Anglicans United & Latimer Press

The trouble comes when the tables are turned, and the bullies themselves get beaten up. When that happens, they run to their parents and cry foul.

This is precisely what is happening in The Episcopal Church (TEC), the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England today. Episcopal and Anglican Church leaders behave like bullies and cry foul over perceived
interference from bishops outside North America. Then they beat up on African archbishops and bishops for being backward and for not buying into the Episcopal Church's new sexuality preferences.

Mrs. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop, is complaining mightily about the arrival next week of the most powerful African Anglican on the planet, The Rt. Rev. Peter Akinola, to lay hands
on a number of Anglicans in Virginia, saying "it puts a strain on the fragile relations on the Anglican Communion." This is while the TEC has done more than any other Anglican jurisdiction to aggravate and violate the wishes of the greater Anglican Communion.

What we have is the classic combination of the ecclesiastical bully and the crybaby! It goes along the lines of "How dare you cross jurisdictional boundaries" (the bully) and "Why the hell can't you buy into anal sex?' (cry baby) because it really is filling up our churches.

Not.

Rich North American Episcopalians, using dead men's money, have figured out that they can buy loyalty from 15 or so provinces by dropping money into African laps on that continent in the name of helping HIV/AIDS patients.

When African Anglican leaders tell them they won't take their money because it is tainted with sodomite acceptance - an acceptance that has eternally damning consequences -- the Americans cry foul and say how can
you let women and children die over sex. It has not dawned on the enlightened ones at 815 2nd Ave., New York City, that it is precisely because of the misuse of sex that people have contracted HIV/AIDS in the first place!

So there you have it, the ecclesiastical bully and the whining crybaby. The "how dare you" with the "why can't we all have sex with whomever, it's so much fun" and God (whoever He or She is) really doesn't mind,
because our gender neutral higher power wants us all to live fully unto ourselves, and be who we are, sexually fulfilling ourselves with whomever we happen to find ourselves with, while reaching for the communion wafer.

The Anglican Church of Canada has a first class bully. His name is Michael Ingham, Bishop of New Westminster, who has come by his award as Bully First Class for the way he has treated departing orthodox parishes. His carrot and stick approach (very big stick, very small carrot) with fleeing parishes has made him a legendary bully. Here are a few examples.

* He controls all diocesan synods to the point of ordering the microphones shut off if someone gets up to speak against him...

* His own people at synod have total control and get all the principal speaking time, bullying any and all who go against the bishop's agenda...

* He forces clergy who stand against him out of their churches, fires the duly elected lay officers, replaces both with his own people, and changes the locks on the doors... (The writer was in North Vancouver the
day this actually took place.)

* He acts unilaterally in pressing his own agenda on the international Anglican Communion, without regard for the truth or well being of that communion...

Ingham also threatens people with his principal back-up, lawyer George Cadman, the diocesan chancellor. While Ingham has ingratiated himself with all the local and provincial political leaders the truth is, he has people cowed and afraid of him. His clergy are afraid to speak up on moral issues because they can be fired and have their pensions trashed.

Said a source to VOL; "no real born again conservative Christian would be ordained by Ingham in the Diocese of New Westminster. If Ingham's so wonderful, why are most real Christian clergy fleeing the diocese?" Indeed.

The American Episcopal Church has several A1 bullies, foremost among them is John Shelby Spong. He has made it his lifetime work to pour scorn on, ridicule and denigrate evangelicals in TEC (he started out as one). He took particular delight and pleasure in using his considerable skills blasting African bishops at Lambeth 1998 for their backwardness on sexual matters. He has also taken major pot shots at Archbishop George Carey and most recently at the ailing John R. W. Stott, who has singled-handedly upheld the faith in England, indeed across the globe.

If he had not done so, the Church of England would be an even bigger mess than it is already.

Another vile bully is the Bishop of Long Island, Orris Walker. He has made it his lifetime work to destroy the ministry of every Anglo-Catholic priest in his diocese. He has made their lives a living hell, yelling and screaming at them about what Prayer Book to use, while promoting a horrible, sexually warped priest who appeared naked in
PENTHOUSE magazine under a banner headline, "The Boys from Brazil." He ripped up his Dean the same week the Dean lost his son to suicide. The handful of Evangelicals have quietly slunk away, still too afraid to talk to VOL about their experiences with this horrible bishop who may well be dying of AIDS.

The winner by far, is the Bully of Pennsylvania - Charles E. Bennison. In his ten-year career, this sociopathic bishop has cut a swathe across the diocese. He lied to the 'seven sisters' Anglo-Catholic priests about
alternative oversight, then set about ripping them apart one by one till there was no one left standing (or preaching). The last to go was Fr.

David Ousley who was thrown out of his parish; was inhibited and deposed; and, the doors to the parish were locked. Another priest, Fr. David Moyer is still standing. He is now under another jurisdiction and is fighting the bishop in the secular courts for justice and equity.

Bennison has bullied evangelicals who remained cowed and stay as far under his radar screen as they possibly can. He has bullied his Black clergy into submission and is responsible for the death of one Black clergyman, according to the priest's wife, who is also a clergyperson.

He has written a Visigoth rite to be used by any sexual combination that walks through the cathedral doors wanting to be married. He could not uphold certain basic doctrines of the faith when asked to do so by a priest, spent millions on failed diocesan programs, covered up his brother's sexual sin (the abuse of a 14-year old girl) and is so hated by the Standing Committee that they have filed presentment charges against him with the National Church. He has even lost the support of his liberal base, a dangerous thing to lose in times of spiritual battle, but still he insists on staying so he can go on bullying whoever stands in his way so he can accomplish absolutely nothing except the death of a diocese. He is even worse than his father, also Charles Bennison, the Bishop of Western Michigan who built a cathedral (read monument) to his enormous ego, a cathedral that is now being sold at half its original cost to erect - the legacy of an ecclesiastically and theologically worthless life and ministry.

Other bishops worthy of mention include Tom Shaw, Bishop of Massachusetts;, John Howard, Bishop of Florida;, and J. Jon Bruno, Bishop of Los Angeles. Bruno is a huge bully of a man who feels it is his bounden duty to blast anyone who dares to stand in the way of Mrs. Schori being recognized by the Anglican Communion. He has gone after the former Bishop of Texas, Ben Benitez, while at the same time legally trying to trash five parishes and their priests in his diocese, time and time again because they won't conform to his religion.

Every day orthodox Anglican priests get a little bit closer to the true life story of Meshack, Shadrach and Abednego, three courageous Hebrews who stood in the midst of the fiery furnace refusing to defend themselves., "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter." (Dan 3:16) So it is with the Rev. Don Armstrong who faces a Kangaroo Court this week by his former Bishop Rob O'Neill. This court will undoubtedly find him guilty of cooking the books even though there has not been one single tangible piece of
evidence that the evangelical rector has had his hand in the parish till. Armstrong will not attend this farcical court loaded as it is with O'Neill's yes men and women. He will not defend himself and he will emerge unscathed from the burning fire of O'Neill's wrath.

How many times has the Rt. Rev. Bob Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh, been trashed by V. Gene Robinson in House of Bishops meetings with the nodding approval of liberal and revisionist bishops? These bishops would love to see Duncan overwhelmed by the Rev. Harold Lewis, a revisionist priest in his diocese, and a group of so-called Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh who would love to dump Bishop Duncan legally in the courts, if they could. It is bullying without end.

One of the most egregious cases of bullying took place in the Mid-West. The Bishop of Kansas, Dean E. Wolfe, pulled a Tony Soprano and put a gun to the head of the priest of Christ Church Overland Park and said that
for 10 large a year for ten years (that's $1 million bucks) he could keep his parish property. The priest agreed.

When the same priest arranged for a transfer of jurisdictions, he got a Godly octogenarian Episcopal Bishop, William Cox, to perform the business. Suddenly, up jumped Wolfe and fellow Oklahoma Bishop Robert Moody (a man who allowed a wannabe deacon to have a sex-change operation). Together they tag-teamed the faithful old bishop and filed presentment charges against him. Undaunted, the 86-year bishop shifted his allegiance to the Province of the Southern Cone.

The bullying is not all focused exclusively in the U.S. and Canada, it has gone international.

When it was first announced that Dr. Rowan Williams would become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of England's homosexual community lauded the Bearded One as enlightened, progressive and a
supporter of homosexuals. Around the world, orthodox Anglicans and Episcopalians went into quiet despair, hoping and praying that, as the leader of nearly 80 million Anglicans he would change his mind. They saw
hope when Jeffrey John failed to get a bishopric and were hopeful that he would see how united African Anglicans were along with orthodox remnants in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Then everything changed. When the primates met in Tanzania earlier this year and delivered a time line for liberals in the US to repent, Britain's homosexual community suddenly went ballistic. Led by the interminably pro-homosexual sycophantic religion writer for the Guardian newspaper, they hissed and snarled at Dr. Williams, saying he had betrayed them and worse. Many, including the Canadian Archbishop, called his leadership weak and inept. The ABC promptly announced he was taking a three-month sabbatical.

On the surface, the bullies are winning. They are trashing all before them, taking the spoils of war, which include properties, endowments and much more. The numbers are now running into the tens of millions of dollars. In the end they will lose, because they will never ever own the hearts of faithful priests and laity who believe in Jesus and His gospel and not the progressive pansexual "inclusive" gospel of liberals and revisionists. Across the country they are walking out parish doors leaving behind the spoils to the victor, but the victories for these
bishops are entirely pyrrhic. If there is no one to fill the pews, will the bishop be able to hang onto the properties? The answer is no, because across this great land of ours, parishes are being sold to clothing boutiques, x-rated porn shops, upstart independent evangelical congregations, etc.

One diocese (San Joaquin) has announced it will probably leave The Episcopal Church fostering the question, will there be more? Three bishops have fled the HOB, one to Rome, one to CANA and a third to the Southern Cone. Priests and parishes are fleeing like scattered sheep in all directions. CANA and AMiA are scooping them up like beached whales.

