When I was a youth pastor, my church occasionally hosted an “ecumenical” worship service that moved around the Twin Cities in an attempt to unite Christians in worship.  (Truth be told, the monthly service was dominated by Pentecostals who danced, sang, and spoke in glossolalia.)  The Minnesota population of Messianic Jews is pretty darn small, and most of them came to this worship. 

One Sunday night, when we hosted the worship, I brought the youth group and we sat in the balcony.  Our kids were intrigued by the scarf-twirling dancers and the tongues, and they entered into the singing readily.

But then a rabbi-looking guy (who turned out to be a Messianic Jewish pastor) took to the middle of the stage and blew a shofar into the microphone.  At that point a girl from our group (whom I did not know) abruptly got up and ran from the sanctuary, followed out by a boy from our group.  When he came back in, he explained that the girl was his girlfriend, that she was Jewish, and that he had brought her to church that night for the first time.  She left because she had taken great offense to the blowing of the shofar.  She explained to him that it’s very holy — it’s only supposed to be blown on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, not just any old time there’s a break in the worship music.  She was in the parking lot, sitting in the boy’s car, crying.

He drove her home and, as you might guess, she never again accompanied him to church.

It was with that in mind that I read in The Revealer that the breakaway conservative Anglican Church of North America blew a shofar to announce their divorce from the the Episcopal Church.  Money quote:

Even
as these Anglicans create something new — a church actually founded on
its rejection of queers, a movement opposed to the marriage of two men
growing out of a denomination built on a divorce — they declare
themselves part of something very, very old, as if Joshua’s men blew
their horns outside Jericho because they foresaw Bishop Gene Robinson
several thousand years down the road.