Someone wrote in another blog, commenting on The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops resolutions this past week:

“We are witnessing the decline and fall of Christianity in Western culture…”

I don’t buy this. First of all, it sounds as if the presumption is that God will not be able to cause the Church to survive in Western culture. Sure He can, and will.
We may no longer have our privileged position of state-sanction (whether explicit or implicit), but Christianity will survive and flourish. Flourish, because I think what will happen is that Christianity will become something that people participate in because they truly believe it and desire to do so, not because it is culturally expected or demanded. This will give us a much stronger Church, although the membership numbers will probably be less. It will also give us a far less culturally determined Church – less influence from both the political and social left and right.
This is God’s Church, and He will do what He will do. We are not in control of it nor can we determine its outcome. Our House of Bishops will be shown to have acted correctly or incorrectly, as will our Church and our whole Communion, in time. IN TIME. God’s time is not ours, and his timing is not our timing. Why do we so worry and think that we humans are God’s only means of defense?
An additional observation: We are blind if we think that the conservatives are any less influenced by our culture than are the liberals. We both are, and we both reflect the negative and positive aspects of the political and social positions of left and right.
To say that the conservatives or liberals are more or less influenced by our culture positivity or negatively simply shows the difference of what we choose to focus on. Hyper-individualism and consumerism of the right, or political-correctness and hyper-inclusion of the left.