I preached a sermon yesterday from the Old Testament (we are in the process of switching to the Revised Common Lectionary, but yesterday the reading was still from the BCP Lectionary – Isaiah 2:10-17). I preached on haughtiness and pride and the trouble it gets us into.
I read the final statement from the “Global Anglican Future Conference” (GAFCON) in Jerusalem . It was expected that this conference would set the stage for actual development of an alternative international Anglican organization/Church, and while the statement states that they are not leaving the Anglican Communion they have in fact embarked on such a path if we take historical Anglican structures to be the rule.
Haughtiness and pride (perhaps hubris and vainglory are better terms) will always win-the-day when ideology (whether political, social, or theological) becomes the god unto which we give ourselves. Among the leadership of those Anglican provinces and organizations that insist on pushing their notion of “correctness” based on identity-politics and political-correctness (dressed up in the language of social-justice) regardless of the outcomes and also those provinces and organizations that demand strict adherence to a particular form of the faith and the capitulation of all to a particular Scriptural interpretation and moral perspective (dressed up in language “reform” or of purity of devotion and theology), among these groups their social and theological ideology blinds them. Vainglory, pride, haughtiness rule because humility requires admitting that each of us and our understandings and our organizations could be wrong and that we all need to compromise. Anglican comprehensiveness is defeated by the results of the attitudes and actions of both groups, both sides, both perspectives.
No one wins, despite their want to believe so. The cause of Christ always looses. Our faith is a faith that rests on relationship – our relationship with God as we strive to love God with all of our hearts, all of our minds, and all of our souls. It rests on relationships as we strive, with God’s help, to love our neighbors as ourselves. When we descend to defining the faith only by our pet creeds, tenants, or declarations, we deny the essence of what Jesus did – he restored the possibility of relationship. He didn’t create a new religion. We did.
Read more here:
Ruth Gledhill from the TimesOnline gives us, “Gafcon: a longer look.”
Guardian UK by Riazat Butt:
Conservative Anglicans form breakaway church in revolution led from the south
Conservative Anglicans form global network