As bad as the Justin Welby/John Smyth scandal is, a survey at YouGov illustrates what might be an even bigger problem for the Church of England: 42% of the population has never heard of Justin Welby.
What can this mean other than an indicator of how utterly irrelevent the church has become to almost half the people in the UK?
Justin Welby has resigned over the John Smyth sex, physical and psychological abuse scandal. Welby was not directly involved in the abuse but he knew about it and almost certainly covered it up to protect the institution and his cronies, although he has denied the cover-up and pleaded incompetence instead.
Other heads in the Church of England should probably roll but the ecclesiastical old boys’ network is undoubtedly circling the wagons.
Much as I have disagreed with Welby’s performance during his tenure, I feel rather sorry for the man. Based on his experience as an oil executive, he has tried to run the church as a business, and it hasn’t worked because the church is not a business.
Welby tried to bring reconciliation between irreconcilable parties by telling each what they wanted to hear, earning him the mantle of hypocrite rather than reconciler.
Who will go – and deserves to go – next, I wonder. The Pope?
From here:
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, resigned Tuesday after an investigation found that he failed to tell police about serial physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps as soon as he became aware of it.
Pressure on Welby had been building since Thursday, when release of the inquiry’s findings kindled anger about a lack of accountability at the highest reaches of the church.
“It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024,” Welby said in the statement announcing his resignation. “I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honored to serve.”
Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, said Monday that Welby’s position was “untenable” after some members of the church’s national assembly started a petition calling on him to step down because he had “lost the confidence of his clergy.”
But the strongest outcry had come from the victims of the late John Smyth, a prominent attorney who abused teenage boys and young men at Christian summer camps in Britain, Zimbabwe and South Africa over five decades. Andrew Morse, who was repeatedly beaten by Smyth over a period of five years, said that resigning was a chance for Welby to start repairing the damage caused by the church’s handling of historical abuse cases more broadly.
first and foremost a place of prayer and worship. It is a place where we hope you can come to know a God who knows and loves you. I hope people will do this in many different ways whether you are visiting as a tourist, a pilgrim, a worshipper.
It is a place where, according to its website, you can Create your own journey.
Drag queens, Ketona Madrave and Debbie Darling, are indeed creating their own journey: they are going to abseil down the cathedral in lady’s clothes in order to raise money for an LGBTQetc charity.
The cathedral Dean, the Very Revd Dr Sue Jones, is presumably not ony aware of this but has given it her approval, since it is advertised in the local paper:
Drag queens to ‘jump off’ Anglican Cathedral ‘in stilettos’
The performers said it comes at a time when ‘far too many young souls have been lost’
Pride Quarter drag queens are set to swap their standard Saturday shift in the city’s queer venues for something unusual. Debbie Darling and Ketona Madrave can typically be found in the likes of Stanley Street’s Superstar Boudoir or Eberle Street’s Gbar entertaining crowds till all hours in the morning.
However, this weekend looks a little different for the pair as they plan to abseil down the city’s Anglican Cathedral in full drag for a good cause. The Saturday, September 21 challenge is to raise funds for Liverpool’s oldest LGBTQ+ charity Sahir House.
In 2018 Revd Dr Sue Jones
was one of the speakers, praying for justice and peace for people with minority gender identities and sexual orientations around the world, and especially for respectful dialogue in the Church of England’s Living In Love And Faith conversations on Identity, Sexuality, Relationships and Marriage.
It’s understandable then that, as a next step, she would want men dressed up as women jumping off the top of her cathedral. What next, I wonder.
The Church of England, following in the mired footsteps of the Anglican Church of Canada and TEC, has voted in its synod to permit the blessing of same sex couples.
The first couple to be blessed are Catherine Bond and Jane Pearce, both Anglican priests.
Bother ladies are – or were – married to men and both have adult children. How does a married woman with children suddenly decide she is a lesbian? The answer is simple: enrol in an Anglican seminary, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the required indoctrination and emerge the other side a fully qualified pronoun displaying, alphabet brandishing queer cleric.
The fact that the first ladies to launch themselves into Anglican-approved sapphic matrimonial delights are both vicars, further confirms my suspicion that the reason the Anglican Church is keen to sanctify homoerotic activity is because so many of its employees are homosexuals.
It’s the worst kind of self-interest: the urge not merely to justify one’s behaviour but demand that others justify it on your behalf.
From here:
A couple has become one of the first same-sex partnerships to receive a blessing at a Church of England service.
Prayers for Catherine Bond and Jane Pearce were held at St John the Baptist Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk.
Both are associate priests in the parish and celebrated the “love and friendship” and “commitment to one another”.
Blessing same-sex couples was recently sanctioned by the House of Bishops.
During the prayers, Canon Andrew Dotchin said the pair were continuing on a “pilgrimage graced by your (God’s) blessing, with you as their companion in the dark where they can rejoice and hope in sustaining their love for all the days of their lives”.
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.
The Church of England is thinking – yes, I know, an oxymoron, but bear with me – of using gender neutral words when referring to God. Thus “Nory” is a “name which is derived from the “no” and “ry” in “non-binary”. It may work for ze, but does it work for God?
Justin Welby thinks (there I go again, another oxymoron) it might:
The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the religious head of the church, previously said that “God is not male or female” or “definable.”
“All human language about God is inadequate and to some degree metaphorical,” he said in 2018.
While bishops have been busying themselves discussing climate change, racism and mosquito nets at the Church of England synod currently in session, someone had the effrontery to ask the bishops to define a woman. No clear answer was forthcoming. The church, we are told, has only just begun ‘to explore the complexities associated with gender identity’.
