One salutary effect of GAFCON is that it has awakened the British public to the fact that conservatives attempting to take over the Anglican Communion mean business. The British press has been simultaneously hyping and decrying the right wing’s campaign, and support for an inclusive Communion has come from unlikely quarters. (The Mad Priest makes a similar point.)
Take The Financial Times, for instances, where Willen Buiter argues:
It is unfortunate that a vocal part of the most rapidly growing segment of the Anglican Communion, the African one, is deeply homophobic and full of bigotry towards and contempt for the homosexual life-style and for people engaging in homosexual acts. These new African bigots have to be confronted head-on about their prejudices and profoundly unchristian attitudes and statements. Again, the origins of this homophobia are regional and cultural in nature. It is not uncommon, for instance, for the same person who considers homosexuality to be the mark of the devil, to be tolerant of polygamy or even to practice it. We should never turf the bigots out of the church, but we should confront them with their unchristian nature of their loveless prejudice and intolerance at every opportunity.
Or the Times of London, never the Archbishop of Canterbury’s closest ally:
There is a narrowness, self-righteousness and arrogance about some of the rebels that is deeply unappealing. Several want to have it both ways: to remain within the communion (largely because of the legal and property obstacles that arise from a walkout) while sniping at Canterbury’s authority. The more immediate challenge this weekend, however, comes not from Foca [the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans] but from clergy unreconciled to women bishops. They want permanent, binding safeguards for traditionalists that Dr Williams and others are unwilling to concede for fear of enshrining discrimination. He must therefore address their defiance in York as vigorously as he has replied to the Gafcon rebels.
Julian Baggini, an athiest, found the first post-GAFCON meeting in England off putting. He wrote in the Guardian:
[A]t All Souls, I saw a side of Christianity that I don’t like. They all seemed obsessed by salvation and glorifying Jesus. You would not have guessed that the only prayer their messiah gave was directed at God, not himself, and that he repeatedly told people not to worship him, but the father. You would not have guessed that he spent much of this time telling people to be good neighbours, irrespective of what other people believed or who they slept with. The very human moral teacher of Matthew, Mark and Luke was eclipsed by the more ethereal Christ of John.
For all their fretting about homosexuality, the evangelicals place little emphasis on Christ’s moral and social teaching. The Jerusalem declaration, for example, which announced the founding of Foca, contained a list of 14 “tenets of orthodoxy”. Apart from one which upheld the essential heterosexuality of human beings, only one focused on our moral responsibilities to each other.
Meanwhile, back at The Times, George Walden scolds the archbishop for living a double life on the issue of homosexuality:
The oblique way that he addresses the subject suggests that he finds it as difficult as many others to see how the Church can continue to discriminate against practising homosexuals in an age in which scientific knowledge tells us that sexuality is rarely a question of choice. Sacred texts can be disputed, but all that matters is what the Bible would have said had it been known that homosexuality is largely genetic. How Christian can it be to deny men and women a sexuality that is, in Christian terms, God-given?
Suddenly a chorus of voices echoing what groups such as Integrity, whose statement is below the fold, have been saying for years.
Integrity Responds to GAFCON Statement
Integrity joins with leaders from all around the Anglican Communion rising to reject the GAFCON premise that the differences that challenge us as 21st century Anglicans must necessarily lead to division. Rather we claim the historic gifts of our Anglican heritage that give us grace to celebrate diversity and to listen for the voice of the holy in the “other.”
We reject the assertion that seeking to fully include all of the baptized in the Body of Christ is a “false gospel.” Rather we believe it to be a core value of the Good News of the One who became one of us in order to show us how to love one another as he loved us.
And we share the concern that those who “do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury” are abandoning the historic bonds of affection that have knit us together as members of this worldwide Anglican family of God. Replacing those bonds of affection with a straight jacket knit out of doctrinal conformity is not only antithetical to the ethos of Anglican Comprehensiveness, it abandons historic catholicity in its effort to reinvent Anglicanism as a “confessional” church.
Integrity is committed to continuing to work with those with whom we differ as we live into a Global Anglican Future drawing more people to God’s table – not drawing circles to keep them out. We look forward to the opportunities we will have for our own “constructive conversations, inspired prayers, and relational encounters” as we offer our witness to the Good News of God in Christ Jesus made present in our lives, our relationships and our vocations in Canterbury later this month.