The teachings by Bishop Lebhar and his wife Marcia represented one of the high points of the convention. Conflict in churches, he told the assembly, is \u201ca major problem for American Christians. We go shopping for non-conflict churches \u201d\u201c good luck!\u201d\u009d We are generally viewed as failures if we\u2019re involved in conflict, and yet sometimes conflict is a necessary part of our spiritual growth. Often the problem is not so much with the information that we gather on a problem but how we interpret it, and it is in the white heat of interpretation that conflict flourishes. In a conflict situation, the default position for those who are afraid is to cling to the familiar rather than to trust in God\u2019s power to preserve us from even the worst of situations. God\u2019s purpose in difficult times is both to humble and to test. Often our preference is to relieve pressures rather than have the inner workings of our hearts revealed. Members of his Diocese were all obliged to go through a process of coming to terms with their lack of control and of learning to forgive their detractors.<\/p>\n
Marcia Lebhar later took up the theme of trust with a reflection on the reality of the paucity of water in Canaan as compared with the Israelites\u2019 experience in Egypt. The heart of idolatry is the insistence on a \u201cPlan B\u201d\u009d and God has prepared a new Anglican for ACNA that its members must expect on God\u2019s terms. Finally, and at the close of proceedings Bishop Lebhar, introduced the imagery of the challenge posed to Judaism posed by the Romanized culture of Herod the Great\u2019s Caesarea and the warning to the infant Christian Church given by the Epistle of Jude, namely of cultural surrender. \u201cMany Americans,\u201d\u009d said, \u201chave become co-dependent on the culture.\u201d\u009d His greatest fear for ACNA is that today\u2019s vitality will weaken and acculturation make its way in, for if we acquiesce to the prevailing culture we cannot save those now imprisoned by it.<\/p>\n