Tag Archives: Justin Welby

Justin Welby: the secret of being an archbishop is to be reconciled to your own embarrassment

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From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said it is “embarrassing” that posts in the Church of England are being advertised for less than the living wage despite the Church’s declared commitment to the principle.

[….]

The living wage commitment was included in the controversial bishops’ pastoral letter, ‘Who is my Neighbour?’, released last week.
Speaking at a conference in Birmingham today for business and Church leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the revelation was “embarrassing”. However, the Press Association reported: “But in the light of transparency, which I welcome, I will say we are a complex institution and every parish church and cathedral is an independent charity, as is every diocese.

“We don’t have a centralised method of control.

“I’m not very keen on centralised control where, from far away, you tell people what to do.”

If only Welby took the same view when it comes to the government. The Pastoral Letter issued by Church of England Bishops expends a torrent of verbiage on telling everyone what to do – when it isn’t waxing lyrical on the virtues of centralised control.

As it happens, I reported on the Church’s stingy salaries in July 2014, so Welby has no excuse for being unaware of this: he just needs to read Anglican Samizdat.

Justin Welby wants businesses to pay more tax

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He is upset that businesses are using foreign countries with more attractive tax laws as a haven for tax saving.

From here:

The Archbishop kept his strongest comments for the role taxes play in ensuring that companies contribute to the societies in which they operate.

“There has always been the principle that you pay the tax where you earn the money,” he told me.

“If you earn the money in a country, the revenue service of that country needs to get a fair share of what you have earned.”

Welby’s point about contributing to the society in which a business operates by paying tax in that country would be more convincing if the Church of England didn’t receive extravagant tax breaks. The church collects £1 billion a year in donations, spends £189 million in salaries, has an investment portfolio worth £5.5 billion and receives £84 million in Gift Aid tax rebates.

The church, of course, is a charity and does not operate for profit – although the £5.5 billion looks suspiciously like profit to me. In spite of its spiritual aspirations – none of which seem particularly in evidence these days – as an organisation, the CofE runs as a business.

It doesn’t help that in 2012 when the government threatened to impose VAT tax on church building renovations, the church pleaded to be exempt from that tax, too.

To be clear: I don’t think churches should have to pay tax. However, since churches are in that privileged position in our society, a church leader who whines about businesses minimising their taxes deserves all the ridicule we can muster: his organisation is a consummate tax dodger.

Justin Welby the socialist

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From here:

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby opened the discussion, which was part of the Trinity’s Institute’s conference on Creating Common Good: A Practical Conference on Economic Inequality, Jan. 22 to 25. Examining scriptures from both the New and Old Testaments, he said, “There is an ambivalence, an acceptance of wealth as blessing and yet a hesitation, a doubt, a fear about its consequences.”

Of course, examples of people who have created great wealth and used it for the common good, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, spring to mind and are reason to give thanks, he acknowledged. There is no biblical injunction against all personal wealth but, he said, there is an injunction against “the systematic and indefinite accumulation of grossly unequal [wealth in] societies.”  That, he said, “always leads to abuse, even if every wealthy person is generous, because the asymmetries of power means that wealth allocation becomes a matter of paternalism not a basic issue of justice.”

There has never been – nor, I contend will there ever be – a society in which there is not an allocation of grossly unequal wealth. The difference between capitalist inequality, an inequality from which, as a salaried archbishop Welby derives considerable benefit, and socialist inequality is that the poor in capitalist countries tend to be far better off than the poor in socialist countries.

As Winston Churchill observed, the only equality that socialism manages to spread is equal misery – apart from the ruling elite, of course, who appropriate grossly unequal wealth.

I can’t help wondering if Welby believes his own Gospel – the one where the poor are blessed and a camel going through the eye of a needle is easier than a rich person going to heaven. In Welby’s red Christianity, the rich young ruler would not be invited to sell everything he had and give the proceeds to the poor: his wealth would have already been confiscated by the state, depriving him of the choice. But that’s what socialism is all about: removing choice.

