teasingly as "the frozen chosen."

Prichard, who grew up attending Truro, said many of its members and almost of all its lay leaders spoke in tongues in the 1970s. "There was a kind of coaching in which people who had spoken in tongues would surround a person who was praying for the gift of tongues," he said.
Parishioners say the practice continues today in both congregations, though not at Sunday morning services. Some members have never seen it.

"It's very much a part of our experience and lives," said Truro Rector Martyn Minns, a new bishop in the Nigerian Anglican Church. But "we've grown up. We integrate it rather than focus on it."
Dean Miller, pastor of the young adult ministry at The Falls Church, said some members also have "visions of the Lord" during healing services. "I don't. I'm not gifted that way. But there are people in the community who do," he said.

Prichard contends that charismatic worship is vital to understanding these congregations because it paved the way for them to join the broader evangelical movement, which emphasizes being "born again," having a personal relationship with Jesus and reading the Bible as the wholly true word of God.

Unlike many Episcopal churches nationally, neither Truro nor The Falls Church was active in supporting the civil rights movement or in protesting the Vietnam War.
"I don't remember any political sermons at all," said Al Long, 80, who has been a member of The Falls Church since 1959. "We go there to find out what the Bible says and how we're supposed to live and relate to each other and the Lord. . . . And that's it."

Beginning in the 1970s, though, Truro embraced the antiabortion movement. It also started a program to help those who wanted to leave what it calls the "homosexual lifestyle."

"These emphases have never been mainstream within the Episcopal Church," said Joan Gunderson, a Pittsburgh scholar who is writing a history of the Virginia Diocese. "But there is a movement they are tapping into that is larger than just the Episcopal Church."

As Truro and The Falls Church adopted a conservative approach, dissenting members retreated to more liberal Episcopal churches in the area, such as Christ Church Alexandria. New worshipers, many of them born-again Christians who had grown disillusioned with their denominations, streamed in.

At Truro, "we don't have to water down the Gospel," said Mary Springmann, a member of the vestry and a born-again Christian who was raised Catholic.

These days, Truro is a magnet for conservatives across the Washington area, and the percentage of "cradle" Episcopalians among its 2,000 regular worshipers has dropped steadily. In the 1980s, more than two-thirds of its members had been raised Episcopalian, according to church surveys. Today, fewer than 40 percent grew up in the church.

Truro's red brick campus sprawls over four leafy acres at the intersection of two of Fairfax City's busiest arteries. In the vaulted main sanctuary, the church embodies the centuries-old traditions of its Anglican heritage -- stately rows of candles, organ pipes set into the wall behind an ornate crucifix and wooden pews equipped with fold-down kneelers.

In the labyrinthine hallways, shelves of books reflect the church's conservative bent: advice on evangelizing to "unbelievers" and "liberal secularists," how to "engage the culture with absolute Biblical truth" and tracts against the "occultism" of the New Age movement.

The Falls Church, whose historic sanctuary dates from 1769, draws almost 2,500 worshipers to its services on an average weekend.

Goss has attended with his family for years. He said he draws spiritual sustenance from the church's strong emphasis on the teachings of Jesus. "It's a congregation that really exhibits the love of Christ," he said last week. He declined to comment on the current controversy.

At least two-thirds of the worshipers are Methodists, Presbyterians or Baptists, and there is no pressure on them to be confirmed as Episcopalians, said the Rev. Rick Wright, associate rector.
Wright said the diverse membership of both congregations illustrates one of the great changes in American religion of the past half-century: The divisions between denominations are far less important today than the divisions within denominations.

"I tend to feel very comfortable rubbing shoulders with folks at McLean Bible or Columbia Baptist . . . that are real orthodox, evangelical, biblical churches," said Truro's chief warden, or lay leader, Jim Oakes, referring to two Northern Virginia megachurches. "We share core beliefs. I think I would be more comfortable with them than with anyone I might run into at an Episcopal Diocesan Council meeting."

In some popular services, Truro and The Falls Church blend the traditional liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer with such megachurch touches as huge choirs, bass guitars and drums. Neither offers "smells and bells," the incense and chimes favored by "high church" Episcopal congregations. But some parishioners affectionately describe Truro as "McLean Bible with candles."

Attitudes toward homosexuality are one of the brightest lines between the liberal and conservative camps. But few members of Truro or The Falls Church say the division is, fundamentally, about whether to bless sex-same couples or whether to ordain gay ministers -- the issues that have strained relations between the Episcopal Church and the rest of the 75 million-member Anglican Communion, the worldwide family of churches descended from the Church of England.

Many say the rift involves something deeper -- whether the Bible is the word of God, Jesus is the only way to heaven and tolerance is more important than truth. When he was a newly ordained priest almost 20 years ago, Wright said, he talked with several other priests about how to respond to a teenager who asked, "Do you really believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?"

