Friday, May 1, 2009
Delivering an extensive survey and commentary on the current inter-Anglican crisis over human sexuality last week at an open meeting of the Evangelical Fellowship of Irish Clergy (EFIC), the Archbishop of Sydney, the Most Revd Peter Jensen, issued a rallying call to Church of Ireland evangelicals to be vigilant that no "official act which endorses sin" should take place in the Church of Ireland.
The meeting, which was held on Monday 20th April at St Saviour’s Church, Dollingstown, Co. Armagh, was attended by approximately 300 clergy and laity.
Archbishop Jensen, who said he had recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of his conversion at a Billy Graham crusade, told his audience that this was a "solemn time" for Anglicans, as the Anglican Communion was facing a crisis over the authority of Scripture. Dr Jensen said that the Anglican Communion was "a very significant body of Christians" in today’s world and that anything that divided it was bad. The Communion enabled a sharing of resources, the delivery of aid and important networking across the globe.
However, he said that the 2003 consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson, a practising gay man, had deeply torn the Communion. Bishop Robinson’s consecration, he added, had been the culmination of years of liberal teaching and had taken place despite the guidance of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the view of which had been "set aside" by the US Episcopal Church.
Since 2003, there had been attempts to "put the Communion together again", but a fundamental issue concerned the "locus of authority". By contrast, however, he said that the policy of liberals in the Communion was to delay decisions because they thought people would eventually agree with them.
Dr Jensen said that among Christians there were differing emphases on the place of reason, magisterium, experience and Scripture in terms of authority, but he went on to assert that in the events in North America "culture has trumped Scripture".
He said that, since the 1960s, Western culture had "slipped its moorings" and that there was now widespread ignorance of the Bible. The shift of culture away from the Church had resulted in biblical teaching being seen as "bizarre". One of the slogans of the current age of heightened individualism, he said, was ‘The reader is the author’, meaning that "you are the master of what you read, you determine what this means".
These developments had impacted on human sexuality issues, Dr Jensen said. An over-emphasis on the individual’s rights had led to an increasing trend towards cohabitation, as people did not want the restrictions of marital commitment. Now, he said, promiscuity was seen as "success". A recent film had depicted a young woman proudly claiming to have had 30 sexual partners, but such a woman was "sick", Dr Jensen said.
Referring to a recent Gafcon Primates’ Council meeting in London, of which he is secretary, Archbishop Jensen said it had been agreed to bring together diverse groups of traditional Anglicans in the US and Canada into a new Anglican province, the Anglican Church in North America, and to commend this to the Communion.
In an exclusive interview with the Gazette earlier in the day, Dr Jensen said he hoped the Archbishop of Canterbury would now be "smiling", because the proposed new province was bringing 100,000 Anglicans together and would avoid further splintering. He said that his vision for the new Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans was of a spiritual movement as opposed to a bureaucracy.
Archbishop Jensen told his Dollingstown audience that, at the recent meeting of Anglican Communion primates in Alexandria, Egypt, some of the primates would not receive Holy Communion with others and some had not wished even to be photographed with others, because of the "pro-cultural" attitude of the primates on the human sexuality issue.
Dr Jensen said that the seven Gafcon primates, in asking the Communion to recognise the new Anglican Church in North America, understood that this was now "uncharted territory", although examples of parallel jurisdiction in Anglicanism could be found.
However, this was an emergency, Dr Jensen said.
Addressing the question as to what the situation would be if same-sex relationships were to be endorsed in the Church of Ireland as they had been in the Diocese of New Westminster, Canada, Dr Jensen made a number of points in his final rallying call at the EFIC-sponsored gathering:
During a question and answer session, Archbishop Jensen stressed the need for the pastoral care of same sex orientated people. He declined to comment on the fact that all the Irish bishops had attended last year’s Lambeth Conference, which he himself had not attended for "fellowship" reasons. He said that some of his friends had attended, and some had not.
In his interview with the Gazette, Dr Jensen said he thought that initially the US Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada would not be in communion with the new Anglican Church in North America. However, he expressed some hope that over time Churches which initially were not in communion with each other might come to be in communion.
He also hoped that, in ten years’ time, the bishops of the new Anglican Church in North America would be invited to the Lambeth Conference "as a matter of course", and he pointed out that Anglo-Catholics as well as evangelicals, and indeed most shades of Anglican opinion, were involved in the new move.
However, Dr Jensen warned that even in ten years’ time the cause of the current crisis - liberal teaching on human sexuality - may not have been resolved. This, he said, was a major cause of division between members of the Anglican Communion and it had to be dealt with "at a spiritual and a repentance level" if the Communion were to return to its former unity.
Archbishop Jensen told the Gazette that the younger generation of evangelicals would be less interested in Church structures, less concerned with the history of the Reformation and increasingly influenced by the communications revolution; while the under-30s evangelicals would be more flexible, they would not be fundamentally different, however, still remaining Bible readers and their heart still beating "strong and true for Jesus and the Bible".
The URL for this article is:
http://www.gazette.ireland.anglican.org/2009/010509/frontpage010509.html
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