The best stand to take

Here is a long, rambling, interesting essay on the issue of gays and the Anglican Church by an "indigenous" pastor (one local to a small church who hasn't attended seminary). Here are some ideas from it.

The Anglican Lambeth Conference, coming up this month, does not set policy, like the United Methodist General Conference last April. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the nominal head, is not a pope, able to issue decrees. However, they can pass resolutions and one resolution passed in 1998 was that homosexual practice was contrary to the teaching of Scripture. It was done through careful diplomacy leading up to that conference. Resolutions cannot be enforced.

So, when Gene Robinson was ordained 5 years later (in 2003) it was seen as those Americans going it alone against a world-wide understanding. Actually, Canada provided a little fuel for the fire is 2002 by adopting blessings for same-sex ceremonies. But Americans rubbed others noses in it when electing a woman as their head in 2006.

The rift comes down to three questions: (1) Is Jesus who he said he is, providing only one way to salvation? (2) Can the authority of scripture be trusted? (3) Are there moral absolutes or merely suggestions on how we are to act?

All that means the rift goes back to the "Elizabethan Settlement" of the 16th century after Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church. What is the source of authority -- Scripture or the pope? Anglicans settled on Scripture, tradition, and reason (later John Wesley would add experience). While the "Settlement" put an end to beheadings, nothing was settled. England went through its own civil wars, regicide, several religious movements and a population that ends to avoid churches.

What is now different is the global scale of the split. In 1960 there were only 50 million Christians (of all denominations) in Africa, now there are over 300 million. In that time most African countries became independent and are now eager to impose their clout on their former colonial masters.

Another way to look at it is marginalized people aligning and converging (a messy process) and the "straight, white, male, clerical, overly educated, financially secure, English-speaking, well-pensioned, professionally established" are being moved to the margins as the formerly marginalized move to the center. In this thinking, fundamentalism is a vestige of a binary view of us and them, orthodox and heretic.

But what good is that binary if Christianity is implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and environmental rape? Why is the split over gays? As Gene Robinson puts it:

“I don’t believe there is any topic addressed more often and more deeply in Scripture than our treatment of the poor, the distribution of wealth, of resources, and the danger of wealth to our souls. One third of all the parables and one sixth of all the words Jesus is recorded to have uttered have to do with this topic, and yet we don’t hear the biblical literalists making arguments about that.”

One of the African Anglican bishops complains of Robinson's ordination by saying the Episcopal Church has violated that 1998 understanding but also the faith their own fathers taught in Africa as missionaries. "We stand where their ancestors stood." Put another way, the African bishop is saying that he gave up his gods, his family structure (polygamy was normal), and his language, even risking being accused of encouraging Western encroachment for the gift of the Christian faith. Now Americans are changing the faith he changed his life to receive.

Lots of people have said and say now that communication is the key. But the "Listening Process" the Anglicans have been trying to practice over homosexuality hasn't gotten very far. The communion bread can only communicate when we stop talking. Communication carries risks: It leaves little room for the ambivalent -- he isn't likely to post on blogs as the two sides bash each other. When we spend so much time "communicating" we are spending less time actually doing -- we are being asked to "take a stand" when the best stand to take is with an actual person in an actual place, such as standing with the gay man whose partner just died of AIDS.

Back to Robinson's issue of the church and the poor: The churches with the most need, such as in Appalachia, should get the priests with the greatest skills. Alas, priest allocation in the Episcopal Church is based on free-market principles. The priests with the greatest skills go to the churches with the greatest resources.

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British news media are reporting there has been a secret meeting between the conservative Anglican bishops, the ones boycotting the Lambeth Conference, and advisors of Pope Benedict. The issue is primarily the inroads gay clergy have made in America and Britain, though women bishops were also discussed. The disgruntled Anglicans are discussing greater unity with the Vatican. Whether that means healing the centuries old split between the conservative Anglican and Catholic churches at the expense of the world-wide Anglican Communion remains to be seen.