Her views on the relationship between science and faith has also raised eyebrows with her saying that creationism is not a tenable position that any right minded person could possibly hold onto without violating evolutionist icon Charles Darwin.

"The bigger picture behind evolution I find a wonderful coherence in what the bible talks about creation and the Big Bang. There is a poetic sense in Genesis, a poetic sense of scientific understanding of creation," she said.

But her central message, and one that she wants to make clear (and be remembered for) to the church and the world, is that the church's primary, central and apparently unassailable message is to end human suffering around the world - feeding hungry children, education for all, AIDS prevention etc. - in short endorsing the UN's call for Millennium Development Goals.

She has sounded this note from Day One of her apostolicity, and she continues to sound it forth even as The Episcopal Church comes unraveled with fleeing mega-churches in California, Florida, Dallas and Virginia.

It's as though the last person leaving the church has turned off the lights, the sound man has turned off the sound system, while Mrs. Schori stands in the pulpit talking to an empty church about MDG's.

AT no time, since she took office, has she mentioned The Great Commission, ("Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you") or the Great Commandment, for that matter; it is though the gospel of God's transforming love simply does not exist.

The irony of this should not be lost. The Anglican Province of Nigeria will double its numbers from 18 million to 36 million in the next five years preaching a message of salvation from sin, while The U.S. Episcopal Church, already down over 115,000 members in two years, will continue to wither and die while preaching a humanistic salvation that saves no one and nothing.

Mrs. Schori recently aired her views again in an interview on National Public Radio. (She had recently given an interview to the New York Times).

When asked by an NPR reporter about the pressing issue of the ordination of women, (with the possibility of women bishops splitting the Church of England), Mrs. Schori replied that it was only "a handful of bishops who don't believe in ordaining women...a small percentage of bishops. Fortunately we are moving to a more open understanding in this season."

Never mind that 2,000 years of church history are against her, that the vast bulk of the Anglican Communion still does not support women priests and there is little support in Scripture for the ordination of women, and a recent study by several Anglican theologians concluded that women priests could not be theologically or ecclesiastically supported, Mrs. Schori brushed it off as a remnant view held by historical Neanderthals.

When asked about the consecration of openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson and her support for him, and the damage it is causing the church, all she could say was, "We are working hard to resolve it," but then she admitted that the outcome might be uncertain. "The reality is that we always had gay clergy, now we are willing and able to be open about that."

So the fact that the church has had gay clergy, who may well have been celibate and therefore found no need to "come out" because they did not find their identity in sex but in Christ, can now, because of the church's new found openness about pansexuality reveal themselves and demand full acceptance even as they jump into bed with one or more partners.

It is irony stacked upon irony. The vast majority of the Global South bishops and archbishops who live daily with abject poverty in their countries (which Mrs. Schori would know nothing about except in resolutions the TEC passes) believe that sodomy is worse than poverty because it can destroy your soul, and refuse money from the TEC because of it. Uganda had Christian young men accept martyrdom rather than cave into the demands of a sodomite king because they took St. Paul seriously and literally when he said "that neither fornicators, adulterers nor homosexuals will enter the kingdom".

Perhaps Mrs. Schori believes that Gene Robinson will be given a back door key.

When asked if she would be known as the Presiding Bishop involved in this issue that could split the church, Schori demurred saying it was not her issue (it was Browning's and later Griswold's) and fought back saying that her leadership was about "broader issues" surrounding "human suffering around the world about people who go to bed hungry every night, women who die in childbirth..."

She then opined that there was too much debate on homosexuality to the neglect and ignoring of those who suffer, and "it is not the centerpiece of what we are about." It is an easy way to neglect other suffering in the world, she said.

She opined that the church exists not for its members in healing and serving a world that is broken. Perhaps, but The Episcopal Church won't serve the world (even at 0.7% of its budget for MDG goals) till it has a fixed notion of what it really believes, if anything.

Jesus made it clear that we are to serve the "least of these", and people like Mother Teresa, Jean Vanier and organizations like the Salvation Army and World Vision Intl., have done, and continue to do a magnificent job in serving the poorest of the poor, but both these persons and ministries have never forfeited the message of taking man out of the slum at the expense of taking the slum out of man. Without the latter, the former is hollow.

For such a time as this, Mrs. Schori isn't.

END