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Episcopal Church

Mar 20, 2008

Why I am not afraid of schism

The Rev. Paul Gibson, formerly liturgical officer with the Anglican Church of Canada and coordinator of liturgy for the Anglican Communion, offers the following reflection in which he considers the present state of the Communion and concludes that schism is far from the greatest ill that can befall a church. I am not afraid of schism. I am afraid of a church in which some leaders voted to commit themselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptized, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ (from the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1998, Resolution I.10.c), but show little evidence of having acted on that promise. I am afraid of a church in which righteousness is understood to be the enforcement of a small number of prejudicially selected biblical texts to the exclusion of many others, some of greater clarity, forgetting that in the bible righteousness is realized in the practice of justice. There are at the most seven references to homosexuality in the bible (some of them are disputed and all require contextual interpretation) but the word "justice" (or its negative "injustice") appears 194 times.

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