In part one of this article last week, I suggested the Episcopal Church is no longer one church but two. What divides us is not the sexuality debate but what lies beneath that debate, namely, two incompatible ways of understanding and using scripture and two incompatible ways of locating the authority to decide issues of conflicting data and opinions.

What holds us together? Four things, all but one of which, I believe, is being severely shaken, hold us together:

• The Book of Common Prayer. Everywhere we go in the Episcopal Church, our worship is anchored in a book we hold in common. Our commonality is not in liturgical forms, but in a common theology that undergirds the forms, namely, a common understanding of who God is and how he behaves and of who we are and how we are called to behave in relationship to God and to others around us. That theology is what makes sense out of the liturgies and gives them life.

To say this common theology is under fire in the church is to say the obvious. Efforts to revise our liturgies are constant and range all the way from the radical worship of Sophia and/or Wisdom in some quarters to an array of inclusive language revisions that offer not just to rename God but to redefine him. At the level of the parish and diocese, we are held together tightly by liturgy. At the national level, that bonding is severely jeopardized. I believe this will get much worse before it gets better.

• The national apportionment. As long as we all recognize an obligation to support the mission of the church at the national and international level, we are bound to each other. My sense in the past 15 years, and especially in the past three years, is that the binding is beginning to unravel seriously.

There have always been dioceses, which, claiming economic distress, have not paid apportionments in full. One can legitimately wonder if, as much as 10 years ago, the real reason for some underpayment has not been economic but has, indeed, been a message of protest about the direction of the national church.

One need not wonder about that any longer. There are several dioceses now saying plainly that their decision not to pay in full is precisely that, a protest. My sense is that there will be more dioceses which will make that decision in this triennium and beyond. As a vehicle to bind us together, the apportionment is a weak link that is going to get weaker.

• Leadership of the Presiding Bishop and the House of Bishops. Together they are the visible symbol of both our unity and ecclesial authority. However, as individual bishops continue to act on their own consciences in the matter of ordinations, and neither the Presiding Bishop nor the House of Bishops seems able to address that, our unity and authority is eroded.

The March House of Bishops meeting at Kanuga [TLC, March 26] is a good, although not the first, example of this. Some bishops continue to ordain non-celibate homosexual persons, and, claiming such ordinations to be a violation of the doctrine and discipline of the church, other bishops filed a presentment against one bishop and threatened to file presentments against others on the same grounds [TLC, Feb. 19].

The bishops chose not to address this radical separation or the frustration that provoked it. Instead, the focus was on finding ways to approach hard decisions where there is not a common mind in the whole church. The conclusion was this: If a bishop is considering the ordination of a non-celibate homosexual person or the filing of a presentment (or presumably some other "hard" decision), the following procedure was proposed:

1. That bishop should consult with the other bishops of the province; 2. All bishops concerned should engage, together and apart, in prayer with openness to the leading of the Spirit; and 3. When a decision is made, that bishop should maintain ongoing communication with the provincial bishops with whom he/she has consulted.

I was not able to remain at Kanuga to engage in this discussion. That may disqualify my response or it may enhance it by virtue of the objectivity of distance. In either case, my response is clear. The methodology champions the deciding, or avoiding, of critical questions by deciding not to decide. It does not lead to living with ambiguity, but rather to abdication of authority. It does not accommodate diversity, but invites division. It does not add to the dialogue but, by default, gives permission to any bishop to do whatever he/she wants to do with the guarantee of impunity. To address critical issues by deciding not to decide erodes even further the existing community of the church.

• The canons of the church. Indeed, some lean on that by saying that if the canons do not specifically prohibit something, it is permissible to do it.

What all this adds up to, in my view, is that it will not be long before the canons will be the only serious link between various bishops and dioceses and, at the national level, we will become a church of Pharisees and Sadducees, arguing over the fine points of the law while failing utterly in our mission to evangelize the world for Christ.

If I am anywhere near the mark in what I have described, what, then, can be done about any of this? The church will always need to discuss how to discuss the hard questions. Such process work, however, cannot continue to be used as a hiding place to avoid making decisions on the hard questions. I believe the time has come to heed Jesus' words in the sermon on the mount. In the context of a whole series of sticky moral questions, Jesus said, "Let what you say be yes or no; anything more than this comes from evil" (Matt. 5:37).

Can our divisions be resolved or are we like Humpty Dumpty, where "all the king's horses and all the king's men" cannot put it together again? Honestly, I don't know. What I do believe is that our present course has profoundly divided this church and that promises to get only worse.