Sunday 18 September 2011

Entryists Hijack Arab Spring Motivation

We do read some drivel these days. Apparently, the tiny group of Conservative Evangelicals, in terms of their number in the Western Anglican Churches, are likening their entryism across Church structures to the Arab Spring!

Goodness me: I thought Rowan Williams was a bit unpleasant for making people cry on committees, and John Sentamu similar for engaging in destructive gossip, but I never thought of them and their system as tyrannical. But the Conservative Evangelicals do:

We can learn here from the Arab Spring for there are many parallels. The Arab Spring was started by few people, as few as seven in Egypt, who were provoked by the suicide of a market trader in Tunisia and by the murder by police of a blogger in Cairo. In the CofE, following years of similar problems, a bishop refused to say he would teach that homosexual practice was a sin and thus young men were unable to accept ordination from him.

In the Arab Spring, those seeking change made straight for the central square, the focus of national life and identity and occupied it. They were claiming it belonged to them, not to the tyrant who had usurped their nation for himself. They did not say that they were forming another nation. They did not say that they would emigrate. They went to the central public space and occupied it in order to state clearly that the square and what it stands for was theirs. They stood together in a way that the authorities could not control to claim their heritage.

Let's be clear. There is no large scale sympathy for a minority group of Conservative Evangelicals wanting to make the Church of England even more homophobic or sexist. Having produced the usual suspects as shock troops, there are no follow-up large scale demonstrations in the parishes.

This use of 'global Anglicanism' is precisely because the Conservatives lack support on home turf, whether among bishops or the rest. The whole point of entryism is to infiltrate and bypass according to the strategy of the few, and to have 'international oversight' means just their own preferred authorities.

There is no such thing as global Anglicanism as a system of authority. That some people, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Fulcrum, would like to push in that direction, only encourages the distant minority to then use the idea to push their own corner. The Anglican Communion Covenant gives the excuse, only to be ignored by the entryists as they choose.

Anyone in authority by now should have taken these people on, but of course they are frozen in the attempts to cause 'centralisation by process' through the Covenant. If the Covenant can be killed off, then the entryists will have lost their excuse. Their attempt to circumvent, to power grab, will then be all the clearer.

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