Peter Ould: GAFCON, Women Bishops and the End of the World…

July 11, 2008

Ahh yes….

So I’ve been plagued for a few days by emails asking me what I think about GAFCON, the latest nonsense from the Church of England General Synod and other such what not. I’ve been sitting on my hands for a few days on all of this because I wanted to make sure that what I said was not just a knee jerk response. Now the silence is, at it were, broken.

There is a fundamental problem with the Church of England today and it is that we have completely forgotten what it means to be a broad church. There are portions of the church that believe that to be "broad" is to allow a huge variety of theological opinion, and while that may be right, there are certain bounds within which that broadness is intended to operate. It is simply incorrect to argue that when Elizabeth I said that we were not to pry into men’s souls, she was perfectly happy to have clergy who denied the divinity of Jesus, let alone who taught publicy a sexual moral that denies the heart of the transforming Gospel of redemption. the rest