Perhaps the everlasting church squabbles about ordination of women and about gay and lesbian people boil down to this:

It is a question of making conflicts more visible, of making them more essential than mere confrontations of interests or mere institutional immobility. Out of these conflicts, these confrontations, a new power relation must emerge whose first temporary expression will be a reform. If at the base there has not been the work of thought upon itself and if, in fact, modes of thought, that is to say modes of action, have not been altered, whatever the project for reform, we know that it will be swamped, digested by modes of behaviour and institutions that will always be the same.

—Michael Foucault, Politics, philosophy, culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 156.