VOL: First of all when you talk about "good news" in lower case rather than upper case as in Good News, you could be talking about anything. The Good News is about Jesus, his life, death and resurrection, the promise of new life in Christ, none of which Mrs. Jefferts Schori believes in as she eschews personal faith in Christ nor does she believe in converting Muslims as they have the same God, according to her.

SHERMAN: Is the Episcopal Church's approval of a gay bishop still a big an issue in the church?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: I think the church as a whole is beyond being terribly upset about that. Every time the Episcopal Church has struggled with significant change, some people have left, dating back to 1870s, when they were arguing about the color of vestments and candles on the altar. Change is a challenge, but God continues to call us to new duties and new challenges, and that's a good thing.

VOL: This is nonsense. The color of vestments and candles on the altar are not salvation issues, neither is which Prayer Book Episcopalians use. Homosexual behavior is repeatedly disavowed in Scripture (and is a salvation issue), a point that Global South Archbishops repeatedly tell us. To say that the Church is "beyond being terribly upset" flies in the face of what Nigerian Archbishop Nicholas Okoh said only last week, "I want to draw your attention to what is becoming acceptable in some quarters which we must not accept. What is being known now as gay and homosexuality is contrary to God's plan for human sexuality and procreation. It is against the will of God, and nobody should encourage it, and those who do will earn for themselves the damnation of the Almighty."

SHERMAN: Are people still leaving the church over it?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: We're not seeing more departures at the moment. Those who have gone to find another home have done so. We would remind them that the door is open, and we welcome anybody who wants to be a part of this community.

VOL: Not entirely true. People are still dribbling out Episcopal Church doors, some to ACNA, some to CANA, some to AMIA and some to the Ordinariate, some are going directly to Rome, some to one of the Continuing Anglican churches, and some to the Orthodox Church. The door can stay open till hell freezes, but people who leave are not coming back, not now not ever. This past week, the Nigerian Synod of the Anglican Church in Nigeria approved the creation and formation of the Missionary Diocese of the Trinity (MDT) which will embrace churches in North America and Canada.

"The MDT shall be an evangelical and church planting mission that also joins Confessing Anglican movements to sustain the sanctity of Anglicanism and its rich heritage, as well as the apostolic teaching and practice, and the faith as handed over to us by the Apostles."

Mrs. Jefferts Schori is deluding herself into thinking departures are over. As they say, you ain't seen nothin' yet. If she pushes to remove Bishop Mark Lawrence from the Diocese of South Carolina, she could well lose another entire diocese. That story is only beginning to be told.

SHERMAN: Do you have a relationship with the new Anglican Church in North America?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: We don't, and when they discover a positive identity that's not based on displacing the Episcopal Church, I certainly hope that we can build an ecumenical relationship.

VOL: If ACNA is displacing TEC, it is doing so because TEC has lost the gospel plot and exchanged it for MDGs, anti-racism training, interfaith alliances, sodomy and much more. ACNA believes in the Great Commission; TEC believes in "mission" defined as anything but the Great Commission.

SHERMAN: How is the Episcopal Church's relationship with the worldwide Anglican Communion?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: The anxieties around the Communion have gone down. The Episcopal Church has relationships, mission partnerships, in every part of the Communion, certainly stronger in some areas than in others. There are still a handful of bishops, who are upset with the Episcopal Church, but even so, we have relationships in those provinces, and we continue to work at building those relationships.

VOL: This is a complete fiction. If anxieties have gone down, perhaps she can explain why a third of the world's Anglican archbishops failed to show in Dublin (and why lighting candles and putting them on empty chairs changed nothing). The only "relationship, mission partnerships" TEC has are those they can buy with money, like Mexico, the Anglican Church in Southern Africa and now the Congo where TEC is trying to work its financial magic. If African bishops take TEC money, it is not because they are buying TEC's theology on human sexuality, but because they think it is more important that some of their people get to eat and drink water. However, all that will change as it has in Nigeria where TEC cannot get a foothold because the Nigerian church is now self-sufficient. If and when Nigeria can offer a financial hand-up to their African brethren, all that will change. Meantime, TEC is trying to use its diminishing financial resources to buy acceptance if not love from as many Global South nations she can.

SHERMAN: How do conservative Anglican leaders in the southern hemisphere accept you as the first woman presiding bishop?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: That's not been an overt issue. I'm certainly aware that a couple of them were unhappy when I was elected, particularly in provinces where they don't ordain women in ministry, but face to face, most of them were reasonably polite, even if they don't agree. VOL: Africans are always polite, even when they disagree with you. It is not in their culture or nature to tell a woman leader where to get off. They will deal with issues that are life and death like pansexuality. Nowadays, the American Presiding Bishop is being ignored. For the record, the Global South Bishops, all 12 of them, will never be seen in the same room with her again. Witness the absence of a third of all bishops and archbishops, mostly from Africa, at the last Lambeth conference and more recently the Dublin meeting.

