What about the mainline Protestant religions?

Speck, log. Do we really think that we Baptists are the only true Christian faith, never having done any damage? Oh wait, some Baptists do indeed think that.

As I said earlier, every religion, church, fellowship, congregation, and denomination, is flawed, manmade, fallible, and imperfect. Pulling logs out of the eyes of the brethren does nothing to make us more able to see clearly. We parade around singing the "my church is better than your church" theme song in vain, and getting nowhere while wo sing it. That's what we've done for hundreds of years, and that's the way it will be until Chist comes.

 

The issues in the mainline go well beyond "my church is better than your church". We're talking heresy. I do think it's incumbent upon those who know about it to speak up. When you have denominations that are in as much trouble as the UMC, it's not about "my church vs. your church". It's about whether they're even Christian. Back to my post -- if a bishop can deny Christ's virgin birth and resurrection with impunity, then it the incumbent upon the true believer to take a stand from within, and/or to leave, and leave shining light on the issues. There are people being deceived every Sunday in the mainlines.

I've said nothing at all about Baptists; this isn't about "Baptists are better" or any other group is better. What's better is biblical Christianity, a relationship with the living Savior.

 

I thought we had covered this already. I'm Episcopal but Spong does not represent me or the millions of other Anglicans/Episcopals.

You have one thing right if people start teaching this then it is heresy and they have deviated. But remember this there are millions of us in the Anglican communion who stand against abortion and homosexuals being ministers.

I agree completely some of us choose to stay and fight while others run! To each his own I suppose but I do agree we in the church must stand against those that teach or promote heresy.

 

The government of the Anglican Communion is effectively conciliar although in theory episcopal. The Communion is split into various Provinces, each one quasi-autonomous. I can only really comment form the POV of the Church of England's Province, which is run effectively by Synodial government (the Synod has just voted here to consecrate women bishops for example), and the links I gave earlier relate to that Province. The ECUSA Province has always been more liberal than the CofE. The Third World Provinces are much more conservative.

Overarching the Provinces is the Episcopal oversight of the Lambeth Bishops' Conference. This meets once every ten years and makes the really important doctrinal and organisational decisions. The last of these, in 1998, condemned homosexual clergy. Since then, ECUSA has unilaterally consecrated the gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of NH, and the Canadian New Westminster Diocese has gone pro-gay marriage. A full ruling on this will have to wait until the next Lambeth Conference in 2008, but in the meantime the usual balancing act between unity and truth has had to be done by the head of the Anglican Communion (kind of delegated to him in the interim by the Lambeth Conference), the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has effectively ruled the ECUSA actions as being out of bounds and called upon them to think again. Other more conservative Archbishops like ++Akinola of Nigeria have called for ECUSA to be expelled. We'll have to wait and see who prevails at Lambeth in 2008 but I hope that explains how the Anglican wheels grind rather slowly re people like Robinson and Spong...

 

Matt, it does help explain. In the meantime, there are a couple of different results in the US in reaction to the ordination of Robinson. One is the establishment of the Anglican Mission in America (AMIA) - from their web site:

Now is the time. In a groundbreaking response, some leaders of the Anglican Church in Africa and Asia have acted to provide seeds of hope for the dire situation in the United States, by establishing the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). This new movement, like a wave of the Spirit, is quickly gaining momentum, encouraged by the connection to revivals in other parts of the globe. The Anglican Mission is charged with building an alliance of congregations committed to gathering, planting and serving dynamic congregations in the Anglican tradition.

We’re moving forward in the God-given opportunity to plant and strengthen churches that will have a powerful impact in our culture. We invite you to ‘catch the wave’ and join us in this transforming adventure of the Anglican Mission in America.

http://www.anglicanmissioninamerica.org/index.cfm?id=05DDA148-A90F-482C-A7FCFCE51C09508D

 

In a way. Matt did a good job of explaining it. We are all in communion but we have no control over what other church groups do. Churches can be expelled but that ruling doesn't come around but every so often. Our church has entered into official ties with the Church of Nigeria and the Anglican Province of America to stand against the deviation from Scripture and the Church tradition.
Here is the Covenant Union text.

 

In addition - to make things even more confusing ...

Today, you have to talk about denominational families and denominations within those families. Often there are many different denominations - liberal and conservative - within each family.

Even in the more liberal denominations, you can still find excellent local churches that still believe and teach the Gospel. I visted the local United Methodist church a few weeks ago and it was great.

BTW - I checked out the links about the UMC. It's important to note that none of the liberal groups listed are officially tied to the UMC.

 

Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) was the term you were looking for, I believe (at least that's what it's called over here).

It is and it isn't a shame that the Anglican Communion lumbers slowly. There is a desire to preserve unity and inevitably that is at the expense of Truth to a degree, but at least their attitude contrasts favourably with that of some of their more fundamentalists brethren and sistren ("We must separate from him because he once shared a preaching platform with someone whose wife's third cousin once took a cup of coffee from the same dispensing machine as a Catholic")

 

Catholics and the historic mainline churches tend to take a longer view of history than what happened yesterday and might happen tomorrow.

After all, some controversies raged in the church for centuries before final resolution. In the mean time, the word was preached and the sacraments administered and God's work went forward.

Alexander

 

The local Bishop has great control over his/her own diocese. The diocese where I serve is primarily evangelical and conservative in theology. The diocese next to us is more liberal in theology. If you think that the wayward Bishops go unnoticed, you are quite mistaken. They are discussed on a regular basis, and their expulsion has been considered, even before the Archbishop in England. We have collectively called for the ban of the Episcopal Church of the USA at the next Lambeth Conference.

The one thing we try not to do is hang up our dirty laundry in the public. We try to work through things in private, and get on with our primary function of serving Christ in community.

The evangelicals in England had certain issues with the election of the present archbishop, but chose to deal with it internally, and gain whatever steps they could from within. We don't want a split in the church, but we are not silent, where it counts, either.

Cheers,

Jim

 

Ah, would that be Richard Hooker's idea, perchance?

The Church of England, which is kind of the 'Mother Church' of the Anglican Communion, has always seen itself as a 'middle way' between the City on the Hill (Rome) and the City in the Valley (Geneva), and is therefore properly described as Catholic and Reformed (see the text of the Book of Common Prayer as a classic example of this). At times it has been more one than the other and right from the start had both of those 'wings' in it, eg: the Laudians of the 17th century and Oxford Movement Tractarians of the 19th representing the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum and, through the 'Branch Theory' of Apostolic Succession, seeing themselves as spiritual descendants of the ECFs and as valid Reformed successors to the medieval Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries, Wesley and Co in the 18th, and the Tory evangelicals of the 19th representing the evo-Reformed wing on the other hand. The liberals are very much the new kids on the block as far as the 'wings' are concerned and have only really risen to prominence in the last 40 years or so (anyone here old enough, apart from Jim to remember +John Robinson's Honest to God ?)

[ETA - ironically, it tends to be the CofE churches over here which use the traditional liturgy ie: the Book of Common Prayer, which are more liberal/ nominal. The Anglo-Catholic liturgy tends to be smells'n'bells and virtually indistinguishable from the Roman Catholic Mass (but the communicants tend to be very devout), whereas the average evangelical congregation is happy-clappy and indistinguishable from the average evo Baptist service (albeit they wheel out a member of the clergy to 'do' communion); neither can be considered 'traditional' CofE...

 

Cheers!