Posted on 07/02/2006 5:32:34 PM PDT by sionnsar
Kate Schori kicks things around with the Las Vegas Sun:
For all the attention given to her insistence that gays and women be fully included as active leaders in the U.S. church, Jefferts Schori says her mission is driven by the more basic, Christ-like goals of advocating for social and economic justice.
She's hoping such an emphasis can hold her fractured church together both in the United States and with the worldwide Anglican Communion, that the liberals and conservatives within the church can rally around shared common ground.
So she thinks turning the Anglican Communion into an international Lion's Club will keep everyone together. Good luck with that, Kate.
At the heart of her efforts to fully include gays and lesbians in the church is her belief that Jesus sought people on the margins, and that everyone deserves a seat at God's table. Coming of age in the 1960s and '70s, she like many in her church have been moved by the civil rights movement to push for full inclusion for people of all races, backgrounds, genders and sexual orientation.
She is troubled that the Anglican Church can support civil rights for gays outside the church and yet deny those same people full inclusion in the body of Christ.
"People want a clear understanding of who is OK and who is not," Jefferts Schori said. "But over and over again in the Bible you have Jesus eating with people he shouldn't or talking with women he shouldn't."
God's table welcomes everyone, regardless of what rules they follow, Jefferts Schori said. From her background as a biologist, she believes same-sex relationships are part of God's created order, and that the emphasis of the church should be in supporting monogamous, lifelong partnerships.
Oh for the love of...how any allegedly educated, allegedly Christian person can serious advance such a patently idiotic argument boggles my mind. Jesus did eat with publicans and sinners. But He did so to seek and to save those who were lost. NOT TO ALLOW THEM TO REMAIN IN THEIR SINS!!
"For us to say in this day and age that homosexuality is sinful is to ignore evidence science has brought us," Jefferts Schori says.
As soon as we finesse the "evidence science has brought us" about how it's natural to sleep around, expect TEC numbers to frickin' soar!
Jefferts Schori says she takes seriously the concerns of conservatives,
No she doesn't
who believe that the Bible teaches same-sex relations are wrong, but believes the deep internal rift is distracting the church from what is really important. Jesus, Jefferts Schori notes, talked far more about economic sin than sexual sin, and said word none about homosexuality.
Except here.
At the 2006 General Convention in June, for instance, the church passed resolutions to support the United Nations Millennial Development goals to fight poverty, AIDS and promote economic development in Third World countries, took a stance on immigration and laid out their own plan for Middle East peace. Yet what made the news and is fracturing the church are issues over homosexuality.
"There are so many cases of injustice," Jefferts Schori says. "For us to be focused on this one thing might be seen as the work of the devil."
But Jesus never said anything about any of that stuff, Kate, so I'm not going to worry about it.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. Blah, blah, blah...Christ wasn't about the world, he was about the eternal. This is political activism thinly disguised as religious belief.
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