Tuesday 26 July 2011

Serving faithfully

Some people feel that the Anglican Church's 'code for personal behaviour' was something of a Trojan horse. That is, at the time when we were all keen to ensure that we were protecting our children against paedophiles we also agreed to a whole raft of measures as a "code of conduct" called Faithfulness in Service
There are those who suggest that we agreed to more than we wanted to.
Amidst regulations about how money might be handled in churches, and how and when police checks should be done for church employees we also made without  (I suggest ...certainly in the Adelaide Synod) wide ranging discussion decisions about people living in same sex relationships...in particular clergy ...
Our Bishop pleaded at a recent clergy conference  that we not have argy-bargy at Synod..The curious  meeting when the Anglican church pretends it is a Parliament, and adopts the most unhelpful adversarial processes of the Westminster system.
So we cannot discuss the the nuances of this issue...we have to argue a pro or con position.
The Bishop I think was right. It is important to not reduce important discussions to the facile simplicity of pro v con. There needs to be much more nuance than this

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