This is a good thing.
There is clear precedent in the early church for the
leadership to debate issues where there is difference of opinion in the church. The Archbishop of Canterbury says he hope the
outcome will be at least that there will be different views but members will still
remain "gracefully and deeply committed to each other".
Reform (an influential and firmly right wing evangelical
group) seems to have pulled out of the process because, as I see it, they want
the current Church of England official position that all sexual activity
outside of heterosexual marriage “should be met with a call for repentance and
the exercise of compassion” to be an unassailable precondition to the
conversations.
Difficult to have a conversation with someone who is not
prepared to discuss the issue from the start.
These two issues seems to be indicative of the current overall
approach of conservative evangelicals within the C of E. Back in July Reform responded to the approval
by the General Synod of women to become bishops by saying in a general
statement to its members: “You will have been saddened, but probably not
surprised, by the General Synod’s vote last Monday on women bishops”, and then
more threateningly: “we will in the next few weeks seek to help PCCs think
through both whether they consider themselves able to act on the new provision
in the House of Bishops' declaration and, if they do, what might be involved”. Letter
from Rod Thomas to Reform members
Briefly, the background here is that individual Parochial Church
Councils will have some form of opt out from oversight by a woman bishop and be
allowed oversight by a male bishop. How
this will work exactly is not known but rest assured that those who take this
position will be looking for a bishop who strongly takes their conservative evangelical
(they have taken to referring themselves as ‘classical’ evangelicals) point of
view.
Which brings me to GAFCON…
The Global Anglican Future Conference is a
meeting of conservative Anglican’s worldwide, overwhelmingly led by the churches
in Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries (not South Africa), who tend to
the very far right. In 2013 the
conference pledged primatial support for the Anglican Mission in England an
umbrella group for British conservative evangelicals. Dr Peter Jensen, a former Archbishop of
Sydney, confirmed that this would effectively be a new province.
My deep concern is that some churches in the
C of E are going to be shepherded into this new province, The Anglican Mission
in England – thereby leaving the Church of England and setting up a new province
in competition with it. This has already
happened in the USA with the establishment of the Anglican Church in
North America.
I am an evangelical by tradition – but not an
unthinking dogmatic one, unable to think beyond the ‘received’ position of the
right wing.
I don’t want to find my church voting to
leave the C of E because the evangelical thought police have led them to it.
