This has been his love, preoccupation and deep concern, after spending 25 years as a parish priest. With all those years under his belt he could have retired and gone gently onto that soft golf course.

Then God woke him up one day to a new concern - millions of men, women and children who had never heard the Good News of God's saving love found in Jesus Christ.

This so energized him, that he formed Anglican Frontier Missions, (AFM) in 1993. He never looked back.

The lost, those who have never heard the name of Jesus, let alone his gift of salvation, became his concern and passion, and all along, he says, it should have been the heartbeat of the Episcopal Church. It wasn't. The church became consumed with sodomy instead.

The net effect was the TEC spent millions of dollars explaining, exporting and finally exploiting sodomite behavior into the church with endless conferences, general convention resolutions, primatial gatherings concerned almost solely with one single issue: homosexuality, and as a result the Episcopal Church now faces the consequences of a divided church with fleeing parishes, perhaps even whole dioceses. To any rational, sane outside observer, this must look like the kiss of death. If The Episcopal Church were a NYSE stock it would have been downgraded and thrown off the exchange a long time ago.

Tad believes that if the church were truly about its business of bringing the gospel of God's forgiveness and grace to tens of millions whom he calls "unevangelized groups" the Episcopal Church would have corrected some of its outlandish and revisionist theology and might have become a healthy, growing, loving, saving instrument of God's grace.

Instead the TEC is withering and dying because a small group of sexually obsessed gay and lesbian men and women became so fixated on their aberrant behavior that it became an all-consuming passion to broker it into the church at any and all cost - even the cost of those same millions that should have been spent reaching out to the world's least and lost.

God will judge The Episcopal Church for doing just that. And He should.

Writing in The Living Church Tad explains: "If the Episcopal Church wants to talk about future agendas for our church perhaps they should think about AFM's goal to be Christ's witnesses to each and every nation. This is supposed to include those tough and out of sight groups who receive hardly any Christian attention."

Tad got so riled up about the church's preoccupation with sex and what he called the "co-opting" of Romans Chapter 1 for purposes of talking about the Apostle Paul's views on homosexuality, that he says it lost sight of what the text was really about.

"Romans chapter 1 is where the great Apostle introduces the theme of missions, and particularly to those who have never heard the gospel. Paul is calling our attention to those who are as yet unevangelized, without scripture and clueless about Jesus Christ," he says.

"The sexuality issue is obscuring this mission theme, it also obscures the overlooked people Paul wants to bring to the attention of the church - once again," he writes.

It's not that complicated, says Tad. "Paul was talking about those who didn't have any revelation of God in the Bible or in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. These people have seen the divine nature only through creation. Some, Paul writes, have so abandoned the worship of God that he has abandoned them to the their own passions and expression of sexuality. These are the people who get shunted aside when we miss Paul's main theme of mission."

Tad calls them the unreached peoples of the world - no less than 20 percent of today's population - who remain blurred in our vision, fogged over, a blind spot in our response to God's missionary call to the Church. "As long as we only read sexuality in Romans 1 and don't hear his missionary call, this neglect of the unreached world will continue."

Tad cites Jesus' own words to the gathered church on the mountaintop in Galilee: "See that each and every ethnic group has believers and disciples."

Today, says the missioner, the number of people who have never heard of him is staggering. "About 1 billion 700 million have no clue who Jesus is and no means to hear about him. They have no way to receive an invitation to enter his kingdom," he says.

Tad puts it another way; "Whatever is wrong on the issues of sexuality and biblical authority is not as wrong as the Church leaving 1.7 billion people in the dark about Jesus Christ."

Then Tad adds this: "The sexuality issues and related matters are very important and must be dealt with biblically and charitably. Far more serious, however, is our neglect of the unreached population which probably leaves 20 percent of the world with no alternative to hell."

And trends in mission today do not indicate a change in directions, he says. "Judging from the destinations of short-term trips and response to visiting Anglican clergy and bishops, we are active in missions, but merely moving from one part of the Anglican Communion to another."

Humorously he writes: "For a period of ten years we should swap the locations of Costa Rica and Kazakhstan. Wouldn't that change our missions' perspective?"

Tad rips how The Episcopal Church spends its money. "What if just 10 percent of the conferences, organizations, blogs, money and attention on issues of sexuality were directed to the challenge of the church planting in the Aceh Province of Sumatra, Indonesia," he cries.

"This missions neglect will bring a high cost to the Church. We will face the Lord of the Church one day, and he will remind us of his charge to go to those at the ends of the earth. He will ask whether or not we went, and then he will deal with our disobedience."

Tad offers a way out. There are things we can do, he says.

* We recruit for ordained ministry; why not for missions?
* We do frequent infomercials on stewardship; why not on Morocco or Bhutan?
* We increase line items for Sunday school; why not a larger percentage for departing missionaries who must raise their own support?
* We use our research tools for church growth; why not for finding ways of involvement among the Yemeni people?

"If we read Paul on sexuality, we must first read him on mission. We hear the voices debating our internal issues, we must also train our ears to hear the cries of those searching for the living and loving God of heaven."

---Anglican Frontier Missions can be reached at: www.afm-us.org

FOOTNOTE: This writer has journeyed with the Rev. Tad de Bordenave to the Anglican Province of Nigeria where he has seen first hand how Nigerian Anglican leaders can be trained to reach beyond their own borders to those who have never heard the name of Christ.