News Analysis
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
12/21/2007
"The Anglican Church is passing through a time of controversy. There have been people praying outside the doors of our temples, people unable or unwilling to come in. Though we go in and out of our churches easily, offering quick assurances that all are welcome, these people fear they are not - aboriginal people wanting to tell us about their woundedness, gay and lesbian people asking for a blessing, young people seeking affirmation of their youthfulness, and many others." --- New Westminster Bishop Michael Ingham
As the Anglican Communion slowly comes apart, the lies of the left grow exponentially.
Consider the above statement by the Bishop of New Westminster Michael Ingham. The truth is there has never been a time when orthodox Anglicans have turned away anyone from its churches. The church is, among other things, a hospital for the wounded and sinners, not a home for the righteous or self-righteous. I have never seen an orthodox priest stand at the door of a church quizzing people about their sexual practices. That is a lie and a myth.
Ingham goes on to say this: "We could have turned away from these people. We could have refused to listen, refused to apologize, refused to acknowledge, refused to bless and welcome. And because we have not done that, because we have opened the circle of our compassion a little wider, and changed the tradition that kept them out, we are paying a price in turmoil." He then goes on to say that his diocese "is facing up to changing understandings of human sexuality."
That the church has made mistakes is hardly new. The aboriginal debacle being a case in point. The church has apologized and shelled out millions to settle the case. When it comes to homosexuality, same-sex unions and the like, we are talking about the received teaching of the church and the way people behave, something the church has every right to do, or it is not fulfilling its mission.
What has happened in this debate is that the people who have been, and are, marginalized, people who have not been apologized to or made welcome, are men and women who have renounced the homosexual lifestyle in Canada in order to be obedient to God's law, traditional Christian teaching, and because they earnestly believe that such a lifestyle is spiritually harmful and eternally threatening should they persist in it.
Members of Zacchaeus Fellowship, Canadian Anglican ex-gays say that not all persons with same-sex attractions want these attractions affirmed. They are especially concerned for those whom they describe as "silent sufferers" in the pews. These are the many individuals who adhere to the traditional Christian teaching on sexuality and wish for the church neither to condemn them as persons nor to encourage them to act on those same-sex attractions.
What happens is this. When a homosexual or lesbian renounces the lifestyle they get accused of being "self-loathing" and "homophobic", much like the Bishop of San Joaquin, John-David Schofield who renounced the lifestyle many years ago. In other words Ingham doesn't want people to change, he wants them wallow in their sin and hopes and prays that God will either wink and nod or turn a blind eye to what they do. Then he hopes these same people will fill Anglican churches!
This is not happening. Even as Ingham offers up his thoughts on human sexuality and condemns anyone who opposes him as hate-filled and homophobic, his Diocesan editor Neale Adams announced this week that the diocese will see major closures in 2008!
Why then is the ratification of sexual sin not working? Why are people leaving the diocese in droves and why are orthodox parishes that have fled his iron grip flourishing in spite of his heavy revisionist fist. Mr. Adams even admitted that four more parishes could leave the Anglican Church in Canada including the largest single parish in Canada, St. John's Shaughnessy next year!
Ingham said that last year a bishop in the Anglican Church in Brazil told him his church is doing something important for the whole of Christianity. Really. Does he know that the Brazilian Anglican church was started as a plant by the American Episcopal Church; that it is totally revisionist; and that it is not growing? They treated one of their own bishops (the Rt. Rev. Robinson Cavilcanti of Recife) so badly he was forced to leave the Brazilian province and seek spiritual shelter under the Province of the Southern Cone and Archbishop Gregory Venables! Where's the inclusivity or diversity there? Who is ostracizing whom?
Liberals are so bent on supporting any wacky liberal cause, including bad sexual practices that come along that in the end they isolate and marginalize the very folk who have the ability to make churches grow - namely evangelical priests and their parishes.
Ingham believes that by promoting the "new thing" that God is allegedly doing by including everyone (except the orthodox) that people will come flocking into his churches. It isn't happening. Any secular marketing person will tell you that once you deviate from your true mission you will, sooner or later, lose market share. If you switch or change mission statements mid stream sooner or later the horse you are on will drown. One has only to look at the attendance figures of dioceses like Newark, Pennsylvania, Rochester, NY, and Minnesota to see the slow decline and fall as people leave, the old die and the churches go on the chopping block and sold to saloons, trendy boutiques, and more often than not a start up independent evangelical church. But not, heaven forbid, to an Anglican group.
