By Jonathan Petre, The Daily Mail.
Church leaders from Africa and Asia are threatening to walk out of a crucial meeting chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury unless American bishops drop their support for gay marriage.
Archbishop Justin Welby last year invited the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Church to the summit in Canterbury next week in a ‘make or break’ effort to avert a permanent split over homosexuality.
The row has torn the Church apart for a decade – with conservatives accusing liberals of abandoning the word of God by backing openly gay bishops and marriages for gay couples – and the Archbishop wants to broker a deal to allow both sides to co-exist peacefully.
But insiders said a hardcore of eight to 12 conservative archbishops from Africa and Asia are preparing to quit the meeting on the first morning unless the liberal Americans ‘repent’ or the Archbishop throws them out.
In what would be a massive challenge to Archbishop Welby’s authority, the conservatives, who represent some of the biggest of the 38 individual Churches in the worldwide ‘Communion’, are then likely move to their own headquarters nearby for the rest of the meeting.
Related article: Anglicans fearing permanent split over gay marriage as bishops threaten to walk out
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Most rational people don’t view 2 people committing to one another in marriage as something to “repent” OF.
But then again, this is religion we’re talking about, so “rational” is kind of moot to the discussion.
It is curious that you should appeal to “rational people” when your argument is irrational, in that it makes no reference to the premise against which you argue, namely that the covenant of marriage ought to be limited to one man and one woman and not expanded to include two (or more) people of indiscriminate gender.
But to put your argument into rational form, it might follow something like this:
A. All rational people agree that the covenant of marriage ought to be expanded to include two (or more) people of indiscriminate gender, and not limited to one man and one woman only.
B. Adherents of religion are, by this definition, irrational.
C. Therefore, religious arguments against this expanded definition of the covenant of marriage may safely be dismissed as irrational.
In reality, even this argument cannot be genuinely classified as rational, inasmuch as it is basically axiomatic and reduces to the form: “I regard all religious arguments against the position I have taken as essentially irrational; therefore, the position I have taken is the only rational position that can be taken.”
My wife was raised episcopalian and outside of the pcusa it has become a shadow of its former self, only interested in real estate and money. While we are still in the pcusa, it’s harder and harder all the time, you sometimes feel like an abused spouse, you can beat me, but just don’t leave me.
I reckon those worldly, sophisticated Anglicans look down their snooty nose at those lowly Africans. Well, look closer. Those African Christians are wonderful, kind, loving, faithful people who are trying to follow the Word of God.
PS: The African Christians I’ve met are also hard working and intelligent.
I believe that God is GOD over all nations, governments and churches.
So, how will God act toward such wayward behavior outside and inside the churches in America because of their disregard for His word?
God is long suffering, not willing that anyone who will come to him
not have a chance. Is there any thought to how God might lift His mantle of grace in our country because of this Immorality? Or might God bring revival with this call to repent? May the Holy Spirit act to make God clear in all His glory and power so we might humbly seek Him, before it is too late.
“. . . because both sides in a religious controversy tend to identify their position with
the will of God, it often takes a long time before the participants are prepared to
accept the fact that they cannot win and must compromise.”-
N. Keith Clifford, The Resistance to Church Union in Canada, 1904-1939 (Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press, 1985), p. 223.
And that has certainly worked out well for the United Church, has it not? The UCC is today a mere shadow of what it once was, having a smaller membership than it had in 1925, and fewer than 40% of the members it had during its peak years in the mid-1960s. Regular attendance for the United Church today is reported to be only a bit more than 100,000 persons throughout the whole of Canada. Can there be any doubt that the one-third of Presbyterians who refused to compromise their principles and become a part of the United Church were the only ones in 1925 who were able to foresee what a disaster the UCC would one day become.
Compromise can be a virtue, but it can sometimes be nothing less that a grave and mortal sin. The many compromises of the UCC’s antecedent denominations provide an apt case study of the latter.
The African Churches are following the Word of God by supporting laws that demand that the death penalty for homosexuality?
I had an uncle who was an Episcopal priest. He was sort of the black sheep in a UPCNA family. That was a standing joke but with a serious sliver. He left this mortal coil before acceptance of gays in the US Episcopal Church. He had two nieces that were gay, and he didn’t want them in his house. The family considered it a blessing that he died before the episcopal church totally fell apart. He was late enough in his life that he perhaps would not have been able to enter into this fight the way he would liked to have, by the time it became just a matter of time for that church. But there is new life with the American Anglican Church. Allelua!