COMMON GOOD SERVED WHEN LORDS SPIRITUAL DENOUNCE PERMISSIVE SOCIETY

Every bishop in the House of Lords would claim that he is there to serve the common good. But the common good is manifestly not being served by the permissive society, so why won't bishops in Parliament speak up more prophetically against its various manifestations?

The permissive society is seriously damaging the stability of the United Kingdom and is grossly unjust to the UK tax payer in the following ways:

• The growth in the proportion of children born outside the God-created institution of holy matrimony since the 1960s has fuelled welfare dependency and undermined the moral importance of working for a living;

• The proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases has damaged public health and become an increasing financial burden on the National Health Service;

• The denigration of fatherhood and of the importance of positive male role models has fuelled the growth in criminal activity by teenage boys;

• The culture of easy divorceism has hugely damaged the emotional health of the children affected and undermined their educational performance;

• The refusal to execute justice upon murderers by capital punishment has contributed to the trivialisation of evil and the banishment of the fear of God;

• The decision to allow abortion virtually on demand has fuelled a culture of moral uncertainty over the value and ownership by God of human life.

The virtues the permissive society hates – faithfulness in marriage, sexual restraint, leadership by men in the home, the work ethic, the State wielding the sword of justice, reverence for the image of God in all humanity, including the unborn – are clearly set forth in the New Testament.

So why don't we hear Christ’s ministers of the gospel prophetically commending such virtues more often from their platform in Parliament and denouncing wickedness and vice?

Being clear on the difference between virtue and vice is surely integral to an ordained minister's calling to proclaim God's glorious gospel of eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

Without such clarity, how can he effectively proclaim the reality of God’s wrath on sin and the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction the Lord Jesus Christ made on the Cross for the sins of the whole world?

This article by cc about the Anglican Mission in England and the southernisation of evangelicalism appeared in Friday's Church of England Newspaper.

Cranmer's Curate warmly commends this excellent article in support of AMiE by the Revd Richard Coekin, director of the Co-Mission church planting initiative in south London. The three English clergy ordained in Kenya are Co-Mission staff members. Mr Coekin lucidly explains the rationale for these ordinations.

Your curate is not blogging for the rest of July due to his summer holidays. He leaves the youth group with today's BCP Collect (Trinity 4):

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal: Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ's sake our Lord. Amen.

PC ENDING TO PD JAMES NOVEL

Best-selling murder mystery novelist PD James is a prominent supporter of the Prayer Book Society, which makes the conclusion of her 2008 novel The Private Patient all the more curious. Cranmer's Curate has just finished it and it is written with Baroness James's characteristic vigour and eloquence but its politically correct ending is markedly out of kilter with the biblical worldview the Prayer Book reflects.

The novel features two lesbians in a civil partnership who are friends of the woman the detective hero Adam Dalgliesh marries in a Cambridge college chapel. At the end of the service Annie

slipped her hand into Clara’s and felt the comfort of her responsive squeeze. She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.

Baroness James was born in 1920, and was therefore a young adult in World War II. It was precisely such naive romanticism, divorced from righteousness as the Bible conceives it, that led Britain to appease Hitler and thus fail to intervene early enough to stop his wickedness from devastating Europe. Virtually the only man who warned of the folly was Winston Churchill, a maverick failed politician whose boyhood had been seminally influenced by an evangelical nanny.

It is also worth reflecting that Germany had become riddled with romanticism in the 19th century, kicking away its spiritual and moral defences against the rise of aggressive militarism and the evil dictatorship that such a culture spawned.

Such a Lennonesque sentiment from an otherwise sensible woman, placed in the mind of a character in a lesbian relationship contrary to Jesus Christ’s biblical teaching, evokes a grim sense that rigor mortis is setting into the murdered corpse of Christian Britain.

CELEBRITY WEDDING ORDINATIONS OMIT MARTYRDOM

The Petertide ordination photographs now appearing in the church press and on the internet are disturbingly similar to the pictures of a celebrity wedding, with a bit of the Glastonbury Festival thrown in.

In view of the colourful clerical shirts and elaborately-tailored vestments on display and the whooping expressions on the faces of the ordination candidates, it is sobering to reflect on the Lord Jesus Christ's words to Peter as recorded in John 21:

Feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go (John 21v17b-18 - RSV).

John then tells us that Jesus said this in order to show by what death Peter was to glorify God.

The possibility of martyrdom is on the tin of Christian discipleship in the New Testament, and its possibility is intensified in the case of those called to pastoral leadership.

A violent death at the hands of God-hating humanity is not a prospect any sane disciple of Christ would wish on themselves (Jesus recognises that by pointing out that Peter will be taken where he does not wish to go). But according to the New Testament the disciple of Christ should be mentally ready for it.

