Wales Elects Former Evangelical as next Archbishop to Lead Province
by David Virtue, VOL:
The newly elected Archbishop of Wales is the Bishop of Bangor, the Rt. Rev. Andy John, a once-upon-a-time evangelical, who now says the church needs “to move with the times” on homosexuality. He succeeds John Davies, who retired in May after four years as Archbishop.
The Church Times noted that although from an Evangelical background, Bishop John has moved with the times. (In past decades, his marital status — he is in his second marriage after a divorce — would have been a bar to preferment.) He supported the latest move to allow same-sex couples to have their marriages blessed in church (News, 6 September), telling The National, a Welsh newspaper, in July: “I think this will make us . . . a Church that provides space for people who demonstrate by their lives that they can be wonderful disciples of Jesus Christ when they want to live in love with a person of the same sex.”
One can only imagine our Lord commissioning the first 72 disciples with these words, “when you go into a village and they reject you and your message, don’t shake the dust off your feet, move with the times.”
Undeterred, the bishop goes on to write, “This is not the teaching of the Church at this moment but I believe it is fully in keeping with our faith and orthodoxy. I believe it will strengthen our witness to a world which longs to see justice and fairness for all, regardless of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, and cannot understand how the Church is still wrestling with an issue that most people have accepted long ago.”
One wonders if the bishop has redefined ‘progressive revelation’ and has not been reading his Bible lately or has failed to see what has been going on in The Episcopal Church for the last 40 years, a church decimated by the acceptance of this aberrant behavior.
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