Radical changes over the last 40 years or so have made it acceptable in TEC to deny the Trinity, the Resurrection, the divinity of Jesus, and many other basics of Christianity. Even some priests and bishops deny these basic tenets of the faith, and are not corrected or disciplined in any way. We know that no church on Earth can be perfect, but we cannot belong to a church that openly and blatantly contradicts the faith that we believe. Homosexuals are welcome at St. Andrew's. We do not reject them. We will accept and embrace them as we would anyone else. Their sins, whatever they are, are no worse than ours. Just don't ask us to bless any sins, either ours or theirs.

TEC, however, seeks not only to overturn 4,000 years of Judeo-Christian teaching on morality, but tries to work on the premise of "he who has the gold makes the rules." With recent losses, TEC has only about 2 million members officially on its rolls, with only about 750,000 in church on any given Sunday. Yet because TEC funds much of the operations of the 77 million member Anglican Communion, it thinks it should get away with defying repeated admonitions from councils of the Communion that denounce TEC's new direction. This defiant behavior has resulted in the Primates (leading archbishops) of 22 of the 38 churches of the worldwide Anglican Communion declaring their church out of communion (or in a few cases, in impaired communion) with TEC. These 22 Primates lead more than 75 percent of the practicing Anglicans in the world.

The leadership of TEC has chosen a path that most orthodox Anglicans see as heresy. This is a path that will either separate it from the Anglican Communion or destroy the Communion as it exists today. Approximately 200 parishes in the United States have separated from TEC in the last three years and united with other parts of the Anglican Communion. The Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) is a part of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, so in asking to be taken under its episcopal authority, we are remaining a part of the Anglican Communion.

As orthodox Anglicans, we at St. Andrew's see the course we have taken as necessary to remain steadfast in our commitment to the Holy Scriptures, faithful to the historic teachings of the Church, and in communion with other Anglicans around the world. While the approvals of an actively homosexual priest as bishop and of blessing same-sex unions were the trigger issues that woke some Episcopalians up to what was happening in their church, homosexuality is not the core problem in TEC. Our departure from the Episcopal Church is most assuredly NOT all about homosexuality.

---Musselman is an Apalachin resident. This letter to the editor followed the departure of St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Vestal, New York.