In the next few years, we will have a chance to compare social trends in the states permitting same-sex marriage against social trends in the others. I contacted three serious conservative thinkers who have written extensively about the dangers of allowing gay marriage and asked them to make simple, concrete predictions about measurable social indicators.
The Anglican Diocese of Cape Town today agreed to a resolution asking the church’s bishops to provide pastoral guidelines for gay and lesbian members of the church living in “covenanted partnerships,” taking into account the mind of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Here is our weekly collection plate of a few of the good things that Episcopalians and their congregations have done that made the news this past week. And other news fit to print.
Here is a round up of news and media reaction to yesterday’s historic votes at the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
The New York Times visited some seaside congregations, two of them Episcopal, and find vibrant, welcoming communities of faith.
The ELCA has voted for the ordination and placement of gay and lesbian persons who are in “publicly accountable lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships.” Now they have passed the practicalities about how they make this a reality in their denomination.
Breaking:The ELCA Churchwide Assembly has passed the third resolution about human sexuality and ministry and has opened ordination and “rostered” leadership to partnered gay and lesbian persons.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church and the United Methodist Church entered into full communion at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly meeting in Minneapolis.
Breaking News Today the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church is voting on four major pieces of legislation that modifies their ministry policies. If passed in its entirety then the ELCA will allow people “in such publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships to serve as rostered leaders of this church.”
What rankled most was the hypocrisy, the fact that the Bible’s scattered and random words on homosexuality were uncontestable for all time and yet, somehow, divorce – which Jesus himself appears from the Gospels to have condemned – was somehow only a minor and changeable transgression.