There is a fundamental understanding that exists in Christianity - that God is our Creator, and we are His creatures.
It is God who made us, and He made us in His image.

There is a fundamental quirk of human nature - that we are constantly attempting to turn that fundamental understanding on it’s head, trying to re-create God so that He is our creature made in our own image.

We want God to be as we want Him to be, to have Him obedient to our whims, and have no demand on us for loyalty to His cause but instead, to abide by whatever it is that we want for ourselves.
While God is to love us unconditionally, we say, we in turn consider ourselves able to choose to behave however we like and not fall out of favour with Him. He is to stay in favour with us while we get on with doing as we please.
God is to stay like some ornament on a shelf, there available and accessible but not interfering, performing whatever function when asked of Him, but put back on the shelf when no longer needed - until next time.

However, those who treat their Creator in this fashion are living on borrowed grace, benefitting from having a life to live but wasting it in a psychotic-like state of unreality.
God is our Creator and we are His creatures. It is not actually ourselves who make the rules. We may have some arrogant delusions about having such a right, but in fact reality is otherwise. The truth about God remains the truth about Him regardless.

It is very sad to see what is happening in His church at present. There are some who believe that they can call the shots, can tell God what is right from wrong, can tell Him how it will be done from now on, and can even decide to call Him some other name as His current ones don’t fit their version of Him anymore.

From the Los Angeles Times, an interesting news comment entitled Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins:

It is not entirely coincidental that at about the same time that Episcopalians, at their general convention in Columbus, Ohio, were thumbing their noses at a directive from the worldwide Anglican Communion that they “repent” of confirming the openly gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire three years ago, the Presbyterian Church USA, at its general assembly in Birmingham, Ala., was turning itself into the laughingstock of the blogosphere by tacitly approving alternative designations for the supposedly sexist Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Among the suggested names were “Mother, Child and Womb” and “Rock, Redeemer and Friend.” Moved by the spirit of the Presbyterian revisionists, Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher held a “Name That Trinity” contest. Entries included “Rock, Scissors and Paper” and “Larry, Curly and Moe.”

Following the Episcopalian lead, the Presbyterians also voted to give local congregations the freedom to ordain openly cohabiting gay and lesbian ministers and endorsed the legalization of medical marijuana. (The latter may be a good idea, but it is hard to see how it falls under the theological purview of a Christian denomination.)

The Presbyterian Church USA is famous for its 1993 conference, cosponsored with the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other mainline churches, in which participants “reimagined” God as “Our Maker Sophia” and held a feminist-inspired “milk and honey” ritual designed to replace traditional bread-and-wine Communion.

As if to one-up the Presbyterians in jettisoning age-old elements of Christian belief, the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord. When a Christian church cannot bring itself to endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New Testament, it is not a serious Christian church. It’s a Church of What’s Happening Now, conferring a feel-good imprimatur on whatever the liberal elements of secular society deem permissible or politically correct.

You want to have gay sex? Be a female bishop? Change God’s name to Sophia? Go ahead. The just-elected Episcopal presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is a one-woman combination of all these things, having voted for Robinson, blessed same-sex couples in her Nevada diocese, prayed to a female Jesus at the Columbus convention and invited former Newark, N.J., bishop John Shelby Spong, famous for denying Christ’s divinity, to address her priests.

After around 40 years of developing it’s own heyday, liberal theology is now seeing the results of blurred doctrine and discarded morality not just in terms of a demographic decline in church membership, but also in church disintegration such as that which is happening within the Episcopal Church in the USA. According to the writer of the article: When a church doesn’t take itself seriously, neither do its members. When your religion says “whatever” on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it’s a short step to deciding that one of the things you don’t want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.

Jesus warned about what happens when we remove ourselves from our source of sustenance, using the metaphor of the vine and the fruit that is produced from it. Jesus, the Word of God, is the true vine and if we remain in Him then we will bear fruit, but apart from Him we cannot. What is more, the gardener - our Creator Father - will remove the dead vine that produces no fruit and discard it, throwing it into the fire to be burnt.

Back to the Los Angeles Times article again:

It is hard to believe that as recently as 1960, members of mainline churches — Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and the like — accounted for 40% of all American Protestants. Today, it’s more like 12% (17 million out of 135 million). Some of the precipitous decline is due to lower birthrates among the generally blue-state mainliners, but it also is clear that millions of mainline adherents (and especially their children) have simply walked out of the pews never to return. According to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, in 1965, there were 3.4 million Episcopalians; now, there are 2.3 million. The number of Presbyterians fell from 4.3 million in 1965 to 2.5 million today. Compare that with 16 million members reported by the Southern Baptists.

It doesn’t help matters that the mainline churches were pioneers in ordaining women to the clergy, to the point that 25% of all Episcopal priests these days are female, as are 29% of all Presbyterian pastors, according to the two churches. A causal connection between a critical mass of female clergy and a mass exodus from the churches, especially among men, would be difficult to establish, but is it entirely a coincidence? Sociologist Rodney Stark (”The Rise of Christianity”) and historian Philip Jenkins (”The Next Christendom”) contend that the more demands, ethical and doctrinal, that a faith places upon its adherents, the deeper the adherents’ commitment to that faith. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which preach biblical morality, have no trouble saying that Jesus is Lord, and they generally eschew women’s ordination. The churches are growing robustly, both in the United States and around the world.

Those churches where Biblical morality is not compromised, where the liberal revisionists have not been allowed to dilute Biblical Christianity with postmodern secular and politically correct notions, are the branches of the vine that are bearing fruit. Their teachings remain true to the Word of God, and their faith in Jesus as Lord and Saviour is strong and unshaken.

The arrogance in attempting to re-create the Creator is something I find quite galling. Who are we to tell God how things are to be done? Wo are we to tell Him what is sin and what is not? I am gobsmacked by the nerve people have to regard our Creator in such a way, and even more so, I am deeply saddened when I see how they would turn their backs on a close real relationship with the most magnificent, holy and wonderfully loveliest Being who desires only what is truly good for us - and instead, relate to something of their own creation, an idol of their own imagination. We do not deserve His love for us, but He gives it anyway, asking us only to enjoy Him to the fullest by our obedience to Him in order to be who we were created to be in Him. Those who are starving themselves of an honest and faithful relationship with Him through Jesus, our Lord and Saviour, are now withering and dying, the lesson Jesus taught that is recorded in chapter 15 of John’s Gospel.

An article well worth the read:
Awaiting an Episcopal Revolution - The Rise and Fall of a Church
by Allan Dobras 7/11/2006