Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador to ignore marriage canon vote

At its latest synod, the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador has voted to marry same-sex couples or, as the article below would have it “has voted in favor of marriage equality.”

The Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador has voted in favor of marriage equality.

Last July, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada voted against marriage equality within the Anglican marriage canon. However, the motion can be voted on at the provincial level as well.

The vote happened during NL Synod 2019 at the Sheraton Hotel in St. John’s earlier today.

In total 88 per cent of Anglican delegates in attendance voted in favor of affirming marriage equality.

127 votes were cast, with 112 people in favor and 15 against.

Reverend Dr. Geoffrey Peddle, Bishop of the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland & Labrador, says that in voting for marriage equality they have made the church bigger and inclusive for everyone.

He says the Diocese has made it very clear that this is who they are now and how they want to move forward.

At least Peddle is clear that “this is who they now are”. They are not the Bride of Christ, not the Body of Christ, not the ecclesia – a called out assembly, not members of the church universal. They are a group of people who marry same-sex couples: this is who they are now.

Here is an updated list of dioceses that will marry same-sex couples:
Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador
Diocese of Western Newfoundland
Diocese of New Westminster
Diocese of Toronto
Diocese of Niagara
Diocese of Montreal
Diocese of Ottawa
Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island
Diocese of Rupert’s Land
Diocese of Kootenay
Diocese of Edmonton
Diocese of B.C.
Diocese of Huron

9 thoughts on “Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador to ignore marriage canon vote

  1. Just further proof that the ACoC is no longer a Christian church having abandoned the authority of Scripture and believing that bishops — note more properly called APOSTATES – can override the authority of Scripture and abandon any and all vows they made both at their ordination and consecration.

  2. 88% is a bit of a shock. All credit to the 15 who saw things differently. And to the others – so long it’s been good to know you – although not recently!

    D’Arcy

  3. What they voted for is not marriage equality. The institution they style as “marriage equality” is not equally inclusive of all kinds of relationships. For example, progressive Anglicans still don’t recognize polygamy (polyandry and polygyny) and bigamy.

    Will progressive Anglicans now advocate for a further redefinition of marriage to accommodate these (and other) forms of relationship? If “love is love”, as we are told, there’s no good reason to stop redefining marriage now.

    Once you throw out the traditional definition of marriage, “marriage” becomes something that is quite arbitrary–it has no grounding whatsoever in Scripture, tradition or reason (e.g., common sense about how essential human nature requires the pairing of male and female).

    • Quite right. As I have pointed out a few times before on this blog, the original 2016 revision to the Marriage Canon replaced “man and woman” and “husband and wife” with “parties to the marriage” without any numerical qualification of “two”. (Was that a stupid oversight or a devious intention ?) The preamble to that revision stated that qualification for marriage in the ACoC was just that of the secular law. Hence, if that revision had passed in 2019, should Parliament legalise “further redefinition” of marriage, then the ACoC would follow suit. That the revision did not pass second reading in 2019 does not seem to matter. So expect (n>2) solemnisations/blessing of “marriage”/”unions” in the future to be a matter of when rather than if. According to the “Pride” promotion in my Starbucks recently, everything hinges on “love”. I doubt whether such promoters have coherently thought through the implications of such a simplistic approach, let alone bothered with works such as CS Lewis, The Four Loves.

      My position is simple: what on earth do these people think “become one flesh”, as used in the NT to underscore and strengthen its occurrence in the OT means ?

      • Ass I wrote years ago in my ‘Dialogue with Hugh’ [Holy Homosex pp. 90-91], “I am STILL waiting to hear the case for the inherent goodness and beauty of homosexual acts. It is not established by an assertion, however often repeated, that perhaps they are not sinful after all.

        As good a case, if not better, could be made for ‘loving, consensual’ father-daughter incest. I cannot see that any conduct is improved or rendered acceptable by an undertaking to engage in it exclusively or for a lifetime.”

        Complete text kindly hosted by David here: https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/dr-priscilla-turner/

  4. When it was first proposed to make ‘sexual orientation’ a protected category I wrote to my Liberal MP to ask whether anyone had noticed that there were quite a few such ‘orientations’, several of them criminal and evil. I never got an answer.

  5. We are learning new terms everyday. In the good old days, we only had marriages and marriages. Now, we have marriage equality and marriage inequality, equal marriages and unequal marriages, same-sex marriages and opposite-sex marriages, etc. Are we looking forward to more new terms to be created?

  6. As the Indigenous Peoples of Canada marked September 30, 2019, to remember and honour their dead and missing children, thousands unnamed as unmarked, left to the tender mercies of the former inter-faith Residential Schools system from sea to sea to sea, in the long, dark shadows of the first publicly revealed (1988, Hughes Report) horrors at Mount Cashel Orphanage, St. John’s, Newfoundland. is this the best they can offer? ‘Bishops in The Hall’?
    On the same hypocritical low plane as the current PCC Moderator’s “Pastoral” Prayer and “Lament” in Cultural Marxist “solidarity”:
    who, at the PCC’s 2019 General Assembly, rejoiced at the ACC’s 2016 reversed vote on gay ‘marriage’: that being the very reason and its former, related deviant sexual and genocidal crimes that, following the 2019 General Synod, compelled two Indigenous ACC Dioceses to walk another path:
    The Way + of Truth and Life. +John 14:6.

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