"The rest of the priests agreed that it was a sticky question, and they felt that way because they didn't believe in it, but they didn't want to say so," he said. "That's where the Episcopal Church has been for the last 20 years. It's not where we are."
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Correction to This Article

A Jan. 4 article about Northern Virginia congregations that have split from the Episcopal Church incorrectly said that the Falls Church is in Fairfax. It is in the city of Falls Church. Also, the last name of Pittsburgh scholar Joan Gundersen was misspelledCorrection to This Article

A Jan. 4 article about Northern Virginia congregations that have split from the Episcopal Church incorrectly said that the Falls Church is in Fairfax. It is in the city of Falls Church. Also, the last name of Pittsburgh scholar Joan Gundersen was misspelledCorrection to This Article

A Jan. 4 article about Northern Virginia congregations that have split from the Episcopal Church incorrectly said that the Falls Church is in Fairfax. It is in the city of Falls Church. Also, the last name of Pittsburgh scholar Joan Gundersen was misspelledBottom of Form

Why We Left the Episcopal Church

By The Rev. John Yates and Os Guinness
The Washington Post
Monday, January 8, 2007; Page A15

When even President Gerald Ford's funeral at Washington National Cathedral is not exempt from comment about the crisis in the Episcopal Church, we believe it is time to set the record straight as to why our church and so many others around the country have severed ties with the Episcopal Church. Fundamental to a liberal view of freedom is the right of a person or group to define themselves, to speak for themselves and to not be dehumanized by the definitions and distortions of others. This right we request even of those who differ from us.

The core issue in why we left is not women's leadership. It is not "Episcopalians against equality," as the headline on a recent Post op-ed by Harold Meyerson put it. It is not a "leftward" drift in the church. It is not even primarily ethical -- though the ordination of a practicing homosexual as bishop was the flash point that showed how far the repudiation of Christian orthodoxy had gone.

A Christmas Eve service at The Falls Church. (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

The core issue for us is theological: the intellectual integrity of faith in the modern world. It is thus a matter of faithfulness to the lordship of Jesus, whom we worship and follow. The American Episcopal Church no longer believes the historic, orthodox Christian faith common to all believers. Some leaders expressly deny the central articles of the faith -- saying that traditional theism is "dead," the incarnation is "nonsense," the resurrection of Jesus is a fiction, the understanding of the cross is "a barbarous idea," the Bible is "pure propaganda" and so on. Others simply say the creed as poetry or with their fingers crossed.

It would be easy to parody the " Alice in Wonderland" surrealism of Episcopal leaders openly denying what their faith once believed, celebrating what Christians have gone to the stake to resist -- and still staying on as leaders. But this is a serious matter.

First, Episcopal revisionism abandons the fidelity of faith. The Hebrew scriptures link matters of truth to a relationship with God. They speak of apostasy as adultery -- a form of betrayal as treacherous as a husband cheating on his wife.

Second, Episcopal revisionism negates the authority of faith. The "sola scriptura" ("by the scriptures alone") doctrine of the Reformation church has been abandoned for the "sola cultura" (by the culture alone) way of the modern church. No longer under authority, the Episcopal Church today is either its own authority or finds its authority in the shifting winds of intellectual and social fashion -- which is to say it has no authority.

Third, Episcopal revisionism severs the continuity of faith. Cutting itself off from the universal faith that spans the centuries and the continents, it becomes culturally captive to one culture and one time. While professing tolerance and inclusiveness, certain Episcopal attitudes toward fellow believers around the world, who make up a majority of the Anglican family, have been arrogant and even racist.

Fourth, Episcopal revisionism destroys the credibility of faith. There is so little that is distinctively Christian left in the theology of some Episcopal leaders, such as the former bishop of Newark, that a skeptic can say, as Oscar Wilde said to a cleric of his time, "I not only follow you, I precede you." It is no accident that orthodox churches are growing and that almost all the great converts to the Christian faith in the past century, such as G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, have been attracted to full-blooded orthodoxy, not to revisionism. The prospect for the Episcopal Church, already evident in many dioceses, is inevitable withering and decline.

Fifth, Episcopal revisionism obliterates the very identity of faith. When the great truths of the Bible and the creeds are abandoned and there is no limit to what can be believed in their place, then the point is reached when there is little identifiably Christian in Episcopal revisionism. Would that Episcopal leaders showed the same zeal for their faith that they do for their property. If the present decline continues, all that will remain of a once strong church will be empty buildings, kept going by the finances, though not the faith, of the fathers.

These are the outrages we protest. These are the infidelities that drive us to separate. These are the real issues to be debated. We remain Anglicans but leave the Episcopal Church because the Episcopal Church first left the historic faith. Like our spiritual forebears in the Reformation, "Here we stand. So help us God. We can do no other."

The Rev. John Yates is rector and Os Guinness is a parishioner of The Falls Church , one of several Virginia churches that voted last month to sever ties with the Episcopal Church.