View video of Lord Carey's address
Duke's Methodist roots are well known, of course, and remind us of the debt that both Anglicanism and Methodism owe to each other. I served my Title as Curate at St.Mary's Islington in London and recall noting with delight on my first day there, that the great Charles Wesley had been a curate at the same church in the 18th century. Episcopalians are indebted to our young sister's commitment to evangelism and social action.
Read moreSome years ago, I made a study, utilizing two different Bible Concordances, in which I counted about 110 different verses in the Bible, wherein there is a prohibition , or a condemnation, of sexual relations outside of the bonds of marriage, including adultery and fornication, along with those verses specifically addressed to having sexual relations, with those of one's own sex.
Read moreFor with this decision, the country that first invented the concept of liberalism - the land of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, who fashioned the model of a free and tolerant society for the world - is now set to destroy the concept at its very heart.
That concept is freedom of conscience, the right of religious bodies to organise their own affairs in accordance with their own religious and moral precepts. For that is the real issue at the heart of the gay adoption row.
Read moreOnly a Windsor-rooted response in Tanzania can save the Communion from schism. "Almost everybody involved with this question recognises that there is no way forward from here without pain. It is painful for everybody. There are not going to be winners and losers. There are going to be losers catergory one, two, three, four and five." In reading his words, it is worth remembering that not only is he the intellectual equal of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the two men are good friends.
Read moreThe Times went on to report:
"Though bestiality is not illegal in Washington, the subsequent revelation of the existence of an Internet-based zoophile community (the men refer to themselves as zoos, hence the title) was a shock.
Read moreThe average Anglican ( 45 million in the Global South, 5 million attenders in the Anglo-world) is under thirty, female, lives on two dollars a day, has three children, walks three kilometres for water a day, is related to someone with HIV/Aids and is evangelical. It is not the case that those who are promoting the gay agenda are the poor or underprivileged of western society.
Read moreFord was a lifelong Episcopalian, and his denomination is now fracturing over the Episcopal Church's election of its first openly, practicing homosexual bishop in 2003. Carter, of course, is a lifelong Baptist who officially departed the Southern Baptist Convention several years ago to protest his church's conservative stances, which include firm disapproval of homosexual practice.
Read moreThe bishop was terminating the partnership because Tanzanian bishops had voted to limit communion with American churches that hold liberal views on homosexuality.
Further, the Tanzanian bishops declared that "the Anglican Church of Tanzania shall not knowingly accept financial and material aid from dioceses, parishes, bishops, priests, individuals and institutions in the Episcopal Church that condone homosexual practice or bless same-sex unions."
Read moreOur challenges as the people of God in this day are not unlike theirs, but ours is a spiritual struggle in a very secular and confused age. Our struggle is against more .than flesh and blood, as Scripture and our Baptism remind us. Paul's words at the end of I Corinthians are a clarion call as to how we are to conduct ourselves whatever the nature of our trials: steadfast, immovable, abounding, knowing...
Read moreEach faces its own challenges. The Anglican breakaway parish is now on its own but has the support of some members of the broader Anglican Communion, while the Episcopal returning parish has to rebuild, with the support of its bishop and its diocese, after many of its members started worshiping and forming attachments at other churches.
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