How separate?

A question I may have to wrestle with as I chose a new church where I’m moving is how separate do I need to be from the Episcopal Church in the USA (ECUSA)? Or to put it more broadly, how separate is Biblical separation?

Bear with me as I think out loud a bit.

There are unbiblical extremes, of course. There are people who have had negative experiences at church (Who hasn’t?) who respond by writing off involvement in a church altogether. Then there are those who will not stay in a church that doesn’t do everything the way they think it should be done. This attitude helped fuel the rampant denominationalism of the 19th Century.

The Bible and common sense make clear that long-term involvement in any church requires forbearance. There are some things we just have to put up with in a patient, loving manner.

On the other extreme are those who don’t care about what allegiances a local church has. This attitude can come from an ideology of “inclusiveness� or, say, from thinking what goes on in the rest of a denomination isn’t important. This is unbiblical as well.

But there are a lot of situations in the middle that aren’t nearly as clear cut . . . such as the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas into which I’ll be moving.

If I join a church in that diocese, here a possible situation I’ll put myself in. I would be in the ECUSA. And as you can guess, that is something I do not want, as attractive as the Anglican Communion as a whole is to me.

But not one cent of my offering will go to the national denomination as the diocese allows even individual parishioners to so direct their offerings. I will have an orthodox bishop probably for many years. And my understanding of ECUSA polity is that bishops and their dioceses have a great deal of autonomy. I’ll have a lot more to do with my bishop than with the ECUSA.

But all it would take is one bishop who wants too much to be buddies with the other bishops, and I could find myself in an intolerable situation. I would have to go through the difficulties of starting over and finding a new church again. Of course, there are few guarantees in joining any church. I felt I needed to leave a church once for reasons other than moving, and it was very orthodox. I don’t want that to happen again. Yet I can’t absolutely prevent it. But I don’t want to expose myself to a significant possibility of it happening either. (But, yet, on the other hand….)

Then there is the consideration that to join anything worthwhile bigger than me and my friends, I may have to join myself to some things I don’t like. That’s the way things work in this fallen world, even in the church sadly. If I want to join the Anglican Communion, being a part, however tangential, of the ECUSA may be the price to pay for that.

But do I want to pay that price? Can I pay that price?