To carry out the task of telling people about Jesus Christ, we need to be a Church that is holy. And for us as individuals and for us as churches right round the world that is always a massive challenge. We all live in different contexts and the challenge overlaps but is slightly different wherever we live. We are dealing with very rapid changes of culture in the Global North and the issue of sexuality is a very important one. How we respond rightly to that ”“ in a way that is holy, truthful and gracious ”“ is absolutely critical to our proclamation of the gospel.
Some churches are responding to challenges in their own context that are very very different. We have churches that are caught up in the midst of wars and violence and have to learn to proclaim the gospel in the midst of that. That’s really incredibly hard, and I’ve much experience of seeing it. There are other churches that are in countries where there are governments that are corrupt and it can be very hard to proclaim the gospel truly in those situations. Wherever we are, there’s a different context; but wherever we are, in our own context, in the right way, we have to live as a Church that is holy.
In addition, the gospel has to be proclaimed by a Church that is in unity….
Contextualization is rationalization as justification for whatever TEc and AcCanada want to do, and cOE is following suit. Welby is Rowan in lite verbiage.
Not necessarily, good doctor. Evangelical missionaries have long spoken about how contextualizing the gospel properly is at the very heart of mission work. So let’s be careful about being put off by semantics, and pay careful attention to what the man is saying.
I, for one, hear a BIG difference between ++Welby and ++Willliams.
However, I do find it highly ironic and indeed symptomatic that the ABoC could give as a main excuse for not attending GAFCON II the quite revealing reason that baptizing the future king of England was more important. That speaks volumes. The very fact that this could be seen as a plausible justification for not attending is very telling. It shows how captive English Anglicanism still is to the powers that be in England. Erastianism isn’t dead yet in the CoE.
I suggest that if T19 readers are looking for evidence of a worrisome tendency to compromise the Gospel for the sake of being accepted by Christianity’s “cultured despisers” in the Global North, we don’t have to look very far. As Thomas Cranmer was slavishly servile to the whims of the English monarch, so his successors have tended to be likewise overly submissive. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the royal family is among Christianity’s “cultured despisers.” Well, maybe Prince Charles is to a certain degree, but certainly the Queen is not.
However, my point is simply that by choosing to place serving the royal family ahead of serving the Anglican Communion worldwide, ++Welby has unwittingly tipped his hand, and shown where he is indeed just as likely to compromise as ++Rowan Williams, or ++George Carey, or any of his other predecessors.
IOW, Erastianism is a LAME excuse. A very lame excuse for not going to Nairobi. Anybody could have baptized Prince George. Not everybody can represent the whole Anglican Communion the way that the ABoC can.
Oh, how I hate state churches!
David Handy+
On the bright side, it sounds like those at Gafcon have plenty to do. Missing out on the ABC’s appearance in the flesh won’t bother them much.