The mood of the Communion is very cold in Canada as the iceberg seems to be breaking up and very hot in England as more and more horrid sexual revelation come into the light. Join Kevin Kallsen, George Conger and Gavin Ashenden as they discuss.

5 COMMENTS

  1. At 12:00 the biology question. So, if a patient is bleeding badly in the ER does he expect a nurse to hold up two bags of blood for a transfusion and ask which one they’d “like”? Which one? The blood type “assigned at birth” or something different? Which type do you “self identify” as? Do you just tell the lab what your blood chemistry is or let them tell you what you are “assigned” at the moment? It does change, but who decides if the numbers mean anything?

  2. The business of being scrupulously fair and honest in obtaining evidence of wrongdoing within a Christian organisation – indefensible activity of one or more individuals and subsequent concealing or deflecting of what became known by surrounding colleagues and associates – would obviously be far better done if it were freely and proactively conducted by Christians in advance of information being uncovered by journalists in the secular press. Time may not be on their side. And it now seems the ramifications in the John Smyth / Jonathan Fletcher cases are considerably wider and deeper than the ‘one rotten apple’ assumption many of us will have made when the original Smyth story broke a year or two ago.

    From what has been made public thus far it seems obvious that a deep theological, spiritual, attitudinal and relational cleansing needs to happen among a group of hitherto highly respected people; and that may be pretty painful. But it’s also likely that there will be considerable personal pain and cost born by any victims who decide to come forward in order to provide corroborating evidence. I think it’s beyond question that their needs are the very first priority in the process of cleansing.

    None of us in the evangelical world within the Church of England should want people to be spared scrutiny on account of their position – current or historical. But neither do we want a witch-hunt. We need scrupulous fairness on every account. But we either go for a deep clean now (wherever it takes us) or we lose any right to call ourselves evangelical.

    And this cleansing may well go some way towards answering the question of why there has been an uncanny silence from this ‘leading’ group of evangelicals during the Church of England’s steady unraveling of its biblical stand on sexual ethics. It has been a silence which may yet come to be seen as pivotal in terms of the deplorable decline in defence of faithfulness to biblical teaching that has really taken hold over the last few years.

  3. George, you’re not fair to Ruston there. In the sermon Ruston was saying that we should not seek suffering and used the example of the young men who voluntarily submitted to “discipline” as an example of what not to do. He knew but did not condone. He informed Iwerne Trust , who investigated, and you know the rest.

    • Seriously?
      Respectfully, and I say this carefully, that’s like preaching a sermon about the inappropriateness of sex outside of marriage and using an example of someone who has been sexually coerced and saying they were wrong to let themselves be coerced.
      It was abuse of power and it was coercion. Smyth broke the law. He abused people and he should have been sent to prison, not to another country. And to use people who have been abused as a sermon example in that way is crass.

      • I simply meant that Ruston did not condone the beatings, he knew about them and alerted Iwerne Trust, who investigated, removed Smyth and buried the report.. In that particular sermon Ruston was probably warning students not to get caught that way- I suppose he must have known enough to know the Iwerne response was inadequate as there was a clear breach of the 1861 Offence against the Persons Act,

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