The sad reality is that most American Episcopal churches, "orthodox" and "progressive" alike, are increasingly incapable of reaching a post-modern generation with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Also last week a Gallup poll noted that the vast majority (over 80%) of professing non-Christians age forty and under in the US hold negative views of the Church-as judgmental, hypocritical and overly-strict. This may not be surprising; it is surprising, however, to read on and learn that the majority of their contemporaries who are Christians believe the same thing.

Years ago Bishop John Spong wrote: "The Church must change or die." Spong's suggested changes were not really changes-simply an affirmation of the already-worn out radical liberal theology of the 1960s. Yet although his way of carrying out his own admonition was dead wrong, in a way Spong was right. And the way in which he was right affords the primary reason why the worldwide Anglican movement now finds itself in danger of fracturing. Countless generations of Christians before Spong have run aground attempting to change the unchangeable truths of the Gospel in order to be "relevant" in their own time.

Nonetheless, there is a sense in which the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit always creates new wine in the Church, and when there is new wine there is also need for new wineskins. It may be that as Enlightenment-based western society disintegrates, we now find ourselves in a new era when new wineskins, new structures, are called for in order to hold the new wine of the Gospel.

As Anglicans we should already have learned this lesson. Regrettably the Anglican tradition has seldom if ever been deeply hospitable to genuine renewal, except by neglect or by accident. Anglicans who have wanted to walk in any genuine degree of revival in ministry and mission have often, and almost always with deep regret, found institution-Church with its threadbare attempts at relevance "walking apart" from them.

The examples are rife. The English Puritans were never at home in the Anglican Church. Within a generation of the Elizabethan Settlement in the late 1550s, they were already finding it necessary to meet in small groups in order to learn the Scriptures because they were not being given this opportunity in their local parishes.

Thousands of Puritans in the early seventeenth century risked the dangerous North Atlantic passage primarily because they expected to find a greater measure of religious freedom in America than under the repressive control of the English Church establishment. In mid-century, over a thousand Puritan clergy were ejected from their parishes when the monarchy was restored after the English Civil War.

At the same time, John Bunyan was persecuted by Anglican authorities and spent 12 years in prison for the "crime" of preaching the Gospel in other than Anglican orders.

The crowning illustration, of course, of the fundamental incapacity of the historic Anglican wineskin to hold a Biblical revival is that of the Wesleys. While they never departed de jure from the Church of England, it was abundantly clear by the end of their fifty-year ministry in the 1780s that the Church of England had departed from them; and today we have the Methodist churches as a result.

The Wesleys' case is probably also the most closely similar to our own. John Wesley, a convinced High Churchman who, it is said, never went a day without receiving the Holy Communion if he could, was a reluctant convert to field preaching following his own personal conversion to Jesus in the late 1730s.

Undoubtedly he did not possess the capacity at the time to realize all the reasons why that single decision would become so vitally significant not only to his own ministry, but to the expanded Christian mission of his day.

The signal missional reality of mid-18th century England was that lost people, for whom Jesus died and whom he passionately loved, were simply not coming to the Anglican churches (or any churches) to hear whatever Gospel might have been being preached there. Then as now there was a gaping social gulf between church attenders, who tended to be better-educated and more among the social elites, and non-attenders, who tended to be less well-educated, less affluent and more given to social vices such as drunkenness, violence and abuse.

The Wesleys saw the need for the Gospel to be preached to these "last, least and lost" of society. In part perhaps this was because of a sense that these were leaven in the lump; that if the lower strata of society could be lifted, perhaps the effect on the overall society would be for good-and in fact that became so.

The primary motive of the Wesleys and their followers, however, was clearly the incredible love of God in Jesus Christ for people otherwise without means to know that love. Because the Wesleys were compelled by that passion of Christ for the lost, broken and poor, they were thus constrained to move beyond a formal Anglicanism that, bluntly, wasn't.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church lives in a luxury penthouse suite located on some of the priciest real estate in America and she oversees a structure that seems in general to be much about preserving its own economic and social privileges and prerogatives, and very little about the real needs of people whom the God she was ordained to proclaim longs passionately to see restored to his redeeming love. Whatever may be the sins of the individual, her example well illustrates that more than just the individual is broken here.

There is a desperate need for new structures if the Anglican movement is to survive to be part of God's Gospel witness in this nation for a new day.

If followers of Jesus are forced to leave TEC it will not be liberal theology that drives us out. Anglicanism has managed to tolerate considerable theological and ethical differences over the years.

Rather TEC has reached a point where its social and economic trappings-however well they may once have served the advance of the Gospel in a different era-now hinder us from being genuine witnesses of God's sacrificial, self-giving love to a people increasingly unable to find any credibility whatsoever in the message we proclaim from behind the hedge of our pensions, health benefits and other institutional perqs.

Once again, as in the days of the Wesleys, the Anglican institution-church has become hopelessly inaccessible to people for whom God cares passionately. Is it possible that in the coming split in the Episcopal Church God is graciously giving us in the Anglican movement yet one more opportunity to demonstrate that, knowing his care for us, we care for them, too? And if so, will we have ears to hear, and the courage to respond?

--- Dr. Dennett Buettner is priest in charge at Church of the Savior in Ambridge, PA. He formally was the Associate Rector of Shepherd's Heart Fellowship, a ministry to the homeless in Pittsburgh. He is a graduate of TESM, has a JD from Harvard Law School and a DMin in Urban Ministry from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His wife Andrea is a Vocational Deacon at Shepherd's Heart.

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