God is not mocked. The liberals and revisionists are reaping what they are sowing, and they are sowing to the whirlwind of God's wrath as churches empty and the money slowly dries up. A Day of Reckoning is coming when judgment begins, and it will begin first with the household of God.

END

"Oh God, forgive them for they know not what they do," she said, agreeing with the words of Christ on Calvary (Luke 23.34), according to a letter Christians in Turkey have written to the worldwide church, a letter released through Voice of the Martyrs.

"In a country where blood-for-blood revenge is as normal as breathing, many many reports have come to the attention of the church of how this comment of Susanne Tilman has changed lives," the letter said. "One columnist wrote of her comment, 'She said in one sentence what 1,000 missionaries in 1,000 years could never do.'"

She is the widow of Tilman Geske, a German citizen who along with two Turkish Christians were martyred recently – allegedly by five Muslims who met the three victims at a Christian publishing company for a Bible study.

Authorities have taken several suspects into custody, and their cases remain pending.

The letter titled "A letter to the Global Church from The Protestant Church of Smyrna" was received by VOM shortly after the slayings, and the ministry organization that works with the Persecuted Church worldwide is publicizing it.

"The Voice of the Martyrs has already been actively involved in assisting the families of these courageous Christians. We encourage you to pray for them as they grieve, and to pray that this will be a significant turning point for the gospel in Turkey," the organization said.

(Story continues below)

VOM noted that 2,000 years earlier, this location of Christians was addressed in Rev. 2:8-11: "And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write… 'Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. Indeed, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation 10 days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes shall not be hurt by the second death.'"

The letter describes the work Geske, 46, was doing on a new Turkish Study Bible. That morning, he went to the offices of Zirve Publishing, which produces and distributes Christian literature to Malatya and other parts of eastern Turkey, for a Bible study. Pastor Necati Aydin, the father of two, also left for the same office, as did Ugur Yuksel.

"None of these three men knew that what awaited them at the Bible study was the ultimate testing and application of their faith, which would conclude with their entrance into glory to receive their crown of righteousness from Christ," the letter said.

Also heading to the Bible study were five men thought to be "seekers" who had been guests of Pastor Necati at an invitation-only evangelistic service earlier.

"No one knows what happened in the hearts of those men as they listened to the gospel. Were they touched by the Holy Spirit? Were they convicted of sin? Did they hear the gospel in their heart of hearts? Today we only have the beginning of their story," the letter said.

"The young men got guns, bread knives, ropes and towels ready for their final act of service to Allah. They knew there would be a lot of blood. They arrived in time for the Bible study, around 10 o'clock," the letter said. "Reportedly, after Necati read a chapter from the Bible the assault began. The boys tied Ugur, Necati, and Tilman's hands and feet to chairs and as they videoed their work on their cellphones, they tortured our brothers for almost three hours."

The letter included the following graphic details of the torture:

"Tilman was stabbed 156 times, Necati 99 times and Ugur’s stabs were too numerous to count. They were disemboweled, and their intestines sliced up in front of their eyes. They were emasculated and watched as those body parts were destroyed. Fingers were chopped off, their noses and mouths and anuses were sliced open. Possibly the worst part was watching as their brothers were likewise tortured. Finally, their throats were sliced from ear to ear, heads practically decapitated."

The letter released by Voice of the Martyrs said neighbors thought the noise was a domestic argument so they did not respond.

Another believer, Gokhan, arrived about 12:30, but couldn't get in, so he called.

"Ugur answered his phone. 'We are not at the office. Go to the hotel meeting. We are there. We will come there,' he said cryptically. As Ugur spoke Gokhan heard in the telephone's background weeping and a strange snarling sound," the letter said. He called police.

When officers entered, they found, "Tilman and Necati had been slaughtered, practically decapitated with their necks slit from ear to ear. Ugur's throat was likewise slit and he was barely alive," the letter said.

Several assailants were caught in the room, and two nearby, including one who apparently tried to jump out a window to flee and was seriously hurt.

The letter said persecution of Christians – bombings, physical attacks, verbal and written abuse as well as media propaganda -- moved into the intense range following a decision in 2001 by the National Security Council of Turkey to consider Christians a threat to national security on the same level as al-Qaida.

The letter described cameras in churches to promote fear and antagonism towards Christians.

What Turkey witnessed from its Christians was something else. "Hundreds of believers and dozens of pastors flew in as fast as they could to stand by the small church of Malatya and encourage the believers, take care of legal issues, and represent Christians to the media," the letter said.

When Susanne Tilman desired to bury her husband in Malatya, the local officials spread rumors it was a sin to dig a grave for a Christian, so volunteers from the church in Adana dug the grave in an untended 100-year-old Armenian graveyard, the letter said.

Ugur was buried with "his believing fiancée watching from the shadows as his family and friends refused to accept in death the faith Ugur had so long professed and died for," the letter said.

"Necati's funeral took place in his hometown of Izmir, the city where he came to faith. The darkness does not understand the light. Though the churches expressed their forgiveness for the event, Christians were not to be trusted. Before they would load the coffin onto the plane from Malatya, it went through two separate X-ray exams to make sure it was not loaded with explosives," the letter said. "Necati's funeral was a beautiful event. Like a glimpse of heaven, thousands of Turkish Christians and missionaries came to show their love for Christ, and their honor for this man chosen to die for Christ. Necati's wife Shemsa told the world, 'His death was full of meaning, because he died for Christ and he lived for Christ… Necati was a gift from God. I feel honored that he was in my life, I feel crowned with honor. I want to be worthy of that honor.'"

Then Susanne Tilman expressed her forgiveness in a television interview that was reported on front pages across Turkey.

The letter said the Malatya missionaries most likely will move, as they've been identified as targets in that hostile city, and the remaining 10 believers have gone into hiding.

"What will happen to this church, this light in the darkness? Most likely it will go underground. Pray for wisdom, that Turkish brothers from other cities will go to lead the leadership church," the letter said.

"Please pray for the Church in Turkey," wrote Pastor Fikret Bocek. "Don't pray against persecution, pray for perseverance."

"This we know. Christ Jesus was there when our brothers were giving their lives for Him. He was there, like He was when Stephen was being stoned in the sight of Saul of Tarsus," the letter said. "Someday the video of the deaths of our brothers may reveal more to us about the strength that we know Christ gave them to endure their last cross, about the peace the Spirit of God endowed them with to suffer for their beloved Savior. But we know He did not leave their side."

"We pray – and urge you to pray – that someday at least one of those five boys will come to faith because of the testimony in death of Tilman Geske, who gave his life as a missionary to his beloved Turks, and the testimonies in death of Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel, the first martyrs for Christ out of the Turkish Church," the letter said.

Susanne said she planned to remain in Turkey with her children, Michal Janina, 13, Lukas, 10, and Miriam, 8.

Voice of the Martyrs is a non-profit, interdenominational ministry working worldwide to help Christians who are persecuted for their faith, and to educate the world about that persecution. Its headquarters are in Bartlesville, Okla., and it has 30 affiliated international offices.

It was launched by the late Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, who started smuggling Russian Gospels into Russia in 1947, just months before Richard was abducted and imprisoned in Romania where he was tortured for his refusal to recant Christianity.

He eventually was released in 1964 and the next year he testified about the persecution of Christians before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee, stripping to the waist to show the deep torture wound scars on his body.

The group that later was renamed The Voice of the Martyrs was organized in 1967, when his book, "Tortured for Christ," was released.

Episcopal leaders say the visit threatens to strain further the already fragile relations between their church and the rest of the worldwide Anglican Communion. But Episcopal traditionalists say there is a growing desire among them to break away. A decision by the Episcopal Church in 2003 to consecrate an openly gay priest, V. Gene Robinson, as the bishop of New Hampshire profoundly alienated those theological traditionalists, and most of the Anglican Communion overseas, who contend that the Bible condemns homosexuality.

The Nigerian archbishop, Peter J. Akinola, will preside over a ceremony in Virginia on May 5 installing Martyn Minns, former rector of an Episcopal church there, as the bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, an offshoot of the Nigerian church.

The convocation was created in part to oversee congregations that no longer want to be in the Episcopal Church but would like to remain in the Anglican Communion.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, said in a statement that Archbishop Akinola¹s acceptance of ³an invitation to episcopal ministry here without any notice or prior invitation² was not in keeping with ³the ancient practice in most of the church² that bishops minister only within their own jurisdictions.

³This action would only serve to heighten current tensions,² the statement said, ³and would be regrettable if it does indeed occur.²

Archbishop Akinola is the primate of the largest region, or province, in the 77-million-member Anglican Communion. He is also the leader of an increasingly successful alliance between theological conservatives in North America and those in the developing world that is pushing the Episcopal Church to renounce its acceptance of gay men and lesbians or face exclusion from the communion.

Archbishop Akinola¹s office did not reply to an e-mail message seeking comment about his visit.

But Bishop Minns said the convocation that he is to lead was not interfering with the Episcopal Church.

³The reality is that there is a broken relationship between the Episcopal Church and the rest of the communion,² Bishop Minns said. ³We want to give people a freedom of choice to remain Anglican but not under the Episcopal Church as it is currently led.²

Those loyal to the Episcopal Church said the visit provided yet another glimpse of the alienation that some in the communion feel toward them.

³The archbishop of Nigeria may think the Episcopal Church has acted wrongly, but that is quite different from using that as an excuse to cross boundaries and do things that violate longstanding practice,² said the Rev. Mark Harris, a member of the Executive Council, which governs the Episcopal Church between the conventions it holds every three years.

Mr. Harris, associate priest at St. Peter¹s Church in Lewes, Del., said Archbishop Akinola ³is making clear that he considers the church in Nigeria is not in communion with the Episcopal Church.²

But theological traditionalists like the Rev. Dr. Kendall S. Harmon, canon theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina, said there was mounting impatience among some conservatives with the Anglican leadership.

In March, Episcopal bishops rejected demands, put to them earlier in the year by Anglican primates meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that they create a parallel leadership to serve the conservative minority of Episcopalians who oppose their church¹s stance on homosexuality.

