Check out Paul Gibson’s essay, “Why I am not afraid of schism.” The Rev. Dr. Paul Gibson was liturgical officer with the Anglican Church of Canada and is now coordinator of liturgy for the Anglican Communion.
He writes:
If my convictions lead someone else to declare that they have excommunicated me–that they refuse to share a place with me at the Lord ‘s Table–and that there is therefore a schism, I have to live with that or give up my belief in what is right. I am not afraid of schism if it is caused by what some believe to be right.
…
I am not afraid of schism. I am afraid of a church in which some leaders voted to commit themselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptized, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ (from the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1998, Resolution I.10.c), but show little evidence of having acted on that promise.
I am afraid of a church in which righteousness is understood to be the enforcement of a small number of prejudicially selected biblical texts to the exclusion of many others, some of greater clarity, forgetting that in the bible righteousness is realized in the practice of justice. There are at the most seven references to homosexuality in the bible (some of them are disputed and all require contextual interpretation) but the word “justice” (or its negative “injustice”) appears 194 times.
The essay appeared in Stories of Faith from the General Synod of the Anglican Communion of Canada. Go read it all here. Thanks to Mad Priest for the pointer.
Some snippet from a related post at Stories of Faith by Kawuki Mukasa:
There is nothing wrong with listening for guidance or waiting for the wisdom to understand the will of God on the issues before us. But for anyone out there projecting “neutrality” simply out of fear of offending others I say, it is time to step down. This kind of “neutrality” is counterproductive. What is needed is for us to explain as best as we can why and how we are grounded where we are.