Reformed Episcopal Church guilty of the schism, the party which separates and goes out? or the party that forces the separation, by making binding on the conscience what Christ has not made binding?" Rather than characterize this as schism, Bishop Cummins and his fellow reformers portrayed themselves as providing a Protestant, Anglican identity under which there could be a 'closer union of all Evangelical Christendom.' "The Reformed Episcopal Church would be what the Protestant Episcopal Church might have become had it not been paralyzed by the Tractarian virus." The term "Reformed" was never intended to denote any Calvinistic sense of Reformed theology, but
Episcopal Diocese of San Diego that encouraged these members to leave. Some dissident groups attempted to retain control of their church buildings and property, but in 2008, the California Court of Appeal ruled for the Diocese and upheld the authority of Mathes to dismiss parish vestry members and clergy who sought to take a parish out of The Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church provides "wide pastoral latitude" to individual bishops on the subject of blessing same sex couples. In 2010, Mathes approved a policy by which individual parishes could, after a self study period, choose to recognize LGBT couples in a blessing service. Episcopal Diocese