anglican stuff: living with differences

[jenk]

So ross_teneyck posted about more Episcopal Sturm und Drang. This got me googling. I loved what The New York Times quotes The Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane (Archbishop of Cape Town) as saying on the issue of gay rights: “We need to make a distinction between issues that are fundamental to the faith and second-order issues. This is not a church-dividing issue.”

He said he could not understand why a debate over homosexuality had sidetracked what he saw as the church’s true mission in Africa: confronting AIDS, poverty, war and famine.

“I wonder if somebody could calculate how much money is being spent on these meetings, which deal with one issue and one issue only, when we have 48 million orphans?” he asked. “Whose agenda is this? Definitely in my view, this is not God’s agenda.” [...]

His views on homosexuality are considerably more liberal than those of his African counterparts but more conservative than those of the leaders of the American church. His church accepts gay priests in its clergy, but on the condition they remain celibate.

Archbishop Ndungane said the church decrees that marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman and that only married couples should engage in sex. The Episcopal Church does not forbid gay priests in monogamous relationships from having sex.

It is his willingness to tolerate that stance that has provoked his conservative African counterparts. Although he says, “I am not here to fight America’s battles,” he is the only African archbishop to argue that the American branch was within its rights to consecrate the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a gay man living with his partner, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

I would note that it's he's not just espousing the view that "we should tolerate America / Canada doing this bad thing until they come around". He's pointing out that it's okay to disagree on the "second-order" issues, that we don't all have to believe all the same things all of the time.

And that can be scary.

Especially since - as CS Lewis so rightly remarked in Mere Christianity - Christians not only disagree on their beliefs, but they disagree on how important their disagreements are :\