Doug PollardMore Gay Bishops Soon
July 13th 2008 23:50
Episcopal Shield
The Episcopalian church – US wing of Anglicanism – has lost patience and will go ahead and create five or six new gay bishops immediately after the Lambeth conference.
The once in a decade gathering of Anglicans was supposed to be a time of healing, with no debates and votes, a time when the two sides of the divide within the church came together in prayer to try to heal their differences.
Instead a renegade group of fundamentalist clerics, led by Peter Jensen of Sydney diocese, raised the stakes by going to Jerusalem first and announcing that would form a schism-that-isn’t, a group within Anglicanism to fight for traditional, literal interpretations of the Bible – the Federation of Confessing Anglicans (FOCAs).
They refused to attend Lambeth (even though the Abp of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, specifically excluded US gay Bishop Gene Robinson) and reaffirmed their opposition to women bishops and gay clergy.
But if they expected the liberals to shake in their shoes and beg them to stay, they’ve miscalculated badly. Instead, the Americans and their alies are fighting back.
First, the Church of England synod voted by a large margin to begin ordaining women bishops, rejecting any compromise which would have allowed opponents to refuse to serve under them.
Now the US church will end its moratorium on consecrating gay bishops, and therefore logically must move to celebrate same-sex unions in its churches soon after.
There have always been gay clergy in every denomination. Some have fought their sexuality and subdued it. Some have been warped by the struggle, and become sexual predators. Still others live fearful closeted lives, unable to reconcile their call from God with their need for human love.
The liberal wing of the church has decided to accept and celebrate love – Jesus’s guiding principle – over fear and repression.
Jesus said “my father’s house has many mansions”, but it appears the fundamentalists and the liberals don’t even want to live in the same suburb.
The formal schism that the FOCAs tried to avoid – so as not to lose the property and income they now enjoy – is now at hand. Some of the African bishops, notably Peter Akinola of Nigeria, have said in the past that they must break away, whatever the cost, if the liberals win this battle.
Others, like Peter Jensen in Sydney, may not be so precipitate now that push has come to shove. It will be interesting to see what justification the Sydney fundamentalists come up with to justify remaining in the Anglican communion.
They say they are not leaving the church – it is the church that is leaving them.
They remind me of General Franco, the former dictator of Spain. As he lay on his deathbed, thousands filed by his palace, calling out, “Goodbye! Goodbye!”
He whispered to his doctors, “Where are they all going?”
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