GAFCON, in its February 20th statement responding to the Church of England’s decision to bless same-sex marriages, has declared that the CofE can no longer be considered the “mother church”. It has broken communion with provinces that hold to Biblical views on human sexuality and Justin Welby is no longer the first among equals in the global communion.
In other words, the Anglican Communion is divided, split, rent asunder, fractured, broken.
Linda Nicholls thinks everything is just fine. The problem has been “overblown”. Like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, Nicholls cannot hear the waves of chaos crashing against the foundations of what is left of her church.
The truth is, the Anglican Communion has already split. What we are witnessing now is the external outworking of an inward fracture, an outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible rupture, an unholy sacrament.
Nicholls goes on to complain that according to the GAFCON statement, “the final test of orthodoxy is human sexuality”.
Not so. Orthodoxy requires not only a correct understand of the nature of God – or at least as correct as flawed humans can be – but a correct understanding of the nature of mankind. At the root of the church’s LGBT* mania is the lie that the purpose and nature of man is self-fulfilment, self-gratification and, especially in the “T” case, atheistic existential self-determination, a misreading of the human condition so mixed up, most self-respecting pagans wouldn’t hold to it.
From here:
The significance of a press statement from a grouping of theologically conservative Anglican primates which recommends the withdrawal of “orthodox provinces” from the rest of the Anglican Communion, and which has drawn international headlines, has been overblown, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, tells the Anglican Journal.
[….]
The motion passed in the Church of England’s General Synod allows clergy to use their conscience in deciding whether to use the prayers of blessing, meaning that they can opt in or out of blessing same-sex unions on an individual basis. So no church or individual will be required to give blessings that they disagree with, Nicholls says. In fact, she adds, since the Church of England motion extends only to blessings, it does not actually make any changes to its policy on marriage itself. For comparison, some dioceses in the Anglican Church of Canada, after extensive discernment, have provided same-sex marriage as a pastoral response, Nicholls says.
In that context, she says, it makes little sense to break up the Communion over such a small change.
“after extensive discernment” !!!
Nowhere that I know of was there any discernment at all. I wouldn’t attempt to cross the road and hope to tell the tale on the basis of that amount of discernment.
(In a similar vein ..)
“such a small change” !!!
Does Nicholls think that a one-time Anglican “swimming the Tiber” is also a small change ?
We are fortunate, in the orthodox Anglican world, to have had the time to gather ourselves together and provide some structures of governance during the long unravelling of the Canterbury communion.
This is just another so-called bishop that is nothing less than an apostate. She has no interest in the authority of Scripture and her sole interest is in herself.
Only Jesus can cure such blindness.
Nicholls might better spend her time studying Scripture than offering such vacuous opinions. The sermon on the mount comes to mind, Matthew 7:21-23 where Jesus says, ” “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ “
“conscience” parading as Scriptural choice the GAFCON Kigali Commitment of April 21, 2023, has identified the third mark of the True Church, “failure of Church discipline at every level”, “episcopal” primus inter pares, as the cause of the current impaired Communion: bringing to mind the renowned ‘Claim of Rights’ of The Church of Scotland delivered at her May, 1842, General Assembly, when the violators of the non-intrusion principle (re. Patronage Appointments to the Pulpits of Jesus Christ) became the very Courts of the Church delegated to protect His Sovereignty in His Church.
uphold
Tragically the ACoC seems to have adopted the belief that a bishop is beyond reproach and can virtually the Gospel as many Anglicans seem to believe that whatever a bishop says is true regardless of THE WORD. Even worse is the belief by many so-called bishops that they are beyond criticism. The Anglican communion cannot remain united until it returns to the TRUTH and accepts it without reservation. I sincerely pray that the Anglican communion will return to the Gospel and rid itself of apostates.