We are called as Christians to be gathered in the Spirit and to show in the life of the Church of England a passionate love for every person, a profound commitment to the proclamation of Christ, a powerful symbol that culture war and crisis is not the way the world must go: God shows a better, a saving way.

Just as God has spoken in His word, God speaks to us today, in a language that our hurting hearts understand. It’s a language that gives us a new identity, made in the image of God. God gathers out of a physically and ideologically scattered people a church which acts in unity for those who are different, and does it with unquestioning love.

A common identity, those who are saved, a common tongue, speaking Christian, together offer a common community. To those driven into doubt, or disbelief by the raucous hammering at each other in all our churches around the world – not just Anglican, I know what it feels like to have some raucous hammering – which seems to reject people for their sexual identity or their ethnicity, or their gender, or their youth, or their age or their character or their past or their potential future – we must say; “God himself has come for you. God himself cannot bear to be apart from you, he binds himself to you. He invites you to participate in his divine life and he sets you in his church where all, all have a cherished and essential place.”

That is the good news we carry. Whoever we meet, they are loved by God freely and completely. We may say it, we must live it and how we do that is one of the great tests of these times of societal, national and international division. For we live today in a time of war physical, and war cultural. We too easily import culture wars and lapse into their language. It is the sea we swim in. We do not need to drink it.

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The Bishops in the Church of England wrote and issued a paper whereby they intend to introduce same-sex blessings services. They are not proposing same-sex weddings (at this stage), but wantng same sex blessing ceremonies. In other words, this change amounts to formally recognising same-sex relationships as a moral and God accepted good and that churches ought to offer services of prayer and blessing for these couples. Not every bishop agrees with the document, but clearly, there is sufficient consensus for its publication and presentation to General Synod for serious consideration.

In what can only be described as a dishonest riff, some Anglican leaders are insisting that the church’s doctrine on marriage isn’t changing…quite literally as they call for changes to the church’s understanding of sex and marriage. The same hypocrisy is being offered up by The Australian Law Reform Commission, albeit a legal entourage rather than a church one. Their recent submission to the Federal Government calls for religious schools to lose their freedom to practice traditional views of sexuality. For example, they are recommending legislation that allows Christian schools to teach a Christian view of sex and marriage, but they may also be required to teach alternate views. They will lose the right to employ staff on the basis of religious convictions. In other words, we’ll tolerate your religion so long as you tell and permit today’s sexology. That’s not compromise, it’s forced capitulation. That’s not co-existing with two unbridgeable views, that’s crossing over and demanding change.

This General Synod is happening on the other side of the world and in a Christian denomination that is different to my own, so why take interest in this debate? This particular case is important for several reasons: 1. I have many friends who pastor or who are members of churches in the Church of England. 2. The very public stature of this denomination (part through age and part through connections to the State) will garner significant media and public attention. 3. The Church of England is part of the worldwide Anglican communion which accounts for 10s million of believers, including Australia. 4. The same revisionist agenda playing out in the Church of England is present here in Australia, including among Baptists.

The flavour of the month is self-expression. In every sphere of life we are told that autonomy and self determination is an absolute, and questioning this ‘reality’ is the gravest of sins. From TikTok to the Bishop of York, the sermon proclaims that an individual’s sexual preferences and gender identity is the most fundamental aspect of reality…with a dash of God apparently giving approval. While this religious message will arouse a clap from the culture’s elites, notice how it doesn’t bring people to the cross or persuade them to follow Jesus and join a local church. What’s the point of Christianity if it does little more than mirror the culture’s messaging?

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The real point of all this is that the Church of England is now to bless same-sex unions in clear defiance of both the Bible and the tradition of the Christian church. It will do so even as many of the more conservative churches in the Anglican Communion threaten to break from Canterbury. It will do so even as those identified as LGBTQIA+ in the bishops’ statement are outraged that the church is so tepid. It will do so even after evangelicals rightly call the move outright rebellion against the Word of God.

Anglicans pride themselves on their traditional via media, or way between. They were born in an effort, at least by some, to find a third way between Protestantism and Catholicism. They are proud of their supposed openness to both believers who hold to historic Christian doctrines and heretics who deny them. Now that the sexual revolutionaries are in control of the society and ready to bare their teeth against any who resist, the bishops of the Church of England reveal themselves to be toothless tigers who hold to an imaginary third way between biblical Christianity and the ideologues of the sexual and gender revolutions.

In the Book of Common Prayer’s rite for the consecration of a bishop, the candidate is required to pledge fidelity to the Bible. Then they are asked this: “Will you then faithfully exercise yourself in the same Holy Scriptures, and call upon God by prayer, for the true understanding of the same; so as ye may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome doctrine, and to withstand and convince the gainsayers?”

