I’m aware that this cartoon was drawn for another situation. However, this is kind of how it feels to be gay in the Scottish Episcopal Church at the moment. My guess is that other people feel it too.
We need to pray for a different style of leadership.
Urgently.
My thanks to Dave Walker for making this and other great cartoons available to post occasionally on blogs and to Andrew Swift who drew my attention to it.
My children just don’t understand it. Nor do they understand why I stay.
I suspect that the children of very many Christians in the UK these days don’t understand and don’t stay. We can see that laid out for us in page after page of diocesan and provincial statistics.
And still we are expected to cheer on Archbishops who propose amendements which would institutionalise treating women as having less authority than men and also Bishops who tell us that banning gay people from leadership roles is good.
In both these cases we are supposed to believe that these actions keep the church together. Meanwhile the children leave bewildered.
Hear what the Spirit says to the children.
What surprises me is that it’s the same term “evangelical” that went from connoting “student-ish” in the 90s to “happy” (reserving outright clappy for those of charismatic designation) to “evangelicals come in Open form too!” now to “traditionalist” in matters of Backwards Beyond Belief(TM).
Now I’m used to the arguments being “our tradition, restated more-so and louder” versus “put the Bible in context” – at least one party talking theologically.
For a fresh thought, is the CoE (in particular, but also the AC in general) a bit preoccupied with not losing any *one* bum-on-its-3-legged-seat? There is a tension in the dynamic that could be resolved well by a large-scale rotation in membership – redefine the denominational lines by issues not history – that leads to a slimy weasely position of “I sort of want to go but don’t have the honesty to get on with it so I’ll sit around being a thorn in the canonical flesh and blame the church for trying to push me out”.
Social evolution is too slow; that is where injustice lies.
I often ask me why I stay, and I’m in my late fifties. In the end, it is because I feel cheated without other people to worship with, and, well, to be a kind of thorn in the canonical flesh for the conservatives!!
We had a great day on Sunday at St Mary’s. The Feast of St James in the morning was a lovely interlude into the usual summer Sunday calendar and then a special Choral Evensong sung by the Choir of St Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut. They had been in Lincoln for a week singing…
I just want to applaud Bishop David asking us what we think he should say to the Pope later this year. That’s such a good use of a Primus’s blog. I hope he gets plenty of comments.
Here is a quick video of the Botafumeiro swinging in Compostella last year as promised in the sermon this morning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Qiv3F3bv4&feature=related Commentary is a bit intrusive. Watch out for the brilliant catch and swirl movement by the chief tiraboleiro as it is brought to rest at the end. There is a simulation of how it…
For the Feast of St Hamish.
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