I don't want to argue the merits of the Millennium Goals. I would say that these goals, and others like them, are worthy of Christian concern and response. Leave it to later discussions to determine who exactly gets the .7 percent of our dollars, whether it goes to direct relief, or to some U.N. agency or bureaucracy, along with a whole host of other practical questions.

Here's what I would like to observe: seven tenths of one percent is not a "major priority", and to say that it is, is a bad joke. Whatever the Millennium Goals mean to the Episcopal Church, they do not make up a "priority". They're more like the latest "talking points" to distract attention from something else.

Nor can the PB-elect, in her post-convention interview with Time magazine, state with any credibility that the church's "primary focus" is "feeding people who go to bed hungry, providing primary education to girls and boys, healing people with AIDS, addressing tuberculosis and malaria, on sustainable development."

At the end of the same interview Bishop Schori referred indirectly, and with veiled contempt, to the American Church's strained relationship with the rest of the Anglican Communion as "bickering about fine points of doctrine" and distracting us from "the centrality of our mission". Now, at last, that "central mission" has a name.

Here's what the good Bishop and her cronies were "elated" about as they left Columbus this past summer. Even though we had flunked the Windsor challenge, even though congregations are leaving the church in droves, even though the Primates are making plans to excise us from the Anglican body like a malignant sore, we have an unbeatable face-saving gimmick. We have a program no one can argue against: Millennium Goals.

In the present charged atmosphere of American social discourse, anyone who opposes the church's agenda would be saying that they were AGAINST feeding hungry people, or primary education for children, or healing people with AIDS, and all the rest; and conversely, that they were FOR starving people, maintaining underdevelopment and plague, and so on.

If this were not clearly implied, Episcopal pundits from New York would spell it out. Anyone who would distract the Episcopal Church from its noble mission with trivialities of religious doctrine would be heartless, diabolical, and proof positive of a well-financed right wing conspiracy.

After reviewing Dr. Peter Toon's book on the early Councils of the Church and the centuries of "bickering over fine points" of the Trinity and Christology, I was left wondering how today's Episcopal activists can in conscience identify with such a reactionary dinosaur as the Christian movement, when what they're really "all about" is feeding the hungry and eradicating AIDS. I could only picture the haughty disdain with which today's clerics must see the early centuries of the Christian Church.

If Millennium Goals are really the mission priority of the Episcopal Church, why do we invest any time AT ALL in "religion", from Sunday worship to seminary training, from choirs to coffee hour? If God was made incarnate in order to establish a fund raising agency and a lobbying group, how do we justify the 99.3 per cent of what we do (that is, after the .7 per cent goal is reached)? Why all these eccentric characters with titles and turned-around collars, not to mention all the meetings, the huge majority of which never breathe a word about Millennium Goals, except to silence those who bring up "fine points of doctrine", i.e., what used to be called the Christian Religion?

.7 per cent is chump change. It may be a worthy line item, but it is not a "mission". We are like wealthy tourists wanting to feel good about ourselves by tossing a few coins to beggars in the street. Go ahead and toss your coins, but don't call a press conference. And don't say this is what you're "all about". It makes you look bad to say you're "all about" throwing loose change to starving people. It makes you look especially bad when you say this with an air of superiority, and when you're too self-absorbed not to notice that no one is impressed.

The "seven tenths of a per cent solution" solves a short term public relations problem. PERIOD. Here's a counter proposal that I think would be more in keeping with the Episcopal Church's "main priority" as affirmed by General Convention.

Let the Episcopal Church sell off all its properties, including all its parish properties, cancel its multi-million dollar conventions and its one-hundred-fifty-million-plus triennial budget. Let the Church keep .7 per cent of the proceeds to run an office that oversees funding-raising and lobbying enterprises. There should be plenty of money to rent space near the UN with a sizeable staff. Let the church send its clergy into some form of social work, without all the vestments and professional libraries, without the need for advanced degrees and all those other frivolous and time consuming distractions. Those who are obsessed with "religion" can become missionaries.

The Episcopal Church might consider selling its properties to continuing Anglican congregations, those Neanderthals still taken in by "religion". And if this sticks in the Episcopal craw, they certainly should stop them! After all, this is taking food out of the mouths of starving children.

Perhaps the real reason why TEC wouldn't do this is that they know soon these continuing churches will be raising more money for all sorts of missions than they are, including feeding the hungry, AIDS, etc.! After all, the Christian Churches have a Risen Savior, who is a great motivator for sacrificial giving. The Episcopal Church has only itself to proclaim.

Let the Episcopal Church get down to its commitment of feeding the hungry, healing those with AIDS, educating children and the rest AS THEIR MAIN PRIORITY, if that's what it is. Let representatives of the organization meet every few years in convention and produce statistics demonstrating how effective their programs are in achieving these goals AS THEIR MAIN PRIORITY, not as talking points.

That would be putting our money and whole lot else where our collective mouths is.

---Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon in charge of Pastoral Care at St. Luke's Cathedral in Orlando, Florida and a cyber columnist for Virtueonline.