If there is one issue that threatens to destroy what remains of Europe’s Protestant ecclesiastial communities from within, it is homosexuality.
Few Christian communities have kept up with the advance in homosexuals’ civil rights.
Perhaps they do not understand how advances in education mean that young people coming out of schools today find opposition to homosexuality in the churches incredible. The Anglican Communion, possibly even the Church of England, might not survive the debate in their present form.
At a crucial meeting of its central executive body in Jamaica last week, leaders of the Anglican Communion effectively kicked a new “covenant”, into touch. This was a document designed to hold together the member provinces under a banner of agreed orthodoxy.
Some believe it could never have worked, as wealthiest of these provinces, The Episcopal Church of the US, has already embraced gay rights and has no plans to relinquish them.
The Anglicans are the most publicly divided over this issue, and are now staring schism in the face, but in the Church of Scotland the divisions also run deep, as they do in most churches.
The Methodists and the Quakers, adopting their gently liberal gospels of inclusiveness, are among the few who seem to have managed this issue with true Christian charity.
More here-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6276906.ece
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