Reflections on the aftermath of the Primates’ Meeting at Canterbury
by Gavin Ashenden, Anglican Ink:
“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” Joshua 24.15.
If we look to Scripture when difficulties arise between Christians we have on the one hand the profound call to unity amongst those who love Jesus that we find in St John, 17. 20ff:
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
But we also have Jesus’ instructions on how to approach conflict in St Matthew chapter 18.15ff
“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”
In the light of the global struggle between two conflicting ways of being Christian that the Anglican Communion has struggled with, we might see the gathering of the Primates in January 2016, as the final stage, played out globally rather than locally, in the process Jesus describes above.
The mantra of the culturally attuned liberalism within Anglicanism is one celebrating and ensuring ‘inclusion’. At first sight this might seem to be fulfil some of the conditions of Jesus’ invitation to unity. The difficulty is, as we have seen and known for some while, that inclusion does not mean what it says. Rather it means the reconfiguration of different sets of values.
Inclusion here, where it applies to gay life-styles, means the exclusion of those who hold to an orthodox reading of Scripture.
What happens if we ask questions to aid our discernment about what lies behind the movement of inclusion and the claim for social justice that liberal Anglicanism, and particularly TEC, celebrates and pursues?
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