The global primates at that meeting issued that demand as part of a broader ultimatum insisting that the Episcopal Church pledge not to consecrate partnered gay bishops and that it stop bishops and priests from authorizing blessings of same-sex couples.

Explaining the views of theological conservatives who may be drawn to joining Bishop Minns¹s convocation, Dr. Harmon said, ³The frustration is:

We¹ve been asking; we¹ve been waiting. Where is the way for us to continue as some kind of catholic Christianity that has connection to the worldwide church?

Next year's decennial conference will be different, however. Rather than a parliamentary debating chamber with a string of resolutions, it will be a time for "spiritual reflection, learning, sharing and discerning," said Archbishop of Melanesia, Sir Ellison Pogo.

The 77 million-member Anglican Communion had been considering whether to cancel the global event in the wake of heightened controversy over the Episcopal Church's recent actions and stance favoring the consecration of homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions.

Earlier this year, Archbishop Peter Akinola of the Church of Nigeria had threatened to not participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference and hold its own gathering if the issue of homosexuality was not resolved before then.
The Episcopal Church, which consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003, was given a Sept. 30 deadline this year to unequivocally pledge not to consecrate another gay bishop or authorize prayers for homosexual unions.

Leading up to the deadline, the Anglican spiritual leader had questioned the timing of the 2008 conference.
"We've been looking at whether the timing is right, but if we wait for the ideal time, we will wait more than just 18 months," Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams told the Anglican Journal last week.

Last week, the conference "Design Group," appointed by Williams, worked on the conference structures, purposes, issues and program, according to the Anglican News Service.

In the meantime, U.S. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told The Boston Globe this week that the Episcopal Church will not likely be moving "backward" on their 2003 decision to elect an openly gay bishop.
"I don't believe that there is any will in this church to move backward," she told the newspaper on Tuesday. She called the 2003 election "a great blessing."

While the majority of Anglican leaders, mainly on the African continent, say the Episcopal Church has departed from Anglican tradition and scriptural authority, Jefferts Schori believes the rest of the Anglican churches will move in the direction of the Episcopal Church possibly 50 years from now.

"Where the protesters are, in some parts of Africa or in other parts of the Anglican Communion today, is where this church and this society we live in was 50 years ago, and for us to assume that people can move that distance in a year or in a relatively instantaneous manner is perhaps faithless," she told the Globe. "That kind of movement and development has taken us a good deal of pain and energy over 40 or 50 years, and I think we have to make some space so that others can make that journey as well."

"In other words, Jefferts Schori argues that time is on her side," commented the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of America's pre-eminent evangelical leaders, in a blog post Thursday. "The African churches will simply have to grow up and learn to play the game. They will have to learn to replace the authority of the Bible with the authority of modern therapeutic ideologies.

"In time,” he wrote, “she expects the African churches to learn to play the game - relativizing Scripture, redefining biblical morality, and flaunting the moral wisdom the church has known for over 2,000 years.

"She may be right," Mohler added. "We must pray she is wrong."

Lambeth 2008 will continue to address the "internal conflicts of recent years," according to Ellison, and also address such topics as the Millennium Development Goals, HIV/AIDS, Ethical/Green living, Anglican identity and covenant, The Listening Process and relationships with people of other faiths.

Correction: Thursday, April 26, 2007:
An article on Thursday, Apr. 26, 2007, about statements made ahead of an upcoming decennial conference incorrectly stated that Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of the Church of Nigeria had threatened to not participate in the Anglican Communion's 2008 Lambeth Conference. It was Archbishop Peter Akinola, not Ndungane, who said he would not participate in the decennial worldwide assembly if the issue of homosexuality was not resolved before then.

Relatives of Canon Rodney Hunter, 73, believe that his food was contaminated by supporters of the Rev Nicholas Henderson in a battle between the liberal and conservative wings of the Anglican Church.

In November Canon Hunter was found dead at his home in Nkhotakota, Malawi, with a strange black substance around his mouth. The day before his death he had complained of severe stomach pains, and postmortem examination has now shown that he was killed by three poisons.

Malawi police have charged his cook with murder and are investigating rumours that the poisoning was organised by supporters of Mr Henderson, who had no knowledge of the alleged plot.

Canon Hunter was an outspoken critic of plans to appoint the liberal Mr Henderson as Bishop of Lake Malawi. The Province of Central Africa is at the heart of conservative evangelical opposition to the liberal Anglican outlook in the West on homosexuality.

Mr Henderson, Vicar of St Martin’s Acton West and All Saints’ Ealing Common, was elected as Bishop of Lake Malawi last August. He had known the region for 18 years, raising funds for religious, social and humanitarian projects, and was learning the local language, Chichewe. At the time, few in Malawi knew of his record as a leading liberal theologian and that he had been chairman of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union. There was also concern in Africa at reports that he had a male lodger.

As a result, the Primate of Central Africa, the Most Rev Bernard Malango, wrote to Mr Henderson asking him to confirm that he subscribed to the Creeds, the Bible and the Thirty-Nine Articles and that he “fashions his own life and his household according to the doctrine of Christ”.

The diocese’s Court of Confirmation blocked Mr Henderson’s consecration, deeming him “a man of unsound faith”, and instead appointed the retired Bishop of Zambia, the Right Rev Leonard Mwenda.

Canon Hunter, who had been living in retirement in Malawi, was made assistant priest at All Saints Cathedral. He faced continuing violent protests against his opposition to Mr Henderson and had been physically attacked in the pulpit.

His nephew, Mark Hunter, an accountant from Bristol, told The Times that he had received an initial postmortem report which confirmed that three poisons had been used, and believed that his uncle had been murdered. He said: “I understand that in the last months of my uncle’s life, local supporters of Mr Henderson made his life hell. I know he spoke out to the bishops, saying he should not be appointed. My uncle’s beliefs were strong. If he believed something, he would not give way.”

Canon Hunter had previously served as a cathedral dean in the diocese. He had been appointed after three priests died in strange circumstances and witchcraft was suspected.

His nephew said: “He would come back to England every couple of years, but his work was very important to him and he was highly thought of in Malawi. He loved Malawi. He thought of himself as Malawian, not English.”

Archbishop Malango said of Canon Hunter, who had trained him for the priesthood at a seminary in Lusaka: “He was brilliant, a good philosopher. I owed him a lot — he was my mentor.”

Mr Henderson told The Times: “I have not got anything to say. I have not seen the autopsy report. I heard accusations were going round that he was poisoned. Ihad a very high regard for Canon Hunter. But I am here in England, 5,000 miles away. I do not know what is going on. I have not been to Malawi for months.”

A requiem for Canon Hunter is to be sung at Pusey House, Oxford, this Saturday.

The idea is to explode two millennia of traditional belief on which these institutions rest, thereby making room for a new Christianity based on a conception of Jesus that is palatable to “a twenty-first century person.” What actually crawls out of the rubble is a Jesus for John Shelby Spong.

This Jesus would be unrecognizable to most Christians. The largest section of the book is an attack on “the supernatural forms of yesterday’s Christianity.” Spong executes this attack by means of a lengthy textual criticism of the Gospels, sprinkled with occasional undeveloped thoughts on the incompatibility of traditional belief with a modern worldview. (“The ability of anyone to walk on water exists in our world not in reality, but only in very bad golf jokes.”) Along the way, he jettisons the following claims, among others: that Mary was a virgin at the time of Jesus’s birth; that Jesus performed miracles; that Jesus atoned for the sins of mankind; that Jesus was resurrected; and that the resurrected Jesus ascended to Heaven.

Spong’s analysis is interesting as far as it goes, though his tendency to dismiss all disagreement as “hysterical” — his adjective of choice for traditional believers — is unbecoming, morally and intellectually. I offer here no evaluation of his textual criticism, as literary sleuthing is rarely dispositive. Instead, let’s assume for the sake of argument that his thesis is correct: Jesus performed no miracles, wrought no atonement, and rose from no tomb. When one is left with such a Christ, what does it mean to say — as Spong says of himself — that one is “a believing Christian”? What does one believe in? How could one persuade anyone else to share this belief?

Spong’s attraction to Jesus seems to be rooted largely in the ethics Jesus taught and lived. Jesus was nice to Samaritans. Jesus didn’t shun lepers. Jesus protected adulteresses from the stoning mobs. All to the good, as hysterical Christians would agree.

Disagreement is likely to begin where Spong’s Jesus starts preaching the Gospel according to Howard Dean. For instance, this Jesus would support the ordination of homosexual bishops and oppose the “authoritarian” institutions of the Christian churches. Why? Because “moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment, as Jesus’ love did, is.” One can charitably assume that, had Spong written more carefully, he would not have implied that all moral judgments are to be forsworn. (His admonition not to judge rests on a judgment against those who are judgmental in ways he disapproves of.) But the principal message of Spong’s Jesus is clear enough: We must set aside unacceptably exclusionary traditions and moralities.

Whether this appeals to you as an ethics will depend on whether you share Spong’s opinions about which exclusions are unacceptable. But even if you do, Spong does not want you to think of Jesus as a moral exemplar merely. Probably he wishes to preserve some necessary connection between Christ and Christianity, and recognizes that the soundness of an ethical system does not depend on who taught it, or whether anyone taught it at all. (We could pattern a very fine Christian ethics on the “life” of Alyosha Karamazov.) How, then, does Jesus transcend the ethical? “As a Christian,” Spong explains, “I live inside a faith system which, at its core, asserts that in the life of this Jesus, that which we call God has been met, encountered and engaged.”

A FAREWELL TO THEISM
“That which we call God,” eh? And what might that be? Spong starts by telling us what it isn’t. The “theistic definition of God” is dead, he says. What he means is that he does not believe — and does not think anyone else should believe — in “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and able to invade the world in miraculous ways to bless, to punish, to accomplish the divine will, to answer prayers and to come to the aid of frail, powerless human beings.” Our goal should be to “separate God understood theistically from the experience of God that we claim for Jesus.”

