Asian Episcopalians Face Growing Church Splits

http://www.asianweek.com/2008/01/04/asian-episcopalians-face-growing-church-splits/

[AsianWeek] 5 Jan 2008--The growing split within the Episcopal Church in the United States has generated new challenges to its more than 17,000 Asian American baptized members and clergy.

“Sometimes it is necessary that there be divisions in the Church — as it was in the apostolic times on the question of circumcision as requisite for Christian baptism, on the issue of slavery which divided the American Church, the ordination of women and the ordination of the gay bishop — so that the genuine among us would be recognized,” says the Rev. Dr. Winfred B. Vergara, the current missioner for the national Episcopal Asiamerica Ministry, which has 120 congregations and approximately 1.8 percent of the Episcopal Church membership. “Father Fred,” as he is known, describes the current disharmony in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as “worrisome and burdensome,” especially if elements of the church end up in litigation with the national church or local diocese over church money and property.

Yet, he is hardly neutral about the international controversy that has roiled one of America’s oldest denominations, and he speaks passionately about an “essential message of love and reconciliation.”

“It is not revisionism, but progressive revelation when we come to have a more sympathetic understanding of gay persons in light of Scriptures,” Vergara said. “The Bible was culture-bound even as it shaped the development of the church. The world moves faster due to increasing globalization. I think conservative Christianity is jaded and is reactionary.”

Anglicanism has historically rejected the notion of "progressive revelation." Both the Church of Rome and 16th century Anabaptistism, the two extremes that the Anglican "via media" seeks to avoid, embrace the notion of "progressive revelation."