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Written by Jon Spinnanger
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Friday, 06 August 2010 18:26 |
Now that the 219th GA has mercifully ended and the dust on all of the policy decisions is finally settling, what conclusions can be drawn?
Permit me to offer the following analogy. In days gone by when an elderly relative died at home, those present at the time of passing anxiously awaited the arrival of the coroner, or doctor who would “pronounce” the departed legally dead. To that point, however, the departed family member was, in fact dead, just not legally declared to be so.
Is this where our beloved denomination is right now? We’re gathered around the bedside of the recently departed, saddened and shocked at what has happened (at the 219th GA), anxiously awaiting the dreaded “pronouncement” that our friend is in-fact legally dead. For the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I believe, the “official” death will actually be declared when a majority of presbyteries vote to allow homosexual ordination – a very likely scenario given the support it received in Minneapolis last month. And that will be that. Moreover, unlike a departed family member, this death will bring about no wake, no funeral, no burial because — truthfully — this has already happened.
To prove the foregoing, one needs look no further than what has already taken place in the Episcopal Church USA, (ECUSA) and most recently the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Both were once proud flagships in the American Armada of Protestantism. Both are now floundering in the surf, their “Great Commission Engines” having already failed, so if the rocks don’t get them first, then the beach certainly will. For these denominations the death certificate has already been issued. “Finis!”
Some of us in the PC(USA) are in local congregations that still adhere faithfully to the central tenet of our Reformed Faith: Sola Scriptura. To use another analogy, these churches are lifeboats secured to their davits on the flagship PC(USA). As soon as the LGBT lifestyle is no longer a barrier to ordination, however, the question becomes: Will there be time for these already full lifeboats to get away from the ship before it sinks, or will all of us perish with the ship?
Jon Spinnanger
Williamsburg, Va.
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I think those who've made LGBT issues the Rubicon beyond which one cannot go have done themselves a great disservice. Luke 21 and our Lord's comments about the brevity of the Temple, already by then a thousand years of spiritual and cultural importance, remind us that what we build, and even what God builds (e.g. the Temple) changes in the tides of time. Jesus urges us to be calm and loving, and to put our heart into the heart of God, and not into the things we build, or even the things God has built. As Tom Wright has so powerfully developed in his works, capturing the power of Hebrews, Jesus is the Temple, and it's within his precincts that we are safe.
50 years from now, folks will wonder what this was all about, though, as with women and race, there will always be those who hanker for a time when their view of things prevailed.