Canadian Primate says 2018 Lambeth unlikely

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Justin Welby doesn’t want to hold another Lambeth conference only to discover a large number of bishops absenting themselves because they are upset with the presence of the Anglican Church of Canada and TEC; both provinces have wandered away from received Christian truth according to Primates from the Global South. As a result, Justin Welby is meeting with the Primates, ostensibly to listen to their concerns, and, no doubt, to try and convince them to show up.

Fred Hiltz thinks this is “okay”; anyone adept at reading between the lines will notice a concealed “just” in front of the “okay”. Hiltz isn’t very happy about it: it isn’t “okay” at all. The reason is simple enough: the Global South Primates have little use for the obfuscating tactics of Western Anglicanism: Indabas, the listening process, holy listening, facilitated conversations and other such claptrap. They will tell Welby exactly what they think of TEC’s and the ACoC’s elevation of homo-erotic gratification to the status of holy  – and it won’t be pretty.

Reading what Hiltz said gives the impression that Welby and Hiltz are simpatico – I hesitate to imply that Welby is in the pocket of the North American Primates. The Global South and Hiltz are, of course, antipathetic, if not downright mutually hostile.

Hiltz said that sort of consultation is “okay,” but noted that it is a change from the way the meeting has been called in the past. “He may want to style it so that it is the Archbishop of Canterbury in consultation with and support of the primates, but historically it is the Archbishop that convenes a Lambeth Conference, and then people decide whether they will come or not, including some primates.”

Justin Welby and the Idolatry of Reconciliation

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I’ve been sitting on the balcony of our apartment in Brisbane enjoying watching the river traffic and strolling along the river walk: OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA _DSC0172-2 _DSC0245Although this is more entertaining than dwelling on the convulsions of the terminally sick Anglican Communion, I have taken the odd moment to listen to the ever louder death rattle.

Justin Welby is so keen on reconciliation, I had thought him a Reconciliation Fundamentalist; it seems to be worse than that, though. I suspect that when the time comes for man to judge the fallen angels, Welby will plead the case for a good disagreement rather than outright damnation.

Just as there is no reconciling good with evil, there is no reconciling the faux-Christianity of the Anglican Church of Canada and TEC with the genuine article. To pretend otherwise is to make an idol of reconciliation.

From here:

The ACNA is a “fellow member of the church of Christ in the world,” but added the “ACNA is a separate church. It is not part of the Anglican Communion.”

[……]

“We are committed ecumenically to reconciliation of the churches, to visible unity this is John 17 particularly the last few verses. That is a profound commitment, a profound emotional and theological commitment. Where there is the possibility of reconciliation with ecumenical partners, ACNA is clearly an ecumenical partner, it is a fellow member of the church of Christ in the world, as with all ecumenical partners we seek reconciliation.”

Justin Welby hopes women bishops won’t be an ecumenical stumbling block

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From here:

In a letter sent to Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said he hopes the vote to allow the ordination of women bishops would not prove a stumbling block to future “full communion” between the Anglican and Catholic churches.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the Most Rev Justin Welby admitted in the letter that the vote at the General Synod earlier this month to allow women bishops was a “further difficulty” as far unity is concerned.

In the letter to Francis and other church leaders from around the world, the Archbishop said: “We are aware that our other ecumenical partners may find this a further difficulty on the journey towards full communion.

“There is, however, much that unites us, and I pray that the bonds of friendship will continue to be strengthened and that our understanding of each other’s traditions will grow. It is clear to me that whilst our theological dialogue will face new challenges, there is nonetheless so much troubling our world today that our common witness to the Gospel is of more importance than ever.”

I’m sure Justin Welby is correct in saying that a unified witness to the Gospel is needed now more than ever. It seems to me, though, that when the Church of England voted in favour of women bishops, they were setting their own parochial agenda above the unified witness to the Gospel to which they claim to be so committed. Justin Welby was not ignorant of the fact that ordaining women bishops would further fracture Christian unity: women bishops were more important that a common witness to the Gospel and, in that sense, more important than the Gospel itself.

