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Church of England and Church of Scotland Face Splits: No Lessons learned from TEC

Church of England and Church of Scotland Face Splits
No lessons learned from what happened to the Episcopal Church

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue DD
www.virtueonline.org
June 28, 2016

You would think that, following the consecration of an avowed non-celibate homosexual priest to the episcopacy in the Diocese of New Hampshire in the person of Gene Robinson in 2003, that other western Anglican provinces viewing this, and the fallout that followed, might have learned a lesson or two.

Apparently not.

The moral order that has prevailed for 2,000 years and longer, must now be overturned in the face of the felt pain of a handful of pansexualists who believe their sexuality is innate, unchangeable and must therefore be accepted by the Church Universal, or face being forever branded as homophobic, hateful, lacking inclusivity and diversity.

Turning the Church on its head for less than two percent of the population practicing risky sexual behaviors that can result in up to 30 sexually transmitted diseases, is apparently worth doing, causing a de facto if not a de jure split. Future historians will marvel at the outright insanity of a people calling themselves Christians doing this.

The penultimate Archbishop of Canterbury, one Rowan Williams, tried desperately to square the circle over pansexuality, failed, and retreated to academe to lick his wounds. The present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has hedged his bets so often now on the subject, that he has finally resorted to firing salvos at conservatives, accusing them of homophobia, when such is not the case. The whipping boys are not those who practice unbiblical and unhygienic sex, but god-fearing believers whose only sin is to say that sodomy is sin and get yelled at for saying so. Do fornicators who get caught accuse their accusers of heterophobia?

But this desperate act of inclusion by The Episcopal Church has not gone unnoticed. Robinson's great betrayal of biblical sexual teaching brought about the birth of the Anglican Church in North America, the formation of almost a thousand churches, over 111,000 members, over 1700 clergy, 29 dioceses, plus the Jurisdiction for the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy and 51 bishops in open defiance to the revisionist episcopal province that has now solidly embraced unbiblical sexualities, publicly proclaiming a social gospel devoid of repentance while, in turn, scorning orthodoxy.

It is a mammoth, ecclesiastical sea change of tsunami proportions. No province in the history of Anglicanism had ever embraced pansexuality. The Episcopal Church had gone where no Anglican province had gone before and with its embrace of modernity and millions of "mission" dollars to play with has set about earnestly to change the entire moral fabric of the communion, no expense to be spared.

Unable, up to now, to persuade the Africans, Asians and Latin Americans of the new moral order, it set its sights on the mother church and its ancillary provinces, in order to undermine the whole communion. A brilliant move no doubt, but will it work?

The Church of England, while officially holding the line on same-sex marriage, is fiddling to change it.

At next month's General Synod, the Church of England will try a new approach to avoiding a disastrous formal schism over homosexuality. After two days of discussing legislative matters in open session and once all outsiders have left, the 550 representatives from around the world will break into groups of 20, for three days of intensive and personal discussions about sexuality, noted the Guardian.

The idea is not to reach agreement -- 30 years of wrangling have established that this is quite impossible -- but to try to bring people on both sides of the debate to see their opponents as fellow Christians. Conservative evangelicals have denounced the scheme as an attempt to manipulate opinion, which, of course it is. The question is whether it will work.

The answer, of course, is that it won't. And all the fine talk of "facilitated conversation", buzz words that mean we will talk and talk till you agree with us, or "reconciliation" till we all drop over dead and the much misused word "Indaba" - won't, in truth, change anything. Now there is a new word to get us all excited about and it is the concept of Sankofa. The Akan concept of Sankofa -- literally, "It is not a taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind" -- refers broadly to the unity of past and present, where the narrative of the past is a dynamic reality that cannot be separated from consideration of the present and future.

So sodomy, which is proscribed in both the OT and NT, suddenly gets a cultural lift, and the authority of scripture is ditched in face of the new sexual reality of this present age, aided and abetted by the Sexual Revolution, undoing specifically what St. Paul himself said about not being conformed to this present age, but being transformed by the renewing of our minds. Sankofa does an end run around that.

The Church of England's approach is that the manipulation that Justin Welby's strategists have in mind is not to be carried out from the top down. It is hoped that the process of facilitated conversations will allow the church's activists gathered in the synod, to take note of the social changes that are happening in their own congregations and their own families, where acceptance of gay people is becoming much more common.

Now this is right out of the play book of former TEC Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, whose basic Sufi theology was to find a "transcendent" way out, and for all the players to meet on a plain beyond good and evil. It was pure fiction of course, but it did subdue the dwindling forces of righteousness such as there were in the House of Bishops, by putting people in the same small groups with opposing views, thus mixing and muting criticism of the pansexualists. In the end, the revisionists and progressives won the day. The handful of orthodox bishops were duly humbled and silenced by the presence of the whining and pain producing act of Vicky Gene from New Hampshire.

The basic approach of the Church of England is 'why can't we all simply get along'. But that won't work.

The Church of Scotland recently voted to allow ministers to continue to serve if they are in a same-sex marriage. Previously, The Church of Scotland had already agreed that ministers can enter into civil partnerships. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has now voted to allow ministers to continue to serve if they are in a same-sex marriage.

Whether the Church of England and Scotland likes it or not, Scripture prohibitions preceded the Sexual Revolution and will outlive it. What Scripture says on homosexual practice is not negotiable and no amount of new books, videos, personal stories or sudden revelations about God's apparent change of mind and heart will change that.

As columnist Michael Brown, in his book "Can you be Gay and Christian?" writes, "no new textual, archaeological, sociological, anthropological, or philological discoveries have been made in the last fifty years that would cause us to read any of these Biblical texts differently."

Progressive Western Anglican provinces are playing a dangerous game not only with the spiritual lives and eternal destinies of men, women and children, they are incurring the wrath of the Global South, specifically the GAFCON primates and bishops who see the West capitulating before culture, instead of standing firm on the Word of God.

The charge by one Church of England bishop that Africans are being manipulated by western conservative money is so far off the mark and wrong, it is patronizing, and post-colonial thinking. The Africans have always stood on scripture as their authority, not money, and they are insulted to think otherwise.

The Anglican Province of Nigeria, for example, is totally self-sustaining, materially and theologically. Their archbishop, the Most. Rev. Nicholas Okoh, is a no holds barred, take no prisoners evangelical and he is the new chairman of GAFCON.

His most recent declaration should be a wake-up call to the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He ripped the CofE over its appointment of an Episcopal bishop as Assisting Bishop of Liverpool and said that, as a result, GAFCON will now focus on actions of the Church of England, and pointed to the ACNA as a model of how they would proceed. What about that does Welby not understand!

He blasted the CofE saying that a line had been crossed, that the false teaching in TEC was now being normalized in the Church of England and GAFCON would have none of it.

"GAFCON is evidence that despite this deep failure, God has not given up on the Anglican Communion. Indeed, in his mercy and grace, he is renewing it and we look forward with great anticipation to GAFCON 2018 as a gathering of the nations for the nations as we magnify the one true God who has rescued us from futile ways and brought us into the Kingdom of his Son."

GAFCON leaders hope to revitalize and reinvigorate the Anglican Mission in England (AMiE), something that will no doubt cause heartburn at Lambeth Palace.

Said Okoh; "GAFCON remains a rescue mission for the Anglican Communion." Welby beware.

END

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