A new biography of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby highlights an interview recorded a decade ago in which Welby describes homosexuality as a “lightning conductor” in the struggle for dominance of the Church of England. From Christian Today:
In a conversation recorded a decade ago when he was a canon at Coventry Cathedral but only made public today, the future Archbishop asked: “How can we go around the world trying to talk about reconciliation…when we don’t live it out in our own community?”
Some at the cathedral did not want to invite evangelicals to preach, “because they’re homophobic European versions of the Taliban,” he is quoted as saying in a new biography out this week. Others refused liberals, “because they don’t preach the gospel.”
Welby was of the opinion that “we’re going to have to take some risks if the cathedral community is going to find a safe place to work out its issues in a reconciled way, not with conflict.”
In the recording of the conversation, he made his own position clear, that “sexual practice is for marriage, and marriage is between men and women, and that’s the biblical position.” Such a view was pastorally difficult, he admitted, “but it’s what the Bible says.”
Read more here. The new biography is “Archbishop Justin Welby: Risk-taker and Reconciler” by Andrew Atherstone.