Now, the bishops of the Church of England are the gainsayers. If you bless same-sex unions, you are buying the entire package demanded by the moral revolutionaries. This isn’t a third way. This is just old-fashioned surrender. You bless same-sex unions, dear bishops, and you just bought them.

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Americans are more likely to predict negative rather than positive outcomes for five key aspects of the U.S. economy over the next six months. Higher inflation, unemployment and interest rates, as well as reduced economic growth and stock market values, are all expected.

A majority of U.S. adults (67%) expect inflation to rise, although more (79%) predicted that it would last year. At the same time, the public’s outlook for unemployment and the stock market have become more pessimistic and are now negative on balance. Expectations for economic growth and the stock market are the most pessimistic in Gallup’s periodic trend.

Gallup first asked Americans in October 2001 what they expected would happen with these five aspects of the economy and updated them monthly until 2006. Since then, Gallup has asked about them eight times, though not during the late 2007-early 2009 Great Recession. The latest results are from the Jan. 2-22 Mood of the Nation poll, which also found that Americans’ confidence in the economy remains low, mentions of inflation as the nation’s most important problem are still elevated and perceptions of the job market are positive but weakened compared with a year ago.

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Americans are more likely to predict worsening rather than improving conditions for five economic aspects, including inflation, unemployment, economic growth, the stock market and interest rates. https://t.co/xsV2WlFSyE

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) February 6, 2023

We do, of course, not live in an heroic age, an age of burning faith, martyrdom and devotion. Rather we live in the great era of spiritual apathy and indifference, interspliced with mad bursts of quasi-religious progressive fanaticism; of mechanism, materialism and utilitarianism; within the church, of the meticulous, supine management of a decay and decline that is seen as inevitable. Given that, it should probably come as no surprise that the sort of bishops we produce are not quite of the nature of Athanasius, Chrysostom or Becket, and are rather more likely to remind us of the deputy regional manager of a chain of supermarkets. Perhaps in some respects that is a good thing: such formidable men were the products of ages more violent, more turbulent and a good deal less comfortable and ‘safe’ than our own. Personally, they were probably incredibly difficult and alarming individuals. If Chrysostom were transplanted to the 21st century, one struggles to see him being offered a column in the Church Times or becoming a regular on ‘Thought for the Day’. He might make us all a bit too uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, it is surely the case that in this kind of shuffling, pusillanimous era we need uncompromising messengers of Gospel truth and orthodoxy, heroic conveyors of inconvenient moral verities, and fiery prophetic voices of doom crying in the wilderness more than ever. Surrender to the secular languages of ‘change management’ and MBA-style jargon, attempting to adapt the spirit of Taylorism and human resource departments to produce spiritual time-and-motion studies, will not make the Church more ‘effective’ or ‘productive’ (whatever that would mean) – it simply reduces its extraordinary, transcendental, urgent message to the level of the quotidian, the utilitarian, the banal. Not only that, but the grasping, instrumentalising spirit of technocracy and managerialism is actively contrary to the spirit of the gospel, which rejects every easy commercial assumption, every sophistical calculation of profit-and-loss, every piece of instrumental rationalisation. We should sell everything we own to possess one pearl and one pearl alone, that of Heaven.

What we need, therefore, are some bishops who defy this spirit, who refuse to conform to the Weberian spirit of the new church bureaucrats, who rattle against the iron cage that Welbyism is creating. The Bishops only emerge from their bureaucratic fortresses nowadays to issue vague, theologically undernourished moral pronouncements on subjects where they know their viewpoint will find approval from their liberal masters. This is not good enough.

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Deliver us, O God, from injustice, envy, hatred and malice; give us grace to pardon all who have offended us, and to bear with one another even as thou, Lord, dost bear with us, in thy patience and great loving-kindness.

Today’s cold and cloudy sunrise at Cape Cod National Seashore! Coast Guard beach. #eastham #capecod #StormHour #sunrise pic.twitter.com/Q95sNbKTAF

— Darius Aniunas (@dariusaniunas) February 7, 2023

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life which is in Christ Jesus,

To Timothy, my beloved child:

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

I thank God whom I serve with a clear conscience, as did my fathers, when I remember you constantly in my prayers. As I remember your tears, I long night and day to see you, that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lo”²is and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you. Hence I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control.

–2 Timothy 1:1-7

Brrr!! Cold start to the day White mill bridge #Dorset pic.twitter.com/1FAHiPvWO9

— (@Matt_Pinner) February 7, 2023