The Anglican church, ever willing to bend to the latest fad, has declared that the environment is a top Anglican priority:

Secondly, we want to try our best to make sure that all Anglicans see this (the environment) as their primary work because some people don’t think it is.

Oops, forgot about the Gospel – better mention it otherwise people will say we are no longer a church:

They actually think that somehow preaching the Gospel – which, of course, is our number one task – makes this work of a lesser importance. It’s one of the five marks of mission of our church, and safeguarding the integrity of creation is a core Gospel issue.

We all know what this is really about, though – nudge, nudge: Down with Capitalism! Workers of the World Unite! Viva Che!

In addition to that, I’m here to emphasize that the economic crisis the world is facing at the moment is an environmental opportunity because we actually can redirect our priorities. Clearly, the old capitalist system has failed and we don’t need to actually go back to it.

How can I join this Angli-Gaia revolution? You need an Internet connection, even though it was spawned from the evil, carbon belching, capitalist, military-industrial complex ARPANET:

Q: What would membership entail?

A: First, the person has to be able to connect to the Internet. We can’t really communicate with people successfully without using it.

In case anyone has any doubts that this is a totalitarian junta, be aware that, once in control, they will dictate what you sing:

every parish is required to do an environmental audit, which has to do with what they teach, what they preach, what they sing,

What you drive:

what cars they use, whether they could change their cars,

And even when you are singing in the celestial choir, they will be fiddling with your grave:

Graveyards, particularly, can be little oases of the protection of threatened species.

A homosexual Anglican priest and his catamite draw comfort from Rowan Williams:

Interview with Greg Lisby, Rector at Church of the Ascension, Cranston

Kiersten Marek: My first question is: I recently read this article in The Atlantic called “The Velvet Reformation,” about Bishop Rowan Williams and the question of whether the Anglican church can become open to gay marriage. The article referenced an essay by Rowan Williams called “The Body’s Grace” in which Williams talked about how intimate relationships are about experiencing grace and that this grace should be accepted as part of both gay and straight relationships. He wrote:

“Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.”

I wonder if you can comment on how this idea strikes you, both as a church leader and as a partner in a gay relationship.

Fr. Greg Lisby: To know you are significant and wanted -isn’t that what we all desire? In the lore of creation, found in the book of Genesis, God said it is good for a human to have a partner (it isn’t until the second creation story that it specifically says male and female). God desires for us to be in relationship with another. It is in relationship, whether intimate or not, that we can glimpse the reality of God’s presence. So, whether it is an opposite-sex or same-sex relationship, all possess the potential for manifesting God’s presence. When that presence is realized, acknowledged, then the sense of worth and vulnerability that opens us to God’s grace is made possible. This, I believe, is what Archbishop Williams is getting at.

The whole interview is worth reading, if only to reinforce why the Anglican Church in North America has become an international laughing stock. Of particular interest in the section above is the fact that, no matter what public face Rowan Williams puts on the crisis tearing his church apart, his private views on homosexuality are being used by gay priest activists to justify their behaviour.

Going hand in hand with this is the trivialising of the meaning of Christian grace. Rather than its true meaning of God’s unmerited favour, it has been turned into the nugatory, “to know you are significant and wanted”, and is used in this context as a justification for homosexual activity; a ghastly perversion of a central truth of the Gospel for no other reason than self-indulgent antinomianism.

The person who wrote this is retired from a job as hired help for a certain denomination; guess which one (it begins with “A”):

Something far more radical and painfully sacrificial is needed if we are to ever engage meaningfully. We need to bring about a world of mutual, outward-going respect, a warmth that far surpasses mere tolerance. And I think here of kenosis, or self-emptying.

Traditionally the term has been used to denote the process whereby God empties himself of his divinity in order to experience the reality of our humanity. But in eastern orthodoxy and the writing of the mystics it refers more to a fresh spiritual beginning, a cleansing of our negative thought patterns so that we slough off all resentment, mistrust, prejudice and exclusivity, leaving the soul free for divine love to pour in.

The compassion and acceptance generated by this soul-purging would undoubtedly bring to birth a new era in inter-faith relationships. It would enable us to understand that truth is elusive and imprecise, and not the prerogative of any one religion, and it would allow us to see that all bigotry and fanaticism is anti-God.

If you guessed Anglican, you were correct. The writer, David Bryant is a retired Anglican vicar who is obviously uncomfortable with the proposition that Christianity is true while other religions are not: to think in such a way is fanatical and bigoted – just like St. Paul and the other apostles.

With the benefit of 2000 years of Christian thought to draw on, Rev. David Bryant has concluded “that truth is elusive and imprecise”; after all, what is truth?

George Pitcher’s pitch:

Dr Nazir-Ali’s departure signals the end of Anglicanism’s damaging schism, says George Pitcher.
Again, it’s important not to read too much in to Dr Nazir-Ali’s resignation itself. He has had the See of Rochester for 15 years; at not yet 60, he has another career in him yet. But can anyone seriously suggest that, had those biblical traditionalists of the southern hemisphere, known collectively as the Global South, prevailed last year in overthrowing the authority of Canterbury in favour of an African-led Communion, he would have abandoned his important foothold in the English Church?

No. Dr Nazir-Ali, scourge of homosexual liberalism and what he sees as the Muslim threat to Christendom, pitched his tent with the African rebels, under the flag of the unfortunately named Gafcon, but now finds that army dispersed and demoralised.

In the upside-down world of liberalism, a rebel and schismatic is someone who holds to 2000 years of established Christian doctrine, while a crumbling colonial edifice entrenched in an old boy network of back-slapping bishops that boast about making up their own rules is the standard-bearer of all that is proper and decent.

In fact, it is the largely decadent western expression of Anglicanism that is rebellious and schismatic; it is the one that has departed from received doctrine.

Once Pitcher has established that it is “important not to read too much in to Dr Nazir-Ali’s resignation”, he does just that. I have no idea why Dr Nazir-Ali’s has decided to change careers and neither does Pitcher, I imagine. One thing that Pitcher’s article does reveal, though is that a liberal finds the idea of eschewing ecclesiastical power – which is not much different to secular power – impossible to understand unless it is because the power has failed to achieve its ends. What seems to beyond Pitcher’s grasp is that God may have called Nazir-Ali to do something else and Nazir-Ali is more interested in what God wants than a pointed hat.

As for Gafcon’s army being dispersed and demoralised, there are millions of Gafcon/Foca Anglicans who are completely unaware of that – because it isn’t true.