There are repercussions to this. For example: when, in 2014, the CofE made much of Libby Lane becoming the first woman bishop, it was almost certainly mistaken. The church has probably been riddled with women bishops for centuries, since learned Anglican clerics have no idea what they even look like. For all they know, Justin Welby could be a woman.
Unsurprisingly, no one cares what the bishops have to say about climate change, but the fact that bishops have no idea what women are has sparked enough interest to make its way into the secular press.
Read the whole thing here. The comments under the article illustrate nicely how the church has managed to make itself a laughingstock. Again.
The church was put on the spot in one of almost 200 questions submitted to its ‘parliament’, the General Synod, in York this weekend.
Adam Kendry, a lay member from the Armed Forces, asked simply: ‘What is the Church of England’s definition of a woman?’
Rt Rev Robert Innes, the Bishop in Europe, replied: ‘There is no official definition, which reflects the fact that until fairly recently definitions of this kind were thought to be self-evident, as reflected in the marriage liturgy.’
He added that the church ‘has begun to explore the complexities associated with gender identity’ .
From here:
Holy Trinity Brompton (known as HTB), the largest church in the Church of England, is to have a new Vicar lead its 4,000-strong congregation.
The former curate who pioneered its first ‘plant’ outside of London – the Revd Canon Archie Coates, 51, currently Vicar of St Peter’s Brighton, has been chosen as HTB’s Vicar Designate. It is expected that Canon Coates will become Vicar in September 2022, taking over from the Revd Nicky Gumbel, 66, who has announced his intention to resign his post from July 2022. Mr Gumbel has been Vicar of HTB since 2005 and has overseen considerable growth in that time. His books, which include Why Jesus? and Questions of Life, have been international best-sellers.
In 2016, while at St. Peter’s in Brighton, the Revd Canon Archie Coates lent his support to the UK’s largest gay pride parade, saying many in his congregation would take part.
Is this the beginning of the end for Holy Trinity Brompton and Alpha? I hope not but fear it might be.
From the 2016 Christianity Today article:
Churches are preparing for the UK’s largest gay pride march this weekend in Brighton.
Tens of thousands are expected to turn out on the seafront in Brighton and Hove for the annual “pride parade” through the town to the festival on Saturday morning.
A number of churches are dotted along the march’s route. While the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage is highly controversial in many of Britain’s churches – including the Church of England – the local Anglican Diocese of Chichester has said its churches have “created a range of inclusive events to celebrate” the festival. Some churches are putting theological questions to one side in an effort to be open and welcoming.
A key landmark on the route is the evangelical Anglican church St Peter’s, known as the “cathedral of Brighton”. Vicar Archie Coates told Christian Today he was “very supportive” of the parade and a lot of people in his congregation would be taking part.
“It’s great because it celebrates diversity as much as it celebrates LGBT people,” he said. “In our congregation we have a lot of diversity and a lot of LGBT people and we are very supportive.”
The church was planted by the charismatic London church Holy Trinity Brompton in 2009 and around 1,000 people attend every Sunday.
Rev. Kate Bottley is a Church of England vicar who felt called to take her clothes off and pose outdoors for a life-drawing masterclass. The event is to be televised and pumped into the parlours of those among the British public who happen turn on their TV’s at the wrong time.
I’m not sure why she is doing this. Perhaps it is to identify more fully with other average middle-aged ladies who also like to take their clothes off in public – and if we are honest, what respectable matron doesn’t like to expose herself in public once in a while – thereby assuring them that there is nothing strange, quirky or abnormal about the Christian Gospel.
The Rev. declared that after removing her attire, she felt “empowered” and “safe”, and that, after all, is what Christianity is all about.
But do the rest of us feel safe knowing that while innocently strolling in one of Britain’s serene, lush, verdant parks our eyes might be unexpectedly assaulted by a sizable expanse of pink, naked clerical buttock?
Read all about it, if you must, here.
The Church of England is cheering on the UK’s banning of conversion therapy:
The General Synod has voted overwhelmingly to reject coercive Conversion Therapies so we welcome the Government’s commitment to explore these matters further with a view to enshrining that position in law.
Notice that the word “coercive” has been slipped in, whereas the Queen’s speech left it out:
Measures will be brought forward to address racial and ethnic disparities and ban conversion therapy.
I’m sure that no one is under any illusion that, once the law has passed, the banning of conversion therapy will be confined to the coercive variety. If that were so, there would be no need for a new law: it is already illegal to coerce someone into being something she is not by kidnapping her, confining her and subjecting her to uninvited brainwashing.
Come to think of it, that is a moderately accurate description of what we are doing to our children in school: brainwashing them into believing that boys can be girls and vice-versa. This non-binary conversion therapy is a heinous corruption of innocence that the church should be denouncing but isn’t.
Once the law is passed it will be illegal for a person who experiences unwanted same-sex attraction to seek help in combatting it. The best she can hope for from the Anglican church is to have it affirmed.
The church’s incoherence intensifies on reading the motion agreed by General Synod in July 2017:
That this Synod: (a) endorse the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK of November 2015, signed by The Royal College of Psychiatrists and others, that the practice of gay conversion therapy has no place in the modern world, is unethical, potentially harmful and not supported by evidence; and 3 (b) call upon the Church to be sensitive to, and to listen to, contemporary expressions of gender identity; (c) and call on the government to ban the practice of Conversion Therapy.
Note that there is no mention of coercion. Moreover, the church is going to listen to contemporary expressions of gender identity. That means the church will nod sympathetically when a man comes to a priest to declare he is a woman, is taking hormones to grow breasts and will soon have surgery to remove the parts God gave him but are now unwanted. In short, the church will approve his conversion therapy.
No wonder no one takes the church seriously.
