What Schism Really Looks Like

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | August 3, 2026

If you want to know what schism actually costs — not in theory, not in press releases, but in souls — don't read a canon or a court ruling. Look at the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin.

San Joaquin was the first full diocese to walk out of the Episcopal Church, and it did so in two deliberate steps. In December 2006, its convention voted to strike from the diocesan constitution the language by which it acceded to the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church. The decisive blow came a year later. On December 8, 2007, the Fresno-based diocese, under Bishop John-David Schofield, voted overwhelmingly to sever ties with TEC and align with the Argentina-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

Now look at what remains

Today the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin counts 18 churches and 1,958 members, under Bishop David Rice. The rival Anglican diocese, under Anglo-Catholic Bishop Eric Menees, counts 30 churches and 2,392 members. On the day the diocese divided, it had 8,500 members. Add the two survivors together and you reach roughly 4,350. The Anglicans — the ones who kept the faith — finished with a mere 434 more members than the church they left behind.

Do the arithmetic. Between them, the two bodies have lost more than half of what was once a single diocese. More than 4,000 people — better than four in ten — simply walked away and never came back. This is the legacy of Gene Robinson. This is what his 2003 consecration purchased in one Central Valley diocese. Ask it honestly: how has any of this served Christ's Church or advanced His kingdom?

It has not. And the man who presided over the wreckage on the Episcopal side — the man who made certain the departing were stripped, sued, and driven out — died this week. His name was Jerry Lamb. He was 85. He died on July 25. Pardon me if I do not pretend to mourn.

The Enforcer

Let us be precise, because precision is the sharper weapon. Lamb did not start the fire at San Joaquin; Gene Robinson and the General Convention did that. But when the Presiding Bishop needed a man to punish those who left, Lamb answered the call — and he did the work with relish.

A former Roman Catholic priest who had served as a college chaplain and camp director, Lamb was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Oregon in 1977. He rose through the Diocese of Northern California — rector, diocesan staff, and in 1991 coadjutor to Bishop John L. Thompson — before succeeding Thompson as the diocese's sixth bishop the following year. He led Northern California for fourteen years. His churchmanship, it must be said, was as thin as his institutional ambition was not.

Communion for the Unbaptized

Consider the doctrine for which Lamb is best remembered. He was among the Episcopal Church's first public champions of communion without baptism — offering the Body and Blood of Christ to men and women who had never been baptized into His death. By his own telling, he crossed that line at a funeral in the 1990s.

According to a 2022 account first published in Deputy News, Lamb resolved to invite the unbaptized to the altar while burying the husband of his secretary — a sheriff's deputy killed in the line of duty. With law officers filling the pews, Lamb reportedly said he could not stand there and tell them only the baptized might come forward: “I just can't do that.”

Sentiment, however, is not sacramental theology. What Lamb could not bring himself to do was hold a line the Church has held since the apostles. Years later, when his own former diocese moved to repeal the canon requiring baptism before communion, 22 prominent Episcopal theologians rose to condemn it, and General Convention — to its limited credit — took no action. That is the ground Lamb spent a career softening.

San Joaquin

Then came his true assignment. After Lamb retired from Northern California in late 2006, and after San Joaquin voted to leave, the ultra-liberal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori nominated him bishop provisional — charged, she said, with serving the clergy and congregations who wished to remain Episcopalian. Delegates from just 19 of the diocese's original 47 congregations elected him.

He declared his intentions at once. On taking office, Lamb licensed three women priests into what had been one of only three domestic Episcopal dioceses that declined to ordain women — a calculated affront to the Anglo-Catholic conscience of the place. He spoke, naturally, of reconciliation. The word was hollow. His lawyers were already drafting the suits to seize the property of the congregations that had withdrawn.

In the fall of 2008 he deposed 36 priests and 16 deacons of the Anglican diocese, charging them with abandoning the communion of the Episcopal Church — their offense being that they declined to beg release from vows they fully intended to keep. He stepped down in 2011, his work finished.

The courts completed it. In July 2009, California's Superior Court ruled that Lamb's body was the true Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin and the rightful owner of the assets the departing parishes held. Rulings in 2013 and 2014 forced the return of more than 30 properties; the Anglican appeals were exhausted by 2016. The buildings were recovered. The people were not.

The Final Accounting

Give the man his due: he was efficient. He did precisely what he was sent to do, and he did it thoroughly. But look at what the efficiency bought. He won the buildings and lost the diocese. He got the deeds and left the pews empty. He enforced the canons and emptied the churches.

Half a diocese is gone, and no lawsuit will ever bring it back. That is what schism really looks like. ENS contributed to this report.