Here is the theological projection of a society built upon preference – one in which the inclusion of preference within common life is the be-all and end-all of the social system. ECUSA's God has become the image of this society. Gone is the notion of divine judgement (save upon those who may wish to exclude someone), gone is the notion of radical conversion, gone is the notion of a way of life that requires dying to self and rising to newness of life in conformity with God's will. In place of the complex God revealed in Jesus Christ, a God of both judgement and mercy, a God whose law is meant to rule human life, we now have a God who is love and inclusion without remainder. The projected God of the liberal tradition is, in the end, no more than an affirmer of preferences. This view of God is, furthermore, acted upon by an increasing number of ECUSA's clergy who now regularly invite non-baptized people to share in the Holy Eucharist. It's just a matter of hospitality – of welcoming difference. An inclusive God, it would seem, requires an inclusive sacramental system. (p. 23)

There is, furthermore, a sadly missed opportunity and calling in ECUSA's continued insistence on ‘going it alone’. The conciliarists had a deep and historically significant commitment to proper ‘representation’, in council through election (cf. Nicholas, Bk. II.13, 19). The purpose of this was not protecting or maintaining ‘rights’, but rather integrating individuals into the fullness of the Body. As someone like Wondra properly appreciates, the 18th-century American Episcopal Church taught the English about this fundamental element of conciliarity (at a time when their own Convocation was prorogued); it was a great and reviving gift for the whole Church. But now ECUSA must learn her own gift's meaning as shared with the world. The levels of integration that form the ‘concord’ and ‘consent’ of the Body's life are now multiplied beyond the dreams of 18th-century Anglicans. Rather than parsimoniously denying ECUSA's integral ecclesial relationship to other churches in the world – as some American Episcopalians like Crew now insist, in their efforts to protect their own perceived rights from the claims of the larger church – we should recognize that the conciliar vocation of representative consent, begun in 18th-century America, is the same today, now properly explicated within the life of a global church.

Our very incompleteness and imperfection as a ‘part’ of a dismembered Body, of which the Anglican Communion itself is only (with others in different ways) a pale shadow, underscores the plaintive tenor of this seemingly undesired calling. Many Roman Catholics today actually look to Anglicans as a sign of their own transfigured conciliarism – one with and through the Pope, to be sure, as ARCIC has sought to point us towards; but only within the synodal dynamics that Vatican II began more fully to unfold and which seem to many to be unclearly directed at the moment. The failure to honor this call, echoed thus even by our ecumenical friends, would prove a desperate rejection of God's evident will. We would be throwing away a calling to live for the sake of the whole Church, in favor of local and (even locally) highly contested discernments whose consequences are, even now, proving a ruination to the hopes of our creedal prayers: ‘I believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church’. This is surely the only constraint – and privilege – from which our decisions might rightly take their form. (p. 239)

What are we to do who live within a church whose governing bodies and authorities act in ways clearly opposed to the common belief and practice that define a communion? This is one of the most perplexing and serious of the issues that face all the churches. An answer that has, as it were, become a part of the DNA of the churches perhaps from the time of the Great Schism and certainly from the time of the Reformation, is to break away and form another church or (latterly) to join a church whose belief and practice more clearly match one's own. In these essays . . . we suggest another way. It is the way of conformation to Christ's cross through patient and obedient suffering. This way of addressing the strained relationship between truth and unity does not pit one against the other and ask for a choice for one or the other. It does not seek to place the future of the truth and unity revealed and established by Christ within human hands but within the providence of God. It allows for the fact that God may place his judgement so severe that it may appear to die; and it insists that no one should seek to place themselves outside that judgement by flight to or creation of a purer church. A communion bound by a conciliar form of government, if its foundation is indeed scriptural immersion, must allow for the possibility of its own defection from God's purposes. If such proves to be the case and if indeed it is a communion, can its members exempt themselves from God's economy of judgement and redemption? Our contention is that communion is maintained not only by the path of mutual subjection, scriptural immersion, holiness of life and godly discipline but also by submission to divine judgement. Such judgement is intended by God not as an exit visa from one church and an entrance visa to another, but as another, though not preferred, way in which God maintains the truth professed by his people and the unity to which they are called. (p. 11)