Another sad myth is that parishes are closing for demographic reasons. Bishops in Newark and Pennsylvania have made this argument. It is a lie. The Diocese of Pennsylvania is based in the growing Philadelphia area and mainline. The Diocese of Newark is within a stone's throw of New York City and the Diocese of New Westminster is in the thriving city of Vancouver and environs. There is no excuse for parishes not to be growing in any of these cities. The reason they are not growing is that the priests and bishop have no Good News to proclaim. By contrast the Bishop of Dallas, James Stanton continues to make his diocese grow even though they lost 3,500 members largely through the departure of Christ Church, Plano. His churches grow because he and his priests have a clear gospel to proclaim.
Without an "exclusive" gospel to announce that offers folk a way to walk from darkness into light, the darkness only continues and will consume its own and the house will fall. The "come as you are, stay as you are" "gospel" isn't working and liberal dioceses know it. That is what is happening in the Diocese of New Westminster. Adams believes the closures will somehow spark "new life" in the diocese, but not only is this a fiction there is not a scrap of empirical evidence that suggests it will. Adams is breathing a lot of non-aboriginal smoke right out his nostrils.
Ingham said a Roman Catholic priest he met commended him for his courage and said he believed that he and the diocese were acting out of the gospel, "and whenever the church acts out the gospel, he said, truth is released and so too is hatred."
This priest, whoever he is, is not repeating his church's teaching that homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered" and people who practice it need pastoral help not affirmation. Ingham has shown a remarkable narrowness and hubris in finding one Roman Catholic priest to support his position. One doubts the Catholic archbishop of Vancouver would endorse that particular priests' views. And as far as "hatred" goes, no one has shown more hatred towards Global South Primates and to fleeing parishes in this diocese than Michael Ingham.
Said Ingham: "An African bishop told me what you are doing is remarkable - some day we in Africa will have to come to terms with these issues too, and then we may need your help." Really.
Clearly Ingham is not reading the missives being put out by the Anglican Primate of Nigeria and the vast majority of CAPA bishops who are saying the exact opposite of this nonsense. They are so incensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury's unwillingness to discipline the American Episcopal Church over sodomy, they are willing to hold a separate Lambeth Conference next year because they don't want to be seen with the likes of Ingham (and Gene Robinson) whose dioceses are slowly dying while African provinces are growing by leaps and bounds, with the Archbishop of Nigeria consecrating some 18 new archbishops alone in his province this year! By contrast New Westminster is closing down parishes.
The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) with its 132 fast growing parishes is already bigger than the Diocese of New Westminster. CANA with its 60 lively, growing parishes will soon find itself as big as any of the largest liberal Episcopal dioceses in the US within the next 12 months, VOL predicts. And the Diocese of New Westminster will continue to slowly wither and die.
Where's the win-win for sexual inclusivity? Where is the "new thing" we hear being touted and heralded as the new day dawns for a vigorous growing liberal church?
The truth is, it isn't happening. Liberal dioceses are slowly withering and dying. One has only to read books by Canadian authors Ed Hird and Marney Patterson to know that. No brain surgery required.
Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori was watching as four (and possibly more) of her bishops fled to Rome this year, while four and possibly more dioceses will flee TEC this coming year to the protection of the Southern Cone, taking tens of thousands of faithful Episcopalians with them. Her bishops meet in March and they will carry on as though nothing is going wrong with a business as usual attitude.
It is blindness upon blindness. Worse, it is the blind leading the blind.
How long will we wait to learn that the first TEC diocese declares bankruptcy or announces a quick merger with another diocese to save it the public embarrassment of everyone
knowing that it can't pay its bishop a living wage any more. The Bishop of the Diocese of North Dakota, a good man I am told, now works part time for the Diocese of Louisiana to help pay the bills. Only three of his parishes I am told can make a contribution to diocesan coffers!
Writes Ingham: "Births are always joyous events; they are also messy and painful. When God brings about something new, God does that through faithful and courageous people who are willing to be put to the test. The gospel is always breaking open in new ways, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through people who live at the margins, often those who live under a curse, a wound or a stigma, often those whose lives challenge accepted conventions."
This is nothing short of spiritual adultery. To say God is doing something "new" by brokering sodomy into the church "under the guidance of the Holy Spirit" is both to mock the work of the Holy Spirit and to blaspheme the very nature of Christ's salvific activity. We are all sinners in need of grace, demanding that we repent and practice amendment of life, homosexuals are no better or worse than the rest of us.
Ingham will have none of it, and at the end it is he who may well hear those words, "depart from me...I never knew you." Awesome and terrifying words indeed.
END
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