Justin Welby declares that gay marriage is great

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Justin Welby, for reasons known only to himself, decided to be interviewed by PinkNews, a “gay news service”. What he said was revealing:

When asked if he had a ‘message’ for Britain’s LGBT community, Archbishop Welby told PinkNews.co.uk: “As you know I have said, and got a fair amount of flak for it within parts of the Church, we have to accept, and quite rightly, that the same-sex marriage act is law, and that it’s right and proper, it’s the law of the land, and that’s great.

This has prompted Lambeth Palace to call on its ready supply of advanced hermeneutics to obnubilate what Welby said in order rob it of its obvious meaning and render it harmless:

Lambeth Palace insisted that despite the initiative, the Archbishop remained opposed in principle to same-sex marriage and that he had been speaking about the right of Parliament to change the law when he used the word “great”.

No-one still in possession of his faculties could possibly believe Lambeth’s reinterpretation of what Webly plainly said, in spite of the fact that Lambeth’s theologians have been honing their obfuscatory skills on the Biblical texts for decades; so I’m quite certain Welby will be sent for clerical woolly-speak re-education when he returns home. And he won’t be let out again without his handlers.

Justin Welby vacillates about gay marriage

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From here:

“We are struggling with the reality that there are different groups around the place that the Church can do — or has done — great harm to,” the Archbishop says. “You look at some of the gay, lesbian, LGBT groups in this country and around the world — Africa included, actually — and their experience of abuse, hatred, all kinds of things.” But he says: “We must both respond to what we’ve done in the past and listen to those voices extremely carefully. Listen with love and compassion and sorrow. And do what is possible to be done, which is not always a huge amount.”

The Archbishop adds: “At the same time there are other groups in many parts of the world who are the victims of oppression and poverty, who we also have to listen to, and who find that issue an almost impossible one to deal with.

“How do you hold those two things [in balance] and do what is right and just by all? And not only by one group that you prefer and that is easier to deal with? That’s not acceptable.”

The most senior bishop – the first among equals – in the Anglican Communion can’t make up his mind whether or not the church has, for the last 2000 years, mistakenly taught that homosexual activity is wrong.

The problem appears to be that, rather than do what the church has done for centuries – take its moral cues straightforwardly from the Bible – Welby is “struggling” with the fact that different groups of people have different opinions on the issue. This astonishing development has completely flummoxed him.

Clearly what is needed is a series of facilitated conversions on the next problem that will face the first among equals: if, for fear of upsetting one side or other, the Archbishop of Canterbury is unwilling to take a side on the issue that is tearing his church apart, why bother to say anything about anything; no-one is going to listen – not even if it’s facilitated.

Welby and Hiltz discuss sexuality and reconciliation

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Read it all here:

When Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby met with the primate, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, he was “very interested” in the work of the Anglican Church of Canada’s commission on the marriage canon because of the reality that the Church of England will have to wrestle with the issue of same-sex marriage following its legislation in the U.K.

“Notwithstanding the declared position of the Church of England at this moment, he [Welby] is very conscious, of course, that there’s going to be a fair amount of pressure from within the Church of England to at least have some discussion around that [same-sex marriage],” said Hiltz in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “He hoped that we would stay in touch over the work of the commission, [because] inside the Church of England, they will need to have the same conversation.”

Here we have a rare example of a clear statement by an Archbishop of Canterbury. The Church of England will be following in the Anglican Church of Canada’s footsteps: conversations about same-sex blessings; decline in attendance; dioceses performing same-sex blessings; further decline in attendance; conversations about same-sex marriage; full steam ahead to extinction:

During their two-hour meeting April 8, Hiltz said Welby was interested in how the church has dealt with the conflict over human sexuality, in particular, how the 2010 General Synod in Halifax dealt with the issue in a non-parliamentary manner and how there has been “continuing conversation” about the matter. Hiltz quoted Welby as having said, “You’re actually on the frontline of where we’re going to be eventually. You’ve been on a journey; it hasn’t been an easy [one]— it has been conflicted at times, but you stuck with it.”