Unfortunately, Spong never explains what his nontheistic God is. His book abounds in passages such as this: “There is something about this Jesus that erases tribal boundaries, that calls people to step beyond security systems and that flows into a new humanity unbounded by the walls of protectionism. That is one huge dimension of what it means to say that God was experienced as present in this man Jesus.” One reads on in the hope that Spong will come around to the other dimension — to whatever it is about God that cannot be reduced to ethics. (For if the word “God” denotes nothing but the totality of sound ethical propositions, it is simply a metaphor for what could be discussed more clearly without it.) One’s hope is finally disappointed in the last chapter, when Spong admits to having no idea what God is: “I cannot tell anyone who or what God is. . . . The reality of God can never be defined. It can only be experienced, and we need always to recognize that even that experience may be nothing more than an illusion.”

Spong’s position, then, is this: There is a higher reality, and we have named it “God.” Somehow we encounter this higher reality in the life of Jesus. But we have no idea what the higher reality is, and can say nothing intelligible about it.

This view has one troublesome little catch: It destroys the possibility of justifying the claim that the higher reality exists. It would be one thing if we had a way of cognizing some aspect of the higher reality, an ability to articulate propositions about it and adduce reasons for thinking these propositions true. It is quite another to posit the higher reality’s existence simply because you feel you have “encountered” it. If you can say nothing about what you have encountered — and if the supposed encounter might in fact be “an illusion” — how can you know that you have encountered anything at all?

The blindness of this epistemological alley is all too apparent when Spong uses “the language of human analogy” to describe his experience of God. What he actually describes is his feelings. “I experience life to be more than I can embrace.” “I experience love as something beyond me.” “I experience being as something in which I participate, but my being does not come close to exhausting the content of Being itself.” This is all fascinating as one man’s account of his personal psychology. But there is no reason to suppose that what John Shelby Spong feels tells us anything other than what it feels like to be John Shelby Spong.

Even if we could somehow know that the nontheistic God existed, its obscurity would vitiate Spong’s conception of Christian ethics. Consider again my original question: What is a religion good for? One answer is that it goes on where Spong stops. It offers an account of the higher reality. It is not just an aggregation of imperatives, but a group of answers to such questions as: Why does something exist instead of nothing? Is there a supreme being? If so, what is his nature, and what does he expect of me? Will I survive my death? What must I do to ensure that my life after death is agreeable?

A religion’s answers to these questions are perfectly intelligible, even if its success in justifying them is open to debate. This intelligibility in turn provides a secure foundation for the religion’s ethics. If you believe (1) that you owe obedience to God and (2) that God has commanded you not to murder, it is a simple deductive step to the conclusion (3) that you ought not murder. I am not saying that an ethics must make reference to claims about God. But Spong thinks Jesus’s ethics is grounded in the divinity that was present in Jesus. By insisting that this divinity is unknown and unknowable, he destroys the possibility of such grounding.

SOMETHING ERE THE END . . .
So the nontheistic God is mute. It can say nothing about how we should live. Worse, it can say nothing about how we should die. That too is something a religion — or a theistic one, at least — is good for. Spong seems to recognize this. Theism arose, he says, as an adaptive response to the irreducible anxiety of self-consciousness, and in particular the fear of death. Whether or not he has his evolutionary biology right, it is surely true that theism, coupled with a belief in personal immortality, helps ease the way into that good night.

John Shelby Spong is an old man. In a passage both moving and sincere, he writes of his own approaching end and his hope to write another book:

I have one further literary task that I hope to complete in my already more than ‘three score and ten years.’ . . . I want to take the idea of a nontheistic but eminently real God met in the human Jesus and from that vantage point address the subject of death and dying, as well as what the church has tried to say throughout the ages on the subject of eternal life. . . . If my idea of God and my vision of a redefined Jesus cannot speak to the human anxiety of death, then I do not believe that I have found either the new beginning for the Jesus story that I seek or one that will survive.

It is hard to see how the new story can survive when the God at its center is nothing but an overwrought sentimentality plummeting down an abyss. If that is all we have left, Spong can keep his Christianity. There would be more dignity and courage — to say nothing of honesty — in facing life’s terrible question marks with a mind that does not flinch.

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, announced the meeting during a visit with Canadian bishops in Toronto this week. He will be accompanied on his visit by key archbishops, or "primates," from conservative overseas Anglican churches, where pressure has been steadily building to eject American Episcopalians from the global confederation of churches.

The meetings will be Sept. 20-25.

The event will briefly position the Crescent City at the center of the Anglican universe, but for an unlikely reason. The Episcopal Church's House of Bishops previously scheduled a meeting here to see its church-related hurricane relief work. That will come precisely as Anglican leaders worldwide demand an answer from Americans on contentious questions of homosexuality dividing the worldwide church.

Williams, who has struggled to keep opposing sides together, is head of the Church of England and the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest church, behind the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Yet his New Orleans visit might not become a high-profile celebration marked by civic receptions and mass public events, one church official said.

That's at least partly because Williams is fully occupied trying to steer the Anglican Communion through one of the most perilous moments in its more-than-450-year history.

The flash point nominally is the church's teaching on homosexuality: whether the Anglican world can live with American Episcopalians' blessing same-sex unions and ordaining partnered gay bishops.

More deeply, it is how the church uses the guides of Scripture, tradition and reason to make all moral judgments.
On one side are 2.3 million overwhelmingly liberal Episcopalians who recently elected as their presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, not only the global communion's first woman primate, but one who, in her former Nevada diocese, supported same-sex unions and the ordination of the Rev. Gene Robinson as the church's first partnered gay bishop.

Opposed are conservative Anglicans in the Southern Hemisphere, especially Africa and Asia, who take a traditional Scriptural view of homosexuality.

American Episcopalians have the wealth, sending tens of millions of dollars to Anglican churches overseas. But conservatives have the numbers. Nigeria alone, headed by the outspoken conservative Archbishop Peter Akinola, has 17 million Anglicans -- seven times the United States membership.

In February, Anglican primates from around the world met in Tanzania and issued the American church an ultimatum: Stop authorizing same-sex unions and stop ordaining partnered gay bishops. They gave the Americans a Sept. 30 deadline, giving the New Orleans meeting an unexpected prominence.

In March, U.S. bishops meeting outside Houston rejected the ultimatum, but they begged Williams for the face-to-face meeting he will grant in New Orleans.

Like Williams, Bishop Charles Jenkins of the Diocese of Louisiana has sought to keep disaffected conservative Episcopalians from walking out of the American church, but since Katrina, he has been occupied with other issues, including raising money and organizing local church-related relief work.

He said New Orleans' needs were much on his mind as he thought about Williams' visit.

"I hope this will be an opportunity for him to visit and see and bless the work of Episcopal Relief and Development in New Orleans," Jenkins said.

"It's when we're involved in this kind of work that some issues that so divide us take on their proper perspective. I think one of the reasons we're holding together here in the Diocese of Louisiana is that we have a relief and development focus, and not on ourselves or others."

Jenkins said the meeting might bring 500 to 600 visitors to New Orleans. About 100 would be bishops, and the rest staff, said the Rev. Jan Nunley, a church spokeswoman. Jenkins said he has asked each bishop to come with a gift of $10,000 to be split between the dioceses of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Louisiana's share would help support a post-Katrina Episcopalian church that relief workers founded in the Lower 9th Ward, he said.
. . . . . . .
Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3344

This imbalance is already a distortion of sorts, especially since Williams also once notes that the “‘liberal’ or revisionist case” is not helped by the fact that “everyone in [Paul’s] imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents.” And yet the reporting is not a complete distortion of Williams’ remarks. The dominant point that Williams makes rests with “conservative” misinterpretation of the text’s “movement,” not with the “liberal” reading. Moreover, even when he states that his own reading is “not helpful for a ‘liberal’ or revisionist case,” he carefully couches his language. He does not say that Paul himself fully accepted the view of homosexual practice per se as “immoral” (perhaps, but only perhaps, this can be assumed) but refers instead to what Paul’s readers think and that only with regard to “the same-sex relations of the culture around them,” leaving open the possibility that their opposition to homosexual practice was limited only to common exploitative forms. Then, too, he states that same-sex relations were “as obviously immoral as . . . disobedience to parents,” which is a distortion of Paul’s point in Romans 1:18-32. To indicate, as Paul does, that any form of sin could get one excluded from the kingdom of God if personal merit is the criterion of evaluation is not the same as saying that all forms of sin are equally abhorrent to God (the latter point Paul and Scripture generally deny categorically).

I reproduce below Williams’ remarks on homosexual practice and put in boldface the most relevant portions. A full copy of his address, which he delivered at an event hosted jointly by Wycliffe and Trinity theological colleges in Toronto, can be obtained at the Archbishop’s site at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/070416.htm or, for a better format, http://www.anglican.ca/news/news.php?newsItem=2007-04-16_abc.news.

My second example [note: the first was John 14:6] is even more contentious in the present climate; and once again I must stress that the point I am making is not that the reading I proposes settles a controversy or changes a substantive interpretation but that many current ways of reading miss the actual direction of the passage and so undermine a proper theological approach to Scripture. Paul in the first chapter of Romans famously uses same-sex relationships as an illustration of human depravity -- along with other 'unnatural' behaviours such as scandal, disobedience to parents and lack of pity. It is, for the majority of modern readers the most important single text in Scripture on the subject of homosexuality, and has understandably been the focus of an enormous amount of exegetical attention. What is Paul's argument? And, once again, what is the movement that the text seeks to facilitate? The answer is in the opening of chapter 2: we have been listing examples of the barefaced perversity of those who cannot see the requirements of the natural order in front of their noses; well, it is precisely the same perversity that affects those who have received the revelation of God and persist in self-seeking and self-deceit.

The change envisaged is from confidence in having received divine revelation to an awareness of universal sinfulness and need. Once again, there is a paradox in reading Romans 1 as a foundation for identifying in others a level of sin that is not found in the chosen community.

