I am not surprised that, from your point of view, I appear to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and I hear you on presumptuousness, yet if there was no discernment, would the faith Jesus imparted have developed into what we have now? Even if one were to look at the church of Rome alone and accede it its claims.

Well, we disagree – I think your view wrongheaded. Why? Because, whilst Rome does change, it is how it changes that I take issue with. Let me explain: many RCs have various views on how their church should or should not change, yet the Vatican calls the shots for the whole church. So what’s new? Compare that to the model of church that is implemented elsewhere in all its various forms: Orthodox, Anglican and even those millions of ‘Bible churches’. It’s about a model of church that is claimed as right for the particular local circumstance. OK, so a self-appointed Bible leader is not the same as the bishop of Rome when it comes to discernment, so there has to be a balance between the ‘Bible church’ way of each church thinking that it knows best, and the Roman way where there is one truth that is true for the whole world at any point in time – and when that truth changes, then it changes for the whole world. As you will have guessed, it is perhaps Anglicanism that is a good via media, once again.

This is what is so wrongheaded about Rome – it claims that the truth of Christianity in San Francisco is the same as the truth in the Solomon Islands is the same as the truth in Middlesbrough. There’s no reason why a core of truth cannot be the same – and I think it is, Chalcedonian Trinitarian faith – but Rome has dished out so many add-ons that is has become a lop-sided shape-shifting leviathan attempting to keep itself on an even keel, losing people all over the place, gaining in others, but with so much of the “we’re a long way from Rome” variation that it’s Rome that is the true total mess – not Anglicanism. We are trying to make sense of it all. This is human life – messy. Humans discerning faith together is messy. What Rome says true faith is might conceivably be right, but there’s mightily few people who actually act on that basis – who demonstrate what is true to them.  No matter how many RCs there might or might not be in the world (baptised figures mean next-to-nothing) how many of them are fully adherent to all that Rome says is true? Very few. Maybe not even the pope – he rightly recognises that we’re all sinners.