The Windsor Report

[Pah]

A debate that lacks Christian charity

From The Guardian Ltd.]/url]

Stephen Bates
Tuesday October 19, 2004
The Guardian

The Windsor Report, which may be the last, best, hope for the unity of the Anglican communion, has a gloomy, almost elegaic tone, as if in their hearts the authors realise that the task is beyond them.
It prays for good will, speaks of the challenge of the gospel and the love of Christ. But commission members - indeed many senior Anglicans - are gloomy about the prospect of reconciling the irreconcilable, bridging the gap between those who believe the Bible is perfectly clear in condemning homosexuality and those who would like to see it reinterpreted for modern society.

The trouble is that the church's traditional remedies of evasion and compromise have deserted it over the issue of gays. As in all marriage breakdowns - and civil wars - the two sides have stopped talking to each other, both convinced they are right.

Conversation has been replaced by a most un-Anglican shouting, with African bishops bawling about how their cultures cannot envisage such decadent, imperialist, western tendencies.

In return, liberals have dismissed their concerns about social and family breakdown and theological and Biblical schism with sometimes too brusque contempt.

After such exchanges of insults - the Dean of Sydney condemned Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a theological prostitute taking his salary under false pretences - reconciliation is difficult to envisage.

Anglicanism has managed to finesse divisions before - over divorce and remarriage (after all, it was founded by a man in search of a divorce, Henry VIII), over slavery, even over women's ordination - but there is something visceral about distaste for homosexuality, and, among traditionalists, a suspicion that if they do not hold fast over this, all else they believe in will be lost.

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But homosexuality is only the presenting issue; at depth, the division is about authority within the church and a fear - certainly among some evangelicals in the west - that they are losing the argument with secular society. The fact that society has changed, only confirms their belief that they are right.

This is a debate between different visions both of what the church should be like, but also what society should do. It is made all the more fierce as the church has lost numerical support and social authority in western societies.

By contrast, its strength is rising in the developing world, particularly Africa, the very societies least culturally attuned to tolerance of gays, though relatively happy to overlook other transgressions.

Anglicanism has traditionally allowed its separate provinces considerable autonomy. It is not a curial church, like Roman Catholicism.

And that is creating pressures and problems as the 164 countries in which it is to be found - mainly but not entirely relics of the British Empire - grow more diverse.

If the Church crumbles, it is likely to be slow and messy. There are complicated issues of property to be sorted out - in the US certain to be sorted out by the courts. There is a need for Christian charity - but men of goodwill are hard to find.

· Stephen Bates is author of A Church at War, Anglicans and Homosexuality (Tauris, 2004

 

[Michelle]

The Anglicans have a set of principals called the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral and number one is

Our earnest desire that the Savior's prayer, "That we all may be one," may, in its deepest and truest sense, be speedily fulfilled;

I wasn't able to find an asterisk but I'm sure somewhere they must have clarified their position.

Unless otherwise specified, homosexuals are prohibited by law. Please check all local, state, and federal laws. It's sad when you think about it. I like this quote

"The people talk about empty churches. Empty churches may well be empty because of the image that we are presenting of narrowness and bigotry and prejudice. "This is not a bad message simply for gay people. This is a bad message for many heterosexual and open-minded and intelligent Christians."

Colin Slee,Dean of Southwark