Now this gives little comfort to either party in the current culture wars in the Church. It is not helpful for a 'liberal' or revisionist case, since the whole point of Paul's rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same-sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents. It is not very helpful to the conservative either, though, because Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading /hearing subject who has been up to this point happily identifying with Paul's castigation of someone else. The complex and interesting argument of chapter 1 about certain forms of sin beginning by the 'exchange' of true for false perception and natural for unnatural desire stands, but now has to be applied not to the pagan world alone but to the 'insiders' of the chosen community. Paul is making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding. As I have said, this does nothing to settle the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment. But I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture . . . is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community.

Now I am in full agreement that it is essential to read a specific passage in its broader literary context; that is, to recognize (as Williams’ puts it) that the passage in question is “part of a rhetorical process or argument” and must be read “as a full unit,” giving due attention to “the actual direction of the passage” and its “movement.” In fact, my critique of Williams is precisely that he has not accurately taken into account Paul’s “movement” in Romans and in his letters as a whole, which has led him to a misapplication of the text. He similarly misinterprets “the way, the truth, and the life” text in John 14:6, which I will comment on more briefly at the end of this response. Before I proceed with my response to Williams, a word needs to be said about what Williams was doing and not doing and what I am doing and not doing in this article. What Williams was not doing in his address was settling the question of whether Rom 1:24-27 condemns homosexual relations absolutely, that is, even when such relations are non-exploitative and loving, and entered into by persons homosexually oriented. This is what Williams apparently means when he says that his reading of Romans 1-2 “does nothing to settle the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment.” His remark cannot mean that he has nothing to say about the main question raised by the passage in its context, that is, its “movement” and “direction” of the text as it leads to Romans 2, because Williams’ precise point in these four paragraph is to explain what this movement or direction is and how such a movement or direction constrains the church’s application of Rom 1:24-27.

Williams’ point is that Paul’s “primary point [is] not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding” who are “happily identifying with Paul’s castigation of someone else” and oblivious to the fact of “universal sinfulness and need,” including their own. Therefore, Williams suggests, even if homosexual practice were absolutely rejected by Paul in a way that would include committed homosexual unions—a point that Williams begs off debating here—that would still be secondary to Paul’s use of his remarks in Rom 1:24-27, namely, that one ought not to be judging those who engage in such behavior since we are all sinners. He infers that the church should take note of this primary point and not be judging persons who enter into homosexual unions or making too much of an issue of homosexual relations, at least not to a point where it may lead to a rift between ECUSA and the Anglican Communion generally, for we are all sinners anyway.

It is precisely Williams’ contextual use of Rom 1:24-27 that I contest in my article. Because Williams did not address the exegetical question of whether Paul’s indictment of homosexual relations was absolute, I do not address it directly here but presume it on the basis of hundreds of pages of work that I have previously done on the subject.

See especially: The Bible and Homosexual Practice (Abingdon, 2001), esp. pp. 229-395; Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Fortress, 2003), esp. pp. 74-88, 101-2, along with online notes at http://www.robgagnon.net/TwoViews.htm;

“Does the Bible Regard Same-Sex Intercourse as Intrinsically Sinful?” in Christian Sexuality (ed. R. E. Saltzman; Kirk House, 2003), 106-55, esp. 128-51;

“A Comprehensive and Critical Review Essay of Homosexuality, Science, and the ‘Plain Sense’ of Scripture, Part 2,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 25 (Dec. 2003): 179-275, esp. pp. 206-65 (online at http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/homoBalchHBTReview2.pdf); “

Why the Disagreement over the Biblical Witness on Homosexual Practice?” in Reformed Review 59 (2005): 19-130, esp. pp. 62-86, online at: http://wtseminary.gospelcom.net/pdf/reformreview/gagnon_autm05.pdf;

“Does Jack Rogers’s New Book ‘Explode the Myths’ about the Bible and Homosexuality and ‘Heal the Church?’” Installment 3, pp. 3-15 at http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/RogersBookReviewed3.pdf;

and “How Bad Is Homosexual Practice According to Scripture and Does Scripture’s View Apply to Committed Homosexual Unions?” pp. 17-22, online at http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/homosexWinterResponse.pdf.

Instead, with Williams, I focus on the literary context for Rom 1:24-27. My own point is that, contrary to what Williams claims, the context for Rom 1:24-27 does not suggest to the Roman Christians (or to us) that we should stop judging sexual immorality in the midst of the community of faith. Now one might argue that contextual analysis of a passage in Scripture is still part of exegesis. I would agree. But the context of Williams’ own remarks makes clear that he means by “not settling the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment” only the exegesis proper of the Rom 1:24-27 itself, namely, whether it rejects homosexual unions absolutely.

Let me also say that I respect the Archbishop as a caring person and able theologian (though he is not a biblical scholar). There is much in his address as a whole that is commendable, which makes his misinterpretation in these two specific examples that much more regrettable. Paul’s own application of Romans 1:24-27 to believers later in Romans Williams implies in his remarks that leaders of the church err in opposing the affirmation of homosexual practice in the church too strongly, not necessarily because homosexual practice can be a moral act (whether it is or not Williams does not say in this article though in previous work he has said that it can be), but rather because Paul’s primary point at the beginning of Romans 2 was to criticize persons who judge those engaging in the sins cited in Rom 1:18-32. So Williams: ·

“It is precisely the same perversity that affects those who have received the revelation of God and persist in self-seeking and self-deceit.” ·

It is a misuse of Rom 1:24-27 to use it as a “foundation for identifying in others a level of sin that is not found in the chosen community.” ·

“Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading/hearing subject who has been up to this point happily identifying with Paul’s castigation of someone else.” · “Paul is making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law-abiding.” In short, Williams appears to be saying that so-called “conservatives”—let it be known that opposing strongly the affirmation of homosexual practice in the church hardly makes one a theological “conservative” (more a centrist)!—should stop making such an issue of homosexual practice and attend to their own sins, which are just as great. Hence, Reuters’ headline, “Anglican head Williams says anti-gays misread Bible,” is not likely to be far off the mark. Indeed, the headline accurately captures the primary substance and focus of his remarks on homosexuality.

Let us begin by affirming what Paul in his letter to the Romans was emphatically not telling believers in Rome. Paul was not telling the Roman Christians to avoid passing judgment on fellow believers who actively engage in sexual immorality of an extreme sort, including homosexual practice. To the contrary: When Paul next used the term “sexual impurity” (akatharsia) in his letter (6:19), a term that he used elsewhere in Romans only in 1:24-27 to describe homosexual practice, he did so in direct address to the Roman believers. He reminded them that believers in Christ are no longer “slaves to sexual impurity,” for to continue in such behavior was to engage in acts of which they should now be “ashamed” (echoing the shame language that dominates Rom 1:24-27 regarding homosexual practice). Such acts, he says, lead to death and the loss of eternal life (6:19-23; compare 1:32). Indeed, Paul’s entire argument around the question “Why not sin?” since we are “under grace and not under the law” (6:15; cf. 6:1) culminates in 8:12-14 with the response: If you continue to live in conformity to (the sinful desires operating in) the flesh you are going to die. But if by means of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For only those who are being led by the Spirit of God are children of God.

This quotation makes it clear, if it were not already, that mouthing a few words of confession that Christ is Lord does not exempt Christians from leading a life consonant with that confession, nor even from the dire eternal consequences that would arise from failing to do so. For Paul the outcome for a believer who lives under the primary sway of sin in the flesh is no different from the outcome for an unbeliever who so lives. Both alike face the prospect of exclusion from God’s eternal rule. Again in Romans 13, Paul makes clear that sexual impurity is definitely not one of the matters of ethical indifference, like diet and calendar issues, that later in 14:1-15:13 Paul will warn believers against judging fellow believers for. Paul insists in 13:13-14 that, in view of the coming day of salvation and judgment, believers “lay aside works of darkness” such as “immoral sexual activities and licentious acts” and thereby to “make no provision to gratify the sinful desires of the flesh.”

The Greek word for “immoral sexual activities” is koitai, which literally means, “lyings” or “beds,” a term that obviously links up with arsenokoitai, “men lying with a male,” in 1 Cor 6:9 as a particular instance of an immoral “lying.” The Greek word for “licentious acts” is aselgeiai, which refers to a lack of self-restraint with respect to refraining from prohibited sexual behaviors. This takes us back to the discussion in Rom 6:19-22 where Paul insists that believers stop putting their bodily members at the disposal of the kind of “sexual impurity” cited in 1:24-27, which makes them slaves of sin and lacking in sexual self-restraint. If Paul had wanted his converts to stop passing judgment on fellow converts who were engaged in unrepentant sexual immorality then he would have been a monumental hypocrite, inasmuch as he himself regularly made such judgments (we’ll see more in a moment). It is far more likely, though, that Williams has misinterpreted Paul than that Paul was a monumental hypocrite, in my opinion.

The immediate context of Romans 1-2 Indeed, nothing in the immediate context of Romans 1:24-27 suggests that Paul would have been opposed to believers making the judgment that homosexual practice puts the offender at dire risk of facing God’s wrath, warning in the most earnest terms those who engage in such practice, and insisting that a church puts its status as church in jeopardy when it affirms or tolerates such immorality (this last point, incidentally, is not limited to Paul in the New Testament; see, for example, the risen Christ’s warnings to the churches in Pergamum and Thyatira in Revelation 2). For Rom 1:24-27 depicts homosexual practice as a particularly egregious instance of “sexual uncleanness,” grossly “contrary to nature,” and an “indecency.” In fact, Paul treats homosexual practice as analogous on the horizontal dimension of life to the vertical offense of idolatry since in both cases humans suppress the truth about God and his will for our lives that ought to have been self-evident in creation structures still intact in nature (1:19-23, 25).

