Anglican Communion News Service - Digest News

The Anglican Archbishop of Wales has said there is no doubt that the worldwide Anglican Communion is in crisis.

The Anglican Archbishop of Wales has said there is no doubt that the worldwide Anglican Communion is in crisis.

Archbishop Barry Morgan, speaking on scripture and sexuality at St Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork last night, said one could be pardoned for thinking that the Anglican Communion had not been interested in any topic other than sexuality since 1998.

He said the ordination of a practising homosexual as a bishop in the USA and the blessing of same-sex relationships in Canada might not have had the repercussions they had, if the 1998 Lambeth Conference had not had such an acrimonious debate about sexuality.

The conference rejected homosexual practice as incompatible with scripture, and advised against the legitimising or blessing same-sex unions or ordaining practising homosexuals.

Morgan said e-mails sent by Christians on the issue were ‘some of the most virulent documents I have come across.’

‘The view of one side is clear: homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture, since all the references to homosexuality in scripture - and there aren't all that many - are negative,’ said Morgan.

‘Those who hold to a different view…would say that the teaching of scripture on homosexuality is not unambiguous or settled beyond question.

‘One has to examine the logic and direction of the Bible as a whole, and not pluck texts from it and use them legalistically.’

The archbishop said it was shocking to see people from the traditional wing of the American Anglican Church ‘blatantly influencing the more conservative primates of provinces (and) making an inflammatory situation potentially explosive.’

‘Primates have briefed against one another and some primates have refused to receive communion from the same altar as other primates,’ he said.

The archbishop said Anglicanism was about diversity in unity. ‘Not only do we have to respect one another's geographical integrity, but also one another's moral and theological integrity,’ he said.

‘We need one another's insights with all our diversities and differences. Anglicanism at its best is the realisation that none of us possesses the truth, and will never do so.’

Morgan said that, for many people not living in the Western world, the consecration of a gay person and the blessing of same sex unions was a ‘sellout to the agenda of the age - a Church that has given in to the culture of liberalism and a Church without morals or discipline, divided and in disarray,’ and a Church that had departed from Biblical teaching.

Article by: Kieron Wood