"Anglican Distraction Syndrome" Considered

Over in the blog of the parish of St. Margaret's Emmaus (PA) we have reference to an extract of a letter from Bp. Paul Marshall concerning "Anglican Distraction Syndrome":

History teaches that Episcopalians would rather do anything than spread the Kingdom. We tend to invest our energy in debates about liturgy, women's ordination, language, where national headquarters should be, and so on, in a way that is disproportionate to their significance. These are all important issuses, but my constant sorrow--and I have been saying this for decades--is that we historically let ourselves get so concerned with these and other issues that our primary mission is obscured.

The thing is that all of these "distractions" occur in the course of arguing about how we should go about spreading the kingdom. They get argued about because people say or have said that we have to change the liturgy, we have to ordain women, we have to have acknowledged homosexuals in positions of power, we have to change the language used to talk about God, have spend less money on our national church institutions, and so forth. If discussion is the obvious problem, then "leave well enough alone" is the obvious solution. Leave the text of the BCP unaltered; leave +VGR as a singularity; forget about rites for homosexual marriages; leave headquarters at 815; and so forth.

There is, of course, not a snowball's chance in hell that this is going to happen. And if Bp. Marshall really wanted to cast a vote in this direction, he would have witheld consent on +VGR.