Does Williams think that Paul would have chastised believers as “self-righteous” for speaking vigorously against Christians who worshipped gods other than the God of Jesus Christ? I would hope not since Paul clearly regarded belief in Christ as absolutely antithetical to idol worship. For example, he described the conversion of the Thessalonians as a turning from idols to serve the living God (1 Thess 1:9-10). Moreover, he severely chastised the “strong” among the Corinthian believers just for eating in a idol’s temple, to say nothing of worshipping an idol, because it could provoke God to jealousy and wrath (1 Cor 10:14-22). Yet, if Williams would concur with this point, then he would have to give up his point about Paul being opposed to “judging” persons who engage in unrepentant homosexual practice. For Paul’s remarks in chap. 2, where Paul allegedly says, “don’t judge” (incidentally, he doesn’t say this, as we shall see), as much follow the indictment of idolatry as they do the indictment of homosexual relations. Since we noted above Paul’s stern opposition to idolatry in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians as illustrations of his opposition to idolatry in all his letters, it bears mentioning that we see in these letters an equally stern opposition to any continuance in sexually immoral behavior.

When Paul begins his moral exhortation in his first extant letter, he starts off by warning his converts not to engage any longer in the forms of “sexual impurity” (akatharsia) that once characterized their lives as Gentiles; and that failure to heed such a warning would leave them prey to an avenging God (1 Thess 4:1-8). Similarly, in 1 Corinthians Paul’s couples idolatry and sexual immorality as the two main offenses that led God to wipe out the wilderness generation (10:6-12) and focuses an additional three chapters of his letter (5-7) on the paramount importance of sexual purity for believers. One need only compare Paul’s command to “flee from idolatry” in 1 Cor 10:14 with his equally urgent command to “flee sexual immorality” in 1 Cor 6:18. Obviously, then, in Romans 1-2 Paul is not telling his readers to stop passing judgment on severe and obvious cases of idolatry and sexual immorality. For Paul states that idolatry and same-sex intercourse, among other offenses, are already and in themselves manifestations of God’s wrath (not grace). The wrath appears initially in the form of God stepping back and not restraining humans from engaging in self-dishonoring behavior that arises from gratifying innate desires to do what God strongly forbids. Such behavior degrades the human being who has received the imprint of God’s image. The continual heaping up of such sins, Paul says, will ultimately lead to cataclysmic judgment on the eschatological Day of Wrath (1:32; 2:3-9). Thus to accept homosexual practice in the church would be to consign persons who engage in such behavior to the ongoing wrath of God with the ultimate prospect of exclusion from God’s kingdom (compare also 1 Cor 6:9-10; Gal 5:19, 21; Eph 5:3-8). This is not grace but wrath. This is not love but hate. This is not the absence of judgment but the substitution of one’s own verdict of acquittal for God’s verdict of wrath. Paul in Romans 2 is debating, in the first instance, with a non-Christian, imaginary Jewish dialogue partner or interlocutor.

Despite what Williams suggests, Paul does not tell the interlocutor to stop judging pagans for committing idolatry, sexual immorality, and an array of other sins (including murder, 1:29), as if by doing so the interlocutor could escape God’s judgment of his own sins. Rather, Paul maintains both that God’s judgment is indeed coming on those who do such things and that the interlocutor, when he does these or similar things, will likewise face God’s wrath if he does not repent (2:3-4). The interlocutor as a righteous Jew may sin less quantitatively and qualitatively than Gentiles but he knows more about God’s will through Scripture and so the culpability level for suppressing what truth he does suppress rises. Essentially Paul is moving the interlocutor to the view that mere possession of the Jewish law of Moses does not exempt him from responding to the offer of salvation in Jesus Christ, an offer equally accessible to sinful Gentiles (3:3-26). Everybody is in want of the atoning, amends-making death of Jesus and the indwelling Spirit of Christ that makes possible a life lived “for God” (compare Gal 2:19-20). Yes, Paul has laid a trap for the Jewish interlocutor who evaluated God’s judgment against the Gentile world as “just” and “righteous” (3:3-8).

However, it is not a trap designed to preclude judgment of immoral behavior within the Christian community. Instead, it is a trap designed to convince moral unbelievers that they too need the grace of God manifested in the atoning death of Christ and the attendant moral transformation that comes with being a recipient of such grace: “For sin shall not exercise lordship over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Rom 6:14). There is also a layered trap for Christians at Rome who judge one another over matters of moral indifference such as diet and calendar (14:1-15:13). As we have seen, though, sexual immorality, like idol worship, does not fall for Paul in the category of moral indifference. Williams thus confuses his own context with the context for Paul’s remarks in Romans. There is a big difference between, on the one hand, Paul chastising a non-believing Jew for using his sense of moral superiority to consign unbelieving Gentiles to hell while exempting himself from the need to receive Jesus as Savior (Rom 2:12-29) and, on the other hand, Williams chastising some in the church today for regarding the institutional affirmation of sexual immorality of an extreme sort among its leaders by some ecclesiastical bodies a problem for ongoing institutional affiliation.

The parallel case of the incestuous man in 1 Corinthians 5 Just how far off the mark Williams’ theological analysis of Paul’s views on the matter is becomes clear when one looks at how Paul deals with the case of the incestuous man in 1 Cor 5-6. There an exasperated Paul asks the Corinthian believers the rhetorical question: “Is it not those inside (the church) that you are to judge?” (5:12). Williams’ address suggests that his response to such a question would be “no,” at least as regards the comparable case of homosexual practice. For a “yes” for Williams would mean that one has not given sufficient attention to “universal sinfulness and need.” But from Paul’s standpoint “no” is the wrong answer. “No” is the answer that the “tolerant” Corinthian believers would give, but not the answer Paul wants them to give. Far from tolerating the case of incest, Paul advocated temporary removal of the offending member from the life of the community and did so not only for the sake of the purity and holiness of the community but also for the sake of the offender who needed to be recovered for the kingdom of God (5:3-11; 6:9-11).

Paul did not take the approach adopted by Williams, namely to caution the Corinthians against self-righteously passing judgment on the incestuous man’s behavior. Paul also, in the broader context, explicitly rejected any attempt to view the morally significant issue of sexual immorality as comparable to morally indifferent issues surrounding dietary practices (6:12-20). Clearly when Paul spoke of judging those “inside” the church he qualified that judgment in many ways. Judgment should be implemented (1) in a spirit of gentleness and an awareness that one’s own self is vulnerable to temptation (Gal 6:1); (2) in a mournful manner (1 Cor 5:2) and with regard for the offender as a brother and not an enemy (2 Thess 3:15); (3) out of a desire to reclaim the offender for God’s kingdom rather than punitively condemn the offender to hell; (4) with a zeal to restore him quickly and enthusiastically to the community following repentance (1 Cor 5:5; 2 Cor 2:5-11; 7:8-13); and (5) in proportion to the recalcitrance of the offender and the severity of the offense (1 Thess 5:14; 1 Cor 5:1-2). Yet, equally as clearly, Paul insisted that the church do its job of judging those within the community of faith who have deviated into serious sexual immorality. Anything less would be unloving.

Perhaps Williams would respond that a loving and consensual relationship between a man and his mother or stepmother is far more serious than a loving and consensual relationship between persons of the same sex. And yet I don’t see how Williams could demonstrate such a point from Paul, taken in his historical context. For all the evidence from ancient Israel and early Judaism, as well as Paul’s own description in Rom 1:24-27, indicates that Paul regarded homosexual practice as comparable to or worse than a case of man-mother incest, even of a consensual and loving sort. There is no evidence that Jesus’ view of the matter would have been any different since Jesus predicated his view on marital ‘twoness’ on the ‘twoness’ of the sexes: “male and female he made them” (Gen 1:27) and “for this reason a man may . . . be joined to his woman and the two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24; both cited in Mark 10:6-8; Matt 19:4-6). Both incest and homosexual practice are instances of immoral sexual relations between persons too much alike on a structural or formal level (one as regards kinship, the other as regards the sex or gender of the participants). The only difference between the two is that a two-sexes prerequisite for sexual relations is more strongly grounded in the creation texts and is more absolutely sustained in Scripture generally and in the traditions of early Judaism (i.e. with no exceptions) than is even a prohibition of incest.

Moreover, the issue of too much structural sameness, of a narcissistic arousal for what one already is, is if anything more keenly felt in the case of same-sex intercourse than in the case of consensual, adult incest. Of the two, the prohibition of incest and the prohibition of same-sex intercourse, the prior and more foundational analogue is clearly the prohibition of same-sex intercourse. Partly what this boils down to is this: Williams does not regard homosexual practice as a particularly significant sexual offense, if even an offense at all. (I have read in the press that he may have moderated or even changed some of his earlier strong support for homosexual practice but the evidence for such a change is at best conflicting.) For I can’t imagine Williams arguing that it would be inappropriate for the church to split over the issue of, say, ordaining bishops who were in committed sexual bonds with a parent, full sibling, or adult child. I suspect that in such a context he would never introduce issues such as ‘judgmentalism’ or self-righteousness or divisiveness on the part of those who opposed ordination of such. Yet neither he nor anyone else who talks in this way has made a convincing case that Paul would have viewed loving and committed same-sex intercourse involving people “oriented” to such behavior as a significantly lesser offense than adult, consensual, and loving incest of the first order. Until he or anyone else makes such a convincing case, no basis exists for arguing that severing ties with a schismatic Episcopal Church of the United States of America would be an unfaithful, self-righteous, and anti-Pauline act. Indeed, the truly anti-Pauline act would be a business-as-usual approach to a renegade body that endorses sexual immorality among its leaders. To sum it up, then, Williams’ point in his discussion of Romans was to urge “conservatives” who have been staunch in their opposition to homosexual practice to back off in judging those who engage in homosexual behavior, given the immediately ensuing context in Rom 2:1-3. He is not merely suggesting that in the very process of judging—which the church certainly should do in cases where believers are engaged in unrepentant idolatry and sexual immorality—we should be careful not to be self-righteous. There is a difference. The latter is an acceptable read of Paul generally; the former is not. Williams begs off discussing whether Paul’s prohibition is absolute but suggests that even if it is absolute the larger point in the context is “don’t judge.” As I have argued above, Paul never tells the Jewish interlocutor in Romans 2 “don’t judge idolatry and sexual immorality” (can anyone locate for me the text where Paul allegedly says this?). Paul himself judges idolatry and sexual immorality in Rom 1:18-32, where he indicts all Gentiles in preparation for his point that all need Christ.

