Contention 4: GAFCON and prophetic traditionalism
by Stephen Noll:
Here is a tale that you can only appreciate if you are old enough to remember the days when cars had a bench front seat. It goes like this: a middle-aged couple are out for a drive when they notice two love-birds in the car ahead snuggled cheek to cheek in the front seat. “Do you remember when we used to sit like that?” the wife asks. “Yes,” the husband replies; “who moved?”
“Who moved?” That’s the question many of us are asking concerning Anglicanism. Who moved when the 1920 Lambeth Conference said marriage of one man and one woman is God’s “unchangeable standard” and the Episcopal Church replied: “It’s unchangeable until we change it.” Who moved when the 1998 Lambeth Conference stated that homosexual practice is “incompatible with Scripture” and Canterbury now says, “that was then, this is now”?
What’s ironic about the above scenario is that the Episcopal Church and Canterbury claim to own the Anglican™ brand as it were by divine right and wish to portray Gafcon as “troublers of Israel” (check out 1 Kings 18:17). The goal of this essay is to show that it is the Westernized churches and self-styled “apostolic pioneers” and “reasonable radicals” like John Spong and Martyn Percy, who have abandoned the Anglican way and that Gafcon is calling the church to turn back to its original foundations (ad fontes).
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