“Hard-line bishops make a mess of it in the Holy Land” is how the Telegraph headlines today’s report on the startup of the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem today. The article details a number of the initial organizational hurdles the meeting has had to overcome so far.
Some quotes from the article:
“If it was being held in a brewery, it’s a fair bet that the organisers of the supposedly greatest threat to authority in the Church since the Reformation would not be feeling particularly tipsy.
[…]As it turns out, the team’s cheerleader, the belligerent Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, was denied entry to Jordan and the conference is having to transfer precipitately to Jerusalem, with its spokespeople stammering about hotel bookings becoming unexpectedly available there. The Anglican Church in Jerusalem, headed by Bishop Suheil Dawani, is a reluctant host to these schismatics, which is why their preliminary meeting was in Jordan in the first place.
It appears that the whole exercise was undertaken remotely and with arrogance, taking little or no regard for local middle-eastern sensibilities over how the presence of a bunch of Evangelical Christian hard-liners would play with painstakingly constructed relationships with local Muslim authorities. The GAFCON caravan will, nevertheless, issue demands and statements.”
Read the full article here.
One of the Lead editors has helpfully provided this link to help understand the idiomatic use of “brewery” in the first line of the article quoted above.