Indeed, such spiritual preparedness surely helps those disciples set apart for the pastoral calling to keep themselves from prancing about like participants at a celebrity fashion shoot.

PARISH MAGAZINE: WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF LIFE?

The prayers of the youth group were much appreciated for the production and distribution of our church's new full colour parish-wide magazine. Here is cc's article:

A very warm welcome to the new Bridge.

What do you think is the purpose of life?

The answers I have heard to that question include: Procreation (a gentleman in Oughtibridge); sorry I haven’t a clue; paying the mortgage; and there isn’t a purpose – you’re here because you’re here because you’re here.

If Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, those are actually quite reasonable answers.

But if Jesus did rise from the dead, they are the wrong answers.

If Jesus rose from the dead, he is who he said he was – the eternal Son of the one true God, the light of the world, the bread of life, the good shepherd, the only way to God.

If Jesus rose from the dead, he is the one you and I need to be coming to for forgiveness for our ingratitude, arrogance and wilful disobedience against the God who made us.

If Jesus rose from the dead, he is the only person who can save you and me from hell.

So it’s a big if.

The New Testament insists that Jesus was seen alive by real eye-witnesses who actually ate and drank with him after he rose, bodily, from his tomb in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. Many of these eye-witnesses were executed for their faith in the risen Jesus.

Why would they die for a lie?

For the sake of your eternal souls, I urge you to read one of the four Gospels in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John and ask yourself seriously whether what they are telling you about Jesus is true.

Because if they’re telling the truth, there is a real purpose to life and it’s all about Jesus Christ, the risen conqueror of sin and death.

FULCRUM WRONG ON AMiE BUT LANDS A PUNCH

The fact that the new Anglican Mission in England has a panel of bishops supported by the GAFCON Primates' Council, representing as it does the biblically orthodox Anglican Communion, is very significant for the spiritual renewal of English Anglicanism.

Fulcrum is therefore wrong to criticise AMiE for conflating what it snidely calls a 'conservative evangelical political agenda' with concerns about mission and church planting.

Guarding the apostolic gospel is essential to mission, as the Apostle Paul taught in 2 Timothy, a letter concerned with ensuring that Christ's mission can proceed without being undermined by false teaching.

Paul exhorts Timothy whom he had put in pastoral charge of the false-teaching-riddled church at Ephesus to

follow the pattern of the sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus; guard the truth that has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us (1v13-14 -RSV)>.

A so-called gospel that denies the nature of the sin from which we are redeemed may fill churches (in the Church of England's case it isn't particularly), but it will not save people. Fulcrum is quite wrong to dismiss real spiritual concerns about upholding biblical integrity in our denomination for the sake of gospel proclamation as 'political'.

But Fulcrum has landed a bit of a punch over the secrecy surrounding the identity of the three English clergy ordained in Kenya. The GAFCON news release mentions that they were welcomed at the evangelical ministers' conference in the City of London where AMiE was launched last week but does not give their names.

Surely the point of ordaining them in Anglican orders is to give them wider accreditation beyond the London church planting network in which they are beginning their public ministries. Indeed GAFCON explicitly states that they were ordained for 'ministry in the wider Anglican Communion'.

Even if one accepts the argument that the unusual circumstances surrounding the ordinations of these men necessitated discretion beforehand, in its announcement after the event GAFCON should have given their names and explained why they were ordained in Kenya.

Openness strengthens the case for AMiE; secrecy undermines it.

The Revd Charles Raven's excellent analysis of the theological rationale for AMiE is a must read for any member of the youth group wanting to get on the end of this significant development.

One does not wish to make more of this than it deserves, but the fact that the Clergy Discipline Measure has popped into one liberal Anglican blogger's mind as a way of countering AMiE is surely a precursor to the institutional hostility it is likely to face.

The Church Mouse is calling upon the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly to threaten the use of the CDM against licensed supporters of AMiE.

It would be downright unjust to use the CDM against orthodox Anglicans taking action for the sake of biblical truth and the canonical theology of the Church of England.

What would add to that injustice is the sad reality that licensed clergy who deny cardinal doctrines of Christ's gospel or who are engaged in immoral relationships outside of heterosexual marriage or who have been witnessed behaving in other ways unbecoming for a clerk in holy orders have had no action taken against them under the CDM.

Of course, one should expect persecution and opposition as a Bible-believing Christian and this is very tame compared to what many of our orthodox Anglican brothers and sisters around the world are experiencing. But the hypocrisy of such a threat in our current Church of England context is particularly disgraceful, compounded by the anonymiceness of the individual invoking it.