LAST MONTH, FOR THE first time in years, a member denomination withdrew from the National Council of Churches (NCC). The spunky, 400,000-member communion is the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, and its decision to quit the reflexively left-wing NCC was based on a unanimous vote of clergy and lay delegates.
According to one church spokesman, a recent NCC fundraising letter helped spark the departure. It asked supporters to fight "right-wing attacks" on the controversial church agency. The letter named President Bush, Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, and the Heritage Foundation as insidious forces that must be opposed.
"It got to be too much," Antiochian spokesman Rev. Thomas Zain told Ecumenical News International. The NCC, said Zain, has "lost its goal of Christian unity on a doctrinal basis. The goal seems to be including everybody and [promoting] niceties."
Homosexuality, increasingly the bellwether issue that divides religious traditionalists from liberals, was also a big factor for the Antiochians. The Episcopal Church and United Church of Christ, both pillars of the NCC, have largely accepted same-sex unions and openly gay clergy.
Officially, the NCC does not have a stance on homosexuality. But NCC chief Bob Edgar, a former Demo-cratic congressman and liberal Methodist seminary president, leaves little doubt that he favors same-sex unions. "We just feel we don't have much in common with the churches" in the NCC, said Rev. Zain on behalf of the Antiochians.
Historically comprising mostly Syrian-American Christians, the Antiochians have in recent years attracted a number of Protestant converts impressed by the history and ...
