What is true of each one of us is also true of places and peoples. The ways in which they tell their story express and establish their identity. At Gori in Georgia, the birthplace of Stalin, the story of the local boy made good is celebrated in a museum which makes no reference to the appalling deportations and massacres for which he was responsible.

The Christian Church finds and expresses its identity in telling a story; first of all of the people of God providentially guided through exodus and exile. And then the story of Jesus Christ creating the story of the new people of God, a community whose identity is given by the Spirit of the Risen Christ, universal and no longer defined by race. Eusebius of Caesarea (c 275-339), who wrote the first history of the Church, sees a providential pattern in its growth from the small knot of original Disciples to its recognition by the Roman Emperor, Constantine.

Running as a thread through Eusebius's history is the faith and order of the Church, its apostolic teaching and its apostolic structure.

The Church does not invent itself in every generation. It proclaims a revealed and given faith, and its ordered apostolic ministry is both handed down and responsible for teaching and preaching and interpreting the Gospel - the good news - of salvation. It is to be in the world but not of it.

When in the ancient confessions of faith Christians confess their belief in "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" it is no optional extra. Faith in the Church follows immediately from faith in the Holy Spirit, the life-giving, energising power and presence of God.The Church is only the Church because it is called into being by the Holy Spirit.

In the second century sectarian Gnostic movements abounded, sometimes puritanically ascetic, sometimes wildly libertarian, appealing to secret traditions and esoteric wisdom. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, defended the great Church, standing out among sects, teaching a common faith handed down from the Apostles by bishops who were their successors in the great sees. "Where the Church is," he wrote, "there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace."

The pick-and-mix individualism of postmodern Western culture has many family resemblances to these earlier times. The sense of a revealed and given faith and order, faithfully handed down, is at a discount in an age of subjectivism. Cultural captivity is subtle because culture is all-pervasive, seeping in through the media. We have a culture of rights deriving more from the Enlightenment than from Christian understanding. The very culture which despises religion can, with a siren voice, seduce the churches by saying that in order to be acceptable religion must conform to the culture. It is all too easy to believe that mission demands cultural conformity, but the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed is a kingdom that judges all cultures.

Looked at through this lens, the stances adopted this week by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church reveal more about cultural captivity than faithful Christian witness. Anglicans are perhaps being called to realise in a sharp and demanding way the cost of cultural conformity.

The Confessing Church in Germany resisted an overtly pagan Nazi ideology. The consumerist cultural relativism of the West is more subtle. Faithfulness to the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and handed down in the living tradition of the Church, is what must be both taught and lived if there is to be a true and challenging witness to the cultured despisers of today.

Jesus reminded us about the uselessness of salt which has lost its saltness.

---The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe