Thursday 11 June 2009

Anglican Mainstream’s despair

Anglican Mainstream is feeling isolated and beleaguered at the moment. Lisa Nolland despairs in her latest articles on their web site about the failure of key players in the evangelical Anglican British world to respond to the threat from “illiberal Liberalism.” Other evangelicals are apparently failing to indicate the pastoral response that biblically faithful Christians should be giving to lesbian and gay Anglicans and failing to take action in response to the erosion of the broader sexual ethic in the church, not to mention outside its walls. The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans is apparently prepared bravely to enter this dangerous arena.

Lisa is able to recognise that the approach advocated by Anglican Mainstream “is hotly contested and considered deeply offensive by many.” However, she still believes it to be true and she receives confirmation from her friends with same-sex attraction (SSA). SSA sounds like the acronym for a disease, and in Mainstream’s mentality it is – a disease of the soul. Mainstream is unable to understand the experience of faithful, orthodox Christians, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and heterosexual, for whom homosexuality isn’t a problem and love between two people of the same sex is as delightful and blessed as heterosexual love.

Anglican Mainstream is clearly shocked by the action taken by the Church of Scotland over the appointment of the Revd Scott Rennie as minister of Queens Cross church in Aberdeen. Lisa Nolland warns that what happened in Scotland will soon happen in England.

Lisa ackowledges reality:

“… there are many partnered gay and lesbian Anglicans embedded in our churches, parishes and diocesan structures now.”
From her perspective:

“… these people need pastoral support to move beyond their disordered response to a disordered situation. Yes, people with same-sex attraction (SSA) are more than welcome in our churches, but like all of us who live below God’s best, that should be in order than our lives be transformed by Jesus. It is an entirely different matter for them to be given responsibility to lead, teach and provide role models to the flock - in this case of sexual behaviour and lifestyle that is directly contradictory to biblical and Anglican teaching.”
Is it loving, she asks, to allow people to continue to live and believe a lie about themselves?

Lisa takes her own prejudices, shared by her friends with “same-sex attraction” to be valid for the majority of Christians and those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. This is a minority view held by those LGBT people who feel guilty about being who they are and accept a conservative understanding of Christian tradition and teaching. This tradition, as with other traditions once held to be inviolable, is changing.

The response of the church to me and tens of thousands like me in the Anglican communion will be loving when it stops treating us as people who need to be healed and changed and welcomes us unconditionally as we are, people created by God and loved by God – right now, just as we are.

2 comments:

  1. Good Lord, Lisa really needs spiritual/emotional help...has she ever heard of Codependents Anonymous?

    Speaking of controlling, manipulating, lack of intellect/experience and know-it-all-ish religious rabid puritan notions, don´t let her near any Gay Venues/Museums...perhaps it is she that needs ¨loving¨ care for the nonsense and hysteria she feels necessary to pontificate about regarding SEX!

    When I was young, single, and part of the ¨make love not war¨ early 1960´s (I wasn´t a hippy, I was a clean cut type) in San Francisco (Bishop Pike years, RIP) I thought it was beautiful and especially HEALTHY to share intimacy with partners...I always thought sexual intimacy was/is a very personal, tender, loving and sacred exhanging of ones innermost self (mostly). I´m no longer a child of the 60´s and I also have now more ¨mature and realistic experience¨ regarding the depth of feeling and responsibility/accountability toward others (in all ways) but I still regard SEX as major, and positive, human attribute when shared honorably...one of many.

    I´m sorry Lisa is wrapped up in a lustfilled Hell-bound fantasy idea of her own malforming...one wonders what happened to her and where/when *it* all went wrong.

    Yesterday in the United States we saw the final stage outcome of years of White Supremacy (including extreme puritanical notions of discrimination) ¨my way for God¨...insisting and demanding that God doesn´t love ALL his children becomes dangerous madness.

    The extreme dementia of promoting difference, fear and hate against ¨LGBT marginalized¨ brothers and sisters at The Body of Christ that one ¨assumes¨ sexual ¨behaviors¨ about...is, well, very far away from looking into the fragile REAL character of oneself...but, it is a sign that something inside is very WRONG!

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