Moreover, Paul himself, as I have shown, repeatedly in his letters, including the letter to the Romans, warns believers against engaging in sexual immorality (which for him included homosexual practice as a particular egregious form of “sexual impurity”) because such will not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul can hardly be criticizing the Jewish interlocutor here merely for the act of judging Gentiles who engage in such acts. No, the issue here is that the unbelieving Jewish interlocutor is using his sense of moral superiority to exempt himself, ultimately, from the necessity of believing in Christ. The issue is not that of the community of believers warning another offending believer to stop engaging in sexual immorality lest it lead to exclusion from God’s kingdom and the community even going so far as to put such an offender on discipline. Paul affirms, not rejects, precisely this kind of warning and disciplinary action in the case of the unrepentant incestuous man in 1 Cor 5 and 6:9-10. Williams wrongly understands the overarching issue or “movement” of the text of Romans 1:24-27 as denying just such a reaction to homosexual practice. Williams ought to have targeted the bulk of his remarks on the subject against “liberal revisionists” seeking to validate homosexual practice rather than to have aimed his main volley against “conservatives.” This is not the first time that I have addressed these context issues. Much (though not all) of the material above in a different form can be found in works of mine already published (for full citations see above), such as The Bible and Homosexual Practice, pp. 277-84: “Does Romans 2:1-3:20 Condemn Those Who Condemn Homosexual Practice?” and pp. 240-46: “Romans 1:18-3:20 Within the Sweep of Paul’s Letter and the Situation at Rome”) and a more recent article, “Why the Disagreement over the Biblical Witness on Homosexual Practice?” (Reformed Review 59:1 [2005]: 19-130, esp. pp. 83-90: “Addendum: Does Paul reject judgment of homosexual practice?” and “Is Homosexual Practice the Diet and Circumcision Issue of Today?”). It would be nice in the future if persons making the kinds of claims about Paul that the Archbishop has made could at least acknowledge the counter-arguments already made and attempt to respond to them. If I have misunderstood the particulars of Archbishop Williams’ remarks in any way, then I would be happy to be corrected. I respect him and nothing said here should be interpreted otherwise. Of course, I would be delighted to discover that the Archbishop actually does not believe, or has now changed his mind, that Paul warned his converts against judging believers who were actively engaged in sexually immoral behavior of a severe sort such as homosexual practice.

Williams’ Misreading of John 14:6: Way, Truth, and Life A final short word needs to be given about Williams’ other illustration of the need to understand a passage of Scripture in its full literary context. Williams suggests that Jesus’ words in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me,” do not mean in context that “salvation depends upon explicit confession of Christ,” nor do they refute “any attempt to create a more ‘inclusive’ theology of interfaith relations.” Rather, the actual question being asked is not about the fate of non-Christians; it is about how the disciples are to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary clearing of the way which they are to walk. . . . It is about the move from desolation in the face of the cross . . . to confidence that the process is the work of love coming from and leading to the Father.This is a misreading precisely of the context that Williams wants us all to uphold. This “I am” saying is part of a much broader witness of “I am” sayings and identifications made throughout the Gospel of John. Jesus compares himself to the ladder of Jacob (he is the link between heaven and earth, especially at the moment of the cross), the well of Jacob (with Jesus giving ‘living water,’ the Spirit, after the drinking of which one will never thirst/die), the bronze serpent of Moses (when people ‘look on’ or believe in him they live, eternally), the manna or “bread from heaven” associated with Moses (people must ‘eat’ Jesus or die; that is, they must believe on him, especially as the atonement for their sins on the cross when he offers his flesh for the life of the world), the Passover sacrifice (who alone takes away the sins of the world), not only the Good Shepherd but also the Gate itself (through which the sheep must pass if they are to have eternal life), the vine (people must abide in him and bear fruit or they will be thrown in the fire), and so on.

Moreover, throughout John’s Gospel insistence upon believing in this specific being is mandated in order to receive eternal life (John 3:16 is only the most famous of many examples). There are also various places where those who do not believe in him are said to be facing destruction; for example, John 3:17-19 and 36-37, which states that those who do not believe in him are condemned already, before the Day of Judgment, the wrath of God now remaining on them. The whole point of the Gospel of John, in its context, is that even good Jews who believe in God and follow Moses cannot avert God’s coming wrath apart from believing in Jesus. If Moses doesn’t suffice, what other religious tradition would?

Although Williams states that his analysis of the context for John 14:6 “certainly does not suggest in any direct way a more inclusive approach to other faiths,” the key phrase in Williams’ remark is “in any direct way,” which does not preclude “any indirect way.” Williams is clearly arguing for interpreting the text in such a way that believing in Christ is not necessary for salvation: John 14:6 “is (to say the least) paradoxical if it is used as a simple self-affirmation for the exclusive claim of the Christian institution or the Christian system.” The comfort-factor of the text that Williams cites as the context is not to the exclusion of the affirmation of Jesus as the sole “the Way,” not just “a way” as Williams suggests with his statement that Jesus’ death “is itself the opening of a way” (emphasis added; was this a slip on Williams’ part?). Even Williams admits (paradoxically, to say the least!): “The text in question indeed states that there is no way to the Father except in virtue of what Jesus does and suffers.” Although Thomas’ question is limited to the matter of where Jesus is going, Jesus redirects the question to an affirmation of his unique identity as “the Way.” The way to God, in other words, is not something that Jesus points us to. It is rather something that he embodies uniquely. Thus the immediately ensuing conversation revolves around the importance of recognizing that Jesus is the unique revelation of God (14:7-10). This is the approach of John’s Jesus throughout the Gospel, not just here in the context of 14:6.

Williams’ problem here—as with Rom 1:24-27 where he stops the “movement” of the text at 2:1-3—is that he doesn’t look at the broad movement of the whole of the Gospel of John. The broader context of the Gospel as a whole gives further context for the statement “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Everywhere in John’s Gospel this is elucidated as requiring believing in him and so John 14:6 cannot be interpreted apart from that larger context. If there is eternal life apart from believing in Christ, since the days of Christ’s death and resurrection, God hasn’t told us about it in the pages of the New Testament—and certainly not in the Gospel of John. We cannot assure anyone of salvation apart from explicit confession of Jesus. Perhaps God has something else up the proverbial sleeve that God has chosen not to tell us about for those who do not believe in Jesus Christ. Yet it would be wholly unwarranted to use such speculation as a substantive basis for interfaith dialogue. When Williams claims that John 14:6 is misused when it is “regularly used to insist that salvation depends upon explicit confession of Christ,” he is wrong. This is not a misuse of John 14:6 but rather a correct use, understood in the broad movement of the Gospel as a whole.

In the Larkin Stuart lecture, delivered today at an event hosted jointly by Wycliffe and Trinity theological colleges in Toronto, Dr Williams said that Christians need to reconnect with scripture as something to be listened to and heard in the context of Jesus's invitation to the Eucharist and to work for the Kingdom.

"... The Church's public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn't only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences
itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered."

This, he argues, is crucial in the way in which the communities of Christians are informed by what the Scriptures say:

Take Scripture out of this context of the invitation to sit at table with Jesus and to be incorporated into his labour and suffering for the Kingdom, and you will be treating Scripture as either simply an inspired supernatural
guide for individual conduct or a piece of detached historical record - the typical exaggerations of Biblicist and liberal approaches respectively."

"For the former, the work of the Spirit is more or less restricted to the transformation of the particular believer; for the latter, the life of the community is where the Spirit is primarily to be heard and discerned, with Scripture an illuninating adjunct at certain points."

Dr Williams says that neither isolating texts from their contexts nor dismissing them as limited by prevalent cultural understanding were helpful approaches. Quoting from St John's Gospel, Dr Williams said that Jesus's teaching that 'no-one can come to the Father except by me' (John 14 v 6 ) could not be used simply as a trump card in discussions with other faiths: the verse needed to be heard in its full biblical context as the development
of the question posed by his earlier saying, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' (John 13 v 33).

" ... This certainly does not suggest in an direct way a more inclusive approach to other faiths. But the point is that the actual question being asked is not about the fate of non-Christians; it is about how the disciples are to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary clearing of the way which they are to walk."

Similarly, St Paul's denunciation of homosexuality in Romans 1 v 27 also needed to be properly heard as an ancilliary point in an argument about another matter entirely. That did not diminish its force but made it harder
either to discard it or to use it as a definite proof text.

"It is not helpful for a 'liberal' or revisionist case, since the whole point of Paul's rhetorical gambit is that everyone in his imagined readership agrees in thinking the same sex relations of the culture around them to be as obviously immoral as idol-worship or disobedience to parents. It is not very helpful to the conervative either, though, because Paul insists on shifting the focus away from the objects of moral disapprobation in chapter 1 to the reading / hearing subject who has at this point been happily identifying with Paul's castigation of someone else ... Paul is
making a primary point not about homosexuality but about the delusions of the supposedly law- abiding. "

Christians cannot pick and choose amongst the texts of scripture, he concluded; the whole of the Bible needed ot be understood both as inspired and inspiring - the work of the Holy Spirit:

"It is the spirit that connects the periods of God's communicative action towards humanity and thus connects the diverse texts that make up the one manifold text that we call Holy Scripture. The Spirit's work as 'breathing'
God's wisdom into the text of Scripture is not a magical process that removes bilblical writing from the realm of actual human writing; it is the work of creating one 'movement' out of the diverse historical narratives and
textual deposits that represent Israel's and the Church's efforts to find words to communicate God's communication of summons and invitation.

"Ths Spirit through the events of God's initiative stirs up the words and makes sense of them for the reader/hearer in the Spirit-sustained community. As Karl Barth insisted, this leaves no ground for breaking up Scripture into
the parts we can 'approve' as God-inspired and the parts that are merely human; the whole is human and the whole is offered by God in and through the life of the body; always shaping and determining the form of that life. "

The full text of the Archbishop's lecture can be found at:

http://www.anglican.ca/news/news.php?newsItem=2007-04-16_abc.news

“These are complicated days for our Church internationally, and it’s all the more important to keep up personal relationships and conversations,” he said. “My aim is to try and keep people around the table for as long as possible on this, to understand one another, and to encourage local churches.”