SHERMAN: Has the gender issue surfaced elsewhere?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: I was invited to preach and preside in Southwark Cathedral in England a year ago, and when I arrived, I was informed that I wasn't to wear my mitre, the hat that a bishop wears in Communion service. It was an odd request, but there's a significant amount of anxiety in England right now. They're trying to decide if and how to approve women as bishops in that church. They have women priests but not bishops. So I carried the mitre instead of wearing it. I didn't want to relinquish that sign of the office, but I didn't want to get the dean in trouble.

VOL: It was a minor wrist slap that she has milked for all it is worth. When women bishops are voted into the Church of England, as surely it will, this incident will be a footnote to history. She will never be invited to Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, or Rwanda who together represent 75% of the Anglican Communion. The Church of England is an ecclesiastical joke when it comes to numbers, and truthfully, nobody cares.

SHERMAN: What do you think of the idea that a person can have a private, individual salvation experience?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: Our understanding of salvation comes out of the Bible, and in the Bible, salvation is about all of humanity and all of creation. It's less about individuals' relationship. It's impossible to be a Christian alone. That's a nonsensical understanding. Yes, we can individually have a relationship with God, but it only makes sense and has life in community.

VOL: All salvation begins with the individual. It is always initially personal; it becomes corporate as the body of believers gather in the Name of the One with whom they have put their trust. No one ever said one should be a "Christian alone", that is a straw man. The great tragedy of TEC is that individuals have put too much weight on baptism and not enough on personal conviction and faith, so in millions of cases there is no real (personal) faith at all, just a collective memory of what was done in the past, or one was born into, baptized, but was never made real to the person.

When asked by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette regarding the Scripture that says "no one comes to the Father except by the son", she replied, "Again in its narrow construction, it tends to eliminate other possibilities. In its broader construction, yes, human beings come to relationship with God largely through their experience of holiness in other human beings, through seeing God at work in other people's lives. In that sense, yes, I will affirm that statement but not in the narrow sense, that people can only come to relationship with God through consciously believing in Jesus."

Then she said, "Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God. That is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, come to God in a radically different way. They come to God through human experience - through human experience of the divine. Christians talk about that in terms of Jesus." Is it any wonder that Episcopalians are fleeing out the red doors of TEC parishes in droves?

SHERMAN: What do you think of the emerging church movement?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: The emerging church movement is a significant part of our future. The Episcopal Church and all denominations are having to find new ways to speak good news in a culture that is no longer Christian, and that's a great deal of what the emerging church is about.

VOL: "The emerging church (sometimes referred to as the emergent movement or emergent conversation) is a Christian movement of the late 20th and early 21st century that crosses a number of theological boundaries: participants can be described as evangelical, Protestant, Catholic, post-evangelical, anabaptist, adventist, liberal, post-liberal, reformed, charismatic, neo-charismatic, post-charismatic, conservative, and post-conservative. Proponents, however, believe the movement transcends such "modernist" labels of "conservative" and "liberal," calling the movement a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints, and its commitment to dialogue. Participants seek to live their faith in what they believe to be a "postmodern" society. What those involved in the conversation mostly agree on is their disillusionment with the organized and institutional church and their support for the deconstruction of modern Christian worship, modern evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community." [Wikipedia]

The Emerging Church movement is not amounting to much; the tide is slowly turning from it because it has no theological definition that is plausible in the face of a rampant post-modernism. The new Anglican reformation taking place in the US is clearly biblical, evangelical, liturgical and faithful to the gospel. It is interesting that Rick Warren (Saddleback Church with a strong Southern Baptist flavoring), Tim Keller (Reform Presbyterian) or Bob Duncan (evangelical catholic) have not bought into this movement. They are far and away the most creative gospel bearers and proclaimers of our time, following more in the tradition of Billy Graham and John Stott. Bruce McLaren is not a patch on these men.

SHERMAN: You have a science background. What is your position on intelligent design?

JEFFERTS SCHORI: I don't see any conflict between the categories of Christianity and science. Each certainly has something to say to the other. I don't believe in intelligent design. I think that's a diminishment of the understanding of creation. There are two creation stories in the Bible, and another story that scientists and cosmologists and evolutionary biologists tell, and I do not see them as mutually exclusive.

VOL: Reviews on intelligent design are mixed, not everyone rejects it and many good Christians support it. "Intelligent Design" creationism (IDC) is a successor to the "creation science" movement, which dates back to the 1960s. The IDC movement began in the middle 1980s as an antievolution movement that could include young earth, old earth, and progressive creationists; theistic evolutionists, however, were not welcome. The movement increased in popularity in the 1990s with the publication of books by law professor Phillip Johnson and the founding in 1996 of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (now the Center for Science and Culture.) The term "intelligent design" was adopted as a replacement for "creation science," which was ruled to represent a particular religious belief in the Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987.

The essence of the argument from design is that highly complex phenomena (such as the structure of the vertebrate eye) demonstrate the direct action of the hand of God.

Following Phillip Johnson's lead, IDC promoters focus less on "proving" creationism and more on rejecting evolution and redefining science to make it more compatible with Christianity. IDC advocates attack evolution because they believe it is the foundation of materialist philosophy.

The Christian community is divided over Intelligent Design and we should not assume that the Presiding Bishop speaks for all Christians on this subject.

END