Episcopal Church

Last month, Steve wrote a post on the NH Diocese of the Episcopal Church as it was time to replace retiring Bishop Gene Robinson (the first openly gay Bishop whose ordination pretty much set afire the whole of the Anglican Church).  At the time, the choices were another gay man, a divorced woman, and a heterosexual man.  The post he linked to assured everyone that even the latter was “a friend of the LGBT movement”.

One of our loyal readers decided to take us to task for putting up such a post:

Skip – I’m calling you to task.  This is inappropriate.  But mentioning whether someone upholds all ten commandments would be nice.

I share your frustration – I just think there’s a better way to express it.

OK, confustion time on my part (not a hard state of being for me to be in, somehow):

You can call me to task any time you want – but I point out that I didn’t write the post.  To be honest, I haven’t figured out the conjunction of  your “This is inappropriate.” and “I share your frustration” – they seem to be diametrically opposed.  I get the second sentence (altho an Evangelical Christian, I am saddened by Churches that purport to be Christian but their leadership stray from Biblical teachings.  That’s why, when I was a Deacon in my church, I helped make the decision that we would withdraw from the American Baptist Convention because it was moving away from Biblical teachings to a more “social gospel” that was more in line with pop culture (in our estimation)).

But please explain your first sentence of “inappropriate”.

There are churches whose theology seems to reflect the Political Correctness of the Day.  Instead of using Biblical principles and interpret current events and issues through that lens of absolute standards, they twist those two things around and use that shifting sand of pop culture instead – after all, we can’t be hurting anyones’ feeling for telling them “er, that’s wrong”.  EVERYthing has become a target of the “non-judgmentalism movement”.  Problem is, then, what is right and what is wrong becomes entirely relative.  Is that anyway to deliver a Gospel message, when anything is permissible?

Skip – I mis-spoke – I meant that I wish to take GraniteGrok to task.  [It] seems inappropriate to mention someone’s sexual deviance…
Take the highroad and mention what they could have been measured against, or what they were measured by,  not what the media wishes to distract with.

Well, I was floored by this answer from this normally soberly outlooked friend.  In essence: “let’s not “see” the wrong in those that purport to be our spiritual Leaders and that are supposed to be the examples for their flocks; just see them as they are.  And besides, we can blame the media for this anyways.”  I am not a Calvinist in that I do not believe that everything in our lives is pre-ordained; we, given that we are created in the image of God, have Free Will – we can and do decide our own behaviors (all Progressive philosophy aside that holds that evil corporations and the dreaded 1% manipulate us all to make the decisions they want us to).

Read more