Pointless international organization schedules useless meeting next year. Guess who's already bitching about it. I'll give you a hint. Their name starts with E and ends with Piscopalians.
Executive Council has asked The Episcopal Church’s bishops and their spouses, and the House of Bishops collectively, “to prayerfully and carefully consider her/his/their response, choices and actions” in the light of what it calls the “troubling circumstances” of the decision to exclude same-sex spouses from the 2020 Lambeth Conference of bishops.
So all of them might stay home? Have their own, oh, let's call it the "Trinity-Wall Street Conference" with right-thinking Anglican bishops from all over the world?
Awesome.
I officially give the Episcopal Organization permission to steal this idea. You don't even have to credit me. I live to serve.
“Exclusion of spouses at Lambeth Conference: When does all mean all?” calls the decision “particularly misguided and inconsistent with the stated purposes of the conference,” in part because the conference planning group decided to run a joint program for bishops and their spouses, rather than the traditional parallel programs. The FAQs section of the Lambeth2020 website says that the joint conference “is in recognition of the vital role spouses play across the Anglican Communion and a desire to support them in their ministry.”
Right on schedule. Our way or the highway. Damned if we're going let a bunch of unsophisticated Africans impose their ridiculous and outdated "theology" on us. In the Communion, the West and the West alone does the theology-imposing. Got it?
The resolution came in response to a Feb. 15 Anglican Communion News Service blog in which Anglican Communion Secretary General Josiah Idowu-Fearon wrote that Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby had invited “every active bishop.” However, Idowu-Fearon said that “it would be inappropriate for same-sex spouses to be invited to the conference.” He said the Anglican Communion defines marriage as “the lifelong union of a man and a woman,” as codified in Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference.
Resolution 1.10, huh. Little late in the day to invoke that old chestnut since the Communion has spent the last 20 years pretending that 1.10 never happened. PresBish Mike Curry got this in.
Curry said, “It reflects our commitment to be an inclusive church, not based on a social theory or capitulation to the ways of the culture,
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, STOP IT, MIKE, YOU'RE KILLING ME, MAN!!
but based on our belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all. It reflects our belief that the words of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians should be true for the church today: ‘All who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for all are one in Christ.’”
And the last thing anyone who's truly baptized into Christ wants to do is to rewrite the Word of God so he or she doesn't feel guilty about sleeping with...ah, what's the point?
The resolution includes a lengthy summary of what it calls General Convention’s more than 40 years of “support of homosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons, their partners, spouses and families, both in secular society and in the church,” beginning in 1976.
See "long game" reference in the post just below this one.
Section 15.5 of that statement says, “Some in the Anglican Communion are discerning that much of what is held to be true of Christian marriage between a man and a woman is also found and given expression in faithful, committed, monogamous, lifelong relationships between two men or two women, whether it is called a marriage or something else. This provides an opportunity for continuing conversation within the Communion, and listening to the experiences of gay and lesbian disciples of Christ.”
Until you idiot Africans get it through your heads that you're completely wrong.
“[If] we don’t give him the space, if there is any, to change his mind,” the rest of the communion will feel that Welby is “bound to the pressures” of The Episcopal Church, Konieczny said.
Which it is.
Pollard urged the council to approve the resolution because it shows that the council disapproves of a decision that is “unfair to those that we hold dear.” In addition, she said, “Giving the archbishop [of Canterbury] quote, wiggle room, unquote, is a very good strategic idea while trying to avoid telling him to do something.”
Which is exactly what we are doing.
The Rev. Mally Lloyd reminded the council that it meets three more times before the Lambeth Conference convenes on July 23, 2020. “What I like about this resolution is that it is very open, and if we need to narrow it down and be more directive [Told you - Ed.], we can,” she said.
Seriously. At this stage, any conservative or traditionalist Anglican who believes that any accommodation whatsoever with these people is still possible is worse than a fool.
The Anglican Communion are Protestants who think they're "apostolic." They're not "apostolic" and they never were.
Deal with it.
Give up the Communion and get on with the Gospel.
4 comments:
Welby's logic entirely escapes me. The people who ought to be excluded entirely are the bishops who entered into same-sex "marriages" and the bishops who approve of and accept their behavior. Why invite those and not their "spouses?"
It used to be only diocesan bishops who went to Lambeth, not all the suffragans, retired bishops, etc. Word is that with the large African provinces not coming at all, Welby needed more numbers to make the conference financially viable, so invited everybody (except American, Canadian, and South American conservatives, of course). Plus, with the masses of Western auxiliary bishops there, they can overwhelm the Africans who do show up. The whole thing is a farce and ought to be cancelled.
Welby will never do that. If he did, he'd be just another British diocesan in a dying province. Guess he wants to keep up the charade that he's a religious figure of international standing as long as humanly possible. Thing I don't get is why the Africans and other Anglican conservatives keep indulging him. They really ought to officially and finally call this nonsense off themselves and have a "Lambeth Conference" of their own.
It's a question of respect for the office. Africans are big on respect. And it's a question, often, of their standing in their own countries. Welby is damaging their own positions with their own faithful as well as destroying his own church. What they're giving him now is mostly token respect, not real attention or cooperation.
You're probably right, Katherine. But I just think that at some point, what serious Christians are still in the Communion are going to have to admit to themselves that the Anglican game is over and that they can't stay connected to any organization half of whose members deny the faith on a regular basis.
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