Believing in un-believing.

Oh Lord, it’s come to this for the United Church.

There is no God. Wait, what?

So Gretta Vosper, popular minister at West Hill United in Toronto, should not be defrocked as a self-described atheist. Wait, what?

Churches are ipso facto in the God business. To deny God’s existence logically means you’re in the wrong business. Like Bill Gates swearing on a stack of handwritten computer code. Or Alcoholics Anonymous hosting a pub crawl.

It’s always dicey, commenting on the closed-shop of religious observation outside one’s own creed. But surely the bottom-line of faith leadership is keeping the faith. Unless the United Church has come to stand for nothing at all: The Church of Do Your Own Thing.

Growing up in a Catholic family — except for a Seventh Day Adventist great-aunt whose preaching I abided because she always came over bearing gifts, games and jigsaw puzzles — I rather envied United Church congregants. It was a church that seemed to find very little sinful in a doctrinaire way. That struck me as preferable to no-meat-on-Friday and weekly confession (“Bless me father and these are my sins: pinched my baby brother, put only half my money in the collection plate, said ‘s--t’ ”) and guardian angels that fled in shame if I wanted to sleep in the nude on hot summer nights. Though even at a young age I suspected some of these “Commandments” were just my mom making up dumb stuff. Finish your vegetables — it’s a sin to leave food on the plate. Go put on an undershirt — it’s a sin to show your nipples. Take that cat back where you got it from — it’s a sin to bring stray animals into the house.

Protestants didn’t believe in the Virgin Mary and that was just about the worst sin of all.

The United Church, to me, was English Canada. As indeed it was the largest Protestant denomination in the country. And it was so easy; demanded almost nothing of its adherents. Abortion was OK, gay was OK, divorce was OK, female ordination was OK, eventually same-sex marriage was OK. Really quite ahead of the curve, progressive and inclusive. Ministered to U.S. draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. Not so warm and fuzzy about Israel, however, just last year passing a resolution at its 42nd general council encouraging divestment, and earlier this year opposing a House of Commons motion to reject the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement so dear to the WE’RE NOT ANTI-SEMITIC anti-Israel crowd.

A proudly activist big-tent church. Although smaller and smaller tents are required for the shrinking number of churchgoers, as membership has dropped off from 1.1 million in 1962 to well under half a million according to most recent statistics. Of course, church attendance across the religious board has dropped off everywhere.

Even Mother Teresa — elevated to sainthood by Pope Francis a couple of weeks ago — struggled with doubt, “convicting emptiness” through much of her life, as revealed in a compilation of private letters and musings published in 2007. But Vosper is absolute in her conviction that there is no supernatural God. Which is, when so forthrightly and publicly expressed, singularly unacceptable for an ordained minister, as — in a split decision — the church’s Toronto Conference Review Committee concluded in a 39-page report released last week, recommending that Vosper be kicked off her pulpit.

She is “not suitable to continue in ordained ministry because she does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit,” the report states. “Ms. Vosper does not recognize the primacy of scripture, she will not conduct the sacraments, and she is no longer in essential agreement with the state of doctrine of the United Church of Canada.”

Scripture and sacraments are the glue that holds a shared-faith belief system together. Vosper’s rejection of the church’s central tenets — an extremist anti-orthodoxy — puts her well outside the minimum required of her ministry. And maybe she’s right when she told Metro Morning on Friday, the United Church has always been about “ethos, it has not been about belief.

“That’s the United Church that many people have been drawn to.”

Like I said, a church of easy, undemanding theology. The nicely-nicely church. But heresy is a diversity too far, even for so broadly accommodating canons.

Vosper’s resolution position must have traction within the congregation she leads, as many spoke in her defence at a Thursday meeting, churchgoers arguing that she’d made a strong and positive impact on their lives. An online petition steadily gathering signatures urges repudiation of the report’s recommendations — including that the matter be brought before a formal hearing to decide whether Vosper should be placed on a disciplinary “Discontinued Service List.” It will be for a United Church Toronto Conference sub-executive committee to make an administrative call within the next few days. At her first service after the report was released, Vosper received a standing-pew ovation.

Vosper may indeed be a wonderful person, beloved by her flock. But she is fundamentally irreligious in the most meaningful sense. Yet Vosper doesn’t see this as a deal-breaker.

She can, of course, cleave to her radical un-beliefs. Even devil-worshippers are welcome to step into any church if they simply dig the hymns. Churches are communal and largely ecumenical environments.

But the United Church isn’t the Y. It isn’t a country club. Spiritual lives matter. God matters — or what’s the point?

This shepherdess should be stripped of her crook.

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Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

Correction - September 19, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version to update the photo caption.