The announcement came during a press conference April 16 at the Anglican Church of Canada’s headquarters in Toronto. No date for the visit was mentioned.

However, the Rev. Jonathan Jennings, the archbishop’s press spokesman, told The Living Church that Archbishop Williams intended to travel to the U.S. sometime in September, after his return from a three-month vacation and sabbatical.

In addition to Archbishop Williams, the invitation from the House of Bishops also included members of the joint standing committee of the primates and the Anglican Consultative Council. It is expected that at least some of those members would accompany the archbishop during the proposed visit.

“I look forward to some sharing of our experiences as pastors as well as discussion of the business of the Communion,” Archbishop Williams said.

(The Rev.) George Conger

To find more news, feature articles, and commentary about the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion not available online, read The Living Church magazine each week. Call 1-800-211-2771 today to start your subscription.

Let me first of all invite them and any and all persons of good will who are concerned about the financial matters of Grace Church and St. Stephen’s to a public forum this morning at 9:00 in the nave of the church at 631 N. Tejon Street. At this meeting the vestry will preside over Fr. Donald Armstrong’s formal response to the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado’s presentment. As the principal officer of the Colorado corporation of Grace Church and St. Stephen’s, I can assure all that the vestry eagerly awaits this forum for the truth to lay bare the reality behind all accusations, allegations, and charges for the matters in question.

As to the substantial points made in the letter of the 19 persons:

1. The vestry voted to leave the Episcopal Church on Monday morning, March 26, 2007 in a meeting at 8:00 am. Ironically, this can be confirmed by the Rev. Dr. Michael O’Donnell, the priest in charge of the dissenting congregation now meeting at Shove Chapel. Fr. O’Donnell sat in supportive attendance of our meeting and immediately thereafter celebrated our decision to leave the Episcopal Church with us over coffee and donuts.

2. The Diocese of Colorado has recently released the presentment against Fr. Armstrong after a year of formulating these allegations. During the course of the year, the Bishop has prevented Fr. Armstrong from making any public response. Fr. Armstrong has never been accorded the opportunity to respond to allegations before any ecclesiastical review committee or court. The sad reality is that for any justice to prevail in the face of such a contorted ecclesiastical system, Fr. Armstrong has had to leave the Episcopal Church of his ancestors in order to be free to defend himself against the allegations in question. This defense formally begins today in a public forum that will be presided over by the vestry with a congregation assembled to pass their own private judgment on the matter.

3. Regarding the question of scholarships, it was in fact, John Simmons, one of the letter’s 19 signatories and Sr. Warden at the time, who approved the scholarships – based in part on the fact that he had similar arrangements at Colorado College. His wife, Frear, was retained by the parish (at her husband’s suggestion) as an attorney to ensure that the vestry’s actions were legal and that the Parish was in compliance with the specified stipulations of the related trusts.

4. The church has not been “taken” or “raided” by the vestry, nor has anyone been forced to leave the parish. The vestry’s action to leave the Episcopal Church on March 26 was a pre-emptive defensive measure to protect the parish from an expected hostile take-over by the Diocese of Colorado. Our current provisional membership status in the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) allows the congregation to make a real choice in self-determination. In the Parish plebiscite scheduled for Sunday, May 20th the congregation will ratify or veto the vestry’s decision to leave the Episcopal Church. In the meantime, all members in good standing have been invited to fully participate in a 40 day period of discernment and to cast their vote on May 20th. At this time Grace Church and St. Stephen’s will either formally separate from the Episcopal Church or remain in it.

Frankly, the Bishop’s effort to establish an alternative dissenting church is premature, divisive, schismatic, and unhelpful to the process we have set up for full participation of our body in this crucial decision making process about the future of the Parish.

5. We disagree with opinion of the 19 and believe that Grace Church and St. Stephen’s as a Colorado non-profit corporation has the lawful right of selfdetermination.

As is publicly known, the Parish has recently entered El Paso County District Court to protect its rights to self-determination and property, both real and personal.

6. Regarding the letter’s reference to a “foreign leader,” I pray that I am not hearing anti-catholic or even racist connotations in its tone. If this is a reference to the Most Reverend Peter Akinola, Primate of the Church of Nigeria, it deeply saddens me. His missionary diocese in America has been recognized as legitimate by the Primates of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Furthermore, a holy man of God who was nominated to be World Magazine’s “Daniel of the Year” (2006) is undeserving of such contempt.

7. In the letter of the 19’s reaffirmation of their Christian faith and affection for Grace Church and St. Stephen’s, I cordially invite them to return to the parish and worship, pray, and study with us, to be reconciled to their priest of twenty-years, and to fully participate in the 40 days of discernment process concerning the future life of the Parish.

Respectfully,

Jon Wroblewski, Sr. Warden
Grace Church and St. Stephen’s

The Anglican Communion Institute, an international theological think tank funded by Grace Church and St. Stephen’s Parish and whose day-to-day operations were overseen by Armstrong, distanced itself from the church and Armstrong in a statement released Saturday.

“In consequence of the legal and ecclesiastical struggles Grace Church and Fr. Armstrong are now engaged with, we judge it proper to dissolve our relationship with the Web site and all activities of Grace Church ... so that the charges of the Presentment and other matters of public trust and ecclesiastical jurisdiction might be resolved without interference,” the statement said.

Alan Crippen, spokesman for Grace and Armstrong, said he wasn’t quite sure how the ACI could split from the church.

“They just walked away from 85 percent of their funding,” he said. “I don’t know what ACI is without that.”

The ACI is a leading scholarly critic of The Episcopal Church, particularly on the issue of ordaining gay clergy, but has advocated changing Episcopal policy from within.
Armstrong split with the Episcopal Church last month, and Grace’s vestry voted March 26 to align the church with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America — an outgrowth of an Anglican province in Nigeria.

“They have not been pleased with Grace Church’s departure to CANA, and I think that’s the main issue for them,” Crippen said.

During his presentation to Grace congregants Saturday, Armstrong said the ACI provided scholarships and grants for continuing education for clergy, and he said the ACI was the mechanism through which the church paid for his childrens’ college educations. The funding, Armstrong said, was approved by Grace’s wardens.

Timothy Fuller, a former member of Grace’s vestry — the church’s leadership group — and the ACI’s board of directors, told The Gazette several days ago that the ACI board never formally met in the three years he served on it. He resigned from the ACI board in December after Armstrong allegedly told the vestry that the ACI had “borrowed” $170,000 from Grace.

In an interview with The Gazette last week, ACI President the Rev. Christopher Seitz said the ACI should’ve been an inexpensive organization to run.

“The only cost of running the Institute is our time, which we give away, and a Web site, which involves nominal costs. Travel reimbursements were handled by the Executive Director (Armstrong), or we paid for these costs ourselves,” Seitz said via e-mail. “There are no employees, no overhead in a formal sense, no hard-copy publications, and no programme to fund.”

The ACI’s statement Saturday, signed by Seitz and other ACI leaders, reiterated the cost to run ACI was small.

Armstrong was apparently unaware of the ACI’s decision to sever ties Saturday when he addressed the congregation. During the three-hour meeting, Armstrong defended the church’s accounting practices, unveiled his annual salary and hotly denied any wrongdoing.

The sanctuary was nearly full and largely supportive of its embattled rector.

But several congregants questioned Armstrong, and there were signs of the tension that ripped the church apart last month, when Grace’s vestry voted to leave the Episcopal Church. About 200 of the church’s 800 regular attendees now worship as Grace Episcopal Church in Colorado College’s Shove Memorial Chapel.

The meeting marked the first time Armstrong has publicly addressed some of allegations leveled at him by the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado — the most serious of which was that he stole more than $392,000 from the church.

Most of that money was earmarked as scholarships for his children, and Armstrong acknowledged that Grace gave him scholarship money — $40,116 in 2005 alone.
Armstrong said those scholarships were authorized by the church’s wardens — a perk, he said, to bring his compensation up to par with other experienced, big-church Episcopal rectors. His total compensation for 2005 to $141,573 — about $8,000 above the diocesan norm, according to Armstrong’s figures.

In 2006, money earmarked for scholarships was replaced by a big raise in Armstrong’s salary. He made $143,215 last year.

Though about 75 percent of the audience gave Armstrong a standing ovation after he unveiled these figures, but Armstrong’s critics said the compensation isn’t the issue: It’s whether approval should’ve gone through the vestry.

John Hermes, a former vestry member, said the vestry never knew about those funds, though Armstrong insists the scholarships were openly discussed.

Armstrong said that Grace operates under a general budget approved by the vestry, but day-to-day expenses are handled by the rector, treasurer and church wardens. During his presentation, he said the vestry’s never shown this level of concern about financial matters, and suggested former vestry members have turned against him because they’re scared the bishop will sue them for previously shirking their financial responsibilities.
Hermes and other critics say their questions weren’t answered at the meeting. Armstrong skirted some questions by redirecting the conversation and cracking a few jokes, they argue.

The diocese released a statement after the meeting, saying Armstrong’s presentation didn’t “constitute a legitimate response to the serious charges of financial misconduct pending against him.”

Supporters, though, believed Armstrong’s presentation was effective.

“He just refuted virtually everything of importance that’s been thrown at him,” said Jack Gloriod.

The meeting may have been pivotal for the future of Grace. The congregation will vote May 20 whether to sanction the vestry’s decision to leave the Episcopal Church, and Armstrong hoped to dispel lingering questions about his integrity during Saturday’s meeting. He noted he had unveiled his salary, showed portions of his tax reports and stressed the checks and balances built into the church’s accounting.

The vote, according to Armstrong, will determine who gets the church building — at least in the short term. If Armstrong’s supporters win, the diocese will likely try to take the property back through the courts. If congregants loyal to the Episcopal Church win the vote, Armstrong hinted that a vestry member — whose Nebraska bank loaned the church nearly $2.5 million — might call the loan.

Armstrong said that all members of Grace are encouraged to vote, even those currently worshipping at Colorado College’s Shove Memorial Chapel