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After protests by some of the church's bishops, the booklet was recalled.

In 2004, two suburban Philadelphia Episcopal priests, the Rev. William Melnyk and his wife, the Rev. Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk, were investigated by their bishop for being "practicing druids."

The two were found to have been authors of a "Eucharist to our Mother Goddess" published on a Wicca website (and, for a while, on the Episcopal Church's Office of Women's Ministries site). Writing under the Druid and Wiccan names Oakwyse, Raven, Druis, and Glipsa, the liturgy evoked the Babylonian deity "Bel" and offered prayers to the "Queen of Heaven": a reference not to the Virgin Mary but to Ishtar, the consort of Baal.

In an internet chatroom writing under the pseudonym "Druis," Melnyk stated he had been a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids since 1998. "My spouse and I are both Druid graduates of the training course. We are also both priests in the Episcopal Church. Between us, we lead two groves, some call them 'congregations,' of Christians learning about Druidry numbering about 1200."

The Melnyks "recanted and repudiated" their connection with Druidism, but explained to their bishop that they had become involved in the occult "to help others who had lost connection to the Church to find a way to reconnect."

The question of multiple paths leading to the divine has become a professional one for Episcopal priest Ann Holmes Redding. She must decide by March 30 whether she is a Christian or a Muslim. If she does not recant her profession of Islam, she will be expelled from the church's ordained ministry.

In a June 2007 interview with the Episcopal Voice, the Seattle-based Diocese of Olympia's newspaper, Redding announced she was both a Christian and a Muslim. "The way I understand Jesus is compatible with Islam," she said. "I was following Jesus and he led me into Islam."

The former director of Christian Formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, Redding began to study Islam in the wake of 9/11, after hearing Muslim imams speak at interfaith events at the cathedral. A personal crisis spurred her onto a spiritual quest that ended with her publicly reciting the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.

A public symbol of conversion to Islam, the Shahada does not contradict anything in Christianity, Redding argued, nor did the professions made at a Christian baptism contradict anything in Islam, for the language of either creed was not to be taken in a literal sense.

"We Christians, in struggling to express the beauty and dignity of Jesus and the pattern of life he offers, describe him as the 'only begotten son of God.' That's how wonderful he is to us. But that is not literal," she said.

Redding's faith mixes elements of Christianity and Islam to a degree that traditionalists of both faiths would reject, holding in tension the gospel accounts of Jesus' death on the cross, resurrection, ascension, and divinity with the Koran and traditional Muslim teaching that Jesus was not the son of God, only appeared to have died on the cross, and was raised to heaven while still alive by God.

The Seattle priest's superior, Bishop Geralyn Wolf of Rhode Island, suspended Redding following the publication of her views, and gave her a year to reconsider. If she does not recant her profession of Islam by the end of March, she will be expelled from the Episcopal priesthood.

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March (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53