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Welby's Christmas Message is More Fudge than Reality and Ignores Growing Schism in the Communion

Welby's Christmas Message is More Fudge than Reality and Ignores Growing Schism in the Communion

By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline/org
December 31, 2022

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas message was a study in disingenuous sidestepping and a complete disregard for the truth about the current state of both his own church and the Anglican Communion.

He writes: "Right across the Anglican Communion, we are facing the most enormous challenges. Outside the tragedies of war, this is the biggest time of global tension we have faced since the Communion began. So many parts of the Communion already know what it is to suffer. Floods, wars, civil war, corruption, suffering, illness, pandemic, malaria, measles, cholera, typhoid, poverty, oppression, persecution. These continue to be the facts of life."

This begs the obvious point that these above-mentioned issues have been around for 2,000 years in one form or another which is hardly new news. The only difference is that media makes it possible to bring it all into our living rooms in living color. There have been plagues that have killed millions. The Black Death (1334-1353) killed between 75-200 million, far outpacing Covid-19.

What Justin Welby clearly did not say and deliberately overlooked, is the growing persecution orthodox Anglicans are facing at the hands of shrill and strident pansexualists. These pansexualists are doing their best to cancel faithful Anglicans, consigning them to the Anglican rubbish heap in the name of progressivism and left leaning wokery.

Orthodox Anglicanism is virtually dead in the American Episcopal Church. The last bishop (Bill Love) was driven out of the TEC for his faithfulness to Scripture and his refusal to accept homosexual marriage.

Another wannabee bishop, conservative affirming Charlie Holt, has been challenged twice for the see of Florida because a hard-core group of pansexualists don't want him to be their bishop because of his traditional views on marriage.

There has been an ongoing ecclesiastical civil war in TEC for several decades. That war has cost tens of millions of dollars in legal fees fighting for properties that will, within a decade lie fallow, their parishioners dead and gone, the pews empty. The only things full will be the columbaria.

And what of the ongoing war in the broader Anglican communion where the vast majority of Anglicans mostly in the Global South are orthodox in faith and morals? These faithful people are being pressed, bribed, coerced and threatened if they stand up against sodomy and homosexual marriage.

Welby had no hesitation calling out the Primate of Ghana. Welby ripped him for his and his government's views on homosexuality and then backtracked when he was accused of post-colonial racism.

In unusually harsh language, the Archbishop of Canterbury "condemn[ed]" as "unacceptable" a statement by the Archbishop of Nigeria on human sexuality -- thereby raising the stakes in what started as a disagreement between the Nigerian primate and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

How much ink has Welby dedicated to blasting the Nigerian government for its vast inaction in dealing with Boko Haram and the Fulani Tribesmen as they almost daily persecute and kill Christians, many of whom happen to be Anglican! But Welby is happy to wade in if a handful of whiny homosexuals start screaming hate if their behavior is challenged.

What about Welby's farcical, "I won't take sides" on same-sex marriage and the upcoming vote on the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) report because he wants to be the source for unity in the communion? Then Welby appoints an Appointment Secretary who is married to another man, and then he toddles off to Canterbury Cathedral to lay hands on a new dean who happens also to be married to another man!

Taking sides! Huh.

This would be pure fodder for British comedy or Saturday Night Live and talk shows if it was not so shamefully partisan.

But we can still find joy, because that's the world that Jesus Christ came into, sniffs Welby. Really.

The Anglican Communion stands on the brink of schism with GAFCON and GSFA bishops ready to pull the plug if the Church of England embraces the LLF report. And this doesn't warrant a mention in his Christmas message! 'Sorry chaps but I have bigger fish to fry, railing against climate change.'

And then there are the little indecencies of Welby.

How about the 15,000 who are calling on the Church of England to scrap its pro-transgender guidance. Christian parents and two members of General Synod recently handed in a petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury demanding an end to the Church of England's (CofE) policy that says children as young as five should be affirmed if they want to identify as transgender!

And what about a black conservative trainee vicar who was blocked from becoming a Church of England priest because of his "anti-woke views" and that he does not believe the UK is institutionally racist. Calvin Robinson accused the Church of obstructing his ordination plans as a result of his "anti-woke" views and criticism of "bleeding-heart liberal vicars". Robinson was denied ordination in the Church of England by the Bishop of Fulham, but he was ordained a Deacon in the Free Church of England (which has links with the REC).

"We are God's church for God's world, as the Lambeth Conference title rightly says. That's God's mission to us. And we can give thanks at Christmas that all over the world people are carrying out that mission," says Welby.

Well, when has it ever not been "God's world"? And God's (Anglican) mission is a broken, divided communion unable to articulate the gospel in clear apostolic terms. Welby's decision to make climate change the essential talking point largely fell flat as no one really knew what to do with the information...not even the vaguest suggestion of picking up plastic bottles on far off exotic beaches, or even beaches near Cornwall.

Refugees have been crossing borders from time immemorial. The U.S. Congress enacted the first refugee legislation in 1948 following the admission of more than 250,000 displaced Europeans.

Christian Concern, which seeks to change laws and influence the media and government, has three times accused the CofE's "guidance" which it uses to discredit faithful Christians.

They cited the Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall, who was dismissed from his role as school chaplain and reported to the government's terrorist watchdog, Prevent, for a sermon he delivered at Trent College secondary school, which stated that pupils should be free to disagree with LGBT ideology.

Then there was the case of Nigel and Sally Rowe, Christian parents, who raised concerns with their son's CofE primary school after a 6-year-old child was allowed to cross-dress and identify in the opposite sex. A letter to the parents from the school told them that their own 6-year-old son could be labelled as 'transphobic' for failing to acknowledge this pupil in the opposite gender.

Or 'Hannah', who cannot be named for legal reasons, lost her job as a primary school teacher after raising safeguarding concerns over a child that was socially 'transitioning' gender at her school.

They say untold damage is being done to children, but does Welby care about any of this?

When Christian Concern argued that when faithful Christians speak or act in line with both the Bible and science, often seeking to protect children from harmful ideas, they are told by authorities that they are simply doing what the Church of England told them to do. They called on the CofE to scrap Valuing All God's Children urgently, before yet more harm to children and reputational damage to the CofE is done. Is Welby listening?

Welby bleated, "[We need] to talk about how we can transform unjust structures of society and bring reconciliation in places of conflict. And to campaign to treasure the earth in which we live."

"Let us stay and walk together, to do God's work together and to be together in heaven through the salvation he offers us."

Well, that isn't going to happen while the conflict within the communion itself threatens to split it in two.

"How can two walk together unless they are agreed?" writes Amos. He was referring to marriage but he might as well have been talking about the status of marriage within the communion; an ecclesiastical marriage that threatens to come unglued sooner perhaps than anyone thinks.

END

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