Church government?
It’s always around the time of synod that one realises how much pain a church can cause. My heart breaks for those who give their lives to the Church of England, which in turn has hurt them. A church that continues to stamp out new voices to satisfy a few bigots is a disgrace.
The Church of England will not be able to continue in its current state. I raged over last week’s Big Questions where people quoted ‘scripture’ against women priests and bishops. Indeed a woman, who I found utterly intolerable, who sits on the synod, said she doesn’t support women bishops based on ‘scripture’ which says that women shouldn’t teach in the church BUT she feels that she can sit with integrity in church government! How does she manage to contort her brain into such horrors?
This is pure bigotry! The Church of England is vacillating in a nearly completely new realm of hypocrisy. Both gays and women are being pushed around and treated as second class Christians! This cannot be what Jesus imagined when he broke social rules by speaking to women, by teaching his disciples to love their neighbours as themselves and standing up to the religious conservatives of his day.
The whole issue of people other-than-white-men in church leadership is getting very old. Quakers and Unitarians got over these horrors of hatred decades, even centuries ago. It is high time that the Church of England conform to the model of the non-conformists.
