[BUMPED for topical reasons]
Canon David Porter and his team are introduced by David Walker, Bishop of Manchester – he who thinks portraying Jesus as a transgendered woman is fine in his diocese.
Watch it all or listen here
See also related posts:
+ John Bingham: CofE’s teaching on marriage ”˜up for discussion’ to accommodate same-sex couples (February 17, 2016 at 1:32 pm)
+ Archbishops of York and Canterbury: Reply to letter from Jayne Ozanne and co-signatories (February 17, 2016 at 1:14 pm)
Manchester is the second largest conurbation in England, and at one time William Temple was its bishop. Those days are long past and now it is an embarrassment. The church in Manchester is known for the wierd and the wacky. There have been tarot readers and new age faith healers in the cathedral, and now blasphemy supported by an impious bishop.
On the one hand we have just had a General Synod decrying the decline in the church, debating evangelism, and committing 73 million pounds of the church’s capital to trying to grow new vocations and ministries. We have had an Archbishop trumpetting the need to make disciples.
At the same time, the same Archbishop and his Irish sidekick have been making plans to send Synod members to reeducation camp in July to engage in self-criticism until they embrace Welby’s cultural revolution and allow gay blessings, and the man in the chair at the time, the Bishop of Manchester, is allowing his God to be portrayed as a man unhappy with his gender and surgically changing his sex. Meanwhile, in spite of a valiant effort by Ian Paul, the money will be handed to the diocesan bureaucrats to waste along with all the other money they fritter away. Money wasted by failing dioceses like Southwark will be added to from capital so that the same useless leadership which has emptied its churches with the loony and the heretical can without accountability to the successful churches who keep them going, promote those like themselves, and send others who show promise to colleges where their faith will be challenged rather than built up.
It is bad enough having secular sculptors setting up priapic blasphemies, but it is even worse when it comes from the House of Bishops. What is worse – a secular sculptor who adds an erect member to a statue of Christ, or a bishop who permits its surgical removal? And what is one to make of an Archbishop who promotes making disciples and ministers for Christ while actively engaging in undermining the teaching and message of that Christ? It is hopelessly dysfunctional.
It makes all the good being attempted come to nothing. It demoralises those trying, and enervates anyone inclined to try to reverse the trend because they know that whatever they attempt, a twit in a mitre will turn their church into a laughing stock and undermine their ministry.
And by the way, bishops cost over 54 million pounds a year from income. Couldn’t that money be better spent on training ministers than by raiding the capital of the church for a like sum?
As Bugs Bunny would say: despicable! (How non-PC of me.)