Avoiding a schism is key to keeping numbers up, whether it's a 'big tent' political party or what is effectively a 'big tent' religion. The Church of England / Anglican Church and it appears most of the Episcopal communion, has a cop-out: 'lets agree to disagree'. Truth takes a back seat, if any seat at all, and staying together in one church is the top priority. I will agree that accepting each other and being hospitable and friendly are essential qualities to a church, but if a church has no clear direction, no aims, and no priorities, and no basic truths, then it is really just a social club.
I think the churches need to compromise on just being tolerant and include some interest in the truth into the faith. A lack of concern about what is true led to the century long decline in church attendance measured by percentage of population attending. The CofE lost a lot of attendance as a result of telling young men to go serve God in WW1. In a record of an address the Lord Bishop of London gave to the departing troops in 1915 he stated: "you are fighting for Christ and against the anti Christ". There is also a record of him stating that every German killed would help preserve civilization. After the war the man in the pew discovered the German churches were prompting their flocks in a similar way, 'you are fighting for truth, and therefore you will win'. The optics of this are bad, with old churchmen sending their young charges off to die for no good reason.
I wrote a bit about the failure of the churches to be truthful in a previous thread: 'Do you trust your church?', but I did not consider the balance between truth and keeping people together - unity. I changed churches partly as a result of the Episcopal Church blaming the war in Ukraine on the Russian Federation, while it is accepted in diplomatic circles everywhere that the expansion of NATO into central and eastern Europe and then finally crossing the most vivid of red lines by moving NATO weapons into Ukraine on the border of Russia and then attacking civilians in the city of Donetsk finally got a response from Russia. All this is well-known but how can a church follow the truth when most of the congregation believe the news? That could lead to some fission. My suggestion was they should have just kept quiet.
This is also a pretty hot political question because I recall people claiming Trump was causing disunity, but in my own experience Joe has caused more as a result of going in the wrong direction. By analogy more people are getting off the train because with the Biden administration Joe more people feel it is going the wrong way. I was thinking that good leadership, whether in a church or politically, is the best way to keep the flock together.
Yes, from today I will treat the church I go to more as a social club than as a church. They are amazingly tolerant so I will drop in the very occasional bit of truth, but just one item per month approx. I can't expect more of anyone in a country where the propaganda is two miles deep.