The Anglican Church of Canada has indeed been on the frontline of dealing with “the conflict over human sexuality”: it sues those who refuse to go along with it. I suppose this is “interesting”; the fact that Welby believes that that is where the CofE is “going to be eventually” should make orthodox CofE clergy very nervous.

Hiltz said he informed Welby about the Canadian church’s long history of “bending over backwards to hold people in dialogue, to create provisions for everybody to stay in the fold…”

Considering the number of defections from the ACoC to ANiC, these provisions have been spectacularly ineffective.

Overall, Hiltz described Welby’s visit as “good,” saying that he thought it provided the Archbishop of Canterbury “a sense of the commitment of the Canadian church to the Communion.”

Not sufficiently committed to pay any attention whatsoever to Provinces that are opposed to same-sex blessings.

Hiltz said that the dinner he hosted for Welby was an opportunity for him to meet “a host of people from Canada who are so deeply committed to the various works of the Anglican Communion…to get a sense [that they] have a broad, global view of the church.”

To invite ANiC church leaders would have been a diversity too far, of course.

 “One of the blessings of the visit is that he has heard things about all of us and says we’re very diverse, even within our church…,” said Hiltz. “He was leaving us knowing of our deep commitment to preserving the unity of the church as best we can, being prophetic as best we can, being committed to the life and witness of the Communion.”

To put it more plainly: the Anglican Church of Canada continues on a course of theological liberalism; it has no inclination to change direction but is willing to offer the  concession of a dense smoke screen designed to lure the unwary into believing that it cares about what those who disagree think.

Justin Welby interviewed by the Anglican Journal

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The whole interview is here. It is titled: ”Welby explains gays and violence in Africa remarks” because, as you can imagine, liberals have been wailing and gnashing their molars at Welby’s saying that gay marriage in the West will lead to more murders in Africa. Many are grasping at tenuous explanations to excuse such a calamitous lapse from diversity groupthink.

The Anglican Journal tries to come to the rescue:

Q: Were you in fact blaming the death of Christians in parts of Africa on the acceptance of gay marriage in America?

This encourages Welby into Rowanesque waffling:

A: What I was saying is that when we take actions in one part of the church, particularly actions that are controversial, that they are heard and felt not only in that part of the church but around the world…And, this is not mere consequentialism; I’m not saying that because there will be consequences to taking action, that we shouldn’t take action.

So even though there are “consequences” – like murder – to our actions, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them. Or does it? I really have no idea:

What I’m saying is that love for our neighbour, love for one another, compels us to consider carefully how that love is expressed, both in our own context and globally. We never speak the essential point that, as a church, we never speak only in our local situation. Our voice carries around the world. Now that will be more true in some places than in others. It depends on your links. We need to learn to live as a global church in a local context and never to imagine that we’re just a local church. There is no such thing.

Now for the hard question:

Q: In 2016, the church’s General Synod will be presented with a resolution changing the marriage canon to allow same-sex marriage. Is this a cause for concern?

A: That’s a really tough question. Well, it’s got to be a cause for concern because this is a particularly tough issue to deal with…And, I hope that two or three things happen: I hope that the church, in its deliberations, is drawing on the wealth of its contribution to the Anglican Communion and the worldwide church, to recognize…the way it works and how it thinks, to recognize the importance of its links. And that, in its deliberations, it is consciously listening to the whole range of issues that are of concern in this issue. We need to be thinking; we need to be listening to the LGBT voices and to discern what they’re really saying because you can’t talk about a single voice anymore than you can with any other group. There needs to be listening to Christians from around the world; there needs to be listening to ecumenical partners, to interfaith partners. There needs to be a commitment to truth in love and there needs to be a commitment to being able to disagree in a way that demonstrates that those involved in the discussions love one another as Christ loves us. That’s the biggest challenge, that in what we do, we demonstrate that love for Christ in one another.

It’s easy to tell that the answer is prating twaddle: it contains “listening” four times. My favourite is: “consciously listening”; can we unconsciously listen? I suppose so: in institutional Indabas. Although we must listen to “LGBT voices”, when it comes to listening to anyone who lives trying to resist same-sex attraction it will, as usual, be a case of the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear.